by James Howard Kunstler
It ain’t bragging if it’s true. I’ve said repeatedly on this blog for years that the federal government would only become more impotent, more incompetent, and more ineffectual as The Long Emergency rolled out. And here we are now, at just such pass in history.
The process has been well underway since the beginning of the century. Even the attempts to expand its scope and reach — such as the post 9-11 addition of God-knows-how-many new intelligence services — has only produced an epic clusterfuck of cross-purposed mission creep that threatens the federal government’s existential legitimacy.
After nearly a year of investigating, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the DIA, DHS, et. al. haven’t been able to leak any substantial fact about “Russian collusion” with the Trump election campaign — and, considering the torrent of leaks about all manner of other collateral matters during this same period, it seems impossible to conclude that there is anything actually there besides utterly manufactured hysteria.
Now, one might imagine that this intelligence community could have manufactured some gift-wrapped facts rather than just waves of hysteria, but that’s where the incompetence and impotence comes in. They never came up with anything besides Flynn and Sessions having conversations with the Russian ambassador — as if the ambassadors are not here to have conversations with our government officials. You’d think that with all the computer graphics available these days they could concoct a cineplex-quality feature film-length recording of Donald Trump making a “great deal” to swap Kansas for Lithuania, or Jared Kushner giving piggyback rides to Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. But all we’ve really ever gotten was a packet of emails from the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta of the Clinton campaign gloating about how nicely they boned Bernie Sanders — and that doesn’t exactly reflect so well on what has evolved to be the so-called “Resistance.”
The net effect of all this sound and fury is a government so paralyzed that it can’t even pass bad legislation or execute its existing (excessive) duties. That might theoretically be a good thing, except what we’re seeing are individual departments just veering off on their own, especially the military, which now operates without any civilian control. Apparently General Mattis, the Secretary of Defense, pretty much decided on his own to dispatch another 8,000 US troops to Afghanistan to move thi
... keep reading on reddit ➡For instance, some for me off the top of my head are:
- The Boy In The Striped Pajamas by John Boyne
- Before I Go To Sleep by S.J. Watson
- The Road by Cormac McCarthy
- Behind Closed Doors by B.A. Paris
- Atonement by Ian McEwan
- Dangerous Girls by Abigail Haas
I love unreliable characters, plot twists, books that screw with my mind and make me question everything, psychological thrillers... I just need something GOOD.
There are a decent amount of habs and people are actually trying to defend but we seem to be unable to hold or capture anything.
At the end of the game, I look at our team performance and I see 250 deaths with 168 kills. It all makes sense now. The incapacitation were a little better at around 190 but not that great compared to the deaths.
That's the Huckleberry for me. It's so damn fun.
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