Next-Level Insanity

The Pentagon recently estimated it spent 47.1 billion dollars for just seven months worth of a completely unnecessary and unwinnable war  at a time when some 34.5 million of U.S. citizens  officially live in poverty and 48 million (1 in 7) face "food insecurity."

It's all been tried before, though this one has a chance of a slightly different outcome: it has an excellent chance of escalating into the most horrific worldwide conflict since World War II.

That $47.1 billion dollars needed so far for Trump's Iran adventure is definitely an estimate, probably closer to a wild guess, as the Pentagon is notoriously lousy at keeping track of its own spending. The famously corrupt bureaucracy has received a failing grade on eight straight audits -- the only one of the 24 major U.S. agencies to achieve such a perfect record. 

In any case, it's big money, and it will have to be borrowed, given that the annual federal deficit is now in the 'hood of two trillion dollars.

In fairness, it should be noted that in a couple of ways, the people behind this are clever in their lunacy. They will assuredly get at least two outcomes they are after. One is to create a distraction from various scandals, such as (but not limited to) the Epstein saga. The other is that certain corporations, especially contractors like General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin and many others, are and will be making unimaginably obscene profits. If all goes well for them they might even end up --like their friends at the Pentagon -- with more money than they can keep track of. 

End

 

Homeland Cruelty

 

Maybe you heard that the U.S. recently bombed a wedding in a small town in Iran, killing four and injuring 68 celebrants.

There were no legitimate military targets nearby and the missile used had been advertised as the “most accurate” in the U.S. arsenal.

So it had to have been intentional. This is cruelty at a very high level.

 

Meanwhile, The U.S. government seems to be treating its own inhabitants with increasing cruelty.

Here are just a few examples, which probably are not even necessary, since we all know it is happening and can all cite our own examples:

n In the month just passed, federal immigration agents arrested some 50,000 people, a new monthly record. The jails they are held in are basically harsh concentration camps.

n The U.S. is deporting thousands of people to countries those people are entirely unfamiliar with.

n Some 27 million Americans have no health care coverage at all, yet the Congress and Executive Branch does nothing about it.

n Add your own example here.

 

It occurs to me that this increasing cruelty at home is an inevitable consequence of U.S. cruelty abroad. Here are a few more recent examples of that, if anyone needs any more:

-       A recent series of U.S. air strikes in Somalia – Somalia! -- “killed at least 12 people, including eight children and a pregnant woman, according to an investigation by The Guardian.” 

 

-       The Trump crime syndicate has conducted 207 airstrikes on Somalia – Somalia!-- since January 2024, a record pace. During the same time, humanitarian U.S. aid to the country has been cut, even though 21 percent of its people face “acute hunger and malnutrition.”

 

 

-       The U.S.’s spearhead of power in the Middle East, Israel, isn’ just continuing to murder several Palestinian civilians every day. It is also, according to Doctors Without Borders,  “ blocking crucial supplies from entering Gaza. These supplies would otherwise “keep hospital generators, ambulances, water pumps and water trucks running.”

 This is, they say, “a policy of attrition by design.”

 

 

 

 

The U.S. cruelty abroad is, of course, nothing new. The Empire has long installed and protected psychopathic regimes in dozens of countries. And it has directly killed millions of civilians in just as many countries by air strikes.

But the cruelty at home seems to be gaining momentum, as if trying to catch up.

The wonder is that this cruelty has not oozed its way into domestic policies any faster than it has.

End

 

Bertrand Russell on Israel/Palestine

 

Various stories have taken the genocide in Gaza out of the corporate news, but it continues.

Since the supposed “ceasefire” was declared last October, Israel has violated it well over 2,000 times. These violations have resulted in over 800 Gazan deaths by “airstrikes, shelling, and gunfire.” The number wounded is over 2,000.

