Election Day 2016

Aside from perhaps endorsing  the Sweet Meteor O' Death, this is all I'm going to say:

2016: Annus Horribilis Already

2015 was darn awful and pure dagnasty evil, and we were all happy to see the end of it.  Now I'm not so sure we're happy to see the start of 2016, or at least I'm not.  From the recent Iran incident to the utter predation on full display in Cologne to a truly surreal and absurdist State of the Union address that actually - I swear I'm not making this up - spotlighted Obama putting Joe Biden in charge of curing cancer, from the devastating death of David Bowie and then right on the heels of it the passing of Alan Rickman, it's enough to drive one to drink.  

I have only this to say to 2016: I'VE HAD JUST ABOUT ENOUGH OF YOU, PAL.

My Commentary on Current Events

Yes, this about sums it all up, from domestic politics to foreign policy:

Quote of the Day: "Our Stock Arguments Are Lazy Stacks of Cliches"

A thoughtful liberal takes his fellows to task (as well he should, because he's totally correct).  Read the whole thing, but here's a piece of it:

Criticism of today’s progressives tends to use words like toxic, aggressive, sanctimonious, and hypocritical. I would not choose any of those. I would choose lazy. We are lazy as political thinkers and we are lazy as culture writers and we are lazy as movement builders. We ward off criticism of our own bad work by acting like that criticism is inherently anti-feminist or anti-progressive. We seem spoiled, which seems insane because everything is messed up and so many things are getting worse. I guess having a Democratic president just makes people feel complacent. Well, look: as a political movement we are in pathetic shape right now. We not only have no capacity to move people who don’t already share our worldview, we seem to have no interest in doing so. Our stock arguments are lazy stacks of cliches. We seem to want to confirm everything conservatives say about our inability to argue without calling other people racist. We can’t articulate why our vision of the future is better than the other side’s, and in fact many of us will tell you that it’s offensive to think that we have an obligation to educate others on that vision at all. We celebrate grassroots activist movements like Black Lives Matter, but we insult them by treating them as the same thing as hashtag campaigns, and we don’t build a broader left-wing political movement that could increase their likelihood of success. We spend all day, every day, luxuriating in how much better we are than other people, having convinced ourselves that the work of politics is always external, never internal. We have made politics synonymous with social competition. We’re a mess.

... One-liners don’t build a movement. Being clever doesn’t fix the world. Scoring points on Twitter doesn’t create justice. Jokes make nothing happen. We’re speeding for a brutal backlash and inevitable political destruction, if not in 2016 then 2018 or 2020. If you want to help avoid that, I suggest you invest less effort in trying to be the most clever person on the internet and more on being the hardest working person in real life. And stop mistaking yourself for the movement.

Via Mark Hemingway of the Weekly Standard, who also notes: "The Democratic party's complete ideological breakdown in favor of party leaders fragging each other would be an amusing spectacle if so many of America's imminent problems didn't depend on working together."

Well-Known Right-Wing Rag Calls Iran Deal a Disaster

Call the deal what it is with a headline of "Obama’s Iran deal falls far short of his own goals."  So, yeah, even by his own stated standards.  Compare and contrast.

By the way, I was being sarcastic in the post title.  Nowadays I can never tell if people understand what sarcasm is.  

Oh, and the Onion nailed it 2 whole years ago.

Quote of the Day: US Foreign Policy in the Middle East

Or, more accurately, lack of it:

While other administrations have shown weakness or had failures in the region, “This is the first administration to see the region as inconsequential.” Believing our “real” interests lay elsewhere (e.g. Asia) has led to a lack of focus and engagement in the Middle East. We continue to appear unserious because, in essence, we are.

YOU DON'T SAY!

Nerd Journal: IT'S FINALS WEEK

What Finals Week is saying to me:

My reply:

Satire Alert: OUCH

The Onion is ruthless with its new headline: "FBI Uncovers Al-Qaeda Plot To Just Sit Back And Enjoy Collapse Of United States."   Here's a piece of it:

“We have intercepted electronic communication indicating that al-Qaeda members are actively plotting to stay out of the way while America as we know it gradually crumbles under the weight of its own self-inflicted debt and disrepair,” FBI Deputy Director Mark F. Giuliano told the assembled press corps. “If this plan succeeds, it will leave behind a nation with a completely dysfunctional economy, collapsing infrastructure, and a catastrophic health crisis afflicting millions across the nation. We want to emphasize that this danger is very real.” 

... A recently declassified CIA report confirmed that all known al-Qaeda-affiliated organizations—from Pakistan to Yemen, and from Somalia to Algeria—have been instructed to kick back and enjoy the show as the United States’ federal government, energy grid, and industrial sector are rendered impotent by internal dissent, decay, and mismanagement.

The Onion on Student Loan Debt

ZING!

Nerd Journal: FINAL EXAMS ARE UPON US!

Need I say more?  Regular posting and commentary will return after exams!

Finals. Yeah, it's like that.

Hope, Change, and the Iran Deal

Dignified Rant considers the deal.  The conclusion?  "We are so screwed."  I concur.

PS: Peace in our time, yo! Sarcasm, aside, though, consider this, which gives us the quote of the day:

 This Administration in its record on the Middle East appears to have a unique ability not to see the approach of danger. 

You don't say!  Well, none are as blind as those who refuse to see.  I repeat this previously voiced sentiment.  Oh, and keep your eye on the Israelis, who are disgusted with this deal "historic mistake," and I can't blame them.  Ummm ... dude?

Lest We Forget, The Kids Aren't All Right

Yeah, we're all totally screwed:

Washington has willfully ignored the looming crisis of entitlement spending, knowingly consigning young Americans to a future of crushing debt, persistent underemployment, and burdensome regulation. Politicians on both sides of the aisle share the blame.

