Matt Taibbi: How to Stop Going to War

Matt Taibbi concludes that both the Democrats and Republicans cannot resist the allure of future wars. His article: "To Stop War, America Needs a Third Party The American political system has been captured by the military, and only an independent political power can prevent the next Afghanistan." Here's an excerpt:

Afghanistan is as pure a bipartisan fiasco as we’ve had in recent times. Both parties were directly and repeatedly complicit in prolonging the catastrophe. Republicans and Democrats were virtually unanimous in approving the initial use-of-force, both voted over and over to fund the war to insane levels, and both Democratic and Republican presidents spent years covering up evidence of massive contracting corruption, accounting failure (as in, failure to do any accounting), war crimes, and other problems.

Afghanistan was the ultimate symbol of the two-party consensus, the “good war” as Barack Obama deemed it, and defense spending in general remained so sacrosanct across the last twenty years that the monster, $160 billion defense spending hikes of 2017-2018 were virtually the only policy initiative of Donald Trump’s that went unopposed by a Democratic leadership. “We fully support President Trump’s Defense Department’s request,” was Chuck Schumer’s formulation in 2018, choosing then to reward the Pentagon for turning Mesopotamia into a Mad Max set and spending two trillion dollars on the by-then-inevitable fall of Kabul.

The status quo will not offer us any solution. The bad players also include the morally corrupt legacy news media:

Worse, as the performance of the legacy media in the last few weeks shows, the national commentariat is also fully occupied by the military establishment. Staffed from top to bottom by spooks and hawks, the corporate press’s focus from the pre-Iraq firing of Phil Donahue through the past few weeks of guest star appearances on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC by the likes of Leon Panetta, John Bolton, Karl Rove, David Petraeus and Marc Thiessen — all people with direct involvement in the Afghan mess — has been the same. It keeps the public distracted with inane tactical issues or fleeting partisan controversies, leaving the larger problem of a continually expanding Fortress America unexamined.

We need new institutions free of Pentagon influence, probably starting with a new political party.

On a related note, Taibbi pointed out that the U.S. military is such a mess that it cannot be meaningfully audited. Here is an excerpt from Taibbi's 2019 article, "The Pentagon’s Bottomless Money Pit: When the Defense Department flunked its first-ever fiscal review, one of our government’s greatest mysteries was exposed: Where does the DoD’s $700 billion annual budget go?"

Despite being the taxpayers’ greatest investment — more than $700 billion a year — the Department of Defense has remained an organizational black box throughout its history. It’s repelled generations of official inquiries, the latest being an audit three decades in the making, mainly by scrambling its accounting into such a mess that it may never be untangled.

Ahead of misappropriation, fraud, theft, overruns, contracting corruption and other abuses that are almost certainly still going on, the Pentagon’s first problem is its books. It’s the world’s largest producer of wrong numbers, an ingenious bureaucratic defense system that hides all the other rats’ nests underneath. Meet the Gordian knot of legend, brought to life in modern America.

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Walking Turbo-Charges Creativity

There is a significant connection between walking and creativity:

Oppezzo designed an elegant experiment. A group of Stanford students were asked to list as many creative uses for common objects as they could. A Frisbee, for example, can be used as a dog toy, but it can also be used as a hat, a plate, a bird bath, or a small shovel. The more novel uses a student listed, the higher the creativity score. Half the students sat for an hour before they were given their test. The others walked on a treadmill.

The results were staggering. Creativity scores improved by 60 percent after a walk.

A few years earlier, Michelle Voss, a University of Iowa psychology professor, studied the effects of walking on brain connectivity. She recruited 65 couch-potato volunteers aged 55 to 80 and imaged their brains in an MRI machine. For the next year, half of her volunteers took 40-minute walks three times a week. The other participants kept spending their days watching Golden Girls reruns (no judgment here; I love Dorothy and Blanche) and only participated in stretching exercises as a control. After a year, Voss put everyone back in the MRI machine and imaged their brains again. Not much had happened to the control group, but the walkers had significantly improved connectivity in regions of the brain understood to play an important role in our ability to think creatively.

