Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Author: Nate Wilcox

Democrats will not adapt to this defeat

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On November 6, 2024

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There won’t be any introspection.

Empires, like fortunes, are lost slowly and then all at once.

I’m afraid what is coming is going to fall on every American fairly equally like the snow on the graveyard at the end of James Joyce’s “The Dead”

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Democrats who have themselves not yet fallen into precarity or the economic abyss can not and will not accept that our system is completely rotten and we need to change course and leadership.
It took the GOP from 2008 to 2016 to admit that the Reagan/Bush playbook and leadership class was bankrupt and had to go.
It will likely take multiple election cycles before some figure or movement arises that can win a Democratic primary. And given that the Democrats have a long and proud history of sabotaging the most popular and most likely to win the general election candidates it might require a whole new party emerging.
Democrats had their chance at a new direction and likely multiple administrations and an even longer dominance of the Congress with Bernie Sanders but rejected the clear will of the overwhelming majority of the young voters of their party.
Those young voters are drifting away in multiple directions.
Of my comfortably retired upper-middle classic acquaintances none are even willing to admit publicly (some will in private) that the Democrats make poor tactical choices, much less admit that the whole party and every individual needs to really re-evaluate their approach and even core beliefs.
Trump is at least a wild card which presents some chance of positive change, but the odds of radically negative change are much higher.
Regardless, the status-quo has been thoroughly rejected by the majority of the American public.
That is a fact people need to accept in order to try and steer that majority in the least self-destructive direction possible.
It’s unfortunate that the members of professional-managerial class (and those of us who have pretensions to it) have never truly accepted the idea of majority rule.
We’re going to lose a war in humiliating fashion — with an outside chance that it will be over quickly — which will trigger economic collapse (and that’s if we don’t start nuking people).
Then and only then will our ruling elites turn on each other in something that will be like a post-modern parody of the first American Civil War.
Hopefully it’ll be over in 5-7 years and some of us will be alive to adjust to the new normal and enjoy a few decades of relative peace as we adjust to penury, plagues, and rapidly worsening climate change.
Jonathan Cook had some good observations:

Kamala Harris didn’t lose because she’s a woman or because she’s black.

She lost because, if your political and media system – rigged by donors – limits the choice to two hardline neoliberal candidates, with anything else denounced as “communism”, the most hardline, neoliberal candidate has an edge.

Over time, the system keeps moving further to the hardline, neoliberal right. You can’t stop that relentless shift by voting for one of the two symptoms of your diseased political system.

You have to rise up against the diseased system itself.

As did Freddie de Boer:

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Jill Stein.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Putin and the Russians.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Bernie Sanders and his supporters.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Joe Rogan.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Glenn Greenwald and The Young Turks.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on the decision to run with Tim Walz.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on the New York Times and its occasional Democrat-skeptical opinion pieces.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Joe Biden for getting out of the race too late.

You can’t pull all the usual Democrat tricks. You have to actually figure out what’s wrong with your party, root and branch. Because you called the guy a fascist, again, and he walked right through that insult to the Oval Office, again. And the eternal question presents itself: what are you going to do about it?

Postliberalism, Liberal Apogee, Routine Elite Failure and Then?

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On October 23, 2024

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I was alerted to Nathan Pinkoski’s “Actually Existing Postliberalism,” by N.S. Lyons’ response “The Post-Cold War Apotheosis of Liberal Managerialism,” and enjoyed both tremendously.

Pinkosi’s piece is an excellent short history of the public-private partnership currently aiming for absolute global cultural control via the weaponization of finance that he calls postliberalism.

I thought it would be fun to excerpt all the times Antony Blinken’s name appears in the piece.

