Afghanistan and Trump

Since the days of the Great Game, in the mid-1800s, Afghanistan has been known as the ‘Graveyard of Empires’.  Go ahead and Google the term.  They drove out the British Empire twice, Imperial Russia, then the Soviet Union, and have managed to maintain a stalemate with us and our allies since 2001.  Whenever there are no foreign powers to fight, the multitude of competing warlords, tribes and other factions stay sharp by practicing on each other. 

Last night, the Current Occupant of the White House demonstrated that our engagement in that country is yet another critical issue about which he has absolutely no understanding. 

He said, "Our troops will fight to win. We will fight to win. From now on, victory will have a clear definition, attacking our enemies, obliterating ISIS, crushing al Qaeda, preventing the Taliban from taking over Afghanistan and stopping mass terror attacks against America before they emerge."  These crowd-pleasing words sound great, but they are goals, not a strategy – and they are the same goals we have had all along.  The closest thing to a change in strategy is giving the military more autonomy.  But this still does not define what victory would look like, or how to achieve this.  It just means he will have somebody below him to blame when it doesn’t work. 

He cited the service men and women who have lost their lives as reason for staying there to see the battle through.  This is eerily like British and Soviet reasons for overstaying their missions – and very much like the ‘peace with honor’ criteria that kept us bleeding in Vietnam for seven years after our leaders knew it was not winnable.  It defines an escalating cycle of commitment for an unwinnable (and nebulously-defined) war that is already the longest in our history. 

Capitalism and Concentration of Power

A couple points, Dan:

1)      Labor is as fundamental to the workings of capitalism as is entrepreneurship members of the labor force are no more ‘spectators’ than are entrepreneurs, or the bankers who back them.  As economies of scale progress—and the fundamental forces of market competition drive out smaller, less-efficient competitors—there is a natural concentration of power.  Ironically, once the market is highly concentrated, the competitive mechanisms that drive capitalism’s most positive attributes wither.  In other words, unregulated capitalism contains the seeds of its own demise. 
Regulation may act to counter this destructive concentration, but often it is only applies after the power and wealth are so concentrated that the regulators are coopted, and thus ineffective. 

2)      A major intend of the education (what used to be called ‘normal’ schools) was always to provide trained ‘obedient’ workers – what are often called productive contributors to society. 

Thus ends my standard counterpoint to your Schmieding rant.  You’re welcome!

Anthony 'Tony the Mooch' Scaramucci

Tony the Mooch didn't get fired.  

He's just freeing up time on his calendar to study advanced yoga with Steve Bannon.

The Party of 'Hands Off'

The Republican Party claims to be the party that wants to keep government out of people’s lives.  

They, of course, make exceptions in matters of birth, death, marriage, choice or recreation, which bathroom one may use … you know, just the really important places for government to be.  

But hey!  If you want to set up a coal-fired power plant, or a fracking operation, without a bunch of busy-body regulators sneaking peeks at your effluent, well, they say, just let a man live his own life! 

Ersatz ObamaCare Replacement

Despite its shortcomings and compromises, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA, sometimes called ‘ObamaCare’) helps provide affordable health insurance coverage to twenty million of our most vulnerable fellow citizens – the working poor, who make enough money to lift them above the official poverty line, but whose employers don’t provide health insurance, and who can’t afford to pay the full price on their own.  It also defined Minimum Essential Coverage, to make sure that any qualifying policies would meet basic needs.    

In every other advanced industrial nation, the only thing even slightly controversial about the ACA is that it is not more comprehensive.  It is axiomatic that access to affordable healthcare is a fundamental human right.  The idea that somebody who is barely getting by, with little job security and hardly any savings—could face huge medical bills and financial ruin as the result of an illness or injury is recognized everywhere else as a human rights violation.  Here it is so common, it isn’t even news.  

The supposed 'replacement' which is scheduled for a vote today would do worse than reverse these gains; dumping 24 million of our working poor into the jungle of the individual health insurance market, where they have no prayer of obtaining decent affordable health insurance.  

Ironically, the best hope we have of avoiding the passage of this disastrous bill today are votes against it from congressional representatives who insist on a system which would be even more cruel.  

EPA and Naugas

In the first major environmental success for the new administration, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt announce the removal of the nauga from the Endangered Species list.  

According to the press release:  
“These gentle creatures once roamed the plains in such numbers that the ground was barely visible beneath them; the air a cacophony of hundreds of thousands of their, ‘nauga nauga nauga’ vocalizations.  The naugas were hunted nearly to extinction in the 1960s and 70s for their hides – for use in cheap automobile upholstery.  But thanks to changes in consumer preferences, a successful captive breeding program, and the nauga’s prodigious rate of reproduction, their continued success as a species is all but assured.”    

An EPA spokesperson, speaking on condition of anonymity hinted at more good news on the horizon, related to the Corinthian buffalo, also once hunted for its fine leather.  

Agree to Disagree

We can agree to disagree with those who say that the world is flat, that evolution is no more valid than somebody’s creation mythology, that there was no moon landing, the size of the crowds at inaugurations or demonstrations, the veracity of a Bowling Green Massacre, and many other issues.  

But agreeing to disagree does not make both positions equal.  It just prevents a meaningless argument with somebody who ignores reality.