Category Archives: World Hellhole Report

Thanksgiving 2015

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I live in the United States of America, and today is the holiday of Thanksgiving in the USA. Like Christmas, it has been poisoned with commercialism. While this day is set aside for the giving of thanks and expressing gratitude, the day following has fallen victim to advertising campaigns that have stipulated that it is a day for grasping, greedy consumption. It is a day for assembling at the shrines of acquisition with a frenzy sufficient to trample anyone in one’s path, even unto death, that one might forget thankfulness in a rage of worldly want.

And so it goes for most people through to Christmas. The bombardment of advertising is with us all through the year: Valentine’s Day is for buying flowers and chocolate. St. Patrick’s is for buying green beer. Easter is for buying chocolate and eggs and that horrible fake grass that gets everywhere. Mother’s Day is for buying things for mothers. Father’s Day is for buying things for fathers. July 4th is for buying lots of meat and fireworks. August is for buying things for returning to school. September is for buying things in general, at Labor Day sales. October is for buying candy and costumes. But in November, the advertising takes on a sinister quality. It drives people to deadly frenzies and deep depressions. In a time that Christians have set aside to contemplate the birth of Jesus Christ and the message of love, compassion, and truth that he brought, we face the demeaning chants of mammon that overwhelm that message.

We hear and see evidence that we are worthless without making new purchases. We buy things that we don’t really want or need, but we do so and experience some form of psychic release and joy because of the imprint that advertising has burdened us with. Make no mistake: the advertising these days is a highly polished product, capable of infecting even the most stalwart of men that declares, “I’m not affected by advertising!” Yes, you are. It’s that effective. Legions of psychologists have constructed those ads to cause you to believe, with all your heart, in the lies of worldly consumption as salvation.

For the film, “Czech Dream” (Czech: Český sen), the filmmakers showed how easily a lie could be fashioned to the point of driving a mind to madness. They started by shaving their beards and getting some sharp clothes – provided free to them, if they but made an advertising mention for the product in their film. Next, they created an ad campaign for a store that would never exist. The advertisers refused to tell an outright lie, but the filmmakers got the advertisers to go with a negative campaign. “Don’t shop.” “Don’t buy.” “Don’t show up.” Those were the slogans of the campaign, which, legally, were not false advertising.

Next came the psychological touch to the construction of print ads. The filmmakers showed how the makers of the ads study the layout on the page so that they produce not only a document that informs, but that convinces the reader to desire an opportunity to pay for the goods advertised. Was there deception involved? Legally, no. But, ah, there’s that qualifier that the advertisers and psychologists hide behind as they create their propaganda! “Legally.” “Technically.” Words like those mean that, while there is no legally-defined illegal activity taking place to the best of the knowledge of the participants in the activity thereof, oh, yeah, it’s totally unethical and manipulative.

Honestly, I believe that one day, a host of outraged parents could engage in a class-action suit against Nickelodeon, Walt Disney, and, to a lesser extent, McDonald’s, for causing their children to become affected with ADHD and/or ADD. By brandishing the “kid-friendly” adjective, these agents fooled parents into trusting their children’s attention spans to their advertising onslaught, leading to minds made pliant and submissive to the whims of anything flashy. I saw this affecting my child and put a parent block on those channels. With only a few days of withdrawal, she was reading again. She was also no longer nagging me incessantly about how we needed to have a vacation in a Disney property or that we needed to purchase a DVD with a Nick or Disney label on it.

Turning off the advertising on television is only part of a solution. Sadly, I still live in a world of people that are awash in ads. The ads surround me on road signs, on the airwaves, and on whatever sneaks past my adblocker software. It’s a constant mental assault. There are even programs dedicated to the best ads, as if, somehow, the advertising itself is the content to view and not just the things we allow ourselves to endure in order to see non-advertising content. And there are ads, as well, in that content. “Product placement” is as pervasive as it is perverse.

The antidote to this advertising, in my experience, is true devotion and service. I find this in my religion, which teaches me of the constant need to express thanks and gratitude, to avoid the influences of the world, and to seek after the better things that God offers us. The time I spend in devotion and service gives me true joy. Those times give me precious memories with family and friends that are beyond the prices that the pure free-market libertarians want to put on everything, even the breaths that we take. No, there are things that have no way to be bought or sold. They are much more real than the material goods that pass through our fingers on their way to the garbage dump or resale shop.

True religion is not the cause of woe in the world. False religions do cause woe, but look at the causes of false religion: one sees grasping materialism, lusts for power, and desires for control at their roots. Those things are also the causes of many, many other woes in the world. Those things are mammon. Mammon is not some deity of old – it is the Hebrew word for “money.” One cannot serve both mammon and God. The priests of mammon know this, which is why they poison the year, and especially the religious holidays, with their propaganda. Even though service to mammon destroys humanity, it appeals to our lusts and allows them to be unbridled while blinding us to the consequences that surely follow. True religion asks us to restrain our wildness, and shows us the consequences of our actions. It then encourages us to do what is right, to do what is loving. It encourages us to seek after treasures not of the world, but the treasures of true love, for God is love.

I have never bought my wife a diamond ring, and I never will. My love for her is not of this world, so why would I want a token of the world to express it? No, I bought her a small Swiss cowbell as a token for our love. It has a meaning to us (as well as anyone else that has seen “Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge” or DDLJ). The bell can pass from this world, but the symbolism contained in it is eternal. It is not a sign of my earning potential or folly: it is a small material representation of a vast, infinite network of devotion.

