This is the end, my only friend
It’s not just the utterly unhinged Hillary Clinton anymore; now we have general Mark Milley, U.S. Army chief of staff, going on record threatening open war against Russia for unspecified "harms:"
The U.S. Army’s chief of staff on Tuesday issued a stern warning to potential threats such as Russia and vowed the service will defeat any foe in ground combat.
"The strategic resolve of our nation, the United States, is being challenged and our alliances tested in ways that we haven’t faced in many, many decades," Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told an audience at the Association of the United States Army’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C.
"I want to be clear to those who wish to do us harm… the United States military — despite all of our challenges, despite our [operational] tempo, despite everything we have been doing — we will stop you and we will beat you harder than you have ever been beaten before. Make no mistake about that."
Your humble narrator is compelled to point out that history doesn’t contain a very comprehensive set of examples of Russia being beaten before. At least United States Army chief of staff Milley had the presence of mind to clarify which nation he claims membership in — a point that probably needed repeating at the Association of the United States Army’s meeting in the capital of the United States.
Meanwhile, the president of the National Endowment for Democracy has called for the United States to engineer some good ol’ regime change in mother Russia, which action certainly wouldn’t end badly at all.
[Vladimir Putin] used the Chechen issue to seize and consolidate his power and then to extend it. [Russian journalist Anna] Politkovskaya saw the danger, but she and other liberals in Russia were not strong enough to stop it.
The United States has the power to contain and defeat this danger. The issue is whether we can summon the will to do so.
Another issue would be whether or not we’d like human civilization to come to a flaming nuclear end. Last Week in Weird stands firmly in the "no" camp on this question, for the record, but we’re feeling increasingly alone in a world in which pundits and politicians are clearly preparing the American people for the opening salvos of World War III, and in which, by the way, the United States Air Force just conducted a pair of test nuclear bombings in the Nevada desert.
A pair of U.S. Air Force B-2 bombers dropped two 700-pound faux nuclear bombs in the middle of the Nevada desert within the past few days. Now the Pentagon wants to tell you about it.
Conducted "earlier this month," according to an Oct. 6 press release, the test involved two dummy variants of the B61, a nuclear bomb that has been in the U.S. arsenal since the 1960s. One was an "earth penetrator" made to strike underground targets, the other a tactical version of the B61. Neither carried an actual warhead.
I’m feeling safer already. How about you? At least this reckless warmongering is only projected to cost a trillion dollars!
Hell freezes over
It seems completely unreal to be reporting on this, friends, but it’s true nonetheless: Gary Johnson actually took a principled libertarian position on an issue of substance, even though that position was unpopular with the New York Times! Just in case you think I’m making the whole thing up, here’s the Times itself crying bitter, Hillary Clinton-flavored tears about Gary’s first tentative step off the reservation:
Attacking Hillary Clinton over what he criticized as her overly interventionist instincts, Mr. Johnson pointed to the hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians killed by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, as well as civilian deaths caused by the American-backed coalition, and said Mrs. Clinton, the former secretary of state, bore at least partial responsibility.
But when pressed four times on whether he saw a moral equivalence between deaths caused by the United States, directly or indirectly, and mass killings of civilians by Mr. Assad and his allies, Mr. Johnson made clear that he did.
"Well no, of course not — we’re so much better than all that," Mr. Johnson, a former New Mexico governor, said sarcastically. "We’re so much better when in Afghanistan, we bomb the hospital and 60 people are killed in the hospital."
Gary Johnson, where have you been all year? This is what you need to be doing! This is the material that can set the base on fire. Neocons and watermelons aren’t going to back you anyhow, but the people who will want to hear this. This is good material! Yes, you screwlooses, there is moral equivalence between murders committed by the United States government and murders committed by other people. It wasn’t too long ago that I was praising Rand Paul for explaining that murder is wrong even when you get paid to do it; in retrospect, Rand was way too soft, given the way notorious goofball Gary Johnson blew the doors down here.
It’s also charming to see conniving ne’er-do-well William Weld’s true colors come to the fore as soon as Johnson showed a flash of principle, too. Weld, a longtime friend of Hillary Clinton, seems to be as distressed as is the New York Times by the revelation that the Libertarian Party seems to be drawing more support from the Clinton than the Trump camp, and has now fully abandoned any pretense of supporting the ticket he’s actually on:
The Libertarian vice presidential candidate, William F. Weld, said Tuesday that he plans to focus exclusively on blasting Donald Trump over the next five weeks, a strategic pivot aimed at denying Trump the White House and giving himself a key role in helping to rebuild the GOP…
While Weld insisted he still supports Johnson, he said he is now interested primarily in blocking Trump from winning the presidency and then potentially working with longtime Republican leaders such as Mitt Romney and Haley Barbour to create a new path for the party after the election.
Say not so! Not principled libertarian William Weld! Whoever would have guessed he was an agent of the Clintons?
Polls show that Johnson and Weld — who were initially thought to appeal mostly to anti-Trump Republicans — may be doing more damage to Clinton by siphoning away young voters.
