When I was a kid, the UK police made a big deal out of how they didn’t carry guns, but not anymore. Terrorism is starting to pull the police away from the people and increase the separation between the government and the governed.
It turns out that a large number – possibly several hundred – of the antisemitic bomb threats that have been coming in to Jewish community centers around the US, originate from one very sad puppy in Israel.
Venezuela has just implemented a pre-revolutionary French doctrine. One which got Marie Antoinette unfairly attributed with the original “tumbril remark”…
The news about US troops engaging in Syria has been pretty low-key. Probably because, you know, it exposes some government lies about the degree to which the military is/was going to get involved in the fighting in the area.
Warning: war and death
The US has committed unknown numbers of ground troops into Syria,[stderr] and has placed them in position between Turkish and ISIS forces near Manbij to act as some sort of buffer zone.
US Troops in ground war in Syria.
She was the first Soviet citizen to be welcomed to the White House. There are pictures of her, smiling with Eleanor Roosevelt, in her Red Army dress uniform; the uniform is simple, not a beribboned affair, but one of the medals on her left chest is the plain star of the Hero Of The Soviet Union.
Bacevich asks the question, “Where is the strategy?”
A nation priding itself on having the world’s greatest military – and we do – unquestionably have the world’s greatest military – has misused its military power on an epic scale. It’s not simply that we have not prevailed, although obviously we have not prevailed, rather it is that through a combination of naivete, short-sightedness, and hubris we have actually made matters worse. (10:17)
Trump wants to bump defense spending another 10%.[wp]
There were scandals a few years ago regarding test-cheating by operators of the US’ strategic missile systems. [nyt] But that’s just cheating. What about “rank incompetence” in the forces that prop up the nihilist triad of ‘mutual assured destruction’?