Like father, like son. Libertarian-leaning Rep. Ron Paul (R., Texas) is known in the House as a frequenter lone dissenter on bills. Today, his son, freshman Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), voiced the only “nay” vote on a measure that outlaws aiming a laser pointer at an aircraft.
The vote shows a stunning lack of vision…coming from a opthamologist (albeit one who is self-certified).
Obviously he is worried about his livelihood; after all, if you make it illegal to purposefully cause eye injury, you are violating the rights of ophthalmologists everywhere.
Maybe this explains it:
“Congratulations Speaker Pelosi, now let the bombs fall where they may. My prediction: terror attack on domestic soil passenger aircraft within the next six months. Casualties in the 2-300 range. And, unfortunately, maybe that’s just what we need. It’s obvious people don’t remember what happened 5 years ago.
Posted by FullContactPolitics at November 8, 2006 10:52 AM [emphasis added]
http://blog.usefulwork.com/cgi.....ry_id=7430
According to the WSJ article, Sen. Paul isn’t in favor of blinding pilots with lasers and crashing passenger planes, but thinks states should take care of it. In other words, it’s a states-rights thing. Or maybe he just doesn’t want to pay for housing laser saboteurs in federal prisons. Personally, I don’t see how state government is less onerous than federal government. In the real world, because states can’t print money or run deficits, enforcement is much less likely to happen at the state level than the federal level. And all a laser saboteur has to do to flummox state police is jump across a state line. Therefore, from a practical standpoint, Paul’s position sucks. If there’s some theoretical advantage to delegating the task of apprehending, prosecuting, and jailing laser ssboteurs to state governments I don’t know what it is. The theory I favor is the one that says this guy is an idiot.
Yeah, like father, like son.
Dumb.
As.
A.
Brick.
His “principles” come straight out of “Atlas Shrugged”, one of the most poorly written dime science fiction novels I have ever read. He is elected into office representing a State in the bottom 10% of literacy rates.
For the entire fucking world.
I know several Randroids. Every single one of them is obsessed with “libertarianism” and will go on and on and on about what it means. But confront them with a few basic concepts such as economies of scale, or herd immunity or shared responsibility, and they will approach the edge of violence very quickly defending their faith.
They’re what the Star Trek “Ferengi” characters were based on. I got that straight from the horse mouth.
It’s an old GOP strategy to argue that most federal legislation should be left to the states. That’s because the GOP knows it’s finanical sponsors can better control state legislatures by targeting huge sums of money at selected state representatives. The odds are that if they can’t get the federal government to do it, it won’t happen at all. Add to that the corporate threats to “relocate elsewhere” if the states don’t compete in a race for the bottom in terms of pay, benefits, worker and environmental protection, etc., and the states get played like a fine fiddle.
Which is why the federal government became involved in the first place: the states weren’t doing anything to resolve the problem. If you believe otherwise, look to how the states attempted to solve the national problems caused by the Great Depression in the 1930’s: California stationed police at it’s borders to turn back the Oakies trying to escape the Dust Bowl and find work in the state.
Do you think that Rand Paul understands cares about the ramifications of what he proposes, or are they simply knee-jerk ideological responses that require little if any thought prior to their ejaculation?
<<<<>>>>>>>:=)
#3 This is where electing idiots is dangerous. This is NOT a states issue. Not even close. The FAA and federal rules govern nearly EVERY aspect of air travel. I know the “interstate commerce” act is the most abused and over extended element of our government, but air travel is the ultimate valid interstate issue.
Again, if it’s 49 – 1…you’re either the smartest guy in the room way ahead of everyone on the issue…or a retard. Care to guess which category I put this guy in?
This is the real life version of this joke:
http://www.theonion.com/articl.....t-w,19025/
Yowza — Why won’t the line through phrases function work when you cut and paste from word.
I could use that device to great comic effect here and elsewhere.
@6
The latter, obviously.
Deathfrogg @ 4, I’d love to hear more about the horse’s mouth Ferengi info…
I’m listening to Atlas Shrugged on CD when work gets a little mindless. Stupendously cardboard B.S., but I thought I should see what everybody who’re so much smarter than I am are on about.
@10
You have a stronger stomach than I.
It is amazing to me that such a literary bauble like Atlas has influenced so many. I think there must be some dangerous, impressionable time in adolescence that if you read that tripe at the right point, your intellectual and ethical development is arrested, and if you can’t restart the development, you become a glibertarian.
