Noise, Fear, AI/ML

Silverfiddle Rant!

So much to talk about, so little time...

Why did President Trump take and stash all those documents?

What is the absolute worst Russia could do to Europe?  What do we as Americans have to fear from Russia?

Is Europe worth defending with American blood and treasure?

Has the US Federal Government become a horrible uncontrollable machine that depersonalizes us and endangers our liberties, but that we paradoxically cannot survive without?

When President Obama federalized student loans in 2010 as part of interlocking legislation with Obama Care, he said this:

"By cutting out the middleman, we'll save American taxpayers $68 billion in the coming years," the president said. "That's real money -- real savings that we'll reinvest to help improve the quality of higher education and make it more affordable."

It's 12 years later. Can anyone use federal budget figures to demonstrate this savings?

Can anyone point to any politician's promise of "savings" that actually happened?

Bonus Question: Who wrote the following?  (no prizes, Yahoogle search makes finding the author way too easy):

"In any technologically advanced society the individual's fate MUST depend on decisions that he personally cannot influence to any great extent. A technological society cannot be broken down into small, autonomous communities, because production depends on the cooperation of very large numbers of people and machines. Such a society MUST be highly organized..."

What say you?

A Dangerous Escalation

Silverfiddle Rant!

The Department of Justice said it was creating a task force to determine how federal enforcement tools could be used to prosecute criminal conduct toward teachers, and how to assist state and local authorities investigate such threats where such instances may not constitute federal crimes. (The Hill)

What does a progressive totalitarian do when her ideology is challenged by people demanding facts?  Refuse to debate, obfuscate, deploy shifty taxonomy and strain to reframe the issue. 

Most those who have heard of critical race theory and think they have a good idea of what it is believe that teaching it in schools is bad for America (55%). More than one-third of this group (37%) thinks that it is good for America. (YouGov Poll)

What if she still can't convince normal people?  Call them racists.

What if shouting "Racist" doesn't work?  

Get the bureaucratic police state to declare your enemies terrorists.  

So now we are in a nation where "parading" inside the Capitol building wearing a horned helmet makes you a terrorist.  Oath Keepers are now terrorists, despite being members of an above-board organization that states its mission publicly and has never planned or carried out a terrorist attack.  Same for the Proud Boys, who at best are a street-fighting reactionary opposite of the Antifa anarcho-fascists.

George Bush took a giant step towards building a totalitarian police state after 9/11, and the bureaucracies have been building it out ever since, yearning to replicate communist Eastern Europe or 1950's Latin American dictatorships.  Yes, the US Postal Service carries out a domestic spying operation on US citizens residing in the nation we once thought was ours.

Someone shouting at a school board meeting is not terrorism.  Threatening violence is not terrorism--It is a crime that local police departments and local prosecutors know how to handle.  This is way over the top. Our federal government is out of control and I don't know how we stop it.

America has seen terrorism.  Bubba threatening to kick a school board member's ass ain't it. Please read this short article for a dose of reality:  A History of Attacks at the US Capitol

Do Elections Matter?

Silverfiddle Rant!

We've all been commiserating the past few days over the federal government blob.  We all agree it is a clear and present danger to us, to the nation, and to the world, but what can We The People do? 

We know storming the capitol with flagpoles and bear spray doesn't work...

Bruce Abramson writes...

Only a fool would trust the emanations of America’s leading experts.

This week’s trophy, however, goes to America’s leading experts in foreign and defense policy, who assured us mere weeks ago that Afghanistan was secure. Are America’s top generals really that ignorant of military realities? Or were they playing to a domestic political agenda and hoping they could keep the fiction going long enough to gain plausible deniability and confuse the public?

Answer: You don’t get to be a general while being that ignorant of military facts on the ground. On the other hand, you don’t get to be a top general unless you know how to curry favor with politicians, diplomats, pundits, and the press. Which skill do you think dominates among those who’ve made it to the very top?

The same is true throughout America’s elite expert class. Those at the top are those who excel at getting promoted. With some exceptions, their mastery of subject matter and methodology is third rate; their mastery of professional politics is world class.

I am not joking and I am certainly not advocating it, but study some history, and this is usually where a dictator comes to power with the popular support of the people.

Vets in Congress Demand Answers

34 members of congress--nine Democrats and 25 Republicans--are veterans of Iraq and/or Afghanistan, and they are pissed off at the Afghanistan debacle and are demanding answers. That is a very good start.

 
So, what can We The People do?

CI blames our duopoly, and I agree.  Would partyless primaries with ranked choice voting help?

Baseline budgeting, or some kind of modified balanced budget law that limits government spending and forces politicians to make hard decisions?

Who do I blame?  A press that refuses to call ball and strikes and piss off the power elites.  Congress for ceding too much power to the presidency.  Uninformed voters...

A root cause I can identify is that in the short term, no one has skin in the game.

What are my solutions?  (Insert blank stare here)

What say you?  

Trillion Dollar Bitter End

Silverfiddle Rant!

