Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

It's like you haven't even seen that episode of Madame Secretary.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

We can’t kill our way to improving the world. See the last 20 years.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

My nieces’ grandma and her husband aren’t vaccinated. They had Covid already, so they probably have some immunity, but I cannot tell you how angry I am that they won’t either stay the fuck away or get the jab form the granddaughters who aren’t old enough.

It was the older one’s 5th birthday and my brother’s um.... I would have told them not to come. Apparently others in the family are less of an asshole. I should have said something to them. They are inside with my nieces right now.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

In retrospect, one of our greatest failings was the CivOps operation. We convinced few and alienated many.

If your goal is social change, I suspect $4T could have been spent more productively, and the death toll could have been kept below a quarter million.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I think there are many people in Afghanistan who would prefer something else to the Taliban, but that doesn't mean they can create a legitimate, durable government.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/t...s-what-happens

The movie cited in the article contains several great lines. One of the best, paraphrased as accurately as I can recall is, "You can't create peace within a country by invading it."

Bush I understood this in Iraq. Probably because he was not a McKinsey sort. He didn't run models. He didn't apply metrics from afar as would an MBA. Because he'd actually been to war and accumulated decades of experience in foreign affairs on the ground - working directly with other nations - he was humble enough and shrewd enough to view Hussein as a lamentable but necessary garbage pail lid that kept a festering pile of shit from leaking around the greater middle east.

His son, OTOH, w/no experience, and Dick Cheney, the very worst form of Beltway know-it-all consultant-think operative, had nothing but hubris. "They'll greet us as liberators." And of course, once you've broken all the china, put a guy like Bremmer, a half-wit middle manager, in charge of the whole thing.

There are many lousy reasons Americans distrust people calling themselves experts. There are just as many quite valid ones. Colin Powell might've on to something far more than he knew when he said people who haven't gone to war aren't the right people to make decisions about going to war.

Maybe add to that, policy wonks and MBAs who don't have any direct experience with the culture they're liberating are the last people who should be guiding any of our foreign policy, let alone military interventions.

We can't force democracy on the rest of the world for two reasons. First, many cultures simply don't want it. Second, the alleged best and the brightest who task themselves with doing so are just as often incompetents as they are experts.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Exactly. But this is controversial, it being counterintuitive to modeling and that shows that if you take over a country at gunpoint with thousands of soldiers and then install a puppet government to run it, all the while bulldozing the established social/political/commercial systems of the country which have been established over hundreds of years, the locals will greet you with open arms.

This also runs counter to the eminently researched white papers of men like Wolfowitz, Perle, and Kristol, who've seen "nation building" up close, feet on the ground. It runs smack in the face of their assessment, shared by the executive suite of Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Halliburton, that what really dogged us in Vietnam, Iraq, and now Afghanistan was a simple lack of will. That Horatio Alger ethos, and that belief in Manifest Destiny of democracy worldwide (the Bush Doctrine) simply eludes us. It is our lack of backbone, our fatigued spirit and amnesia for the Gipper's never-say-die attitude, that racks up the Ls instead of the Ws.

(Nevermind, of course, that the Gipper, like Bush II, used surgical strikes in response to the attack on Marines in Lebanon, and in response to Gaddafi, and never once considered "nation building" in either location, realizing it was hopeless.)

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

We will never have a govt run by truly useful experts because if you're a truly useful expert you're probably in the CIA, mopping up the fuck-ups of the policy experts working in elected offices.

Beltway lifers are limited. Their knowledge is blindered to anything outside the institution in which they're working. Everything is seen thru the prism of what their agency does. And they protect their lanes like a mother bear protecting cubs, as that's their job security. This is how you wind up with every agency operating like a disconnected tentacle rather than coordinating. Twenty years removed from 9/11, which in part was a failure of coordination, do you think anything has really changed? I doubt it. Instead of even trying to coordinate them organically, we instead developed a whole new bureaucracy - Homeland Security - to attempt to meld their resources to a common aim.

Covid was an earthquake where we really needed a Krakatoa level event. I walked away from the assessment that we needed a complete meltdown of our govt followed by a reboot from the ground up many years ago. I find myself reconsidering that position today. I may have been right early on, and complacent in the intervening years. We're just so fucking stupid.

The American Taliban
 

So Texas is now offering $10,000 bounties.

My understanding is the Taliban's bounties were never more than a couple hundred dollars.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I'd like to extend a hearty "Fuck you" to anyone who ever said, "don't worry about Roe, they'll never touch it. It'd be suicide and the end of their cash cow."

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Griswold next.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Oh absolutely.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Um, Sebastian is right up there and can probably hear you …

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I have come in recent years to recognize that I have certain flaws in my assessments. Much like an economist, I assume rational actors too often. Much like an old line Republican who's perhaps not been as close to the hoi polloi of Social Conservativeland as I might be, I have a misguided assumption that some wise old moderate will always squash the most lurid demands of the Jesus Freaks.

The suicide bombers have the wheel. My gin soaked analyses of what will happen in the GOP might as well be from 1978.

I'd say I'm surprised, that I go to school every day. And I am, but I won't, because whatever leads to the sort of troglodyte reactive politics that caused this abortion debacle in TX I don't really want to understand. It's mental illness.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I'm somewhat upset at all the comparisons of Texas to the Taliban.

The Taliban are traditionalists reacting against a modernizing society that to a great degree has caused violence, poverty, and chaos in their communities.

The Texiban are traditionalists who have been enriched and empowered by a modernizing society who are upset at the trade offs, including not having women under their thumbs.

The Texiban are much worse than the Taliban by many measures.