This time it will kill us all, FOR SURE! We promise!

Recently, Asia Times ran this story recapping and analyzing what actually happened at Fukushima during the minutes of the March earthquake that led to the even greater disaster as the tsunami hit. The entire Fukushima site was in trouble with safety inspectors for years, coming to a head in 2002, but problems persisted for years afterward. Even without the one-two punch of the natural disasters, it seems likely from this story that a serious accident at Fukushima was merely a matter of time. Also, if you missed it last week, the IEEE has republished blog posts made by an anonymous cleanup worker who operates a robot in the facility to remove materials where the radiation is too high for humans. The posts, which were extremely critical of TEPCO management of the cleanup operations, were deleted from their original website after drawing attention, but the IEEE recovered the posts and republished them to much attention. Last week, Naoto Kan, the prime minister of Japan, resigned because of criticism of the government’s handling of the crisis.

If you get your news from the American news media, you probably didn’t hear this tidbit: the U.S. government has negotiated an agreement to leave up to 25,000 troops in Afghanistan until 2024. You hear a lot about the troops coming home in 2014, but not so much about the “special advisors” staying for at least another full decade in the single biggest waste of money and materiel in the history of humankind. That, of course, presumes that we haven’t completely bankrupted ourselves before then.

PZ Meyers had this story about a “pastor” who thinks it would be great if there could be a national registry of all of us atheists just like they have for “convicted sex offenders, ex-convicts, terrorist cells…” and other undesirables. It would be for “information purposes”:

Now , many (especially the atheists ) , may ask “Why do this , what’s the purpose ?” Duhhh , Mr. Atheist , for the same purpose many States put the names and photos of convicted sex offenders and other ex-felons on the I-Net – to INFORM the public ! I mean , in the City of Miramar , Florida , where I live , the population is approx. 109,000 . My family and I would sure like to know how many of those 109,000 are ADMITTED atheists ! Perhaps we may actually know some . In which case we could begin to witness to them and warn them of the dangers of atheism . Or perhaps they are radical atheists , whose hearts are as hard as Pharaoh’s , in that case , if they are business owners , we would encourage all our Christian friends , as well as the various churches and their congregations NOT to patronize them as we would only be “feeding” Satan .

Gee, wouldn’t it just be easier if we all wore a patch or something?

Former BBC producer Jo Glanville has written an in-depth piece for the London Review of Books chronicling the battle over the future of one of the (if not THE) pre-eminent broadcasting institutions, the BBC World Service. While the mission of the World Service unquestionably needs to be re-evaluated in the era of the Internet, British domestic politics may have more to do with its fate than the information age.

Anything else I can help you feel bad about today? I’ve got plenty of links.

The media have reported the death of Australian WWI vet Claude Choules, the last living combatant to fight in that conflict. Only two days ago, this excellent article by Evan Fleischer was posted at The Awl, talking about Choules and the overlapping of generations between the major wars of American history. Whether Fleischer knew something we all didn’t or not, the article is presciently well-timed, but it’s also a really good piece full of interesting tidbits about veterans of a number of wars. Only Florence Green, who served as an RAF canteen girl during the war, is left alive.

A guest post at TomDispatch.com by Adam Hochschild considers some of the parallels between the politics of the First World War and the politics of the Iraq-Afghanistan War. Hochschild is the author of a new history of the war, “To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918″. Here’s a pullquote from the TomDispatch post:

Was it worth it? Of course not. Germany’s near-starvation during the war, its humiliating defeat, and the misbegotten Treaty of Versailles virtually ensured the rise of the Nazis, along with a second, even more destructive world war, and a still more ruthless German occupation of France.

The same question has to be asked about our current war in Afghanistan. Certainly, at the start, there was an understandable motive for the war: after all, the Afghan government, unlike the one in Iraq, had sheltered the planners of the 9/11 attacks. But nearly ten years later, dozens of times more Afghan civilians are dead than were killed in the United States on that day — and more than 2,400 American, British, Canadian, German, and other allied troops as well. As for unplanned consequences, it’s now a commonplace even for figures high in our country’s establishment to point out that the Afghan and Iraq wars have created a new generation of jihadists.

In the wake of the death of Bin Laden, the question “Was it worth it?” looms large over military action that promises to linger almost indefinitely among the poppy fields of Afghanistan, much as it lingers still over the poppies of Flanders.

And when it comes to the Pentagon, that’s just a start. Massive expansion in all directions has been its m.o. since 9/11. Its soaring budget hit about $700 billion for fiscal year 2010 (when you include a war-fighting supplemental bill of $33 billion) — an increase of only 4.7% in otherwise budget-slashing times — and is now projected to hit $726 billion in fiscal year 2011. Some experts claim, however, that the real figure may come closer to the trillion-dollar mark when all aspects of national security are factored in. Not surprisingly, it has taken over a spectrum of State Department-controlled civilian activities, ranging from humanitarian relief and development (aka “nation-building”) to actual diplomacy. And don’t forget its growing roles as a domestic-disaster manager and a global arms dealer, or even as a Green Revolution energy innovator. You could certainly think of the Pentagon as the Blob on the American horizon, and yet, looking around, you might hardly be aware of the ways your country continues to be militarized.

This is a photograph of my mother holding Charlotte when she was about four and a half months old. As we were visiting with my mother that weekend, indeed, as I took this photograph, George W. Bush was on television announcing that American troops were beginning their invasion of Afghanistan.