First mention:

When Bill Clinton took office, he continued the pursuit of openness. In 1993, he ratified NAFTA and relaxed the ban on homosexuals in the military. However, he made it clear that the old liberalism was not enough. Eager to extend the reach of democracy and confront foreign enemies who stood in its way, his administration developed new tools to advance America’s global power. In September, National Security Advisor Anthony Lake outlined a new paradigm. His speech, “From Containment to Enlargement,” bespeaks a political revolution. It provided the blueprint not only for the foreign policy agenda of nearly every U.S. president since then, but for the convictions of every right-thinking person. Lake’s speechwriter was Anthony (sic) Blinken.

Second mention:

After Biden was sworn in as president, his administration shelved a plan to overhaul sanctions policy. A consensus held that if the kinks of the past could be worked out, then the Americans and Europeans had all the weapons in place to launch a devastating financial first strike against their preferred targets. Planning began in the first year of the new administration, with Secretary Blinken’s State Department taking the lead. So by February 2022, just as the Russian invasion of Ukraine faltered, the arrangements were already in place. The strategic possibilities seemed limitless. Russia could be brought to its knees; Putin would follow in the ignominious footsteps of ­Milosevic and Gaddafi.

The execution of the strike was dazzling. The scale, especially the involvement of SWIFT and the targeting of Russia’s central bank, caught the Kremlin by surprise. It was ­Barbarossa for the twenty-­first century. Yet the first strike did not yield the promised results. Nor did the second, third, or fourth. Putin’s approval ratings soared, Russia’s industrial output increased, and its military continues to grind away at the Ukrainian army. Despite implementing nearly 6,000 sanctions in two-plus years, the euphoria of spring 2022 (let alone that of the holiday parties of 2011) is long gone. Although American policymakers have said again and again that they have mobilized a global coalition against Russia that has left the country isolated, that is not the case. The map of the countries that have imposed sanctions on Russia closely resembles the map of the countries that have legalized same-sex marriage. Economic warfare against Russia has exposed the limits of the global American empire.

Lyons applauds Pinkoski’s essay but rejects the notion that this is a revolution against liberalism — instead, it is its apogee.

Sadly, he doesn’t mention Blinken, but he does elaborate on the frightening ambition of this movement:

The managerial ideal is the perfect frictionless mass of totally liberated (that is, totally deracinated and atomized) individuals, totally contained within the loving arms of the singular unity of the managerial state. To achieve its utopia of perfect liberty and equality, liberalism requires perfect control.

This ideal is, of course, the very essence of totalitarianism. Yet if we wonder why the distinction between public and private has everywhere collapsed into “the fusion of state and society, politics and economics,” this is the most fundamental reason why. Perhaps, for that matter, this is also why the U.S. and EU now habitually sponsor LGBT groups in Hungary or India, and finance human-trafficking “human rights” NGOs in Central America and the Mediterranean: because managerialism’s blind crusade to crush any competing spheres of social power has gone global.

In response, a comforting tonic from The Archdruid, John Michael Greer at Ecosophia, whose reader “Dave” asks him:

I’ve noticed a growing and extremely worrying trend of the “elites” of politics and entertainment pursuing reckless and (to me) clearly wrong courses of actions that blow up in their faces, and then instead of honestly looking at the situation they’ve had a large hand in creating and doing a mea culpa, either doubling down and getting mad at regular people when they’re less keen to do what the elites tell them, or trying something else without ever really honestly accounting for their mistakes. The actions remind me of signs of elite collapse that this blog has talked about for years now and it’s very surreal and worrying to see happening in real time. What is going on and why can’t the “elites”, the people with access to more data and resources and advisers than anyone else, seem to realize what’s going wrong? Do they not care or are their actions part of a larger plan, not to sound conspiratorial?

Greer’s response was just what I needed to hear:

Dave, I don’t think that it’s any kind of plan. Quite the contrary, this is normal elite failure, the thing that comes right before an elite replacement crisis. Just as the capitalist elite of the 1920s crashed and burned, and was replaced by a managerial elite in the 1930s and 1940s, the managerial elite of the 2010s is crashing and burning, and will be replaced by an entrepreneurial elite in the 2020s and 2030s. The entitled cluelessness of a class that has remained in power too long is a familiar thing; comparisons to French aristocrats just before the French Revolution also come to mind.