When I joined the military, I signed up for whatever they threw at me and I gave it my all.  Millions of my fellow veterans (most of whom gave much more than I did) will tell you the same.  The military on the ground is tactically brilliant.  The uniformed politicians with stars on their shoulders and the bureaucrats and politicians they serve are tragically, terminally, strategically stupid.

America's overseas failures belong to our politicians, the bureaucratic blob, and the "experts" and corporations who feed them a neverending line of bullshit.

Joe Biden's failure--which includes DOD, State and Intel Alphabet Panopticon--is a failure to clear out of Kabul in a timely, orderly and dignified fashion. 

"Sh*tshow:"  Biden administration embroiled in internal blame-shifting amid Afghanistan chaos

Washington (CNN) - Factions within the Biden administration are embroiled in a blame game over why the US government didn't act sooner to withdraw American citizens and Afghans who helped the US over two decades of war, leading to a rushed and dangerous evacuation.

I pray Biden's bumbling incompetence doesn't result in American casualties.  I won't bore you with the complex logistics (and frightening list of what can go wrong) of extracting the last US troops from Kabul Airport. Gen Milley--who along with many other bureaucrats has repeatedly lied to us about Afghanistan--should be fired immediately, along with the Secretary of State, whoever he or she is.  

Bremmer said the United States failed in four major ways in drawing down its military presence in Afghanistan: intelligence, coordination, planning and communication. He said the Biden administration overestimated the Afghan military's capabilities, failed to work with American allies to formulate an exit strategy, did not seem to have contingency plans in place for a rapid collapse of the Afghan government and failed to communicate effectively with the American people. (Ian Bremmer, Houston Chronical)

We can also blame Trump for brokering the deal with the Taliban, we can blame Obama for eight years of dithering. We can even throw some blame at the Dems for being too cowardly to act on their supposed anti-war convictions, and anyway, Democrats were the ones insisting on nation building and humanitarian projects there, that ended up handing corrupt Afghan politicians and the taliban tens of billions.

Ultimate blame lies with the idiot firebug who started this:  George W. Bush.  

Damn him and his puppet masters Cheney and Rumsfeld.  If there was any justice in this world, they would be put in stocks in the public square and every veteran, friend or family of a vet would line up and take turns kicking those bastards square in the ass.  How tragically and historically stupid they all are. The Russians carpet bombed and horribly brutalized Afghanistan, but they could not conquer it.  Instead, they escaped into Uzbekistan, buttoned down and bleeding, dragging their dead and wounded.  To this day, the Pashtuns remain undefeated.

We need a better government that employs a higher level of thinking.  A few billion in bribes annually and some small-footprint covert ops--dressed up as foreign assistance--would have saved the trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives destroyed.  

Our federal government is an amoral, intellectually bankrupt House of Lies:  

Gulf of Tonkin, Weapons of Mass Destruction, the CIA isn't spying on Congress, the US Government doesn't conduct domestic spying on US citizens, the situation in Afghanistan is improving...

Lies, Lies Lies!

We need a commission to investigate why so many lies were told and so much blood and treasure expended.  We need to hold accountable the liars, the criminals, and even the simply incompetent.  They all must be expelled from the government blob.

We also need a better class of generals.  Ones who will stand up to their political masters and call bullshit on outlandish schemes instead of twisting themselves in knots to justify the unjustifiable and dress it all up in squared-off military speak. 

Ultimately, this is our fault:  We The People continue to elect the venal, the cowardly, the corrupt, the stupid, and we don't pay attention to what they are doing with our money and our military.  We've had bigger freak-outs over avocado shortages than anything that has happened in Afghanistan in the last 10 years.

I'll close with a few quotes from an essay by Andrew A. Michta of the George C. Marshall Center...

As Afghanistan implodes, such flawed assumptions need to be fully owned by those who constructed and sustained this ideologically laden strategic framework.  We will be paying for their hubris for years to come, for going forward both our allies and partners will factor into their decision-making and their policy choices the lessons of the past twenty years.

As we watch authoritarianism surge worldwide, alongside a growing skepticism about American leadership, what happened in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria should bring us back to the fundamentals of realist foreign and security policy. We need to re-learn the art of power-balancing, of building coalitions not around high-minded ideals but around shared interests and threat perceptions, all the while remembering that America’s military is a precious resource and that it must be the means of last resort, not the first tool in our foreign policy toolbox.

Where I've Been

(For politics, please scroll down)

On top of continuing The Big Clean Out (someone in my family has lived on this property since 1947), I'm in the throes of selling my residence here in Virginia and buying another home in Indiana.  This move is a truly daunting task: I've never moved before, and I'm tackling a long-distance move.

The first deal fell through on both ends!  Never mind that, after hours upon hours on the phone, I had everything coordinated with movers, including kitty boarding for about two weeks.  

I've had to start over!

Meanwhile, along came my local government, effective July 1, lopping off 1600 square feet of my property, thus making my "buildable" lot worthless on its own.  No prior notification, no warning whatsoever.

So much for the lifetimes of investment here.

