How to avoid nuclear war

  The new movie Oppenheimer has caused many people to rededicate themselves to the goal of achieving an international ban on nuclear weapons. But that’s never going to happen. There is no reasonable possibility whatsoever that the U.S. national-security establishment (i.e., the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA) would ever agree to dismantle its nuclear stockpile, especially since there would be no way to guarantee that foreign regimes would do the same.

The cancer of the national-security state

  Suppose that after you visit your doctor for a physical examination, he informs you that you are suffering from the following ailments:

1. A stiff knee, which requires six months of physical therapy.
2. Being overweight, which requires a big change in diet.
3. Kidney problems, which require you to give up drinking.
4. A growing malignant tumor on your stomach that can be removed by surgery.

  The doctor recommends that you give priority to ailment 4, but you instead decide to give priority to the first three ailments. 

Military self-delusion on the U.S. Constitution

  Several former U.S. defense secretaries and retired generals recently published an open letter about the current political environment in America. The letter stated, among other things: “Military officers swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution, not an oath of fealty to an individual or to an office.”

  That’s just pure nonsense and self-delusion. Oh, sure, technically it’s true that military officers swear such an oath, but they don’t follow it. Instead, they faithfully and blindly follow the orders of the president, which means, as a practical matter, that their oath is one of fealty to the president, not to the Constitution.

A time for introspection

  With the crisis over Ukraine getting bigger by the day, this would be a good time for the American people to engage in some serious introspection, especially given the recent withdrawal of U.S. forces from their forever deadly and destructive war in Afghanistan. 

An old soldier’s denial on Afghanistan

  In a letter to the Los Angeles Times regarding the Afghanistan debacle, Stephen Sloane, a retired captain in the U.S. Navy who served in the Vietnam War, is a perfect demonstration of how so many people, especially in the military, live lives of denial when it comes to foreign interventionism.  

Let’s reject foreign interventionism entirely

  Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, interventionists are learning the wrong lesson from their ongoing debacle in Afghanistan. They are coming up with all sorts of reasons why this particular intervention has gone bad. Undoubtedly, they will promise to do better in the future.

  That’s not the lesson Americans should learn from this forever-war disaster. The lesson everyone should be learning is that America’s founding heritage of non-interventionism is the way to go in the future. 

The managed economy destroys the First Amendment

  The First Amendment guarantees people the right of free speech. It is a restriction on the power of the federal government to punish people for criticizing federal officials or for saying things that the government doesn’t like. 

  Why did our ancestors want the Constitution amended in that way? Because they were certain that the federal government would end up attracting people who would have the desire and the inclination to do bad things to people who criticized them or said things that public officials didn’t like. 

Trump continues the never-ending war on Cuba

  If it’s presidential election time, then, like clockwork, it’s time for Republicans to continue the U.S. national-security establishment’s 60-year-long attack on Cuba. That’s because Republican presidential candidates feel the need to pander to Cuban-American voters in Florida as a way to show how “tough” they are on communism.

  Well, not all communism. The U.S. government, especially the Pentagon, loves the communist regime in Vietnam, the one that killed some 58,000 American men in the Vietnam War. Today, the U.S. and Vietnamese regimes are living in peaceful and friendly co-existence, exactly what the national-security establishment said was impossible during the Cold War.

“Small government” is an empty Republican mantra

  Favoring “small government” has long been a Republican and conservative mantra. It is also an empty one. It’s a shame that some libertarians have adopted it to describe libertarianism.

  After all, what does “small government” mean? A smaller IRS? A more streamlined DEA? A fascist Social Security system? A reformed Medicare system? A 10 percent cut in the military budget. Fewer CIA assassinations? Fewer coups and invasions of foreign countries? Reduced secret surveillance? Less immigration highway checkpoints within the United States? A reduction in no-knock raids and asset forfeiture? A smaller border wall?

The evil, immoral, vicious, and hypocritical embargo against Cuba

  The banality of evil that characterizes the U.S. national security state is demonstrated perfectly by the continuation of its deadly economic embargo against Cuba, which has been ongoing for some 60 years.

  What’s the point of the embargo? After all, the Pentagon’s, CIA’s, and NSA’s official enemy, Fidel Castro, died years ago. Why continue to intentionally inflict harm on the Cuban people?

Brain injuries from interventionism

  The number of U.S. soldiers who have suffered traumatic brain injuries from the Iranian missile attack last month in Iraq has now risen to more than 100. The injuries demonstrate the sheer inanity of foreign interventionism.