Thanksgiving, at its heart, is about humbling oneself. It is about realizing that there is much to be grateful for, even in the worst of circumstances. It is for accepting that the material world will pass and all the things of the world with it, but that something greater yet endures. It is not nation, it is not corporation, and it is not even land or sea. That which yet endures, which is greater than all things, is love, for God is love.

My nation might plunge itself into a conflict which I know to be immoral and abominable: yet I will give thanks for my family and friends. I might be ridiculed for my fidelity towards something that I cannot prove exists: yet I will give praise to my God. I might be assailed with messages that tell me I am nothing without a certain worldly possession: yet I will find joy in knowing that I am a child of God, and that He is part of my family and friends.

There is much that can be done to fend off the impact of the servants and followers of mammon. We serve and follow love when we give service. We serve and follow love when we humble ourselves and give thanks. We serve and follow love when we can find the quiet stillness within each of us, that allows us the simple, yet eternal, pleasure of discovering our unity with God.

We can all find this quiet stillness, each in our own way and after our own journey to that place. The secret to finding it, however, is not in wrath, but in patience. We find it not with purchasing, but with giving. We approach it not with grasping consumption, but with loving compassion. Mammon is found through acts of violence. Love is found through acts of non-violence.

Therefore, I wish peace unto one and all this year. Find a quiet place and a quiet time, and discover that loving stillness within yourself and let it grow in its influence upon you.

Geopolitical Directions

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It’s no secret that China and Russia are both in a state of heightened tensions with the USA. All three nations have engaged in activities to provoke each other: I will leave aside an accounting of which side does more to provoke the other. The fact that the tensions exist, and that they exist at this level, let us assume as a given.

Now, what the USA is doing with these tensions is what concerns me. Yesterday, I read comments from an admiral that we need to roughly double the number of aircraft carrier groups under US command to 21 to respond to higher global tensions. Today, I read about the USA testing a Trident ballistic missile – a submarine-launched missile that is designed to deliver a nuclear warhead – just off the coast of Los Angeles, a general discussing how the USA conducted war simulations about a potential Russian invasion of the Baltic States (and how the US/NATO forces were destroyed in the conventional exchange), and now I read that Ash Carter, the USA’s Secretary of Defense, gave a speech in which he implied that Russia is intending to potentially engage in a nuclear attack on the USA.

The fact that all of these stories have come out in just a matter of days – if not hours – shows to me that it’s clear that the USA intends to continue to escalate the tensions. These three stories are basically the justification for an escalation, which would include a vast expansion of military spending. But an escalation would also increase the risk of conventional war, which in turn would lead to an increase in the risk of a nuclear war, either limited or all-out.

The USA plans to deliver MANPAD anti-air missiles to Syrian rebels – even though those rebels often become al-Qaeda or ISIS forces – and those MANPADs can be used against Russian planes. Who would Russia hold responsible if one of is planes was shot down with a US-provided weapon? If the USA deploys troops in Syria to fight alongside rebels, who will the USA hold responsible if they are killed by Russian or Iranian forces?

The fact is, Assad *is* the legitimate ruler of Syria, full stop. Assad has requested Russian aid in eliminating *all* rebels against his regime, not just those that belong to a particular group. The UN has criticized the USA for its actions in Syria, and rightly so. By supporting the rebel movements against Assad, the USA has brought forth the entity known as ISIS. ISIS then established a murderous regime that tore into the civilian populations of Iraq and Syria – and the civilian population of Syria included all the refugees from Iraq that that nation hosted. Now, those millions from Iraq and Syria are flowing into Europe, threatening to unleash a massive wave of European xenophobia. Several leaders there, including German ones, have already referenced concentration camps in public speeches.

But the USA continues to poke and probe and prod in Syria because if Assad goes, then so goes Iran’s potential pipeline to the Mediterranean and in goes Qatar and Saudi Arabia’s pipeline. If Syria wasn’t a transit country hostile to US interests, Assad could be as horrible as anyone else in the world and get away with it. Don’t believe me? Look at what Turkey and Saudi Arabia, both US allies, are doing to their people. Saudi Arabia beheads more people than ISIS and the head of Turkey is engaging in a genocidal civil war so that he can rewrite that nation’s constitution to give him dictatorial powers. Syria is all about the oil, and that is why the USA is risking a wider conflict with Russia.

Russia’s economic survival is on the line, so it will defend Assad. Syria has always been Russia’s most dependable ally in the region. Think of Syria as the Russian Israel. If massive waves of Palestinians were threatening to wipe out the Netanyahu government in Israel, you would almost count on US divisions showing up to save the day, if they were requested. We would insist upon our right to aid an allied government deal with its internal crisis and then politely ask other nations to stay out. That’s what Russia is doing in Syria, and the USA is ignoring those requests to stay out. This can lead to trouble.

In the South China Sea, China has claimed a large area of water as part of its territory. Vietnam, Taiwan, Indonesia, and the Philippines also claim those waters, or parts of them. Since claims for waters are based upon nearby land, China went ahead and built some land in shallow waters, and then made its claims based upon those lands. China then built naval and air bases on those lands, just to get the point across that it really intended to claim those waters. The US response? Sail a military vessel into China’s territorial claims.

The Chinese are very, very sensitive about their waters. When a British naval vessel sailed up the Yangtze River in 1949 to prevent the Communists from forcing a crossing of that river during the Chinese Civil War, the Communists informed the British ship to turn around, as the British no longer had rights of navigation on the Yangtze River. Those rights had been established in the wake of the two Opium Wars of the 1800s in what were called “The Unequal Treaties.” The British vessel’s presence in Chinese territorial waters was highly offensive, but the Communists nevertheless gave the British the chance to do the legal thing and withdraw.

