World’s. Dumbest. Enemies. By Mark Morford
Chechnya! Of course! Chechnya wants America dead because they hate our freedoms, our shopping malls and our shiny perfect Jesus. Right? Because we have invaded their homeland and destroyed their culture with Burger King and Walmart and…um, wait, what? We haven’t? They don’t? The Boston bombers, while originally ethnic Chechens, are largely “self-radicalized?” And the younger one, Dzhokhar, is an American citizen? And they acted alone? And they’re basically dumb as logs? Oh.
It’s all so… confusing. So frustrating. How are we supposed to handle this? Who are we supposed to hate upon? The idiot Tsarnaev brothers don’t fit our beloved terrorist stereotypes, do not play the role we wanted them to play. Damn them!
Sure they’re Muslims, sort of, but they aren’t your classic, scarf-wearing fundamentalist sociopaths we love to hate. Sure they’re would-be terrorists, sort of, but it appears they’re also exactly just as hapless, ignorant, dopey, unrealistic, muddled, amateurish, moronic, foolish, gullible and downright stupid as nearly all terrorists the world over. Sure they’re from a violent and war-torn region, mostly (though Chechnya is quite stable now), but it’s also a part of the world almost no one knows or cares anything about, and never really will.
How utterly… deflating. For a country like America that defines itself by its enemies, that must have them lest the hawks and warmongers of the right sigh themselves to sleep every night, we just don’t know where to turn, where to direct all our intolerance and bile. All we have is one skinny, naive-looking 19-year-old kid named Dzhokhar who’s lying in a hospital bed, riddled with bullets, barely alive, his throat torn out and his world surrounded by cops and ignominy and death, whispering that he has no clue what the hell is going on.
the rest: http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2013/04/23/worlds-dumbest-enemies/
= new reply since forum marked as read
Let me explain.....
See? Korea and Vietnam showed the MIC that going to war against a conceptual enemy could actually be better than fighting against nation-states, particularly from a sustainability perspective. ''Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace.'' That sort of thing. If they could only get the rubes to buy into it! Turns out they could! And it was easy!
But like its sister and brother wars, the Poverty War and the Drug War, The War On Terror War is never meant to be won per se. Won enough to keep spirits up that we're ''winning and will not be bowed.'' (USA! USA!) But making the ''enemies of the state'' enough of a continuing threat to our personal safety to justify demanding 60% of the national budget against people whose main occupation before their family got Droned by mistake, was farming.
The better way to see it all is that these ''Wars Against'' are income generating concepts that use Fear and Income reward/deprivation as its leverage. Since the beneficiaries of these ''Wars Against'' are the same people who screw the rest of the world from Wall Street -- and who own most of ''our'' politicians -- are afforded preferential tax positions (meaning paying none), the right of self-regulation, legal personhood (sans the blood-letting parts), and your own group of lawyers (Congress) to make it all tidy and so-called ''legal.''
- It's sort of like art, only with boring politicians who paint by numbers (only where they're told). Oh, and who lack any morals whatsoever.....
K&R
...I use to hire kids through the old CETA program for summer employment. Sent some to training in the public housing's maintenance departments where most were usually hired eventually either by government agencies or private employers doing government contract work.
Now, community development funds go to corporations to help build football stadium infrastructure (did that in Nashville and reclaimed a brownfield in the process, which was land that no private entity would ever buy as it was - paid for with federal funds), inner-city redevelopment projects (gentrification) and corporate tax-write offs for hiring the poor and having the government pay part of their wages for a year. You can always let them go later with 20-35 applicants per job these days.
- I unfortunately know all too well how it works, and was one of the primary reasons I got out as soon as I could.....
...you don't have to think about where your strokes go as much.