For the survivors, very little, if anything, has improved. They are living in a kind of hell that is being deliberately forced upon them by the psychopaths running Israel. One witness very recently described it as follows:

We are speaking about systematic transformation of life into something unlivable. What’s happening is no longer just bombardment or physical destruction. It is the collapse of every essential condition required for human survival: water, food, health, dignity, shelter, safety, everything

… [M]ore than 59 percentage of our people suffer from insufficient drinking water. And more than 55 are uncertain whether the water they consume is safe or not. And also, nearly 94 percentage of families report food spoilage. Rodent infestation also, Amy, has become widespread inside shelters due to the environmental collapse.

All of this, it turns out, was predictable to anyone paying attention decades ago. Consider, for instance, a statement issued by the British philosopher Bertrand Russell on January 31,1970.

Russell’s statement is notable not only for its prescience, but for its clarity -- refreshingly free of slangy buzz-phrases and long, convoluted sentences. It’s also refreshingly concise, consisting of just four paragraphs and 617 words.

So here it is, as they say, “in its entirety”:

Statement on the Middle East by Bertrand Russell, as read to an International Conference of Parliamentarians meeting in Cairo on Feb 3, 1970

 The latest phase of the undeclared war in the Middle East is based upon a profound miscalculation. The bombing raids deep into Egyptian territory will not persuade the civilian population to surrender but will stiffen their resolve to resist. This is the lesson of all aerial bombardment. The Vietnamese who have endured years of American heavy bombing have responded not by capitulation but by shooting down more enemy aircraft. In 1940 my own fellow countrymen resisted Hitler’s bombing raids with unprecedented unity and determination. For this reason, the present Israeli attacks will fail in their essential purpose, but at the same time they must be condemned vigorously throughout the world. The development of the crisis in the Middle East is both dangerous and instructive. For over 20 years Israel has expanded by force of arms. After every stage in this expansion Israel has appealed to “reason” and has suggested “negotiations”. This is the traditional role of the imperial power because it wishes to consolidate with the least difficulty what it has already taken by violence. Every new conquest becomes the new basis of the proposed negotiation from strength, which ignores the injustice of the previous aggression.

The aggression committed by Israel must be condemned, not only because no state has the right to annex foreign territory, but because every expansion is an experiment to discover how much more aggression the world will tolerate. The refugees who surround Palestine in their hundreds of thousands were described recently by the Washington journalist I.F. Stone as “the moral millstone around the neck of world Jewry.” Many of the refugees are now well into the third decade of their precarious existence in temporary settlements.

The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was “given” by a foreign Power to another people for the creation of a new State. The result was that many hundreds of thousands of innocent people were made permanently homeless. With every new conflict their number have increased. How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty? It is abundantly clear that the refugees have every right to the homeland from which they were driven, and the denial of this right is at the heart of the continuing conflict. No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled in masse from their own country; how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate? A permanent just settlement of the refugees in their homeland is an essential ingredient of any genuine settlement in the Middle East.

We are frequently told that we must sympathize with Israel because of the suffering of the Jews in Europe at the hands of the Nazis. I see in this suggestion no reason to perpetuate any suffering. What Israel is doing today cannot be condoned, and to invoke the horrors of the past to justify those of the present is gross hypocrisy. Not only does Israel condemn a vast number of refugees to misery, not only are many Arabs under occupation condemned to military rule; but also Israel condemns the Arab nations only recently emerging from colonial status, to continued impoverishment as military demands take precedence over national development.

All who want to see an end to bloodshed in the Middle East must ensure that any settlement does not contain the seeds of future conflict. Justice requires that the first step towards a settlement must be an Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied in June 1967. A new world campaign is needed to help bring justice to the long–suffering people of the Middle East.

I invite you all to read the letter with thoughtful consideration.

 

End

 

    

Seventy-six Years Ago, Bertrand Russell Described Donald Trump

 

I just stumbled across a talk by Bertrand Russell from December of 1950. It is in acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Literature that year.

 Russell, who died in 1970 at age 97, was a renowned British philosopher and mathematician.  One web site describes him as “one of humanity’s most lucid and luminous minds — an oracle of timeless wisdom …”

And, as you see from the photo below, the guy even looked like he ought to be smart.