When the British refused to withdraw, the Communists opened fire and incapacitated the ship. After several hours of shelling, the British ship surrendered. The Communists had defended the honor of the nation.

Since then, the Communists went on to be simply “China”, and took lands that it felt were rightfully theirs. Xinjiang and Tibet were both areas that Chinese emperors had once ruled over, so China sought for their return to its rule. It engaged in an unofficial war with the USSR over islands in the Amur River. It took land in Kashmir and Assam from India in 1962. About the only nation to successfully rebuff a Chinese invasion has been Vietnam, but the Chinese have still tried several times to take land from Vietnam that it views as being properly part of China.

Interestingly, neither China nor Russia has ever completely invaded a country to take it over. Their goals have always been limited and, once they secured their desired territory, they halted. Granted, the Russian record starts only in 1991 with the disbandment of the USSR, but its adventures in Georgia and Ukraine have been limited. For its part, China fought the US in the Korean War only to preserve the government of North Korea, which the South Korean leaders had threatened to invade and eliminate. China holds the view that its objective in the Korean War was attained so, therefore, it won.

But back to the matter of waters and territory: China has made its claim and has told the USA that it will not always allow its ships to sail through its waters unchallenged. But, because of matters both of oil and out of commitment to its ally, Philippines, the USA will continue to make those challenges. What will happen if the Chinese order their batteries to fire after a US vessel refuses to withdraw? Will the US vessel return fire, or will it be a paper tiger? And if it returns fire, will the Chinese escalate further by formally occupying the Senkaku Islands, thereby provoking a wider conflict with Japan?

Given the US provocations in words and actions, particularly those involving nuclear weapons, I do wonder aloud if we are about to enter a war and, when the war goes badly for one side or another, a field commander will decide to use one of the tactical nuclear weapons under his control, opening up the question of whether or not a general, strategic exchange then commences.

“Employees Are Our Most Important Asset”

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Lots of companies say that line. It sounds reassuring and soothing. However, it’s entirely false. Employees are actually a cost, not an asset, according to accounting rules, and that becomes painfully clear when some clever lad at the top decides the company needs to be more profitable. The easiest way to goose profits is to cut costs and, typically, the biggest costs are in labor.

Look at it this way: the office furniture is more of an asset than the employees. When calculating the value of a company, that office furniture is considered in the total, partly because many employers deem furniture from China furniture factory to be an accurate measure. The employees are not. Actual intellectual property in the form of patents and trade secrets are assets. The minds that think of those innovations are costs.

But before anyone decides to reclassify employees as assets, I’d hesitate. If employees were assets, they’d be owned by the company. People are assets only if they’re slaves. I’m not down with that. And I don’t want to be treated as rented capital goods, either. That doesn’t solve the “being a cost” problem.

This definition of labor as a cost is what has led to the collapse of the American middle class. Idiots running companies think that reducing labor costs is an actual benefit for a company. The word “idiot” is an Ancient Greek term for someone that was totally self-centered and clueless about what makes society work, so it’s quite appropriate here. The idiots think that everything has to be measured and quantified and, if something can’t be measured or quantified, it’s not worth considering. I had this conversation at lengths with my Loveland accountant, people today are being educated in a very odd way, no full picture is ever considered only microscopic parts that seem independent from each other.

Sending out surveys to measure employee loyalty and things like that are useless gestures. Most employees just click right through them so that they can get back to work. Others just click right through them because they know that even though their name isn’t on those surveys, there are still ways to trace responses back to them. The real employee survey that counts is the turnover rate. If people are leaving for other opportunities, it means that the opportunities at that firm are not attractive.

But back to my point… employees certainly aren’t assets, and they shouldn’t be counted as costs. They’re part of the company, the people that can actually keep the whole venture going in spite of the idiots at the top. Good, quality employees are what make growth possible in a firm. Once upon a time, that was reflected in the way companies wanted employees to stay with them for their whole career. When the idiots took charge in the 70s, they started slashing those employee “costs”, and the nation’s circled the drain ever since.

I like the sympathy in that statement, “employees are our most important asset,” but employers ought to not say it. They ought to take actions to prove that value, and shareholders ought to insist upon their take after the employees have gotten their just share. Otherwise, we’ll soon find that what circles the drain without a change in direction is what goes down the drain.

What? Me Stingy?

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Jon Hilsenrath wrote this letter to American consumers:

This is my response:

Dear Mr. Hilsenrath,

How are you? I am fine. I hope you are healthy and well. You recently wrote a letter to Americans, which includes me. You said that most of us were stingy and that the economy was depending upon us to be a bit more free with our cash. You also said that I, along with the rest of America, was getting a free ride with zero interest rates. These statements bothered me.

In response to the matter regarding saving, yes, it is true that I have been saving much more of my money than ever before, but that is not to imply that I am socking away the cash for a rainy day. I am saving by paying off debt, which is an odd way of looking at saving for anyone but an economist. However, I used to teach AP Economics, so I get it. I freely admit that I am saving. I will save and save and save some more until I am debt-free.

I want to be debt-free because money, unlike water, flows uphill. Every penny I spend on interest goes to someone wealthier than me. This is the cardinal reason for wealth inequality. People with lots of money lend it out and are supported by my labor in the form of interest payments. Even if I pay off all of my personal debt, I will always be paying interest on corporate debt, as it is rolled into the cost of the goods and services that I purchase. I will never be able to escape debt unless I myself become a lender of sufficient means to make my living off of the labor of others rendering timely interest payments to me.