Yesterday was the ninth anniversary of that moment. This is Charlotte now:

For all but eighteen weeks of her life, this country has been fighting a war that had no legitimate purpose, no clear goals or objectives, has bankrupted the richest nation in the history of the world, resulted in the deaths of over 2000 coalition troops and countless thousands of Afghan civilians (though nowhere near as many as in Iraq), and imperiled the fundamental civil liberties on which this country was founded. My child was born in a country where peace and prosperity were still the norm, but before she could even walk those conditions would cease to be, possibly forever. And even though the torch of power was handed from the instigator of this conflict, a puppet of the rich and powerful who are the only ones to genuinely benefit from it, that power was handed to a man whose cynical calculus led him to believe that it would be in his own political benefit to continue and even expand the war.

Nine years hence it would not surprise me one whit to revisit this with a picture of my daughter fully grown and this quagmire still in progress. The “Global War On Terror” from its very inception has been nothing but a way for the security state apparatus to create a self-sustaining set of conditions after the collapse of the charade of the Cold War, and as such can never be won, can never be demonstrated for its inherent fallacies, and can be used to justify anything the state wishes to pursue as its prerogative from war to secret tribunals to torture to surveillance to total authoritarianism. If she is lucky, the state will not have imposed conscription to continue to feed its need for fresh troops to throw at the situation, but the balance of her entire life will be spent living with the consequences of something that began on a day that otherwise seemed so joyful and hopeful in her world.

For this, there can be no forgiveness granted to the people who foisted such a tragedy on her and millions of others. One can only hope that in time some proper accounting of it is made and the instigators and enablers alike are given due punishment for their deeds.

“We are in this to win” — General David Petraeus

• Afghanistan Sitrep July 1, 2010 — William K. Polk at Counterpunch
• “When Does Afghanistan Officially Qualify As A ‘Quagmire’?” — Brynn Jacobs at Dangerous Intersection
• “America’s Skewed National Security Priorities” — Andrew Bacevich in the Boston Globe

Dennis Kucinich on the giant fraud being perpetrated on this country called the Afghanistan War:

(and similarly here at the Huffington Post)

Bernie Sanders on Republican stonewalling on unemployment benefits while demanding the end of the estate tax, which benefits only the wealthiest of Americans:

Russ Feingold on the gutting of the Wall Street reform legislation:

and also at Huffington Post.

It’s reassuring that for every Scott Brown, Mitch McConnell, Michelle Bachmann or Joe Barton there is still someone who can cut through the bullshit. It’s disappointing that these men are so few in the halls of power, and more disappointing still that the man in the White House does not stand with them.

And it has only taken ONE TRILLION DOLLARS!

The December issue of Vogue has an excellent interview/profile of Hillary Clinton by Jonathan Van Meter. It’s gotten most of its attention from the behind-the-scenes explanation of how she came to accept the offer to be Secretary of State when she really did not want the job. The piece really shows Hillary’s ability to keep moving forward despite being tossed around by political misfortunes not entirely of her own making, and leaves me genuinely feeling like the Democrats picked the wrong nominee. For all the Hillary Hatred that the right would have mustered up against her, it couldn’t be near as bad as the batshit-insane stuff they’ve plastered Obama with, and I think she would probably have made more headway by now than Obama. Most insiders expect that she won’t stay if Obama wins re-election in 2012, but unlike Bill Clinton, who’s massive ego keeps him going and going and going, it’s hard to see what she would do ex officio.

Last week’s New Yorker takes a peek inside the world of Michelin restaurant reviewers. While all restaurant reviewers have to struggle with maintaining anonymity, the people who work for Michelin are a whole order of magnitude more secretive about it. Author John Colapinto’s description of meeting one of the reviewers who covers New York City for lunch at Jean Georges reads like the machinations of a James Bond novel…and it seems the Michelin people prefer it that way. There’s some criticism of the guides and their old-fashioned biases toward traditional French restaurant cuisine, and after reading the challenges the reviewers themselves face in having to maintain their secret identities, having to live up to the demands of the guide’s management, and having to eat everything on their plate everywhere they dine, I think I won’t be applying for that job.

This original post at the group blog 3Quarks Daily by Evert Ciliers gets down to brass tacks about Afghanistan: it was stupid to go to war there in the first place, everything we do there is back-assward, and Barack Obama is only making things worse by prolonging the conflict in order to look tough. Here’s the money pull-quote, which is actually a quote from John R. MacArthur at Harper’s:

“’Fighting terrorism’ in Afghanistan ‘to prevent another 9/11′ simply isn’t a serious argument, and I suspect that even the deluded Gen. Stanley McChrystal understands that his men are shooting at indigenous Afghan rebels, not Osama bin Laden or his followers. No, the more likely reason for killing all those people and wasting nearly $3.4 billion a month is an ugly mixture of vanity, misplaced pride, crass politics, and liberal self-righteousness. The Army still wants to prove it can defeat a guerrilla army and erase the shame of Vietnam. The politicians, Obama included, want to look warlike and tough, so they can’t be accused of being ‘soft on terror’ in 2010. And then there are the civil servants and think-tank denizens known as ‘humanitarian interventionists’ — now led by Hillary Clinton, who think that America’s ‘civilizing’ mission in the world includes not only establishing ‘democracy’ but also ‘freeing’ Afghan women from being required to wear the burqa.”

If you’re still operating under the delusion that Barack Obama is Superman, hopefully this article will dissuade you of that once and for all. If you’re operating under the delusion that Our Soldiers are Fighting For Our Freedom, this probably won’t change your mind because you’re too big a dumbfuck to get it.