British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, social critic, political activist and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell, 17 June 1957

 

Anyway, in this talk, Russell posits that four things drive human behavior in “politically important” ways. They are:

(1) Acquisitiveness – the desire to acquire things, with greed being the logical extreme. (Not to be confused with inquisitiveness, ie. curiosity.)

(2) Rivalry – ie. competition

(3) Vanity – with narcissism being the logical extreme

(4) Love of power

Seventy-six years after Russell’s speech, it seems obvious he was correct. People who end up at the top of many modern organizations are disproportionately driven by Russell’s four motivators. Our highly structured, highly competitive, highly bureaucratic societies seem to produce “leaders” who are driven by them to the point of mental ill-health.

 

Exhibit A:  Trump

What scares me profoundly is the extreme degree to which – 76 years after Russell pointed them out -- these four motives define the current president of the United States. Russell, in effect, predicted Trump.

Consider:

Donald Trump’s greed is so legendary that to call it acquisitiveness would be a gross understatement.

He takes “rivalry” to absurd levels, seeking vengeance on anyone who crosses him.

His vanity seems boundless, what with the tanning-booth face, the strangely quaffed hair, the bottomless craving for attention, and the neurotic drive to have his name put on things.

And finally, his love of power, by all indications, is up there with the worst tyrants in world history.

This last – the love of power – is certainly the scariest trait in anyone who happens to find himself in charge of something as potentially destructive as the U.S. Empire. Even scarier, as Russell notes, is that:

 Power, like vanity, is insatiable. Nothing short of omnipotence could satisfy it completely. … It is, indeed, by far the strongest motive in the lives of important men.

In other words, it is profoundly addictive, as the love of it “is greatly increased by the experience of power.”

This all begs the question: is Trump the fundamental problem or is he merely a symptom of a culture that reinforces the four motives identified by Russell 75 years ago? Or, as Christopher Hedges puts it, is Trump merely “something vomited up” by an unhealthy system?

The answer is probably both. Getting rid of Trump may not solve our societal ills. But leaving him in charge will absolutely make them worse.

After all, when somebody tosses their cookies, the first thing to do is clean up the vomit.

End

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Iran Disaster

 

Today I sent the following letter to our local weekly paper, the Carbondale Times:

Editor,

Kudos to Scott Thorne for his letter of March 13 questioning the purpose of bombing  Iran.

Our various media outlets offer endless analyses of both the causes and possible consequences of this newest violence. Yet I see almost nothing about the plain old wrongness of it. 

To cite one noticeable example, U.S. explosives with nearly unimaginable destructive capacity recently incinerated some 170 Iranian civilians, mostly children, at an elementary school. The best scientific evidence suggests that those children and their families are no less human beings than we are over here in the great U.S. of A. Their parents and aunts and uncles will grieve just as hard as will those of the US forces killed in retaliation, even if their skin is a little darker than some of ours.

The above incident was, it is true, widely reported. Yet there has been no thoughtful discussion of the moral depravity underlying this incident.

 

*   *   *

There is, remarkably, one item of good news in the Iran disaster. It seems that a high-ranking, extremely conservative (!) and otherwise hawkish Trump official, has resigned in protest to it. This is one Joe Kent, who was, until yesterday, Director of the National Counterterrorism Center.

Kent’s resignation letter offers a glimmer of hope that some tiny crumbs of sanity might still exist somewhere in the upper reaches of the Empire. He says, for instance:

I cannot, in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no immediate threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful lobby.

Kent was the kind of warrior that phonies like SecDef Pete Hegseth try so hard – yet clownishly fail -- to imitate. He (Kent) demonstrates -- I hope for many other young people -- that warriors don’t have to be conscienceless robot:

As a veteran who deployed to  combat 11 times and as a Gold Star husband who lost my beloved wife Shannon in [another] war manufactured by Israel, I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives.

 

I’m not getting my hopes too high, but maybe Kent’s statement indicates we have finally reached some kind of turning point in our attitudes toward violent domination of the world.

End

 

Justified Rage Against the Machine

 

The new attack on Iran by the U.S. and Israel is about as depressing as anything I have seen in a while.

 European academic Jason Hickel sums it up well.