That is unlikely to happen. Even though Janet Yellen told me to get assets or die tryin’, the fact remains that now is not a good time to start a small business and neither is starting a small business any guarantee of success. In fact, in the oligopolistic structure of most markets, it’s a guarantee of failure. Small businesses simply aren’t getting off the ground like they used to. Markets are increasingly dominated by a small group of players that find it easier to compete against the customer than against each other, with resultant market contortions.

This leads me to the matter of zero interest rates. I have not gotten any money borrowed at zero percent interest, ever, unless it was from my dad. My dad is a great guy. If I can’t make a payment one month, he lets it slide and doesn’t report me to a credit bureau, with consequent disasters implied for my precious credit rating. No, Mr. Hilsenrath, I have always had to pay interest on what I borrowed. I do not know anyone paying zero percent interest on anything other than a car, and that itself is part of a highly rigged gimmick. I do not think that I have gotten a free ride. I do not think anyone in America has gotten a free ride from zero percent interest, unless that person was a corporation powerful enough to qualify for such a rate, and then turn around and use the interest-free borrowings to purchase t-bills or lend it out in consumer credit at higher interest rates.

Now, if you would like to figure out the minds of Americans that aren’t Fed officials, let me help you out. Let’s start with the young.

Kids in school get their money from their parents. If their parents are poor, they’re also poor. Quite a few of them are po’. That means they can’t afford the last two letters, just an apostrophe. Quite a few are even p’. They watch people buying vowels on “Wheel of Fortune” and think to themselves, “One day… one day… I will be able to afford to buy a vowel one day.” Pity those poor, po’, and p’ children.

As for the parents, anyone with a job is poor, at best. That means there is no supply of wealth to tide the family over in hard times. If the job is lost, if there is a dread disease in the family, they are wiped out. Elvis Presley is rich: he continues to earn money from his properties, even though he’s dead. I may have a very well-paying job, but if I were to lose that job, my family’s finances would be dire, indeed.

But let’s consider instead the young person that has just gotten out of high school: that person has a choice to get into the workforce, learn a skill, or go to college. Only one of those paths has a better than average chance of paying off. Ironically, it’s not the college path.

It’s the skill learning path that works for young people. They have to learn to do a job that has to be done here and now, not 12000 miles away at midnight. I have a good friend who is learning computer programming skills in a class full of accountants, engineers, and other people with professional degrees. These are not failed baristas and beauty school dropouts: these are guys that went after the degrees with loads of math and science and then found out that they simply can’t get a job.

My own daughter had three years of college and then realized it wasn’t going to get her anywhere. She dropped out, learned how to do CAD work, and now has a job that pays more than the average salary for a recent college graduate. She has no degree, but has a job that is above the US median wage.

My son is getting ready to join the labor force. He doesn’t want to spend a day in college, and I don’t blame him. It’s a gamble of time and resources that has a poor chance of paying off. Even at a state school with junior college, that’s a proposition that involves borrowing at least $50,000 at non-zero, non-negative interest rates to have a degree that is not a real qualification for any entry-level job. Should he do as I did at the end of my teaching career and invest just a few thousand dollars in IT training, he could have a very well-paying job and be free of personal debt. That is a huge thing.

The sad fact is that most kids will either get an unskilled job, a job with low skill levels, or go to college and then get the unskilled/low-skilled job – if they get a job. U3 unemployment may be low, but have you looked at the U6 number lately? There are an awful lot of people that are still out of work, and they’ve given up to the point where they’re no longer trying to compete for the meager jobs out there.

The Panic of 2008 was more than a big whack to unemployment and 401K programs. It signaled a major structural change in the US economy. Now, the structural change in question had been underway for some time, but The Panic of 2008 removed any doubt in my mind of the irreversibility of the changes.

Globalization of labor markets did not result in rising tides for everyone. Rather, minor wage improvements in developing nations were matched by eliminations of high-paying jobs in the US. The globalization of the labor market meant the end of the days of walking out of college and into a job that typically had nothing to do with one’s major. Those jobs went to college graduates, sure enough, but they were graduates of Indian and Chinese universities, and paid Indian and Chinese wages. This meant that US workers either had to accept wages in those areas or not have a job at all.

The jobs that remained were part-time service jobs. Waiters and waitresses have swelled in numbers as accountants have fallen by the wayside. People living off of $2.15 an hour plus tips are not going to provide for a robust consumer economy.

At least they young have their health, for the most part.

So why did the Great American Consumer not show up to spend money? It’s because he or she has no money to spend. Those waiters are not going to go out to eat all that often, let alone buy a house.

I did not care for the tone you took towards the end, berating the poor for being poor and telling them that they were lucky not to be Greeks or Chinese. Mr. Hilsenrath, we *are* Greeks and Chinese at the end of the day. Our wages are already approaching Chinese limits, and our government is approaching Greek levels of indebtedness.

You speak about raising interest rates as if it was a threat against us, the people of America. A person paying credit card interest doesn’t care much between a change from 23.99% to 24.99%. It’s all the same sort of hopelessness for him. Maybe it triggers another massive round of default on debt, which puts those TBTF institutions into a very failure-prone stance. With a higher interest rate, they can’t be sustained as was the case in the wake of the Panic of 2008. Would we lose jobs in the wake of such a thing, if JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs went belly-up? You bet we would.