"That’s obviously a concern," said Mark Robinson, Weld’s friend, former chief of staff, and colleague at the Boston law firm Mintz Levin. “He certainly doesn’t want to be in that position where Trump could win and people would be blaming him."
Oh, right: everybody.
You know where you won’t be reading Last Week in Weird?
It’s probably for the best that Tom Woods has departed on the Contra Cruise already; that will save him the anguish of being triggered by this next entry, wherein I intend to be downright savage toward Pink Floyd, the archetypal high-school stoner band that has momentarily reunited in a bid to express support for the Zaytouna-Oliva Flotilla, which flotilla comprised but a single boat carrying thirteen women and a guitar in a bid to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. Admit it: you think I’m making all this up, don’t you.
In a message posted to their Facebook page on Thursday, the three living members of the band, David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Roger Waters, wrote that they "stand united in support of the Women of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, and deplore their illegal arrest and detention in international waters by the Israeli Defense Force."
The somewhat misleading header was "Pink Floyd reunites to stand with the Women of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. (Lack of closing quotes is [sic])
Pink Floyd was arguably never relevant except among that subset of the population that likes to get really, really high and do that weirdo trick with The Wizard of Oz, but this is pushing it. Say what you will about U2, but at least when Bono gets his panties all a-twist about some "cause" or other, it tends to be just a hair more significant than the allegedly "illegal" detention of a boatful of women who were admittedly attempting to break a blockade, and who were released unharmed two days later.
What’s the word for "irony" in the secret language of Kenyan Muslim communists?
Guys, I don’t want to make too much of this, but president Obama seriously just gave an interview in which he expresses his concern that it just may be possible for the president of the United States to conduct endless, secret drone wars without congressional oversight. No, that’s true.
Obama explained that he had looked at "the way in which the number of drone strikes was going up and the routineness with which, early in my presidency, you were seeing both DOD and CIA and our intelligence teams think about this."
He continued: "And it troubled me, because I think you could see, over the horizon, a situation in which, without Congress showing much interest in restraining actions with authorizations that were written really broadly, you end up with a president who can carry on perpetual wars all over the world, and a lot of them covert, without any accountability or democratic debate."
Yeah, gosh, it would be really rough to be stuck with a president like that, wouldn’t it? What a sad coincidence that president Obama has only had this moment of clarity right before he’s due to relinquish power anyhow. Recall, of course, that it was none other than this selfsame president Obama who concocted and promoted the idea that the president can have a secret "kill list" of targets to be assassinated on his personal say-so, with no "accountability or democratic debate" permitted. It was president Obama who just spent eight years "carry[ing] on perpetual wars all over the world," such as in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia. It was on president Obama’s watch — though, notably, under the command of his Secretary of Hell, Luciferia Clinton — that an entirely covert war was conducted in Libya, the result of which was the destabilization of the entire middle east. It’s good to know he’s had this change of heart, though!
From the very beginning of his presidency, Obama tightly embraced legal arguments, including the "state secrets privilege," to deflect inquiries into the government’s use of lethal force in foreign countries; he fought vigorously for years to keep his rationale for assassinating an American citizen secret; he never explained how the U.S. came to kill that same American citizen’s 16-year-old son; and he has never once forced his premier intelligence agency to publicly answer for the deaths of non-Western civilians — of which there have been many — during an eight-year covert bombing campaign.
Hey, everybody makes mistakes! The comedy reveal, of course, is that the White House has walked back even this absurdly tame statement.
"He was talking about the situation he inherited," [press secretary Josh] Earnest said. "In the early days of the administration, he was considering the tools that had been made available to him, and considering the way in which they were being used, and he was considering how, over the horizon, was a scenario in which there would not be sufficient transparency in place to contain this extraordinary authority that, based on new technology, could be wielded by the president of the United States."
Well, thank God for that. If the past eight years were the restrained Barack Obama, I think the whole world is glad he had this fake-o crisis of conscience.
And now for something completely different
It seems like it’s been just a few short weeks since somebody called the police to complain that he couldn’t catch enough Pokémon on the beach at Holland-on-Sea. Now we have the fun converse of the situation in Holland proper, where the government is filing a lawsuit against Niantic over the environmental damage all those Pokémon could potentially cause to the country’s "protected sand dunes."
The volume of players roaming the beaches in the so-called Pokémon capital of the Netherlands have prompted concern over the potential damage being done to the protected dunes surrounding the area.
The authorities now "want to ban these small virtual animals in protected areas and in the streets from 11:00 pm to 7:00 am," the municipality said in a statement.
Perhaps somebody somewhere should engage in the grand project of explaining to government creeps that there are no Pokémon anyhow, and so banning them is kind of nonsensical. I mean, more nonsensical even than the usual government ban. Perhaps the next project for the Dutch authorities will be to get Blizzard to ban murlocs so the irritating fishmen can’t interfere with international shipping.
The Hague authorities said they had been trying to contact Niantic since mid-August but without success. "We had no other choice" but to go to court, they said.
Apparently "getting in touch with reality" was not an option.