While we're at it, let's note the particular problem of school debt which is - surprise! - made ever worse by political attempts to "fix" it:

This summer, Congress made a big bipartisan show of cutting student loan rates to 3.4 percent from an already artificially low 6.8 percent. But even that seemingly helpful gesture will wind up hurting the Americans it claims to help. Federal student aid, whether in the form of grants or loans, is the main factor behind the runaway cost of higher education. Subsidies raise prices, leading to higher subsidies, which raise prices even more. This higher education bubble, like the housing bubble before it, will eventually pop. Meanwhile, large numbers of students will graduate with more debt than they would have in an unsubsidized market.

S-C-R-E-W-E-D.

FYI: "The Shutdown Is a Sideshow. Debt Is the Threat."

Of course the shutdown is a cynical political sideshow. (But let's not forget who's culpable here, OK?)  Niall Ferguson has the grim reminder that the real problem is unsustainable debt.  Today's quote of the day comes from it:

"Only a fantasist can seriously believe 'this is not a crisis.'"

Unfortunately, the current political "leadership" is full of fantasists, fabulists, and willful deniers of reality.

Nerd Analysis: Syria Fallout

Two professors of national security (backgrounds in history and political science) pen this analysis.  Note: they had diametrically opposed ideas about what should be done about Syria, but they agree that the Putin-Obama deal is a wreck: 

For nearly seven decades, American efforts in the Middle East have been based on a bipartisan consensus—one of the few to be found in U.S. foreign policy—aimed at limiting Moscow’s influence in that region. This is a core interest of American foreign policy: it reflects the strategic importance of the region to us and to our allies, as well as the historical reality Russia has continually sought clients there who would oppose both Western interests and ideals. In less than a week, an unguarded utterance by a U.S. Secretary of State has undone those efforts. Not only is Moscow now Washington’s peer in the Middle East, but the United States has effectively outsourced any further management of security problems in the region to Russian president Vladimir Putin.

UPDATE: OK, how about this negative feedback in the New York Times, no less?  Ouchie.  

In Soviet Russia, Cards Play You

And, boy, have we been played.  Ugh.  The craptacular Russian deal on Syria is now officially a thing.  I don't even know what to say.  

What a total mess.  Hell, a fictional Starfleet engineer knows more about diplomacy than the clowns that we've seen lately:

How Assad will now regard any attempt to stop him:

Meanwhile in the Kremlin, this is the look on Pooty-Poot's face:

And this is what is happening to America's standing in the world:

Oh, and this is me ... and maybe you too:

Quote of the Day: Mark Steyn on Putin

Pretty much, yeah:

Putin has pulled off something incredible: He’s gotten Washington to anoint him as the international community’s official peacemaker, even as he assists Iran in going nuclear and keeping their blood-soaked Syrian client in his presidential palace. 

Quote of the Day: The Russian "Deal"

Oh boy.  From former State Department official Robert Joseph, who a decade ago helped negotiate Libya’s agreement to give up its nuclear and chemical weapons:

“I don’t think for one moment that the Syrians will give up their chemical weapons stocks. They will say they will give it up and they will play the game to undercut any support for a military strike. But they will then start to put conditions on verification and on the foreign presence in Syria.  Soon, they will start in with Israel; demanding that Israel’s nuclear weapons be put on the table. All of this will lead nowhere for the United States — exactly where Damascus and Moscow want it to go.”

Syria In Images

It's gotten to the point that I can no longer find polite words necessary to discuss the Syria fiasco, which seems to get more insane by the second.  So I resort to images.

Basically what the Obama Administration has created:

How the Obama Administration thinks it's doing:

How Assad and Putin think they're doing:

How people who care about actual foreign policy and national security are feeling:

How the media will try to present this to the public as some kind of Obama victory:

The increasingly-clear winner:

How I'm feeling:

A video bonus, since someone has now called this "Monty Python's Flying Damascus."
Look, at this point you either laugh or you cry.

Quote of the Day: War and Therapy

This whole Syria debacle is turning out to be a huge pain in the Assad:

War used to be the pursuit of politics by other means. Today, if the statements made by the Western politicos and observers who want to bomb Syria are anything to go by, it’s the pursuit of therapy by other means. The most startling and unsettling thing about the clamour among some Westerners for a quick, violent punishment of the Assad regime is its nakedly narcissistic nature.  

... Easily the most notable thing in the debate about bombing Syria in response to Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons against civilians is the absence of geopolitical considerations, or of any semi-serious thought about what the regional or international consequences of dropping bombs into an already hellish warzone might be. Instead, all the talk is of making a quick moral gesture about ourselves by firing a few missiles at wickedness. In the words of a Democratic member of the US Foreign Affairs Committee, there might be ‘very complex issues’ in Syria, but ‘we, as Americans, have a moral obligation to step in without delay’. Who cares about complexity when there’s an opportunity to show off our own moral decency? 

All the discussion so far has focused, not on the potential moral consequences of bombing Syria, but on the moral needs of those who would do the bombing.

Hell, there's not even a clear objective here.  This is supposed to be satire, but I can't really discern the difference between its substance and the actual expression of purpose from the Obama Administration.  Can you?

Oh, I can't help adding that Brendan O'Neill wins the palm of hono(u)r from me for riffing on Carly Simon as he lambastes the Syria bombification fanboys: "They’re so vain they think someone else’s war is all about them."

Quote of the Day: Rhetoric Meets Reality

From yesterday's explosive House of Commons debate on Syria, chemical weapons, and military intervention:

“Isn’t the real reason we’re here today, is not because of the horror of these weapons and the horror exists – but because the American president foolishly drew a red line and because of his position now, he’s going to attack or face humiliation?” - Labour MP Paul Flynn

Must be more of that smart diplomacy.