The question that should really be dealt with is, “will we lose our temper?” Seeing that the non-violence of Occupy has been replaced by paroxysms of urban rioting, the answer is most likely yes. This makes sense of all the war-drums beating around the world: better to have that rage directed externally than internally.

So, should the world plunge into war, will it be the fault of the American consumer? No, Mr. Hilsenrath, it will not. For the American consumer is, if nothing else, loyal and obedient to his government and its guidance. Whatever the ills of America these days, Mr. Hilsenrath, I assure you that the average American is but a victim and not a general contributor towards. We cannot vote for visionaries to lead us when the lobbyists and major donors only give us puppets that they can control. You say yourself that you listen to Fed officials all the time at the Wall Street Journal: it is because you know full well that the average American is powerless and voiceless, so why bother with him, eh?

A question you should perhaps ask is if the Fed officials ever listen to the WSJ, or is your voice and the voice of your collective colleagues powerless in their view, and therefore beneath their consideration?

Well, long story short, we got no money because it all flowed uphill to the very rich. The very rich don’t spend the way us poor folks do, so that’s why the US economy is poleaxed. It won’t recover unless the very rich decide they don’t need as much profit or return on investment as they’ve gotten in the past. I don’t see that happening, so why not save your lectures for those guys, Mr. Hilsenrath, and then wait and see what it’s like to be completely and utterly ignored.

I’ll be happy to discuss this stuff more, if you would like.

Kind regards,

Dean Webb

A Trillion-Dollar Gamble

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The high-paying US jobs from the shale oil boom are evaporating as the price of petroleum decreases. The boom can’t be sustained without crude around $75-$80/barrel. The Saudis are pumping the stuff like nobody’s business. They’re not going to stop. Major oil companies and US economic growth are going to take a big hit. If anything will reverse that possibility, it will have to come from outside Saudi Arabia.

China won’t help: it’s sliding into recession. Europe is sliding, as well. Global oil demand is not on the rise, or even holding steady. Fixing the price of oil requires addressing the supply side of things.

Saudi Arabia is at the peak of its power so long as its borders and insides remain calm. With ISIS on its north, the Shi’a in Yemen on its south, plenty of pop-eyed nutcases ready to put the ruling family to the sword on the inside, and an ailing monarch with an unclear path of succession. Four different things that could possibly give way and apply substantial pressure on the Saudi kingdom – as well as upward pressure on the price of oil.

Are any worth the risk of provoking? Ask this question from the point of view of someone that cares only for short-term profits, not lives or long-term geopolitical concerns. That’s how corporations run themselves.

Dynastic intrigues would be the easiest to provoke, but would one be able to guarantee an outcome? Not an outcome in which things work out well for the Saudis, but where the price of oil goes back through the roof. There’s a chance that the royal family is of an accord about keeping up their production. The price boost, therefore, would need a different prime mover.

Popular uprising against the royal family? Easy enough to start, provided the rebels get some really good weapons. That’s not likely, unless the Saudi army splits in two. That itself isn’t likely. Move on, then.

The Shi’a threat from Yemen and Iraq would be seen as an extension of Iranian power, and that could provoke an Israeli nuclear strike. We’re looking for a price spike, not a general war that could go global all too easily. Scratch the Shi’a threat.

That leaves ISIS. It’s easy to get them weapons: just make a shipment to “moderate Syrians” and once they defect to ISIS, their gear goes with them. In the months that the USA has been bombing ISIS, they’ve increased the territory under their control. Honestly, it seems to me as if ISIS, for all its beheadings and breathings out of threats against the USA, is nevertheless serving US interests in the region. Israel attacks Assad, not ISIS. Israel is worried about Shi’a expansion, not ISIS. Yes, ISIS was blunted a bit in Iraq, but only after the government there basically begged for US support. Was that the plan, to have ISIS threaten to go all the way, in order to press the Iraqi government closer to the US camp?

If so, then ISIS is at the ready to threaten Saudi Arabia, ready to press them hard enough to get them to see things from a US perspective. They’ll do the work for the oil companies that the US Army can’t do.

Putin’s Valdai Conference Speech

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Go here: Club Orlov and scroll down to read the speech, then back up to read Dmitri Orlov’s analysis. This is a very important speech. It defines the threat posed by the USA to the rest of the world as clearly as Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech drew out the perils of the USSR. Russia today is not the USSR of old: and, the Cold War over, the USA’s empire building has become progressively more apparent and violent.

I do not admire Mr. Putin, but I respect what he has to say, which itself can be interpreted on many levels. He’s a hardliner, no question about it: there is not a shred of idealism in what he has to say. On the other hand, his honesty is refreshing. His strategy is such that it can play out successfully even if his opponents are aware of it.

This, then, points out the danger to the USA, particularly a danger from within. The USA is acting as if it were the sole superpower in a world that is no longer unipolar. China and Russia have no intention of running their nations to the benefit of Wall Street bankers, and they are enabling other nations to break free of entanglements with American financial and power structures. When the USA “steps on the same rake” over and over again by using extremists to topple democratically-elected governments that won’t dance to the tune playing from Washington DC, it further antagonizes the rest of the world, which is by now tired of seeing US-sponsored “freedom fighters” turn out to actually be al-Qaeda affiliates, neo-Nazis, and Islamic State soldiers. Remember all those Baathists that the USA ejected from power in Iraq in 2003? They’re turning up in IS forces.