PC @10:
Yes, cardboard BS indeed, but like the Bible, regarded as hallowed scripture by the Right.
re 10: You get to feel heroic for manufacturing garbage cans out of, for instance, Reardon Metal.
re 9: If you don’t know, just say so. Hiding your ignorance behind drollery don’t fly.
I noticed Republicans love states rights, unless they don’t. It’s a bullshit issue. There’s no principle here. They just want “certain” issues control where they can at state level, but they’re just as happy to use Federal government to control me.
Did George W. Bush, Ronald Regan, or George HW. Bush ever stop the Federal government from overriding states on drug laws? No. If any state tries to legalize or decriminalize marijuana, the Republicans are ALWAYS happy to use the Federal government to remind us who is in charge and states rights don’t count for shit.
And no blaming the Democrats for ‘stopping’ the Republicans from implementing their utopia. I understand they might not be able to pass and get into law all they want. I just want to HEAR the national Republican party proclaim support for state drug laws and TRY to pass a bill that would remove drug control from the Federal level. It will never happen. Ever. So stop babbling about this fake story about how Republicans support states rights. They don’t. They support states rights on issues they like, and they don’t support states rights on issues they don’t like. That’s it.
Pizzaface @8: Why won’t the line through phrases function work when you cut and paste from word.
Mostly because Word doesn’t do html. To get strike through, put angle brackets around strike and /strike. Same as how Bold and Italic works, only different key word.
re 15: Thanks!
/strike
I’m stricken
/Things just keep getting stupider and stupider…
/
re 20: More stupid. Stoopid.
/
This is struck through textRand Paul is a weaker-willed, softer-minded version of his (already kooky) father. I have great respect for Ron Paul, though I don’t agree with him on very many things. His son, on the other hand, I have little or no respect for.
Anyone else catch his first speech on the senate floor about Cassius and Henry Clay? I’m left picturing the majority of his supports thinking, “Huh? Muhammed Ali was Henry Clay’s cousin?” I’ll give him one thing though–it takes balls for a rich white boy with his political opinions to compare himself to a great abolitionist.
Pizzaface, do this:
Open a plain text editor like notepad. Save a file named test.html to your hard drive. Now use that file for testing. Without closing the file in Notepad, open it with IE or Firefox and they won’t complain even though we won’t have a complete html page.
At HA click on Bold a couple of times. You will get strong and /strong wrapped in angle brackets.
Copy and paste that into the Notepad text file. Change strong to strike in both places. Add text in the middle between the meta tags and save the file (but do not close). Refresh IE or Firefox. You should then see the results of you efforts.
Repeat as needed until working like you want.
My bad. You’ve got it figured out…
re 25: Interesting.
Maybe the surname ;Clay’ was not such a bad ‘slave name’ after all — considering that the Mohammedans of the day were the ones who were largely responsible for capturing slaves.
re 27: You pointed me in the right direction. Thanks again.
@28: Huh? The majority of slaves were captured by other tribesman, who were usually animists, not Muslims. Then they were sold to coastal tribes, then usually transported by white Christians to the Caribbean, where they were fattened up by white Christians and black voudons, then transported to the U.S. and sold to white Christians. Where are the Muslims in that chain? That would only be true if most slaves came from northern Africa, which they didn’t.
I got to see a pod of Orca on my ferry ride to Seattle this morning. Too bad our current crop of Republicans don’t give a fuck about things like Orca’s. The first environmentalist WERE REPUBICANS! Teddy passed all sorts of stuff, Ike passed the first national air pollution rules, Nixon passed a bunch of stuff, Regan built (grudgingly) on what Nixon did, Bush The 1st passed the first cap and trade program. Bush’s C&T dealt with acid rain and worked like a charm.
I’m left speechless too, but for a different reason. A revolution is happening in the middle east at this very moment, and this is what you are posting about? How some guy voted on a laser pointer bill?
re 30: It is commonly accepted as historical fact that slaves were captured largely by Muslim traders, or, they were ‘sold’ to the Muslim traders by their own people in exchange for the goods that the Arabs brought.
I am not sure where your sanitized version of the slave trade comes from — but if you want a ‘battle of the sources’, game on:
The civil rights movement of the 1960’s have left many people with the belief that the slave trade was exclusively a European/USA phenomenon and only evil white people were to blame for it. This is a simplicistic scenario that hardly reflects the facts.