Although, honestly if this means that Elon Musk and company are going to win what Chris Hedges calls “The Choice Between Corporate and Oligarchic Power”…eek!

Kamala Harris, anointed by the richest Democratic Party donors without receiving a single primary vote, is the face of corporate power. Donald Trump is the buffoonish mascot for the oligarchs. This is the split within the ruling class. It is a civil war within capitalism played out on the political stage. The public is little more than a prop in an election where neither party will advance their interests or protect their rights.

And what do the oligarchs want?

Warlord capitalism seeks the total eradication of all impediments to the accumulation of profits including regulations, laws and taxes. It makes its money by charging rent, by erecting toll booths to every service we need to survive and collecting exorbitant fees.

Trump’s cohort of Silicon Valley backers, led by Elon Musk, were what The New York Times writes, “finished with Democrats, regulators, stability, all of it. They were opting instead for the freewheeling, fortune-generating chaos that they knew from the startup world.” They planned to “plant devices in people’s brains, replace national currencies with unregulated digital tokens, [and] replace generals with artificial intelligence systems.”

As much as I eagerly anticipate the long-overdue fall of our current elite, I truly dread what’s coming up in their wake.

Germany Honors Biden For Destroying Nordstream & Their Economy

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On October 19, 2024

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I cannot believe this is happening:

Germany honored U.S. President Joe Biden for his contribution to trans-Atlantic relations on Friday, ahead of his meetings with European allies on Russia’s war in Ukraine and the conflict in the Middle East.

TIME Magazine: Germany Honors Biden for His Contribution to Trans-Atlantic Ties as the U.S. Election Looms

Germany Honors Biden for His Contribution to Trans-Atlantic Ties as the U.S. Election Looms

The sheer delight the pathetic “Traffic Light” coalition government takes in abasing itself before the US hegemon is pornographic in its shameless indecency. Especially the same week that the Danes reported this:

Just days before the Nord Stream gas pipeline attack in September 2022, warships belonging to the U.S. Navy were on the scene and ordered nearby officials to keep away.

That is according to John Anker Nielsen, who is harbour master at Christiansø, the easternmost part of Denmark in the Baltic Sea, northeast of the island of Bornholm and close to the sites of the Nord Stream explosions.

Map showing the route of Nord Stream 1 and 2 in the southern Baltic Sea and location of the leaks. AWZ=Exclusive Economic Zone
Map: AFP / Nadine EHRENBERG, adapted

Nielsen late last month told a reporter at Politiken, a major Danish daily, that he went out with a rescue team four or five days before the blast to check on nearby ships with switched-off radios, suspecting there might have been an accident, only to find U.S. warships, whose staff ordered the team to turn back immediately.

Never forget Biden threatened Nordstream:

Biden: If Russia invades uh that means tanks or troops crossing the uh the border of Ukraine again then uh there will be uh we there will be no longer a Nordstream 2. We will bring an end to it.
Reporter: What? How would you how will you do that exactly since the project and control of the project is within Germany’s control?

Biden: We will. I promise you we’ll be able to do it.

and Nuland did it too. This video is still up on the State Department’s official Facebook page because they’re proud of it:

“If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”

And Never forget what Nuland said at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on January 26, 2023:

“I am, and I think the administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you [Ted Cruz] like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”

Blinken celebrated it as an economic opportunity:

“…ultimately this is also a tremendous opportunity.  It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs.  That’s very significant and that offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come…”

And then there was this from Anne “It’s Time to Prepare for a Ukrainian Victory” Applebaum’s husband who’s a Polish official:

Former Polish FM thanks US for damaging Nord Stream pipeline

The consequences of this have been the deindustrialization of Germany:

German industry increasingly struggles to compete on the world stage. Particularly hard hit are its mighty chemical and heavy industry sectors, which are now in rapid decline. One of the main drivers is policies that have made energy costs skyrocket, and there Germany serves as a canary in the coal mine for other leading industrial nations.