Putin’s speech is very important, and it points to how the USA must now behave as it did in the Cold War: taking measures carefully, so as not to make mistakes that would destroy nations.

The Big Reboot: 7

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Too late. The copy line was insane. Mr. Webb groaned as he took his place. Ms. Killian turned. “It’s worse than that. Only one copier is working.” Mr. Webb slouched in desperation and groaned louder.

Mr. Friendly had just got in line behind Mr. Webb. “What’s wrong, Webb?”

“Only one copier.”

“And you expected better than that the day before school started? No wonder you’re miserable.”

“Let me guess, you were expecting they were all out of action.”

“Yep. With only one working, I’m ecstatic.”

“Really?”

“No. But at least I’m not as miserable as you.” Mr. Friendly grinned proudly.

“At least it’s not an inservice.” Everyone that heard that nodded and grunted approval. Saying that made Mr. Webb think about the H.L. Mencken quote:

“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” During those staff development sessions, Mr. Webb indeed was sorely tempted to do those very things. Quiet, patient endurance certainly didn’t make anything better. The inservice days just kept getting more useless and mind-crushingly boring. That made Mr. Webb consider the Frank Zappa quote:

“Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you’ve got any guts. Some of you like Pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read.”

Mr. Webb read that in a biography of Frank Zappa, “No Commercial Potential”, which was in his junior high library. Ever since 8th grade, Mr. Webb took those words to heart. To Mr. Webb, teaching wasn’t a matter of stuffing facts into heads as it was a matter of making people aware of their surroundings, causing them to learn as much as they could so that they wouldn’t get taken down like some punk. That last bit came from another inspirational quote from some random caller on the Tom Joyner morning show:

“If I could only have one thing on a desert island? It would be an assault rifle with plenty of ammo. I’m not going down like no punk.”

That guy had his head screwed on right, all right. One of Mr. Webb’s proudest moments when teaching a World History class would be whenever he showed “The Battle of Algiers” at the end of the year. He’d pause at the start of the film when French paratroopers fired into a door. “Why did they do that?” Mr. Webb would ask.

The kids that hadn’t paid attention said stuff about locks being shot off. The smart kids would say, “To take down any hostiles on the other side.” Bingo. Mr. Webb would pause again on a scene that had Ali LaPointe wearing a trenchcoat, walking through the Casbah.

“OK, what’s going on here?”

The sluggards would shrug and comment that maybe he was going to do some shopping. The clever youths would laugh at such pedestrian ideas. “He’s got a gun under that coat. See how his right arm isn’t in a sleeve?”

“Very good. He’s got a gun, all right. What kind of gun does he have?”

This led to a discussion over the best ar 15 optics. The students would reason that it had to be bigger than a pistol, otherwise why keep the right arm out of sight? Some students suggested a rifle, but others said that that wouldn’t be appropriate for close quarters, such as in the urban environment. A shotgun, perhaps? Yes, good for close range, but low rate of fire. Assault rifle? Yes, that must be it. “Is it an assault rifle, Mr. Webb?”

“Very close. I’ll give it to you. It’s actually a submachine gun, but the idea is the same. Put as many bullets in the air as possible, so as to injure or incapacitate your opponents.”

And so it would go through the movie. Mr. Webb was so proud of his classes in moments like these, because it meant that they had a shot at surviving. They knew how to think critically, really critically, in times when rapid reactions were important. They liked to say that, “You know you’ve been in Mr. Webb’s class when you have a plan for what to do when you see a live grenade drop in front of you.” Or something like that. Mr. Webb’s kids weren’t going to go down like no punk.

He refused to let there be an environment of fear in his room. There was always hope in Mr. Webb’s room! When the district started to require lockdown drills, as in “there is a shooter on the campus, so go into lockdown” drills, Mr. Webb hated them. They were as useless as nuclear defense duck and cover drills. All they did was instill a sense of fear and helplessness. The drill was simply this: turn off the lights, then lock the door and move away from it.

There were so many problems with that drill. First of all, if the kids didn’t clear all their stuff, then it would be obvious to anyone looking for targets that there were some in that room. Next problem was that the hall-facing walls in most rooms were drywall. Some of the older rooms had cinder block construction, but not the hall Mr. Webb was in. Therefore, having students standing on the other side of a drywall was not much better than having them stand in the hall itself. The biggest problem was what to do if the shooter or shooters decided to break into the room because they were after someone in that room.

Mr. Webb freely acknowledged that, if anyone was going to be deliberately targeted, he had a pretty good chance of being that target. Hiding on the other side of drywall in a dark room was not how anyone wanted to go down. So, when it came time to get ready for the lockdown drill, Mr. Webb went the extra mile.

“OK, lockdowns… We clear our desks completely and then move to the back of the room, and get totally under the tables. Move things so that they block your view of the window in the door. You don’t want anyone seeing you.” That took care of the stuff in view problem and the drywall problem. Putting some wood and metal between you and a crazed gunman was always preferable to just drywall.

Then there was the matter of defense. Mr. Webb identified the people with the best upper-body strength and asked them if they would be willing to volunteer. Of course they would. “OK, you ever hear of a shield rush?” If they had, it made explaining what to do with the smaller, square tables near the door much easier. “If someone tries to break in, he’s probably coming for me first and foremost, but he’ll likely as not want to off any witnesses. When he breaks the perimeter-” It should be noted that Mr. Webb had instructions to shove the sofa in front of the door and to wedge the book cart between the sofa and a wall-anchored bookcase. “- you should have this table perpendicular to the ground so that you can hold the central support and use it like a battering ram. If someone comes through that door, someone’s going to die, and I’d rather it not be any of us.”