Thousands of records of transactions are available on a CDROM prepared by Harvard University and several comprehensive books have been published recently on the origins of modern slavery (namely, Hugh Thomas’ The Slave Trade and Robin Blackburn’s The Making Of New World Slavery) that shed new light on centuries of slave trading.
http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/slavetra.html
There’s a lot more where that came from.
http://books.google.com/books?.....38;f=false
@32
There is a reason why Goldy is now working a day job at a small newspaper for a “modest” income.
@ 10 Poster Child
The writers/futurists for Star Trek were regulars at the Vikingfund conventions my pop used to manage back in the late 1970’s. The Viking Fund was a private, non-profit organization set up to continue funding the Viking landers on Mars after Jimmy Carter slashed NASA’s budget in ’77. They were the precursors to the Trekkie conventions that started in the late 80’s.
My pop was a systems engineer at NASA starting in 1968, we were stationed at JSC Houston during Apollo 9, 10 and 11. He was transferred to NASA/Ames research center in Mountain View CA in 1970 after he was rejected for the Astronaut training, and was there until ’87. So this was an inside view of the funding structure and engineering philosophy at NASA for the guy who got it all started, Stan Kent, who was a British national.
I met a lot of the old school science fiction writers at those conventions, met cast members of Star Trek, met Gene Roddenberry himself several times and he wrote the original character outlines for Next Generation, and much of the shows first story outlines.
During one of these conventions in the mid-80s, there was a bull session in the restaurant at the San Fransisco Airport Hilton and he was talking about already developing “The Next Generation” and at that point was still developing the characters. This was before the show was even on the TV. I think this was in the summer of 1986, but don’t hold me to that.
When the show had been on for a couple of years, we ran into him again at another “Trekkie” convention in Oakland in 1990 that my pop had been involved with organizing, and he mentioned that, I think because someone had accused him of using the Jewish stereotype for the Ferengi characters, and he set them straight. I remember the conversation simply because Jimmy Doohan and Harlan Ellison were also there, and Ellison was my favorite writer at the time.
I still have a couple of the Press/Media packets from those conventions. Might even still have Dick Scobee’s autograph somewhere. Was a fun time.
Well that was slick, I just took the light rail train from West Lake to Columbia City. Beats the he’ll out of driving and drops you off a few minutes from the uber-yummy Columbia City Bakery. Ooo… My order’s up.
@32 Poor little troll
I realize it is difficult for you to understand more than one complex issue at the same time, but the state of our American democracy is also important.
We have a republican Senator who is either too stoopid to understand why regulation of lasers being pointed at planes is bad (for this I refer you to plenty of pilots who consider it beyond a criminal act and basically say they are blinded and cannot fly the planes when the laser hits: so this is as bad as a potential terrorist attack for the effect is can have) OR we have an idiot whose “principles” are more important tthan the safety of Americans.
By the way, it was Bush who claimed to “promote” democracy in the Middle East – but supported the dictators in the region (like Mubarak) anyways….I never heard the right wing fools say anything about that hypocrisy….
@37
Pointing lasers at planes is bad, and so is urinating in public, but could you imagine, on the morning of 9/11, going to a blog to read about their take on the terrorist attacks, to instead see a blogger that day posting about how a Fife city councilman is proposing to decriminalize urinating in public? Wouldn’t you find that odd?
@38 What’s wrong with urinating in public? I do it all the time. So does every other rabbit on the planet. We rabbits have never urinated anywhere else. You don’t expect us to hold our piss for millions of years, do you?
Supply Siders Are Full Of B.S. — Again
“Structural unemployment” is the latest litany of Wingnut Wack-O-Nomics. All the apologists for the near-double-digit unemployment caused by failed Republican policies are chiming it. Basically their argument goes: There are jobs, but employers can’t fill them, because workers don’t have the right skills.
Nope. Wrong. Bullshit.
The evidence says otherwise. It doesn’t matter what occupation you’re in, because unemployment is high across the board. The problem is lack of demand, not a mismatch of workers’ skills or geographic location to available jobs. The problem is jobs aren’t available, period. And that’s caused by lack of demand.
http://www.dailyfinance.com/st...../19827650/
Roger Rabbit: The supply siders are wrong again. But then, they’ve never been right — about anything.
@38: A+ for another false equivalency.