I'll be back to my usual blogging in the fall after I get settled.  

Thanks to my good friend Silverfiddle for keeping this blog going in my absence.

You Are Here

Silverfiddle Rant!

I'm not a conservative anymore, nor am I a liberal.  These words are meaningless now, they are used only for tribal identity, and I'm done with tribes.

Donald Trump was a threat to the Establishment, so they spied on him and sabotaged him.  Props to our always-honest friend Jez for stating the obvious:

"Looks like intelligence agencies were monitoring the Trump '16 campaign, and continued to cast a weather eye on him thereafter. I don't have a problem with that, merely winning an election is no guarantee that you're not a criminal."

You and What Army?

Trump did himself no favors.  He kicked in the door to the clubhouse of the dirtiest, nastiest most dangerous gang in the world and announced he was going to kick everybody's ass, but he didn't have the tough people behind him to make it happen.  Also, he set himself on fire daily and routinely shipped truckloads of ammo to people wanting to destroy him.  

Team Trump was full of outsiders and that made them a danger to institutions and special interests, if not to the US itself thanks to their having no experience steering the ship of state through very dangerous waters.  I'm sure that's how the saboteurs, ratfinks, bedbugs and moles justified their actions.

Challenging China was itself enough to rally his enemies.  Too many people and businesses make too many billions selling out our nation and our workers to China. There is an interlocking global cartel of billionaires, powerful people, governments and bureaucrats, and their one focus is protecting the franchise.  The US citizens in that cartel don't give a shit about Democrat or Republican.  They don't give a shit about the United States of America and her people, either, unless it increases their bank accounts or gives them more power over others. 

Global War on MAGA

John Brennan and Stan McChrystal are aiming insurgency and terrorism rhetoric at Trump supporters, and they need to back it down.  Such talk is reckless and irresponsible, and its fueling  even more irresponsible propaganda emanating from Establishment revanchists and their clueless leftwing handmaidens, hoping to drive a new Patriot Act to bring the War on Terror home to the US.  

I understand the old adage that to Hammerin' Stan, every problem looks like an insurgency nail, but for all his and his fellow Establishmentarians' wisdom, Afghanistan is a lost cause and Iraq--instead of being the Germany of the Middle East--barely limps along.  

All Stan and his fellow generals accomplished--at the behest of their Establishment masters--was wrecking nations, killing hundreds of thousands of people, and enflaming even more hatred against the US.  Thanks for all your brilliance, Stan, but please don't bring your shitshow here to America.  

A Time for Choosing

It's time to reject the old order.  The "experts" have brought us nothing but failure.  Winning WW II and  paying off the enormous debt of that war was the Establishment's last achievement.  Government has since developed an auto-immune disorder and is attacking We The People. The Establishment hollowed out American factory towns, selling it all lock, stock and barrel to China, leaving working people with no jobs and destroyed communities, all in the name of GOP "free market capitalism."  

The Establishment starts wars it can't win, or even finish.  We need to stop listening to Democrats and Republicans preaching us into wars, and we need to stop listening to hubristic generals selling us winning strategies that always end up losing. 

Everybody over 50 needs to get the hell out of the way.  I would take Andrew Yang and Tulsi Gabbard over a GOP Establishmentarian any day.  So, my penultimate piece of advice is to throw your support behind whoever vows--Trump-like--to dismantle the DC Criminal Cartel but--unlike Trump--actually has the rhetorical skills and a top-notch team of smart bureaucratic infighters to get it done.  No more marginal revolutions.

My final piece of advice?  Pray.

Tune in Tuesday...

Government-Sponsored Looting

Silverfiddle Rant!

I read this article, and the further I went, the angrier I got. Please read it now.  If you have high blood pressure, caution.

Trump wants schools to reopen. Experts say COVID-19 safety measures will cost billions

This is a full-on cash grab riot. If you have ever worked on a humanitarian mission or been in a war zone and watched the mad stampede of desperate hungry people when the food trucks roll up, you'll understand what I mean.  The poor refugees can be excused--they are fighting (often each other) for their lives.  Today's US Cavalcade of Waste is shameful and cynical. 

The states closed their schools, and now insist they need billions from the federal government to open them back up.

WASHINGTON — If schools are to reopen safely as soon as August, which President Donald Trump has proposed, education experts say billions of dollars in federal funding will be needed in the next coronavirus relief bill.

Uncle Sam has gone senile and fearful, so he is throwing borrowed trillions out the window, and his madness has touched off a free-for-all.

Governors are asking Congress for $500 billion in emergency funding to rescue states with severe revenue shortfalls, but leading education groups say schools should receive half of that money.

some $50 billion of that money would be set aside for minority-serving colleges and universities. Another $25 billion would go to supporting vulnerable children, as well as low-income and minority students.

Remember what a multi-billion dollar budget-busting boon 9/11 was for the MIC, the alphabet intelligence agencies (that failed us) and for the ballooning federal bureaucracy?

The education establishment and domestic federal, state and local bureaucracies are exploiting this crisis to grab their share.