Everyone liked that. They saw collective hope in teamwork. Mr. Webb had dowel rods that could be used for mayhem. Gymnasts and martial arts students would volunteer to go to the top of the wall-anchored bookshelf so that they could “go ninja” on anyone breaking in. Everyone practiced total silence, down to keeping their phones off so that it wouldn’t accidentally light up or make sound. They didn’t have a lockdown drill. They had an ambush drill, and they felt the power they now had over their situation. A little imagination could turn helpless sheep into a flock of wolf-killers. Mr. Webb himself would stay towards the front of the room, because he knew full well that soldiers followed a commander that shared their risk and hardships with great loyalty. He wasn’t going to ask them to make any kind of sacrifice that he himself wouldn’t make.

Mr. Webb admitted freely to himself and anyone that questioned him that his plans were more than a little freaky and intense. But did anyone actually object to them? No, they did not. They liked having a plan. They liked that there was always hope in Mr. Webb’s room.

They also liked how he’d tell things straight to them and that he’d done his homework. Invariably, some kid would say, “Man, this stuff is boring! Why don’t we talk about something interesting, like dope?”, followed by a second yelling out, “Yeah man, mango dream is my favourite strain! Talk about weed Mr. Webb!” I always loved hearing him surprise these kids and lay some truth down.

Mr. Webb was ready. “You got it. Marijuana was first cultivated as a food in South and Central Asia, about 6000 years ago.”

“Yeah, dope, wait, what? It’s a food?”

“The seeds are highly nutritional. The fibers were also pounded out, to make cloth.”

“It’s clothes, too?”

“Yep. Highly versatile, the hemp plant. The first written evidence we have of it being smoked was in a Chinese medicinal text from 1000 BCE, in which it was mentioned as a cure for headaches and anxiety, but that it should not be smoked too much, or ‘demons would enter the body of the smoker.’ So, obviously, they knew of its potential for hallucinatory and paranoid effects on the mind.”

“Hehe. Demons. Cool. Hey, do you think it should be legalized?”

“No. I think it should be decriminalized, but not legalized.”

“Dude, if it was legalized, the government could tax it and solve the national debt!”

“And then you’d have a situation like in China during the 30s, when the government there legalized opium. Eventually, opium could only be purchased at government dispensaries, independent dealers were executed by the state, and when the government needed more cash, it pushed the drug harder and tried to get more citizens addicted to it. Not a good model for revenue generation. By extension of this model, take a look at what happened in The Netherlands when they allowed cities to create zones for legalized prostitution. First to open up were massive Wal-Mart sized buildings that packed in as many prostitutes as possible and held them to very strict schedules and timetables. Their owners and shareholders stood to make even more money if they hired illegal aliens and paid them less than the legal rate.”

“What? A Wal-Mart full of hookers?”

“Yes. Welcome to Amsterdam. Now, there were other towns that didn’t like that arrangement, so they decided to have the city run the brothels. There were better conditions for the prostitutes at first, but then they began to copy the Wal-Mart style brothels when they wanted to increase revenue. Like the Chinese Nationalist government, they began to push their vice all the more when there was an economic downturn.”

The stoner that had started the whole conversation usually had an expression of severe disappointment by this time. That, or confusion. “Wait, how did we get to prostitution?”

“It’s the general idea of legalizing things that people become addicted to. I see it as a form of slavery or as murder to get gain.”

“Murder?”

“Murder. If I kill you with a bullet all at once, it’s a crime. But if I sell you a substance that kills you slowly, over time, and you can’t quit using this substance, the law does not see that as a murder. But I do.”

“Dope is safer than smoking or drinking though.” Other stoners would “yeah” at that comment.

“I disagree. Inhaling smoke is bad for you, no matter what the smoke is. Turns out, marijuana smoke has as much junk in it as does tobacco smoke. That will tar up your lungs and mess up your cardiovascular system, just like tobacco. I used to live next door to a neo-Nazi homosexual drug dealer that worked in a porn shop. He smoked dope all day, every day.”

“Wait, a neo-Nazi homosexual? What?”

“Yeah, and he beat up his boyfriend a lot. The apartment manager tried to get the cops to evict him, but since he was collecting evidence for them against his supplier, they said they wouldn’t evict him.”

“That’s just messed up.”

“Sure was. Anyway, the guy only smoked dope. He said it was safer and all. The guy practically had emphysema, the way he woke us up by coughing up a lung every morning. I don’t need that legalized.”

“But tobacco and alcohol are legalized. That’s hypocritical.”

Mr. Webb grinned. “Guess what else I want to ban.”

Someone, maybe the stoner or maybe someone else, would say, “But prohibition doesn’t work.”

“Yeah, that’s what the rich people that still want to do the drugs want you to think. A former Marine Corps Major General, Smedley Butler-”

“Smedley?”

“I don’t make these things up. General Smedley Butler ran the Philadelphia police department during prohibition. Within 48 hours of his taking the job, he had raided 900 illegal bars and broke up a bunch of upper-class drinking events at hotels. That last part got him in hot water, even though it meant that he really was cleaning up the town with strong enforcement. The rich people got him run out of town. They’re the ones that owned the newspapers that attacked him. The regular people like the way he got rid of the criminals and they didn’t want to see him go. You had a similar situation in the early 40s, when heroin was almost totally unavailable in the USA, due to World War Two. Street quality of heroin went way below the 2% necessary for it to be potent with an injection, and all the junkies were going through involuntary withdrawal. We could have ended heroin addiction in the USA after that, but the USA made a deal with the Mafia: if they would help liberate Sicily, then the USA would turn a blind eye to any crimes they did after that.”