Walking changes our brains, and it impacts not only creativity, but also memory."

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Performance versus Legitimate Concern on Racial Matters

John McWhorter is now writing several times per week at the New York Times. I can only assume that the NYT hired McWhorter to help deprogram them, to save from their self-induced immersion in the cult that is "antiracism." I'd like to be the fly on the wall when NYT staffers discuss this new hire among themselves. I expect that it would be, in equal parts, entertaining and distressing. But the good guys won this battle, an McWhorter has been handed a turbo-charged megaphone for his eloquent and witty brand of common sense.

Here is an excerpt from one of McWhorter's early columns at the NYT. The title is "The Performative Antiracism of Black Students at the U. of Wisconsin."

Treating a people with dignity requires not only listening closely and sympathetically to their grievances, but being able to take a deep breath and call them out on aspects of those grievances that don’t make sense. And there will be some, unless those airing the grievance are fictional creations instead of human beings.

On race, we should assess, look ahead rather than backward, channel our thoughts and feelings with cortex rather than brain stem, and think slow rather than fast — and the notion that this counsel is “white” is science fiction. That goes for both protesters and those whom they protest at. Instead, too much of what passes as enlightenment on race these days involves merely pretending that something makes sense out of fear.

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Daily Aphorism #6: We Think and Vote Like We Drive and Eat.

Most people claim that they are careful thinkers and conscientious voters, but I seriously doubt that claim. I've seen what happens on social media. It's a nonstop carnival of careless, invalid and fallacious reasoning. Further, we have a big problem here, in that people who don't know are unwilling to say "I don't know." But I have another reason for suggesting that we are sloppy thinkers: We sloppy even when we engage in highly risky activities.

Why would anyone take any more care in thinking or voting than they take when they engage in activities like eating or driving? After all, if you aren't careful with eating and driving, you could die.

We are lousy eaters for at least two reasons. First, we put all kinds of crap into our mouths. Many of us eat lots of food that is demonstrably unhealthy. Second, we put far too much of it into our mouths. 74% of American adults are overweight or obese. That's most of us. More than 42% of Americans are obese. Here are the definitions for "overweight" and "obese."

I won't point to any stats regarding driving. Anyone who drives has seen the insanity, the recklessness, the inattention. On second thought, I'll give two statistics:  any given moment 3% of us on the highway are texting and distracted driving (much of it texting) kills more than 3,000 each year. That is more than 10 people killed every day. That's as many people killed each year as died in the World Trade Center bombing.

I've discussed this matter in a prior post.  My very sad point is this: If a person is going put their life at risk with terrible eating habits and driving habits, why would we expect them to be more careful with how they inform themselves or attempt to persuade others?

I very much wish that none of what I have written above is true.

Continue ReadingDaily Aphorism #6: We Think and Vote Like We Drive and Eat.

Daily Aphorism #5: Fickleness and Death

It's like a on/off switch. When I'm feeling good and no one around me is notably ill, I feel like Superman, even though I am 65. All it takes to make me feel my age (or even older) is a tiny bit of morality salience. How tiny? A mild back ache often does the trick. Or noticing my gray hair. Or needing to stretch out after sitting over the computer for a couple hours. Or forgetting someone's name. That is major terror. Why "terror"? Because Terror Management Theory predicts that even subtle morality salience can send us into spirals. TMT is a power and innovative theory that explains so very many things that we encounter every day. Mainly it explains how human animals can carry one with their ordinary (and oftentimes trite) daily tasks as if everyone on the planet won't be dead in 125 years.

Truly, this is heavy stuff to consider. If you haven't before heard of Terror Management Theory, I've written more than a few articles on the topic, and you can find all of them at this link.

Continue ReadingDaily Aphorism #5: Fickleness and Death