Abolish foreign aid, all of it

  As most everyone knows, the federal government is now in debt to the tune of more than $22 trillion. Since federal officials are now spending, on an annual basis, around a trillion dollars more than what they are bringing in with taxes, that is going to raise the federal debt by a trillion dollars every year. We are reminded of this phenomenon by the periodic debate on whether Congress should raise the debt ceiling, an implicit acknowledgment that too much federal debt is not a good thing, especially since the feds will ultimately tax the American people to pay back what they have borrowed to fund their welfare-warfare state.

  On the welfare-state side, the big-ticket items are Social Security and Medicare, the two crown jewels of the American welfare state. Abolishing them would go a long way toward resolving the fiscal problem.

Gitmo confirms our ancestors’ concerns

  What the Pentagon and the CIA have done with their prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba reflects the concern of our American ancestors who demanded the enactment of the Bill of Rights immediately after the Constitution brought into existence the federal government.

  Recall that when the Constitutional Convention met, it was with the purpose of simply amending the Articles of Confederation, the governmental system under which the United States had been operating for 13 years.

Conscription is slavery

  Last month a federal judge in Texas declared the all-male military draft to be unconstitutional because it applies only to men and not also to women. The decision flies in the face of a decision by the Supreme Court in 1981 that upheld the constitutionality of the draft-registration process. Back then, however, women were not permitted to serve in combat roles, which was the justification for the Court’s ruling. Today, women are permitted to serve in combat roles, a point cited by that Texas federal judge.

Horrific, long-term consequences of regime change

  84-year-old Emma Thiessen Alvarez has never forgotten the day in 1981 when Guatemalan officials came to her house looking for her daughter, a student leader who had escaped from military custody. Unable to find her, the officials settled for Thiessen’s 14-year-old son. She never saw him again.

  Thiesen’s story was highlighted in a recent New York Times article because the Guatemalan legislature is now contemplating granting blanket amnesty to military officials who participated in the reign of terror that the Guatemalan national-security establishment inflicted on the Guatemalan people for a period of some 36 years.

The ongoing, never-ending U.S. death star

  The U.S. national-security establishment’s death star continues operating at full-speed and on auto-pilot. According to an article in Newsweek, the Pentagon and the CIA have now killed half-a-million people since 9/11. The article didn’t say how many of those dead people are estimated to have participated in the 9/11 attacks, but I’d say that a reasonable estimate would be maybe 10 or 20 at the most. That would mean that 498,980 people who have been killed by the U.S. death star since 9/11 had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.

  Moreover, those half-a-million deaths don’t include the hundreds of thousands of people who have been killed in the U.S.-incited civil wars in Syria and Lebanon.

Trump's nighttime trip to Iraq confirms the debacle

  What better proof of the Iraq debacle than President Trump’s middle-of-the-night trip to that country at Christmastime to visit U.S. troops who are still occupying the country some 15 years after the Pentagon and the CIA invaded?

  The U.S. national-security establishment has had a decade-and-a-half to bring its federally planned paradise into existence. From the very first day of the U.S. conquest of Iraq - a country that had never attacked the United States - the Pentagon and the CIA wielded total control over the country, being able to install whatever type of regime they wanted, with no pesky constitutional restraints to inhibit whatever they wanted to do.

MAGA or MAFA?

  The driving mantra for the Trump administration, the one that energizes every Trumpster and Trumpista, is MAGA — Make America Great Again.

  The problem arises in how Trump defines national greatness. For him, it means a gigantic military-intelligence establishment — i.e., the national-security state, consisting of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA. The more powerful this branch of the federal government, the greater the nation in the eyes of President Trump.

U.S. perversity on peace in Korea

  Just when you think that the U.S. national-security state’s policy toward Korea can’t get more perverse, it does. The latest perversion? Opposing a peace agreement between North Korea and South Korea! Imagine that. And why would U.S. officials oppose such an agreement? Because it would inevitably lead to calls for U.S. troops in Korea to be sent packing home to the United States. After all, when a peace agreement is entered into, what would be the justification for keeping U.S. troops in that faraway land?

Interventionists are addicted to interventionism

  In an editorial opposing a U.S.-supported coup in Venezuela, the New York Times gets it right, mostly. Unfortunately, the Times’s editorial board, like so many advocates of foreign interventionism, just cannot let go entirely of its interventionist mindset.

  But let’s first give credit where credit is due. In its September 11 editorial, “Stay Out of Venezuela, Mr. Trump,” the Times makes a good case for non-interventionism in Venezuela, notwithstanding the fact that Venezuela’s ruler, Nicolas Maduro, has developed into a brutal socialist dictator whose “election” was illegitimate. Maduro’s socialism has thrown the country into crisis, chaos, and violence, with Venezuelans on the verge of starvation. More than a million people have fled the country in an attempt to survive.