“Whoa.”

“And the heroin came back into the USA. It also came back into Italy. Mussolini had nearly wiped out the Mafia in Italy, so they were ready to topple him and to get a government more to their liking. Communists also wiped out drug growers and dealers. The Chinese Communists destroyed the opium problem in China that way. The Nationalist generals that we supported were all major drug lords. Remember, that’s how the Nationalists funded their government. During the Vietnam War, the CIA made deals to let the South Vietnamese heroin dealers have immunity from prosecution in the USA and Vietnam if they would inform on the Communists. Not surprisingly, that coincided with a massive increase in heroin availability in the USA. Ironically, it coincided with Nixon’s declaration of a War on Drugs.”

Everyone was paying attention to Mr. Webb by now. “Carter didn’t declare a war on drugs, but he actually ended the deals of the Nixon administration and began to prosecute heroin traffickers. They didn’t have immunity in the USA, any more. That, and a major drought in Southeast Asia in the late 70s nearly wiped out heroin use in the USA. Prohibition works, so long as everyone is part of the fight and we don’t cut deals with the devils out there.”

“So why do we still have heroin?” It was no secret that the affluent neighborhoods north of Garson were famed as the “heroin capital of Texas”.

“Afghanistan. Carter wanted to take the Russians down a peg, and one of his advisors had a plan to stir up Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan to draw the Russians into their own Vietnam War-type conflict. Now, while opium had been grown in that land since around 1300, when the Mongols introduced it there, heroin was unknown there until 1980, when the Russians invaded Afghanistan. Heroin became the drug that supplemented their income very handily. See, it takes ten pounds of opium to make one pound of heroin. It’s worth more that way. So they’d grow it in Afghanistan, and then move it into Pakistan, where all the heroin labs were.”

Invariably, there would be a Pakistani student in the class that either knew an army officer that was involved in heroin production or trafficking or who was the son or daughter of an officer. “My dad told us that he either had to have his trucks transport heroin, leave the country, or we’d all be killed. He didn’t want anything to do with drugs and didn’t want us to die, so we moved here. He can never go home, though.”

Mr. Webb thanked the student for adding valuable details to his story and then continued. “The Reagan administration and later the first Bush gave all these guys a free pass. The leader of the biggest heroin-making faction, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar,” any Afghan students in the room shuddered at the mention of that name, “wiped out all the democratic factions first and then solidified the mujaheddin under his leadership as a combination heroin-trading outfit and anti-Russian resistance. Similar thing happened with the Nicaraguan Contras – who were a bunch of death squad thugs – and cocaine. That’s why crack became so huge in the USA in the 80s. All of Reagan’s buddies in the Contras were flying tons of cocaine into the US, where gangs were baking it into crack. The guys on the street would get busted, but the major dealers all had immunity from prosecution as intelligence assets. That’s why prohibition doesn’t work: we’re too willing, as a nation, to make a deal with the devil.”

Silence pervaded the room. As Mr. Webb made ready to put up the pictures of polar bear cubs, someone would ask, “Man… where did you learn all that stuff?”

Remembering the great Frank Zappa, Mr. Webb would say, “I read books.”

He also wrote them, which was why he was in the copy room. He had a 36-page dissertation, “Economics Gone Wild!”, that he used as his text for AP Economics in place of the woefully outdated and inadequate textbook. The AP kids were free to read it as a supplement, but Mr. Webb no longer assigned any readings or assignments out of it. His text and released AP exam materials were sufficient for the need at hand… provided he was able to make copies of the text in time for the start of school.

Finally, he got to the copier and scanned in his originals. But after only two packets, the copier seized up, displaying a cursed “PAPER JAM” on its informational screen.

The blasted copiers were so complicated and finicky, they were constantly breaking down, and this was the last copier available. It was hot and humid in the copy room, so it was likely that the paper was starting to stick to itself or the drums inside.

“Oh great, Webb broke the copier.” Mr. Friendly said the exact words needed to steel Mr. Webb’s nerves and get him to fling open the copier doors, to plunge into its innards to clear the jams. Mr. Webb refused to be That Guy that broke the last good copier the day before school started.

When he pulled out the main bank of drums, Mr. Webb heard the worst sound possible when clearing a copier jam – the tear of paper. A sheet had been stuck somewhere in there, and now a tiny bit of it would shut down the whole operation, unless Mr. Webb found it and extricated it from the belly of the beast.

The guilty corner was there, way in the back, just past an overheated cylinder. Would Mr. Webb be able to reach it without burning himself? Would he even be able to reach it? Not even hesitating, Mr. Webb blindly thrust his arm into the narrow gap afforded him and prayed silently that his fingers would find their target without his forearm getting singed.

US Foreign Policy Meltdown Roundup

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A list of all the places where the US has seriously screwed things up, either through a failed attempt to “fix” the country or through massive failures of tact (insults, spying, ultimatums, etc.). These are all from recent years, which were supposed to be a much better time for US foreign policy than the Bush II years…

Libya
Syria
Iraq
Afghanistan
Ukraine
Egypt
Israel
Brazil
China
India
Russia
Germany
France

OK, probably not all of them… but these are the major ones. I still hold that Bush II was the worst president the USA has had, but Obama seems to be doing all he can to get the tie.