Bankshotting off Zionism for .... I"m not sure what

Russ and Pam Martens' "Wall Street on Parade" is generally very good — when it sticks to writing about the banksters.

When it ventures beyond that, it generally falls into generic Blue Anon territory. In the past, for example, they've seen fit to attack Russia for various things in the Russia-Ukraine war without batting an eye at similar issues done by Ukraine. Things like war crimes.

So, Tuesday, when the pair wrote about "Deadly, Exploding Pagers ...," but only tacked Israel's pager bobby-trapping to the end of a piece about the newest revelations on Chinese hacking?

It came off as clickbait at a minimum.

By ignoring that the US has — albeit without explosives — done what Israel has done in supply-chain hacking, and nearly a decade ago, it came off as American exceptionist, Nat-Sec Nutsacks™ division post, not just the bankshotting off Zionism, but the attack on China.

In both of that, it came off as trivializing what's happening in Lebanon, and Gaza before that.

They wrote one piece about Gaza since last October.

(They've actually written in the long past a few pieces about Snowden, per Bruce Schneier's piece about NSA hacking. I didn't search too hard as their search window doesn't actually go in strict chronological order on newest to oldest.) 

Back to the matter at hand? The Schneier link was posted within a piece from Tuesday, which went up about the same time as the Martens', which said that none of this is new. And, also not new here in Merikka. Bruce notes that the FBI created a shell company back in 2019. There's Stuxnet, of course.

This is the bottom line:

But now that the line has been crossed, other countries will almost certainly start to consider this sort of tactic as within bounds.

So, are the Martens going to bitch when Russia bobby-traps Ukrainian cellphones? Or, looking retrospectively, what if Dear Leader's CIA had used that, rather than a drone, to off Anwar al-Awliki?

Per their original post, the idea that we can stop this? Doubtful. We get a lot of tech goods from China. And, not just oil, but a lot of other raw materials, like heavy metals, come from Russia and are fungible.

They also raised the issue of gas price gouging in 2022. Problem? Gas prices were actually higher when the emergence from the Great Recession started in 2012. Was there price gouging then? Yes, there was a brief spike in 2022, but for the whole year? Nope. More pricey in 2012.

Again, they're often very good when talking about the banksters. Hit and miss elsewhere. And, yeah, some of their takes on the Russia-Ukraine war left me predisposed to be a bit skeptical about their other non-bankster writing. Speaking of, they decided they had to haul in the Wagner Group along with Bernie Madoff and Jeffrey Epstein about shady people banking at JP Morgan Chase.

Can we remove an asterisk from Memorial Day?

Maybe even a couple?

But, definitely one.

I am officially still not a fan of the idea, after the events of Sept. 11, 2001, of adding "first responders" to those honored on Memorial Day. After World War I, when Memorial Day became a day to honor the dead of all wars, it was for war dead. The honoring of first responders runs the risk of marking 9/11 as part of the "Global War on Terror." Given how much police departments have militarized since that time, in part due to the "War on Terra," and in larger part in reaction to, and with money generated from, the "War on Drugs," this is kind of slippery slope territory.

That's the big asterisk.

Second one?

Per what I said above, I'd be OK with moving Memorial Day back to honoring Civil War dead, since they still make up half our war dead, and by weighted percentage of population, much more. (Imagine 3.5 million Americans dying in World War II, which is still far short of USSR war deaths, and you get the idea.)

I'd favor this idea in part due to the rise of the Tea Party and associated states rightsism. Since Gen. John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic started the idea of commemoration of Union war dead, it would remind various nutbars of who won that war.

That said, per Abraham Lincoln's words at Gettysburg, we need to be rededicated to that issue.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

And, part of that is erasing the 125 years or so of Northern appeasement and amnesia, from about 1880 on, over why the war was fought, and the rise of the Klan and other Southern reaction to Reconstruction. (Sic on the text, for some people who note two missing words.)

Third asterisk? Especially in small towns of America, can we remove the religious steepings of the day? There's obvious First Amendment issues for me and other secularists. Beyond that, though. I am again reminded of Lincoln, this time in his Second Inaugural Address:

"Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully.

Bingo. Invoking god in the picture often runs hand in hand with American exceptionalism. And, given that the Mexican War and Spanish-American War were both wars of imperialism, and that we really had no business in World War I, a little less American exceptionalism would be good. 

And, distantly related to that? Did anybody from the CIA die in the overthrow of Mossadegh or Arbenz, like we know died in Libya? If we're going to be honest about American wars and American imperialism (these covert operations are also the flip side of Eisenhower's warning about the "military-industry complex," his development of the "covert-underhanded complex) maybe we ought to be saluting the CIA and waving a CIA flag along with military service flags.

That said, since it was a Yankee abolitionist song, if we are going to keep religious elements at Memorial Day events, I'm all for singing every verse of "Battle Hymn of the Republic."