Ronald Reagan was the one who signed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act. So state rights don’t matter when it comes to issues social conservatives care about. As long as they can keep an eye on what you do in the privacy of your own home, they are happy.
Troll @ 38,
“Pointing lasers at planes is bad, and so is urinating in public…”
Your mommy told me you peed the bed again last night. I suppose I could post about that….
@38
The riots started over a week ago, not today. Please, stop trying to have a point and go back to being a troll, Troll.
Some HA posters, including some of my liberal friends, occasionally take issue with my position on the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. I’m an independent thinker and don’t march in lockstep with any ideology. I don’t like war, any more than any other liberal, but let’s talk about what the situation is there.
The Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979 to prop up a faltering communist regime. They were met with fierce indigenous resistance. After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, the various Afghan warlords fought among themselves for control of the country. They, in turn, were superseded by the Taliban, who by the mid-1990s had gained control of 97% of Afghanistan. The Taliban remained in power until they were defeated by Northern Alliance forces supported by U.S. forces in 2001-2002, in the aftermath of 9/11, which sprung from Taliban-abetted terrorist training camps on Afghan soil. Since then, the U.S., its allies, and Afghan forces loyal to the U.S.-installed Karzai government has continuously battled resurgent Taliban elements.
Afghanistan has been at war for 30 continuous years. Its cities and villages have been leveled, what little infrastructure it once had is gone, the majority of its population has been killed or displaced into refugee camps, and its economy rendered moribund.
A couple days ago, media sources reported that a 14-year-old Bangladeshi girl raped by a 40-year-old married cousin was put to death under the lash for “adultery” under Shariah Law. (She was sentenced to 100 lashes and died after receiving 80 lashes.) Of course, they didn’t do anything to the male rapist. This incident is emblematic of how women are treated like cattle by Islamic fundamentalists.
During the years of Taliban rule, the lot of Afghan women deteriorated sharply. Under the Taliban, women were not allowed to hold jobs, or leave their homes (even to buy food) unless escorted by a male relative. Taliban religious police roamed the streets and used sticks and whips to beat women who violated these rules. And these restrictions are virtually a death sentence for hundreds of thousands of Afghan women who have been widowed or orphaned by that country’s incessant warfare.
The Taliban, of course, did much more than just abuse women. The Taliban regime was notable for repression, brutality, and executions.
A U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan means turning that country back over to the Taliban. There can be little doubt the Taliban would retake control in the absence of a U.S. military presence. Not only would this lead to re-establishment of Afghanistan as a haven and training base for al Qaida, but it also would re-subject the Afghan people to the brutality of Taliban repression.
Afghanistan is not Iraq. Many Afghans, especially females, want us there. They want the interminable fighting to end so they can build lives for themselves. They want protection from the Taliban. They may not love the corrupt Karzai government, but the Kabul government is largely irrelevant outside of Kabul anyway. Afghanistan is a very decentralized society with most governance taking place at the village level.
I’m just not comfortable with the idea of abandoning the Afghan people to the Taliban, nor is that a good idea from the standpoint of U.S. security. And it seems to me that if we did that sooner or later we’d have to intervene again to protect our own country from terrorist attacks. As a Vietnam veteran, like any former soldier, I hate the idea of asking those currently serving in our forces to pay twice with their blood for the same ground. One of the worst things our military leadership in Vietnam did to our soldiers was to repeatedly capture ground and then walk away and give it back to the enemy. This makes no sense whatsoever and needlessly wastes soldiers’ lives.
No one likes the death, destruction, and financial costs of war, me included. What I have a hard time understanding is how liberal-minded people could callously hand over a generation of Afghan women to the Taliban in the name of peace. This will be no peace for them if the Taliban return.
Most Afghan women are illiterate because the Taliban wouldn’t let them teach or attend school. Most live in isolated rural villages. They can’t speak for themselves. There are a few educated Afghan women in the cities (or now living in exile abroad) who have tried to give voice to the aspirations of the Afghan people and particularly Afghanistan’s women. They don’t want the Taliban to run their country. They don’t want to live under Taliban rule. They don’t want to be whipped, beaten, and mistreated by the Taliban religious police. They don’t want to be stoned for the crime of getting raped. Before you advocate pulling our troops out of Afghanistan and giving that country back to the Taliban, ask these women if they want our soldiers to stay or leave.
This is what you are posting & whining about Darryl? Methinks you and your other brother ought to worry about real news, and quit whining like the tenderhanded panty-waists that you are.