It’s kind of grimly amusing that Forbes’ use of the euphemism “policies that have made energy costs skyrocket” rather than say “self-defeating sanctions on cheap Russian gas combined with the biggest act of industrial sabotage in modern history” and it also doesn’t mention that it’s been America’s policies that have deindustrialized Germany.

It’s also so humiliating as an American that the neo-conservative cabal of psychopathic nitwits has been in sole control of US foreign policy since the Clinton administration and now they have a lock on US corporate media as well.

The above mentioned Anne Applebaum provided the perfect example of their delusion and idiocy with her September, 2022 prediction that Ukrainian victories in Kharkov would bring down Putin.

But that brings me back to Germany’s pathetic ruling coalition. This is how well they’ve done in recent state elections:

In the eastern states of Saxony and Thuringia, the far-right AfD received more than double as many votes as the three parties which make up the federal coalition government — the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), environmentalist Greens and neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP) — combined. These parties’ results are each in the single digits. The Greens in Thuringia and the FDP in both states even failed to meet the 5% threshold to be represented in the state parliaments.

And on the left:

A newly established populist party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), managed to score votes in the two-digit range in their very first election.

The German people are chomping at the bit to vote out the gang of traitors who have allowed the US to annihilate their economy.

Although in fairness, they also gave the last US President who walloped the Germany economy the same award:

“Biden received the highest class of Germany’s Order of Merit, which was also bestowed on former U.S. President George H.W. Bush for his support of German reunification.”

Kind of fitting that the era of American unipolarity is framed this way. Bush at the beginning. Biden at the end. The Germans footing the bill for American foreign policy.

 

 

 

The Senders stumble into the Terror Dome

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On October 1, 2024

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Soundtrack for this post.

William S. Burroughs postulated four political parties in his 1959 novel Naked Lunch: Liquefactionists, Senders, Divisionists, and Factualists.

Per Wiki:

The city is contested by four rival political parties: Liquefactionists, who want to merge everyone into one protoplasmic entity; Senders, who want to control everyone else through telepathy; Divisionists, who subdivide into replicas of themselves; and Factualists, who oppose the other three.

The Senders are a metaphor for mass media propaganda as practiced by Edward Bernays, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Goebbels, and American political consultants.

The Democrats and their allied Never Trumper Republicans are the heirs to this legacy.

The rise of the Internet, then the World Wide Web, and finally social media initially threw them for a loop and played a role in Trump taking over the G.O.P.

Their reaction was to impose a surveillance and censorship regime using the tech monopolies as bottlenecks:

Essentially the Biden administration’s communications policy has been to relentlessly and flagrantly spin, distort, lie

Unfortunately, combining surveillance and censorship with slick media campaigns using the power of celebrity to encourage supporters to form parasocial bonds with politicians is way too much power for anyone to handle.

Because there’s no way not to get high on your own supply.

As YouTuber History Legends said of the Ukrainian war effort:

The propaganda was too strong and too effective.

We have an entire army of NAFO trolls (on) Reddit and Twitter. People that believed 100% everything that was being said by Ukraine.

The Ukrainians will only show their successes to their population as if the Ukrainians are constantly winning.

At the same time we have a million Ukrainian men abroad. We have countless Ukrainian soldiers and enlisted personnel that are not at the front.

We have people in Kiev partying as if there’s no war happening.

The problem for Ukraine is that they haven’t managed to create (a) national feeling of it’s now or never. They always try to portray the war as ‘oh we’re winning. It’s fine.’

So everybody kind of kept their life going because everything is going well at the front but it’s not true and now it’s too late.

The disorientation goes to the top, as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s new piece for Foreign Policy illustrates.

