Why Neocon Foreign Policy Fails Over and Over

This goes for the Neocons who taok over Republic foreign policy and also those how commandeered the cabinets of Democrats such as Obama and Biden. Mike Dimino, a former CIA analyst and a fellow at Defense Priorities. He has been involved in Mideast policy, particularly under the Trump administration, where he has served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East. He hammers it here:

We could talk about sort of the military analysis all day, and I think it's really important to do that. But the bigger point here has to be, you know, we have now seen 20 years worth of evidence in Iraq, in Syria, in Libya, and Afghanistan that we cannot force liberal democracy at the end of a gun. Okay? Iran is a nation of 90 million people. Enough of the people in that country have to overcome what many sociologists and political scientists have called the collective action problem, right? The cost benefit analysis of organic political change, that calculation has to get to a point where change can happen. And that's how it has to work if it's going to last and if it's going to be meaningful. This idea that the United States should be using its military to go around the world and depose every single tin pot dictator that we find and bog ourselves down there to the tune of trillions of dollars to 1000s of American lives with no real goal or or purpose, where we are squandering our national resources in our bandwidth that need to be directed on far more pressing issues is just not really in America's interest. And that's, again, the biggest point that I would make here, is that, you know, this idea that you can, you know, send a couple of, you know, American stealth bombers, you know, over the border and kill all the ayatollahs and some kind of cinematic cutscene. And then, you know, some young woman stands up in a pantsuit and goes, you know, I'm ready to be the president of Iran now. I mean, life is not a Marvel movie and life is not, it's not Harry Potter. So as somebody that has spent a lot of time in the region and has worked on these issues as an intelligence officer, I could just tell you the idea that something like that is possible, I think, is what is in the heads of a lot of people like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, and even a lot of the, you know, the Persian diaspora elsewhere, that is very against the regime. Again, I'm against the regime too, but it just doesn't work that way, where there's going to be some sort of perfect cutscene ending, and there's going to be, you know, overnight, some kind of new regime in Iran, we have learned that the world just doesn't work that way.

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Attorneys Using AI

Westlaw's AI module, called Co-Counsel, does a rather impressive job of reading the notes I scribbled out with pen on paper during a recent client interview. It also does an extremely good job of summarizing deposition transcripts. It excels at some research tasks (not all) and it does a host of other tasks traditionally done by lawyers. As the saying goes these days, AI won't replace lawyers, but lawyers using AI will replace lawyers who don't. That day already seems to be upon us.

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Matt Taibbi: The Bullshit Stories of 2024

Matt Taibbi:

2024 was the year in which people we used to call “elites,” i.e. party heads, intelligence chiefs, CEOs, media celebrities, university presidents, and so on, exhausted real-life strategies for maintaining institutional trust and were reduced to trying to bullshit their way through crises holding no cards at all. Stories like “the politics of joy” were patches used to cover up what in 2024 became big cracks in the illusion of elite competence. For every over-covered pseudo-story like “joy” or “the new masculinity,” 2024 saw ostentatious non-coverage of big, real questions, many still unanswered.

Here are Taibbi's nominations for the top four BS stories o 2024:

1. WHO’S RUNNING THE COUNTRY? "We now know America hasn’t had a functioning president for at least this year and probably longer, which means someone other than the president has been making presidential decisions.

2. HOW WAS JOE BIDEN INDUCED TO END HIS 2024 CAMPAIGN? "Sy Hersh, writing in a July 27th Substack piece called Leaving Las Vegas, reported an unnamed “official” said the deal went down Saturday, July 20th. “Obama called Biden after breakfast and said, ‘Here’s the deal. We have Kamala’s approval to invoke the 25th Amendment,’” the source said."

3. WHO WERE TRUMP’S WOULD-BE ASSASSINS? "[A]ctual coverage of the assassination attempt in papers like the Washington Post was near zero, with little to no information emerging from law enforcement sources and even editorial treatments mostly limited to denunciations of “conspiracy theories” that emerged in the wake of Trump’s shooting."

4. WHAT’S WITH THE DRONE GASLIGHTING? "Is there a threat or not? Someone is lying. Kentucky’s Rand Paul blocked the Senate measure, but the ongoing episode demonstrates that the FAA, DOD, DHS, FBI etc. are holding back what they know about the recent War of the Worlds remake for… what reason exactly? Has unreality become a principle all its own?" Matt Taibbi, excerpt from "Gaslit Nation: From drones to terrorists, authorities are having a laugh at the public's expense":

If you’re in the growing population of Americans that is tired of being fed streams of sensational and inexplicable news stories, while authorities that appear to delight in public confusion sit back with buttoned lips, yesterday might have been the last straw. We are officially Gaslit Nation ... I don’t know what officials are up to, when they leak like sieves about some issues (Russiagate, Luigi Mangione) and refuse to provide even basic answers about others (New Jersey drones, Thomas Crooks, Covid origins). All we know is there’s an elaborate media strategy at work, one that in the content moderation age extends to outright removal of certain materials, like Shamsud bin Jabbar’s Facebook videos. Trying to unwind the logic of these decisions is tiring enough when it’s voluntary, but living in a country that won’t explain things flying over your house is absurd. I get that the president is a corpse, but can’t someone be found to give an old-fashioned Oval Office speech? Why leave us to chew over so much crazy?

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