Oh wait, it’s to divert attention away from the many failures from the left; local, State, and Federal, so let’s post about something so miniscule and irrelvant as to distract the sheeple from thinking about the real issues and incompetence from your Messiah and Co. A play right out of the David Goldstein bathroom reader.
Pathetic, but expected.
So what do you guys really want? No state governments, all decisions made in Washington, DC? Why have elected officials at all at the state level? Why should states get to decide anything? Why have state laws?
Let’s just have the Feds decide everything and watch over us in their benign dictatorship.
# 47: Flags down on the play; foul called on PI for logical falacies, to wit: creation of a “straw man”, and invoking “slippery slope” argument.
It’s not a choice between two extremes. We have a federal system which allows for a careful division of responsibilities and laws depending on the nature of the problem. We don’t have to go to one extreme or the other, with no room in between.
It is a choice between the division of power, however. How much do you want to give the the feds, how much should be reserved for the states, and how much belongs to the individual?
I want a weaker federal government that isn’t wasting our wealth and lives in stupid foreign adventures in the Middle East. I want a federal government that actually follows the Constitution. I’d like to see the 10th Amendment changed to allow a vote of 3/4 of the state legislatures to negate any action or law or taken by the legislative or executive branch of the federal government. In short, I want to put the federal government in its place – it is not the master but the servant.
By the way, interesting news out of Texas yesterday and today.
Yesterday they were reporting massive power outages and “rolling blackouts” as Texans tried to cope with an ice storm and record cold temperatures. Thousands were without power for more than a day as tempertures stayed well below freezing.
Of course, some facilities were exempt from the rolling blackouts, and had priority in case of local outages caused by the ice. These included the hospitals, nursing homes, police stations, jails and prisons, etc.
And any facility where a Super Bowl event is being held, including the larger hotels. They are calling it a “security issue”, as NFL owners, journalists, media types, and celebraties attend coctail parties and “red carpet” events in warm facilities while Grandma is slowly freezing to death in a home six blocks away which hasn’t had heat in two days.
Wow that Chris Christie, “beloved” of right idiots everwhere, sure has his priorities straight:
http://www.nj.com/news/index.s.....ect_r.html
Put gambling ahead of schools and infrastructure. Wow what a wise use of NJ taxpayer money!
@45
Great – where is the rest of the world and our allies on this human rights issue? We have to cajole our western European allies – all democracies – to contribute troops and resources and to stay there, yet we still provide the lion share of everything, including the dying.
Why is this our frickin’ burden when we have so many problems and needs at home?
Let others take the lead – no more.
TJ @ 46,
Nice job whining, there, Squirt!
Politically Incorrect,
“So what do you guys really want? No state governments, all decisions made in Washington, DC?”
What a profoundly retarded thing to infer!
@50
It’s a big natural gas shortage, NM’s up shit creek too.
Welcome to The Long Emergency.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Emergency
@49
Me too, but this is clearly an FAA/federal thing and something that needs to be the same across all the states. Plus, pointing pointers at airplanes being illegal is a bit of a bit of a no brainer and doesn’t put any sort of burden on the general public.
@49
That’s pretty brilliant. Of course you realize this will cause a significant number of the blue states to whither and die out. When states begin to pick and choose where their federal funds are going those great independence minded folks like say….Alaska may find themselves actually having to fend for themselves money wise.
I want a weaker federal government that isn’t wasting our wealth and lives in stupid foreign adventures in the Middle East.
Well, if they don’t waste it there, they’ll waste it somewhere else. That’s what empires do.
I want a federal government that actually follows the Constitution.
OK…so where do you stand on torture, state sponsored assassination, and Guantanamo? Show us you have stuff…not weak wingnut shit.
I’d like to see the 10th Amendment changed to allow a vote of 3/4 of the state legislatures to negate any action or law or taken by the legislative or executive branch of the federal government.
We have an Amendment process. It’s actually in the Constitution. Try reading it sometime.
In short, I want to put the federal government in its place – it is not the master but the servant.
You might can the propaganda and give us a specific law or administrative order demonstrating this allegedly heartfelt plea, because mostly I see pure political posturing on your part.
@58
Actually, we’ve been though that one a few times and federal supremacy always comes out on top. Even with the folks that scream state rights they only want states rights when they know their side will come out on top of whatever issue they’re bellyaching about.