The Biden administration’s strategy has put the United States in a much stronger geopolitical position today than it was four years ago. [Really??] But our work is unfinished. The United States must sustain its fortitude across administrations to shake the revisionists’ assumptions. It must be prepared for the revisionist states to deepen cooperation with one another to try to make up the difference. It must maintain its commitments to and the trust of its friends. And it must continue to earn the American people’s confidence in the power, purpose, and value of disciplined American leadership in the world.

Meanwhile, air alerts over Israel:

All of Israel is covered by air alerts

Eyeless in Gaza, indeed.

Ryan Grim tweets:

This is either a complete and total failure to contain the conflict by the Biden administration -- or this is what the White House wanted and it's the most egregious lie told to the public since WMD. Either incompetence or duplicity--no 3rd option. Malevolent in either case.

Incompetence or duplicity? What do we think?

Jared Kushner declares victory

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On September 29, 2024

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Sharing Kushner’s tweet in full because it has to be seen in toto to be believed and it’s important to remember he will no doubt once again be the architect of Trump’s ME policy should Trump retake office.

And also because of this observation from Mohammad Alsaafin of AJ+:

It’s darkly funny that every stupid thing Kushner is saying here reflects the actual strategy and position of the Biden administration.

Ok, here’s Kushner’s victory lap:

Jared Kushner@jaredkushner
September 27th is the most important day in the Middle East since the Abraham Accords breakthrough.
I have spent countless hours studying Hezbollah and there is not an expert on earth who thought that what Israel has done to decapitate and degrade them was possible.
This is significant because Iran is now fully exposed. The reason why their nuclear facilities have not been destroyed, despite weak air defense systems, is because Hezbollah has been a loaded gun pointed at Israel.
Iran spent the last forty years building this capability as its deterrent. President Trump would often say, “Iran has never won a war but never lost a negotiation.”
The Islamic Republic’s regime is much tougher when risking Hamas, Hezbollah, Syrian and Houthi lives than when risking their own. Their foolish efforts to assassinate President Trump and hack his campaign reek of desperation and are hardening a large coalition against them.
Iranian leadership is stuck in the old Middle East, while their neighbors in the GCC are sprinting toward the future by investing in their populations and infrastructure. They are becoming dynamic magnets for talent and investment while Iran falls further behind.
As the Iranian proxies and threats dissipate, regional security and prosperity will rise for Christians, Muslims and Jews alike. Israel now finds itself with the threat from Gaza mostly neutralized and the opportunity to neutralize Hezbollah in the north.
It’s unfortunate how we got here but maybe there can be a silver lining in the end.
Anyone who has been calling for a ceasefire in the North is wrong.
There is no going back for Israel.
They cannot afford now to not finish the job and completely dismantle the arsenal that has been aimed at them. They will never get another chance. After the brilliant, rapid-fire tactical successes of the pagers, radios, and targeting of leadership, Hezbollah’s massive weapon cache is unguarded and unmanned.
Most of Hezbollah fighters are hiding in their tunnels. Anyone still around was not important enough to carry a pager or be invited to a leadership meeting. Iran is reeling, as well, insecure and unsure how deeply its own intelligence has been penetrated.
Failing to take full advantage of this opportunity to neutralize the threat is irresponsible.
I have been hearing some amazing stories about how Israel has been collecting intelligence over the past 10 months with some brilliant technology and crowdsourcing initiatives.
But today, with the confirmed killing of Nasrallah and at least 16 top commanders eliminated in just nine days, was the first day I started thinking about a Middle East without Iran’s fully loaded arsenal aimed at Israel. So many more positive outcomes are possible.
This is a moment to stand behind the peace-seeking nation of Israel and the large portion of the Lebanese who have been plagued by Hezbollah and who want to return to the times when their country was thriving, and Beirut a cosmopolitan city.
The main issue between Lebanon and Israel is Iran; otherwise there is a lot of benefit for the people of both countries from working together. The right move now for America would be to tell Israel to finish the job.
It’s long overdue. And it’s not only Israel’s fight. More than 40 years ago, Hezbollah killed 241 US military personnel, including 220 Marines. That remains the single deadliest day for the U.S. Marine Corps since the Battle of Iwo Jima.
Later that same day, Hezbollah killed 58 French paratroopers. And now, over the past six weeks or so, Israel has eliminated as many terrorists on the US list of wanted terrorists as the US has done in the last 20 years. Including Ibrahim Aqil, the leader of Hezbollah’s Islamic Jihad Organization who masterminded the 1983 killing of those Marines.
There’s nothing less reassuring than bipartisan neocon war mongers declaring victory in the immediate aftermath of their latest atrocity.

