Welcome to The Vomiting Brain, a blog about nothing and everything headquartered in the remote syrupy northern enclave known as "Vermont".

Friday, November 20, 2015

We Should Fear Ourselves



Events like those that just happened in Paris, Beirut, Ankara, over the Sinai, and just this morning in Bamako Mali are severely depressing.  Not so much the attacks themselves, but the subsequent response.  ISIS is terrifying.  They are a group with a nihilistic medieval ideology, battle hardened, well-funded, well organized, and there is no doubt that if they could, they would make the United States part of the caliphate.  Here is the thing though; they cannot even come close.  What they can do however, is provoke us into costly wars, to surrender our values and freedoms, and distract us from our own problems.

ISIS and organizations like them are not existential threats to us.  ISIS is not Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, the Confederacy, or the Soviet Union and yet judging by the media coverage and the response of many of our political leaders they might be all that and worse.  Donald Trump has advocated a database and ID cards for all Muslims.   Jeb Bush has advocated religious tests for entry to our country.  John Kasich has advocated creating a new government agency specifically to promote Judeo-Christian values (whatever those are).  ISIS believes they are waging a holy war against the west and many of our political leaders are eager to oblige.

Governors and mayors of cities across the country are refusing to settle Syrian refugees fleeing the very people responsible for these attacks.  As if 10,000 refugees, a tiny percentage of whom could be here for nefarious purposes, pose a serious threat to a nation of 350,000,000.  These people are not leaders.  They are cowards and they are laying the groundwork for fascism.

Suddenly after an attack that did not even occur on American soil many of us are perfectly willing throw out other people's rights.  In 2014, there were 13,741 murders in the United States mostly committed by Americans.  Since 9/11, 26 people have been killed on American soil by Islamic terrorists and 48 by radical right wing groups.  Yet when it comes to round the clock surveillance on Muslims, racial profiling, torture, going to war, and purifying our immigrant pool there are plenty of people perfectly willing to go along.  Suggest gun control however, and suddenly these same people become civil libertarians.  In America, the Constitution is only important when it protects the alleged rights of predominantly white males.

Even here in Vermont, where we have a history of taking in refugees from Bosnia, Somalia, Sudan, the Congo, and elsewhere; the two Republican candidates for Governor Phil Scott and Bruce Lisman want to delay resettlement for Syrian refugees whom have already been waiting for years to enter the country.  This is despite the fact that Vermont has an aging workforce, shrinking tax base, and in the long run would almost certainly benefit economically from people dedicated enough to travel thousands of miles despite great cost and risk to go live in a strange new place.

The whole fear of Islamic extremism in the United States is illogical as fear often is.  After 9/11, we responded by invading and occupying a country that had nothing to do with the attack and was holding the various political, ethnic, nationalistic, and religious factions together via a secular (albeit tyrannical) regime.  Now there is a power vacuum and it has been filled with the most violent and fanatical fighters among them, ISIS.  This is a problem largely of our own making.

Perhaps the most difficult part of all of this is the realization that there might not be that much we can do about it.  National borders in the Middle East were drawn by colonial powers where ethnic groups we played off against one and other.  Brutal regimes were propped up and domestic politics were interfered with by outside powers.  Now Humpty-Dumpty has fallen and all the king's horses and all the king's men won't be able to put him together again.  The best thing the United States can do is not repeat the same mistakes that got us into this mess.

If we actually want to prevent terrorism, we should resettle as many of these refugees as possible.  Nothing lends itself to extremism more than ghettoized people with no hope and no prospects.  Is there better propaganda for ISIS then treating Muslims as second-class citizens or killing more innocence?  I don't think there is; it confirms everything they've already said about us. 
 

Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Today in Moronic Memes #5


This one has been floating around for a while on the internet. The first thing I'd like to point out about the policy of testing welfare recipients (and by the way, there is no program for "welfare" there are an assortment of programs with various eligibility requirements), is that the policy doesn't work and costs more to implement then it saves.  In Florida, the program was in place for several months and had a success rate of a whopping 2.6% ,while costing taxpayers more than it saved.  Additionally, Florida Governor Rick Scott was co-founder of a drug testing company, so in a way that very policy was a sneakily executed welfare program for Governor Scott.

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

The Art of the Grift


Gov-Huckabee-001.jpg
Wikimedia Commons
Something amazing is happening in this Republican presidential primary, it is my belief that many of the candidates including the two front-runners have no intention of ever being President or holding any kind of public office.  These candidates are after something far more rewarding, profitable, and easier...the grift.

The most obvious example of these grifters is Mike Huckabee.  Huckabee is running for president you say?  I can forgive you if you forgot, but yeah, I mean he is pretending to anyway.  Huckabee hasn't held political office since 2007.  He ran for President in 2008, which got him a nice seven years of a television show on Fox, numerous media appearances, book deals, speaking tours, and supplement sales.  Since 2014, Huckabee has made just short of 1 million dollars in speaking fees alone.  His show on Fox News gave him a reported annual salary of $500,000, and has used his fame and weight loss story to hawk "natural" diabetes supplements.  Huckabee gave up his show to "pursue" the presidency but rest assured he'll have a job at Fox News when it's all said and done.