@46 Isn’t that just like a wingnut to claim aiming a laser at an airliner cockpit is “miniscule” and “irrelevant.” Which makes me wonder if you’re one of the jerks down in Burien or SeaTac who’s been doing it …
@52 I’ve got a feeling the women clamped their thighs together and told the Taliban to go fuck their goats if they want sex; and I’ve also got a feeling you may be next …
Speaking of speachless….
You gotta love our states parole board..letting a guy out of prison who raped and killed a little girl after only serving 7 years.
Ya think the queen will step in and overturn it?
Or how about Mike! making up excuses and blaming his staff for not lowering the flags to half mast around the city for the fallen corrections officer.
how the fuck you idiots elect these morons is beyond me.
of course, NOW we are finding out that the prisoners at Monroe get to order free Dominoes pizza, get free cable tv, and are getting brand new elliptical machines to work out on(among other things)….but hey, what better way to spend money?
time to make prison what it was meant to be: a fucking cage…no more perks.
Does Stefan Sharkansky do anything, but whine? I’ve been reading Sound Politics (had the potty mouth police called on me when I posted) for the last couple of days and all he ever does is write 250 words worth of whine per post. Little data, few facts, just whine. Even when he could have had a valid point he fucks it up with outrageous claims. He’s even more useless than this tripe I’m writing about him. But, at least I can see that this is just tripe!
The younger Mr. Paul said he thought it was a bad idea to point lasers at pilots, but “there are a lot of states that already have laws, and I think the states ought to take care of it.”
oh there he goes again… referring to the racist institution of states rights again!
@63
It’s a (briefly) fascinating sociocultural expedition into the culture’s collective id over there.
They are caricatures of themselves – self-righteous enforced birthers, global warming deniers, small governmenters who demand uterus inspections, angry little fascists all around.
I’m amazed though with the vapors they have over ‘bad’ language – I got called out for asking the guy who was making a point of buying phosphate containing soap and incandescent bulbs why he was shitting where he bathed, pissing in his drinking water. OOOHHH such bad language degraded the debate.
I don’t think I earned any points by telling them “I’m really god-damned sorry.”
I think I pressed the same buttons when I accused pudge of having Tourettes’s – instead of yelling “FUCK FUCK FUCK COCKSUCKER” he yells “LIAR LIAR LIAR FILTHY LIAR” when he gets stressed with someone challenging his theocratic ideas.
That went over well.
I can’t wait to explore their thoughts about intelligent design.
@63
Yeah, I’ve been reading the stuff you’ve posted. It really does send them over the edge. They post such rubbish that I’m left puzzled with how to refute it.
Rog,
I’m conflicted on Afghanistan. I supported going in when we first went in, I supported Obama’s plan to get out of Iraq and double down in Afghanistan.
But, now it seems like we don’t know what we’re doing there, why we’re even there, or how to know when to leave.
A win in Afghanistan would be a great thing for the world. The Taliban are truly dreadful as are their buddies in Pakistan, the world would be better off without them. But, by being in Afghanistan are we getting rid of them or pissing people off and making more of them? I don’t think we know the answer to that one any more.
Add to that, our military and our country are profoundly broken and I don’t think we can fix it while fighting a war, especially a war that 99% of the population doesn’t have a connection too. If we go to war, we should all go to war. And we should raise taxes to pay for it. We really are flat fucking broke and in big fucking trouble because of it.
I’d like to stay in The ‘Stan. I’d like to fix The ‘Stan, run the talibs out, send the girls to school, build a few roads, give them better sanitation and wells for water. But, I’m afraid we’ve FUBAR’d it. It might be too late and time to home.
Maybe we can airlift out a couple hundred orphan kids, give them the worlds best educations and they can go back and fix what the modern world has spent the last 30 years fucking up.
e 62: “Or how about Mike! making up excuses and blaming his staff for not lowering the flags to half mast around the city for the fallen corrections officer.”
It’s always form over substance for you chumps. Maybe if they’d given the guy the psychiatric treatment he’d been begging for all these years, the officer would still be with us.
“Maybe we can airlift out a couple hundred orphan kids, give them the worlds best educations and they can go back and fix what the modern world has spent the last 30 years fucking up.”
I’m not in a position to judge whether our anti-Taliban military campaign in Afghanistan is FUBAR’d to the point of no return, so I don’t have an opinion on that aspect of it.