The cold comfort of a military coup

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On September 18, 2024

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This is from Col Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief-of-staff to the Secretary of State, on Judge Napolitano’s show:

I’ve been told by fairly reliable sources that (Sec of State Anthony) Blinkin and (National Security Advisor Jake) Sullivan… Blinkin primarily but Sullivan too, have been sidetracked.

What’s happened is the Pentagon has taken over diplomacy as well as any action militarily speaking with regard to both theaters of war and so they’re now in charge.

I have to change my evaluation of (Defence Secretary Lloyd) Austin if that’s the case because it means he listened finally to the people in the bowels of the Pentagon who know the truth. He’s reacting to that.

He’s told the President that and to Biden’s credit even though he was furious he finally took that advice (not to allow Ukraine to fire long-range missiles into Russia or to back Israel against Hezbollah and/or Iran if Israel starts the war).

I’m generally not the type to root for a military takeover of deciding diplomatic and military matters. But the level of callow brinksmanship paired with epic cluelessness that has characterized Team Biden’s foreign policy has me greatly relieved by this Pentagon takeover (if true).

The best part was Bibi Netanyahoo being told that if he invades Lebanon he’s on his own.

The fact that UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer was publicly humiliated by Biden was just a sweetener on top.

What if We Threw a Civil War and Nobody Came?

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On August 28, 2024

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UPDATE: I forgot to include a hilarious bit of business involving the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation vs. the Millersville (TN) Police Department. Have added it below:

Sean Paul’s post on the 2nd Amendment got me thinking about the prospects for civil war in the USA, in particular this spicy quote:

So, Sean Paul, what does this have to do with the Second Amendment Right to Bear Arms?

Everything to do with slavery, and nothing to do with holding our government accountable. Seriously, do you honestly think a couple thousand Texans with AR-15s could out fight an armored brigade? GTFOH.

It won’t be lard-ass militias that matter if there is a civil implosion in the US.

These things always come down to intra-elite splits and/or intra-military splits.

There seems to be a split between the Trump-supporting majority of American police forces, right-wing military personnel, some military officers & at least some FBI vs the Trump-hating “Deep State” CIA, NSA, Pentagon elite and the rest of the active duty military.

As NPR reported in 2021, some po-po’s were even willing to put their bodies on the line for whatever it was they were trying to do on Jan 6.

Nearly 30 sworn police officers from a dozen departments attended the pro-Trump rally at the U.S. Capitol last week, and several stormed the building with rioters and are facing federal criminal charges as well as possible expulsion or other discipline.

The officers are from departments large and small. There was veteran officer in Houston, the nation’s eighth-largest department; a sergeant in the small town of Rocky Mount, Va., and a group of Philadelphia transit officers.

Note that caveat in the headline about the vast majority of them being retired. Are we too “demographically advanced” ie old to get a war on?

