It must be great times for the pentagon: a blockhead in the white house who’ll spend any amount on “defensive” weaponry, and law-makers from both parties that will sign any check so long as it’s for wars. Shopaholic heaven!
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is not a book I have read. Naturally, parts of it have leaked into my consciousness from various sources – it’s a remarkably pervasive fountain of memes.
The loathsome John Bolton is too easy to point at as an example of everything that is wrong with US Middle Eastern foreign policy.
The US Air Force made a bizarre tweet-post on New Years, of a bomber and the observation that they can drop bombs anywhere.
Anyone who heard about the night raids in Afghanistan should have been worried: it marks a shift from trying to engage an enemy on clear ground to hitting them where they live. As someone who grew up during the war in Vietnam, it’s hard not to think of “Search and Destroy” missions and the Phoenix Program.
US citizen Otto Warmbier died after 17 months in North Korea, during which he was abused, ignored, exposed to cold and not fed.
It’s necessary to have people out there to help collect information about what’s happening in the world; ideally they then report on it reasonably honestly.
The Kurds appear to be about to be left in the lurch, again. Although, I am skeptical that the US military will withdraw in any meaningful sense. They’ll withdraw enough to watch our short-term allies get slaughtered.
I nearly made skid-marks just reading between the lines of this one:
According to Pagetutor, this is what $1Bn looks like, if you palletize it: [page]