What I’m aware of, though, is that Afghanistan was intellectually denuded during the Soviet-to-Taliban era. There’s hardly anyone left in that country capable of doing anything besides milking goats. What’s left of the Afghan intelligentsia — the part that wasn’t murdered by either the communists or the Taliban — are emigres living abroad with no intention of ever returning.
If you take, say, 200 orphaned kids out of Afghanistan and put them through western schools, I doubt you could get them to go back to Afghanistan. Why would they? Life is a lot better here or in Europe.
You also need to understand how Afghan culture works. Creating an educated class and planting it on Afghan soil won’t make anything grow there. Afghanistan is a coercive society. Social authority comes from (a) being male and (b) using force. Afghans don’t do anything because you know more about it than they do. To get them to do anything, you first must establish authority over them by coercive means. So, it isn’t enough to teach Afghans useful skills like engineering, etc. You also have to figure out how you’re going to take over the authority structure. In that respect, the only language they understand is guns.
re 65: “I can’t wait to explore their thoughts about intelligent design.”
…and then they’ll blather about higher standards for public education. Here’s the most difficult exam yet devised for ‘intelligent design”:
Q–How does a virus become resistant to penicilin?
A- God makes it happen for His on mysterious reasons.
A+
@68
dumbass….the guy is a multiple-time convicted rapist…the only therapy he needs is a bullet to the head
a hell of a lot cheaper and more effective.
lets hope they FINALLY get the message and blow his brains out.
Afghanistan, and Iraq for that matter, and maybe even Viet Nam all remind me of my time as a resident at Harborview.
In trauma care, the surgeons refer to the “Golden Hour” – the time, the brief time, you have to get someone into and out of surgery before all hell breaks loose. Someone badly banged up in a car crash, usually, internal bleeding, lacerated organs, likely broken bones – you get them into and out of the ER and into the OR as fast as you can. Then you get in and get out ASAP, identify and stopping the big bleeders, maybe take out the spleen, cut out a piece of perforated gut – and then get the hell out, maybe not even closing the surgical wound – and you pack ’em up and get them to the ICU. If need be, and there often is, you take them back later – usually days later, and sometimes multiple times.
The reason is complex and poorly understood physiology, but the capillaries start to leak, the blood stops clotting right, blood pressure takes a nose dive, lungs fill with fluid – all this badness starts making them very very hard to operate on, but there is a delay to it and that is what the Golden Hour is – your little window to get something life-saving done.
The point is – this is sort of like the ‘quagmire’ of any one of these countries we’ve invaded. We’ve gone in guns ablazin’ uprooted the ‘evil doers’ but then stayed in WAY WAY too long. In Afghanistan, things went well at first, it seems, and that may have been a wonderful opportunity to pull back on the military and then spend all that money building roads and schools and hospitals and sewers. Actually make life better by building something, rather than waging a self-perpetuating and self-defeating guerrilla war. We’re up to our elbows in blood, with less and less to show for it.
*****
I commented prior to this – and I think it was somehow disappeared into the ether, but it strikes me that this, by RR:
seems much like Cambodia after Pol Pot.
I know Cambodia isn’t Taiwan yet, or even Thailand, but it’s certainly not the ruined backwater that Afghanistan seems to be. What’s the difference? Is it just that there’s still a war going on in Afghanistan? Is there an intrinsic difference?
@70 That’s an excellent example of how human myth-making functions. When people don’t understand something they rationalize it with their imaginations. Hence the flat earthers, global warming deniers, urban legends, old wives’ tales, praying for rain, etc. Clearly humankind invented the notion of God (or gods) as a way to explain otherwise inexplicable phenomena; and it probably didn’t take them more than a day or two to realize that religion also works wonderfully well as a means of social control and getting and keeping power over their fellow humans.
@72 The fact there’s still a war going on obviously impedes rebuilding but the problem goes much deeper.
Afghanistan is a uniquely poor and devastated country. The country has been utterly ruined. Its land and people have been ground down to the nub. It’s in worse shape than Germany after WW2.
Afghanistan has a harsh terrain and climate. Due to lack of rainfall, it’s not much friendlier to agriculture than the African Saharan countries. Growing crops depended on a centuries-old irrigation system which the Soviets, in pursuit of a deliberate policy of depopulating the countryside, systematically destroyed. They also sowed the fields with mines to render them unusable. Able to control only the cities, they sought to starve the mujahiden out of the countryside.