Also check these nifty stats from Seton Hall’s “A Demographic and Legal Profile of January 6 Prosecutions”:

The government has won all but 12 cases brought to date (five died, four fled, one acquitted, two dismissed);

517 of 716 (72%) were charged as the result of tipsters and informants;

Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, New York, and California are home to 43.9% of those charged;

Only states not represented among the 716 arrested were North Dakota, Nebraska and Vermont;

35.1% of defendants were identified as going to the Capitol alone;

25% were armed;

18.5 % had a background in law enforcement or the military;

Largest employment group identified is the Business Owner group, which accounts for 24.7%;

Only 35 of the 716 individuals were identified as unemployed;

22.2% had a criminal record.

Note that a disproportionate amount of the Jan 6ers came from just five states: Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, New York, and California.

And two of those states are “solid blue” and even the red and purple states each feature very Democratic cities.

If there’s no geographic continuity to the two sides are we just going to have a nationwide running gun battle instead?

But wait, the case for imminent civil war has a couple more points to make.

TX Gov Greg Abbott turning the Texas National Guard against the US Border Patrol was a very ominous sign:

Most explosively, Texas Governor Greg Abbott in January deployed the state National Guard to block the U.S. Border Patrol from accessing a 2.5-mile-long section of the border in the city of Eagle Pass. The section includes Shelby Park, a 47-acre city park along the Rio Grande named for a Confederate general who fled to Mexico rather than surrender. Border Patrol officials had been using the park for processing encountered migrants. Now, they are effectively locked out of the park, and are mostly unable to access a heavily crossed border area to do their jobs.

Fl Gov Ron DeSantis’ creation of the Florida Guard outside federal control and his proposal to send them to the Texas border is another clown show that is also actually quite scary:

DeSantis established the Florida Guard on June 15, 2022, purportedly to enhance Florida’s capacity to deal with hurricanes. It was announced as a civilian force of approximately 400 volunteers to supplement the Florida National Guard, which balances both state and federal government control. The governor asked for $2 million.

Within a year, DeSantis and the super-majority Republican Legislature converted the small volunteer force into DeSantis’ expensive private army.

MORE BUDGET, MORE POLICE POWERS

House Bill 1285 skyrocketed the budget to $107.6 million, with half of the funds designated for “military” equipment. The number of “volunteers”— handpicked by the governor — increased from 400 to 1,500, and they were granted “police powers” to detain and arrest.

Although there is a titular head of the volunteers, the Guard may be “activated only by the governor and is at all times under the final command and control of the governor as the commander in chief of all military and guard forces of the state.”

And it is not under the state’s military control because the law further provides that: “The division [i.e. State Guard] shall not be subject to control, supervision or direction of the Department of Military Affairs in any manner…”

DeSantis moved quickly after that. He set up a military training center for millions of dollars and hired a combat-training company to recruit and train members of the Guard. The contractor was awarded a non-competitive $1.2 million contract and the company’s manual provides for hand-to-hand combat, busting down walls and interdiction in the sea.

These developments show an ominous willingness to escalate political fights into military conflict on the part of the two southern GOP governors.

But militarily this is pipsqueak stuff at this point. Were a war to erupt between the Feds and Abbot and DeSantis it would be over in a few savage minutes, as long as it takes for a pit bull to maul a baby.

And the yokel governors are not the pit bull in this scenario.

But things get very interesting, in the ancient Chinese curse sense, if Trump wins the presidential election and actually manages to place loyalists in key positions at the federal level.

But that’s a big if.

Politically Trump seems way off his game from 2016. Steve Bannon’s in jail and Trump has his head up his own ass. The rousing populism and ‘did he really say that?’ demagoguery are missing.

That makes it less likely that he could motivate supporters to truly crazy extremes.

Does Trump really seem to care enough to organize a civil war?

Also there’s the matter of social cohesion — oddly, it’s a critical ingredient for a civil war. Each side has to at least some internal unity to present a sufficient problem to the other side necessary for the brouhaha to go from “civic disturbance” or “riot” to CIVIL WAR.

Aurelian argues we don’t have enough social cohesion to get a war on.

For all the fashionable talk of “civil war,” a civil war requires organised parties competing for control of the future of the political system. We don’t have that, we just have individuals, and small groups without much cohesion, united only in their detestation for the system.