 

“Bombing Iran in the middle of negotiations, while starving Cuba, while genociding Palestinians, while threatening to invade Greenland… the U.S. and Israel are the single greatest threat to humanity — and it’s not even close. We are all forced to live in the nightmare they create.” https://x.com/jasonhickel

 

So much for international law, by the way. It was a great idea, following the destructiveness of World War II. But a few countries – mainly the US – have emerged too powerful to be held to account by any international court or rule-making body, and their leadership too psychopathic to care.

Caitlin Johnstone’s Statement

The article pasted below, by the Australian blogger Caitlin Johnstone, reflects, I think, how a lot of us feel right now. I freely admit that it has some big flaws. The tone is shrill, for example. If it were written in the same tone but arguing in favor of U.S./Israel aggression, I would hate it. 

It also uses language that many would say defeats its purpose. That would be true if the purpose was to persuade the reader to adopt a point of view. But I think Johnstone’s purpose here is not mainly to persuade. It is to honestly express the deeply felt and very justified anger and sorrow she feels in light of the continuing war crimes by the empire she lives in.

And so I freely admit that, as flawed as the piece might be as a persuasive argument, I for one find it very relatable.

Anyway, here it is, in full, copied from https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2026/03/01/fuck-everyone-who-made-this-war-possible/ :

 

 

Fuck The Western Empire, by Caitlin Johnstone

The US and Israel have launched their long-planned attack on Iran. President Trump said in a speech that the US military is engaged in “major combat operations” intended to cripple Iran’s military and topple the Iranian government. Iran has reportedly been retaliating with missile strikes on Israel and US military bases in the region.

This is going to get ugly, folks.

I don’t even know what to write about this one, honestly.

What am I supposed to say? “Hey everybody, they’re lying to us about this war”? Everyone already knows that. Even the people who support this war know all the justifications for it are lies.

They know Iran isn’t building nukes.

They know Iran poses no threat to the United States.

They know all that bullshit about Iran cutting out women’s wombs and murdering tens of thousands of protesters was evidence-free atrocity propaganda.

Nobody needs me to tell them these things. Nobody needs me to tell them that this war is going to kill a whole lot of innocent people and inflict unfathomable amounts of suffering upon our species, both directly during these attacks and indirectly in the chaos and instability ensuing thereafter. Everyone already knows this.

Everyone already knows this, and it’s happening anyway. They’re just doing whatever evil things they want to do, without the slightest regard for public opinion or consent.

They’re just going right ahead with a military operation to topple Tehran, after decades of inertia for fear of the horrific consequences it would unleash.

They’re just choking off Cuba using siege warfare, which previous presidents refused to do because it would be a monstrous act of war.

They just kidnapped the president of a sovereign nation, which previous administrations had refused to do because it’s plainly against international law.

They just helped Israel turn Gaza into a gravel parking lot and are now building a giant dystopian tech surveillance encampment to imprison the survivors.

They just designated an American company a “supply chain risk to national security” for the first time ever because the AI firm Anthropic refused to let the Pentagon use its technology to operate autonomous killing machines and surveil American citizens — an open admission that the Pentagon plans on using AI to run autonomous killing machines and surveil American citizens.

There’s an old Frank Zappa quote that’s been popping into my head more and more lately:

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”

We’re seeing a lot more bricks these days.

That’s all I can think to say about all this.

Fuck the USA.

Fuck Israel.

Fuck Trump.

Fuck Netanyahu.

Fuck Zionism.

Fuck Trump supporters.

Fuck the Republican Party.

Fuck the Democratic Party.

Fuck war.

Fuck everyone who helped make this war possible.

Fuck the western press.

Fuck warmongering think tanks.

Fuck the Israel lobby.

Fuck the military-industrial complex.

Fuck the western intelligence cartel.

Fuck the western empire.

I hate everyone who inflicted this nightmare upon my species. If you stand by this senseless US-Israeli act of depravity, then I consider you an enemy. And I will never stop reminding everyone of the psychotic agenda you supported.

You own this. This is on you. It’s on you forever.

_______________