Finally, a related asterisk.

If it takes you more than 2 minutes to sing the national anthem, off you go into a penalty box.

Veterans Day — too bad it's needed this much

True liberals and left-liberals among regular readers of my blog know my feelings on American exceptionalism, and recently, what I've also called Texas exceptionalism (and since then, learned that similar thought runs even among academic historians).

Well, it should be no surprise that this spills over to Veterans Day. Most of the wars the United States has fought have been unnecessary at best and imperialist at worst.

That starts, of course, with our various wars against Indian tribes. We could have been like Tsarist Russia versus its Siberian aborigines, and simply killed people without the "benefit" of first making treaties then breaking them. That, at least, would have been honest.

Mexican War: Sorry, Texas exceptionalists, but when Tejas was a province of Spain, then of Mexico, its normal boundary was the Nueces, not the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo del Norte. A Congressman named "Spotty" Lincoln was right about President Polk wanting, and pushing for, and conniving for, this war when Mexico refused to sell California, and using Texas issues as the cornerstone of his conniving. Also, El Paso never was a part of old Tejas, either.

Spanish-American War: President McKinley is on record before the 1896 election as wanting the Philippines. Spain requested a third-party investigation of the Maine explosion, arbitration, etc., Nope. We then had a three year imperialist war in those newly-American Philippines after the Spanish-American War itself was done.

World War I: President Wilson was a Britain-leaner far before April 4, 1917. And, the British blockade by extension (blockading Sweden, Denmark, etc., to no more than pre-1914 foodstuffs so they couldn't trans-ship to Germany) was just as illegal under international law as was German submarine warfare. We should have let both sides beat themselves senseless.

Vietnam: "Old hands" in the State Department knew the 2,000 years of Vietnamese-Chinese animosity, and knew that the domino theory was dumb on that account alone.

The Gulf War: I still believe April Glaspie that we set up Saddam Hussein in some way, egging him on in invading Kuwait. Even if we didn't, we have no doorknob-guaranteed right to cheap oil.

There was only one war that we really "underfought" in a sense. That's the Civil War, or actually, Reconstruction. Instead of 20,000 troops in the South for a decade, we should have had 200,000 for a generation, at least.

That said, it's fun to watch and hear "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" sung at Veterans Day and Memorial Day events in the South, since it was a Union-based Civil War song, as stanza 2 makes abundantly clear.

And, for Christians who love to selectively quote Romans 8, you might want to ponder further the issue of "obedience to the governing authorities" in light of both the Revolutionary War and Obamacare. That's you, dominionist Ted Cruz.

==

Update: I totally agree with this Salon piece.

Most of our "freedoms" are constitutional ones, not from foreign enemies. True, a foreign enemy might want to overthrow them, but, outside of war, the Center for Constitutional Rights, or the ACLU (second to the CCR in my book for the past several years) defends those freedoms more than the military. Also agreed that the fusion of sports and "Patriotism(TM)" pretty much makes me ill. 

Kunstler – the Paul Revere of Peak Oil

James Howard Kunstler continues to sound the alarm of of how radically Peak Oil will change America. Unfortunately, too few people are listening.

The public, and especially the mainstream media, misunderstands the "peak oil" story. It's not about running out of oil. It's about the instabilities that will shake the complex systems of daily life as soon as the global demand for oil exceeds the global supply. These systems can be listed concisely:

• The way we produce food.
• The way we conduct commerce and trade.
• The way we travel.
• The way we occupy the land.
• The way we acquire and spend capital.
And there are others: governance, health care, education and more.

As the world passes the all-time oil production high and watches as the price of a barrel of oil busts another record, as it did last week, these systems will run into trouble. Instability in one sector will bleed into another.

Shocks to the oil markets will hurt trucking, which will slow commerce and food distribution, manufacturing and the tourist industry in a chain of cascading effects. Problems in finance will squeeze any enterprise that requires capital, including oil exploration and production, as well as government spending.

These systems are all interrelated. They all face a crisis. What's more, the stress induced by the failure of these systems will only increase the wishful thinking across our nation.

I’m not as alarmist about Peak Oil as Kunstler is. Nonetheless, I’m more alarmist than many of the people who he finds are still asleep at the switch.

It’s sad that the college students in many of his lectures still appear to believe in American exceptionalism. So much for social conservatives bete noire of the “liberal academia.” Would that it were liberal enough to actually challenge such beliefs.

Then, you have folks like Amory Lovins at the Rocky Mountain Institute. I criticize Lovins for something else than Kunstler does, namely, his wide-eyed optimism for the hydrogen economy.

What both Lovins and too-wet-behind-the-ears college students either fail to, or refuse to, recognize is that empires have fallen in the past and ours is no different.

That’s unless we, as a society, officially withdraw the statement our leaders made at a U.N. conference, and accept instead that the “American lifestyle” HAS TO BE up for negotiation.