The strategic genius says, “when you are throwing people under a bus, make sure that your other staff won’t realize you’re the kind of person who will throw them under a bus, too.”
Stderr
All the unbuffered error messages
The strategic genius says, “when you are throwing people under a bus, make sure that your other staff won’t realize you’re the kind of person who will throw them under a bus, too.”
It sounds like the Kurds have been out-maneuvered by the Iraqi regime; then left twisting in the wind by their American backers. Iraqi Abrams M-1 tanks (which are basically invincible against the light vehicles the Kurds have) were the convincing argument – the Iraqis inter-penetrated Kurdish positions in the Kirkuk area, essentially a peaceful “overrun” maneuver – and the Kurds realized that if they offered resistance, they’d be slaughtered.
When you’ve got over half a trillion dollars at stake, people will do or say pretty much anything. So it gets hard to figure out what’s going on when you read headlines in the form of “X is an ongoing disaster” alongside of “great cost-savings achieved via X” for any given X. It’s hard to be both a tremendous success and an ongoing disaster. I am, naturally, referring to the latest news about the F-35 program.
When the US invaded Iraq and overthrew the government, we heard a bit about “nation-building” until the establishment discovered it no longer knew how to do that, and/or wasn’t willing to pay the price that it paid rebuilding Germany, Japan, and South Korea. [Read more…]
I was expecting Andy Borowitz or someone to be all over it, but the media is full of derisive howling at Dotard Donald and his petty White House invitation Gaffe. The really mythological part of his comments was when he started talking about solar power and the wall.
Whenever we read an account of the beginning of WWI it’s necessary for the historian to first lay out the landscape of interlocking defense treaties that turned Europe into a sort of Venn diagram of fantasy militarism. To me, it’s a reminder of the great Avalon Hill game Diplomacy which we played in my high school Military History Club (AKA: D&D club) – everyone secretly negotiating with everyone else against everyone else. For Europe, the results were grim, and I needn’t go into them.
Just farting around in photoshop and imageready.
At least five individuals were attacked [wp]
[A] pepper-spray wielding Trump supporter was smacked to the ground with homemade shields.
perhaps they should have used harsh language? Or hegelian dialectic?
Canada military builds a camp for refugees from the US.
I never thought Rex Tillerson would seem diplomatic. Our national exercise in Overton Window-shifting has had some results: we are settling for mind-bogglingly foolish because it looks good compared to babbling batshit.