Afghanistan’s only road loops connected the major cities by looping around the country in a circular fashion. Thirty years of war have left it a cratered jeep track. Lacking railroads, Afghanistan’s only other means of moving people and goods is donkeys or human feet. Rural villages are isolated and inaccessible because of the mountainous terrain and lack of roads.
During the Soviet invasion, over half of Afghanistan’s 28,000 villages were destroyed by bombing and shelling. No Afghani family has been untouched by war. Millions died and two-thirds of the survivors became refugees. The country’s social fabric was severely disrupted. One of the reasons the Taliban were able to seize control is because Afghan society’s traditional institutions virtually ceased to exist.
Given an average lifespan of 42 years, the population turns over quickly and is very young. Most Afghanis are children, and few living Afghanis have ever known anything but war and social disintegration. Almost none have any education, because the schools were destroyed and the teachers were killed or driven into exile many years ago.
This is a country that has nothing and must be rebuilt from the ground up. It lacks schools, medical facilities, roads, housing, factories, employment opportunities, and basic sanitation. Its people live on foreign aid and handouts.
The current level of combat makes the country unsafe for NGOs, aid workers, and civil reconstruction personnel from other countries. It’s hard to see how nation-building can happen until the military situation is gotten under control. Perhaps this is an argument for pulling out U.S. troops, but that would mean turning over the country to the Taliban, who did nothing to rebuild the country during the years they did have near-total control of Afghanistan.
Afghanistan is a basket case. Should the civilized world just write it off? That’s problematical because of its strategic location. If Afghanistan is allowed to fester as an untreated wound its gangrene is likely to spread and cause much larger problems in a strategically important part of the world.
Unfortunately, there is no easy solution. For the present, I think the best U.S. policy is to continue to deny the Taliban control over Afghanistan. I would like to see the entire international community step up rebuilding efforts there, but it must be understood that, under current conditions, you have to rebuild cities, villages, infrastructure, housing, schools, and hospitals under military protection. Afghanistan is a physically big country so it will take a lot of troops to provide security for reconstruction efforts. Given the size of that commitment, yes, it’s tempting to want to walk away, but I don’t think we can afford to do that. Not yet, anyway.
Could someone tell me if aircraft are permitted to fly over state lines? What about international borders?
@74 “This is a country that has nothing and must be rebuilt from the ground up. It lacks schools, medical facilities, roads, housing, factories, employment opportunities, and basic sanitation. Its people live on foreign aid and handouts.”
And the opium trade.
@78
Anyone who’s a theist of any sort allows for some kind of supreme intelligence, which may in fact be innate to the universe itself.
From that point of view, there’s no problem accepting and dealing with genetics, natural selection (the “natural” part being part of “natural law”) and a sequence of events over eons culminating in a bunch of bipedal creatures using electronics to trade insults. The philosophical recognition of a “God” doesn’t preclude acceptance of the laws of physics and biology as a way of looking at Her toolkit.
Mind you, this is not to say that the likes of the Discovery Institute don’t have an entirely different agenda–three of them, actually.
The first is to persuade the confused and naive to buy into a sort of “creationism lite” on the way to furthering acceptance of the idea that a guy up in the sky who looked something like a naked, muscular Santa Claus created everything in six days a few thousand years ago and then sat back and had a few beers.
The second is to pander to those who already believe all that, based on their reading (someone reading it to them with embellishments) of a document written about 3,000 years ago by people who were trying to explain things as they understood them at the time, and whose system of numbers stopped at one thousand. By so doing, they hope to obtain more funding from them which will allow them to continue to sit in their fancy offices drinking lattes and dreaming more of this stuff up.
The third is to persuade the general public to be skeptical of science in general, and more easily persuaded that well-established data (about things like the arctic glaciers rapidly melting and turning into ice sliding off a stadium roof in Dallas, or the notion that there isn’t an unlimited quantity of petroleum to be pumped out of the ground if we just look a little harder for it) should be open to challenge, particularly if they might interfere with commerce.
Proud Leftist,
“Could someone tell me if aircraft are permitted to fly over state lines?”
Yes. State lines are not of concern when flying within the U.S.
“What about international borders?”
For just a fly-over, say, going from Detroit to Burlington, VT, you would need to be in communications with air traffic control as you crossed the borders. If you will be landing, there are more requirements.