When you start a donnybrook is when you find out who your friends are

Actually, you should look around the bar before you throw that first punch, to make sure someone has your back. Theoretically, that is — not that I’ve ever been one to leap into bar fights.

In totally unrelated news, Iran, China, and Russia are teaming up in a joint military exercise.

Iran has kicked off the first joint naval drill with Russia and China in the northern part of the Indian Ocean, Iranian state TV has reported.

The four-day exercise comes at a time of heightened tensions since the United States withdrew from a landmark 2015 nuclear deal with Iran in May last year.

“The message of this exercise is peace, friendship and lasting security through cooperation and unity … and its effect will be to show that Iran cannot be isolated,” Rear Admiral Gholamreza Tahani said on state television.

Well, our European friends have pledged their undying loyalty to us, I’m sure.

The US reimposed crippling sanctions on Iran after quitting the nuclear deal last year, prompting Tehran to hit back with countermeasures by dropping nuclear commitments.

Remaining parties to the badly weakened agreement include the UK, France and Germany, as well as China and Russia.

I can take on all of youse, c’mon. Just let me down a couple more shots first, ‘k?

We’ve already lost the war

There was never any way we could win it. The latest phase began with Trump blustering at Iran:

Iran will be held fully responsible for lives lost, or damage incurred, at any of our facilities. They will pay a very BIG PRICE! This is not a Warning, it is a Threat. Happy New Year!

The man sounds like a child having a temper tantrum. Khameini responded with this:

1st: You can’t do anything. 2nd: If you were logical – which you’re not—you’d see that your crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan… have made nations hate you.

He was right, you know. 100% absolutely surefire correct. The US has the technology to wreck the infrastructure of a country, but Iran and Iraq can easily throw a million fanatical, righteously outraged people armed with AK-47s at our troops. Their casualties will be enormous, but we only have about a thousand soldiers in Iraq. They will be overwhelmed. We can pour more men in, but they will only be meat for the furious grinder. The US does not have an appetite for huge casualty lists. We will not succeed. We cannot succeed with conventional warfare. 80 million people live in Iran, almost 40 million in Iraq. Is the plan to hold every citizen at gunpoint?

Remember, these two countries suffered at least a half million casualties in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. They have the will to die for their countries; I don’t think Americans have the will to die for Iraq. We don’t want to win a war there, while Iranians and Iraqis are fighting for their lives.

And most importantly, Khameini is right that we have made nations hate us. Increasing our involvement will only increase the hatred of every citizen in the region, and this latest step is going to alienate them further. We have no friends there; are we going to ask the Kurds to help us? Israel could declare their support to our face, but you know their diplomats and responsible politicians are all seething behind the scenes at the fact that America has stirred up the hornets’ nest.

Except, maybe, for the delusional ones, like our Republicans, who are thrilled with the idea of sending young men and women to die for their glory.

War

I tried this.

I set my expectations at rock bottom. The problem is that no matter how low I set them, somehow the universe drops through the floor.

Surprise! The reports have been confirmed by Iranian news sources. As for that bit about whether the US is responsible…

Yes, it is. Our country has committed a bloody assassination of a major figure in Iran, an attack launched at our idiot president’s order and unauthorized by congress. This will have repercussions.

I wonder if impeachment has destabilized our president as much as our president’s actions have destabilized the Middle East? We’re living in a madhouse.

Under capitalism, evil is just another brand

Eddie Gallagher is one of the baddies: he was a murderous Navy Seal in Iraq.

In a lengthy criminal investigation report, the navy detectives laid out other allegations against Gallagher, including shooting a schoolgirl and elderly man from a sniper’s roost. Members of Alpha Platoon’s Seal Team 7 alarmed by their leader’s conduct said they were initially shut down by military chiefs when they first spoke up, and told their own careers would suffer if they continued to talk about it.

Eventually, the Navy Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) began an inquiry and the platoon members were called to give evidence.

“The guy is freaking evil,” special operator first class Craig Miller, one of the platoon’s most experienced members, told investigators in sometimes tearful testimony. “I think Eddie was proud of it, and that was, like, part of it for him.”

Miller said Gallagher, who had the nickname Blade, went on to stage a bizarre “re-enlistment ceremony” over the body of the captive. “I was listening to it and I was just thinking, like, this is the most disgraceful thing I have ever seen in my life,” he said.