It may be the case that we can bumble our way into something really nasty without  leadership on either side capable of catalyzing discontent into a coherent force.

If there’s a major economic collapse or a military disaster on a foreign front all bets are off.

But even in those scenarios, I’d anticipate more of a gradual disintegration into warlordism than an 1860 type thing.

UPDATE: I can’t believe I forgot to include the piece de resistance. This is a classic real-world example of a conflict between MAGA chuds in power locally vs. a state law enforcement agency:

In a perplexing pair of podcast interviews, the Millersville chief of police says the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation has begun limiting his department’s access to certain sensitive law enforcement data.

It follows a scandal first dug up by NewsChannel 5 Investigates into the troubled police department for the community of 6,000 just north of Nashville.

“Once we start getting this bad publicity, our access starts getting cut off to financial reports, FinCen,” Chief Bryan Morris said in an interview with far-right podcaster Tom Renz. The interview was posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

“We can’t do investigations,” the chief continued. “We don’t have everything in this office that we need, you know.”

Renz chimed in, “You need the tools provided by federal law enforcement and other agencies, and state agencies.”

“And now we’re being denied that,” Morris insisted.

…

Morris — who also serves as interim city manager — claimed his department is now cut off from one of the most sensitive law enforcement data sources available.

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network — sometimes known as FinCen — is a program run by the U.S. Department of Treasury that can give police access to certain banking and other financial records of individuals when there is a legitimate law enforcement purpose.

Morris claimed that, because of NewsChannel 5’s investigations into his conspiracy-minded assistant police chief, Shawn Taylor, the TBI has now cut them off.

Renz asked, “Have they given you a good reason that they are denying you access?”

“No,” the chief answered. “I’ve actually called down there and talked to them, and what I’ve been told is we’re on hold because they are auditing us.”

As part of Taylor’s many bizarre conspiracy theories — including claims that some of the nation’s most powerful political figures are involved in child sex trafficking — Taylor has sometimes boasted about having access to sensitive data linked to some powerful people.

That includes the banking records for U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn’s campaign.

 

The Narrative Noise To Signal Ratio Is Deliberately Out Of Control

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On August 16, 2024

Comments

When I saw SPK blogging here, I couldn’t resist the Auld Lang Syne and asked Ian for permission to post sometimes. I wrote for the Agonist in the 2000s.

I’ve followed Whitney Webb since she wrote for MintPress News and find her to be an extremely informative and critical voice, especially about the nexus of tech and finance. Her work frequently frightens me and if I were a Titan of Silicon Valley I would certainly want her silenced.

Her post on Twitter earlier this week caught my eye because it revealed a sort of fuckery that was new to me:

Whitney Webb

Instead of blanket censorship, I am having YouTube bury all my actual interviews/content with videos that use short, out of context clips from interviews to promote things I would never and have never said. Below is what happens when you search my name on YouTube, every single one is a scammy video using my words and likeness to shill everything from shitcoins to insane predictions I’d never make. Collectively, they have gotten millions of views.

YouTube seems to be adopting an AI version of “security through obscurity” to bury the work of Webb and other dissenting voices. This approach won’t work if it’s your only means of concealing valuables or trade secrets.

But if the only goal is to make it harder for Webb’s audience to find her work, it’s a nasty new wrinkle.

Coming in a context of other tweets about Germany’s up is down policies declaring Jews who oppose genocide in Palestine to be anti-semites, a nominally left wing publication disinforming their readers about Brazil’s Lula, relentless economic gaslighting, a seemingly cooked-up online conflict between Black Americans and Palestinians, and the MI6 blaming Russia for the UK’s recent racist pogroms, it was like being the narrator of an H.P. Lovecraft story who’s just discovered some horrible new tentacle of Cthulhu but you know you’ll sound crazy if you try to explain it to your friends or family.

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