At his court martial, the panel heard evidence that Gallagher had emailed a photograph to a friend in the US containing a photograph of him holding up the dead captive’s head with the words: “Good story behind this, got him with my hunting knife.”

These are actions more appropriate to a nightmarish anti-Nazi documentary, yet he’s an American, he actually did these things, and he was pardoned by the US president for murdering children and mutilating bodies. The man is a monster, and he has been embraced by our corrupt government. He is what the people of Iraq will remember about America, and that we have no sense of shame.

However, there is no embarrassment so devastating that capitalism can’t find a way to monetize it, and for the NY Times to sanitize it. He has founded a clothing line and sells all kinds of militaristic crap.

Right. The NY Times calls murder and terrorism a “distinct brand of patriotism”. I guess you could say that if you were willing to downplay horror.

Julian Castro is out

We need more candidates to drop out of the Democratic field, but I’m not happy at seeing some of the more interesting candidates dropping out, like Julian Castro. We still have 14 people spreading confusion and acting as spoilers! Get rid of Steyer and Bloomberg, we don’t need any more narcissistic billionaires. Williamson is a flake, Yang is an oblivious entrepreneur, Gabbard is a mole, Bennet, Delaney, and Patrick are negligible nobodies who don’t have a chance. It’s incomprehensible that anyone is still promoting Buttigieg. I wish I could fling Biden into a dumpster somewhere, but he has a polling advantage and needs to be taken seriously. There were 15 candidates who dropped out!

The process is generating a lot of noise and the winnowing that is happening isn’t based on merit, at all.

ACAB

A police officer in Kansas stirs up outrage by posting a photo of a McDonald’s coffee cup labeled with the words “fucking pig”. He made it all up. He claims it was “just a joke”. He has been dismissed from the police force.

A class of correctional officers in training (prison guards, that is) included all of the members giving a Nazi salute in the class picture, claiming it was “simply a greeting”, and that “there is nothing wrong with it, we have people of all colors and backgrounds in the picture and every one of them are participating.” The training officer, Byrd, also said that it was an honor because she was “a hard-ass like Hitler.” All of them, including two officers, have been fired.

As a capstone to this demonstration of historical ignorance, the cadets say they were just following orders.

The report states some cadets “only followed what they perceived to be an order from Instructor Byrd to do the ‘Hail Byrd’ for the photograph because they feared they would not graduate, or would be disciplined for failure to follow the order of a superior.”

These are not the worst things the police have done and are doing — murdering citizens for being black has to top that list. It does tell you that there is something deeply wrong in the training of the police, or the kind of people who sign up to “serve”–they seem to think they’ve joined up to be tinplate authoritarians.

Highly on-brand for a billionaire

The Bloomberg campaign claims to have discontinued this practice, but they were using prison labor to make campaign calls.

Former New York City mayor and multibillionaire Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg used prison labor to make campaign calls. Through a third-party vendor, the Mike Bloomberg 2020 campaign contracted New Jersey-based call center company ProCom, which runs calls centers in New Jersey and Oklahoma. Two of the call centers in Oklahoma are operated out of state prisons. In at least one of the two prisons, incarcerated people were contracted to make calls on behalf of the Bloomberg campaign.

Sweet! It’s good to be in Minnesota, where we’ll be mostly ignored throughout the campaign season, but it must be reassuring to Iowans to know that some of the election noise they get dunned with is produced by slave labor.

Oh, not quite slavery: the prisoners get paid, sort of.

John Scallan, a ProCom co-founder, said his company pays the Oklahoma minimum wage of $7.25 an hour to the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, which then pays the incarcerated people working in the call centers. The Department of Corrections website lists the maximum monthly wage for the incarcerated at $20 dollars a month, but another policy document says there is a maximum pay of $27.09 per month.

When asked if their total monthly earnings are capped at these levels, Scallan said incarcerated people who work for ProCom make far higher wages. “I can tell you unequivocally that is not us,” Scallan said. “Some of them are making that much every day.”

Let’s do the math. $7.25 an hour is $58 per day; if they work them 4 weeks per month, that would be about $1100 dollars per month, which isn’t much of a wage. But the prisons cap their earnings and skim off most of the money. In the worst case of limiting them to $20/month, the prison is making $1080 off their labor. In the best case, where they’re getting paid $27/day, the prison gets about half their earnings.

I wonder if there is some kind of profit motive driving mass incarceration in the United States? Nah, couldn’t be. That would be evil. This Republican, for instance, wouldn’t be evil, would he?