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Thetexashammer

Certifiably Surly
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Posts posted by Thetexashammer

  1. It was genuinely hilarious when they were "kicking for $100k" and Herbie tells the contestant "So you have zero chance then." Pat was douching it up and Herbie kept is real. We are living in the upside down.

  2. The Bitcoin ETF thing is of course highly positive, will generate substantial purchase activity, and continues the trend of broader endorsement.

    Lightning is the big mover though. They appear to be aiming to create something similar to apple pay, meaning something you could just scan at the register to pay. Of course, the concern is timeline for adoption. I sold my ETH because although it has maybe the most developer activity, it's not the name brand product, and it's corporate owned/controlled. Bitcoin is the gold standard.

  3. Just now, HouTex said:

    Interesting post.  I assume you know that, speaking of Nobel Peace Prizes, Kissinger did receive the Nobel Prize for peace.  

    Yes, but I don't have the time to go down that rabbit hole. 

    The article tweeted about: Henry Kissinger, War Criminal, Dead at 100 (rollingstone.com) I endorse the entire, with one exception.

    In the public mind, Kissinger is responsible. However, he was merely an advisor. He was never chain of command, he had no legal authority to order anything, not since his time in the military. He was merely a staffer. Obviously a good adviser is persuasive and wields influence effectively, and you are certainly morally responsible for your advice. But his status as an advisor mitigates his responsibility, somewhat.

    So not a war criminal in my mind. Despicable, outsized impact surely, but not philosophically different than a thousand other establishment assholes.

     

  4. Henry Kissinger has died at 100 : NPR

    Quote

    "I remember walking down the street in Manhattan with him, and he would attract a crowd like a movie star, a rock star," recalled David Rothkopf, who worked for a time as a managing director at Kissinger's consulting firm. "Everybody, regardless of what they thought of Henry, wanted to see Henry, wanted to be with Henry."

    Oh, he was a cool kid celebrity. I didn't realize he was an early Taylor Swift type. Now I know.

    Quote

    With that unwavering commitment, Kissinger advocated bombing campaigns in Vietnam and Cambodia to strengthen the U.S. negotiating position. He was comfortable with the U.S. giving a green light to the "dirty war" in Argentina and to Indonesia's invasion of East Timor, because those governments were U.S. allies. Likewise, the U.S. could welcome a coup against Salvador Allende, the elected socialist president in Chile.

    Never saw an act of violence he didn't like. Just the worst of the worst. However, he was not unique. This is pretty much typical foreign policy nonsense,CFR, establishment, neocon, whatever. Just like the near universal support for the 2003 Iraq War which Kissinger supported as well.

    Quote

    For a diplomat who always saw America as a pre-eminent player in the global power game, that was a virtually unthinkable prospect.

     Exactly right. Resulting in the deaths of countless numbers. Why would I hold this guy up as a hero? It's embarrassing. 

    Quote

    In 2011, Kissinger published On China, chronicling the evolution of Sino-American relations and laying out the challenges to a partnership of "genuine strategic trust" between the U.S. and China

     From wikipedia. LOL what an idoit. 

    Quote

    In the Rio Tinto espionage case of 2009–2010, Kissinger was paid $5 million to advise the multinational mining company how to distance itself from an employee who had been arrested in China for bribery.[193]

    Also from wikipedia. 

    Henry A. Kissinger Looks Back on the Cold War | Council on Foreign Relations (cfr.org)

    Quote

    HAASS: In some ways, you've anticipated my next question. When Kennan wrote about containment, he obviously had the idea of resisting what he called, you know, the Soviet encroachment and spread, but he also predicted that if we were successful with that, it would encourage or bring about internal change. So when you all developed and elaborated the notion of détente, what was the balance in your thinking between simply making conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union less likely, if you will, calming the Cold War? And to what extent was your objective, also, to bring about fundamental change within the Soviet Union?

    KISSINGER: We had no fixed idea about the latter. The thing that concerned us was we had inherited a war in Vietnam, which showed what can happen in the United States if the American people lose faith in their leadership. And so we were sort of obsessed with the idea that we had to show to the American people that if there were a crisis, we had done everything that could rationally be done to avoid the crisis.

    And as some of you—maybe many of you remember, we were very adamant when there was any challenge to the balance of power and very willing to resist and go to great lengths to resist in specific challenges. But we thought there were—there were things to be accomplished. One, to demonstrate to the American public that we were serious and that we had a concept of peace and of international order. Secondly, to convey to the Soviet Union that if they wanted to behave like a national state, pursuing national interests, it was possible for—at least to explore accommodations with us. We thought in a vague way that in this process the Soviet Union would probably have to modify its domestic institutions.

    But I don't want to predict—pretend that conversion of the Soviet system was the top item on this list. The top item on the list for us was to manage the Cold War and to transform it into an international system. We did think that in the course of it, the Soviet system would probably not be modified, but it's the first two items to which we gave attention. And we conducted the European Security Conference from that point of view.

    When Ronald Reagan and the Pope teamed up to humiliate the Soviets and win the Cold War, Kissinger et al fought them tooth and nail, every step of the way.

    For the course of my entire lifetime, dude has been wrong about everything. Baseball has the concept of "wins above replacement". My only response is confusion. What wins are they talking about? All I see is bad decisions that got lots of people killed. Why do they glorify the guy instead of pointing and laughing at a lifetime of failed policy decisions? He is a shining example of what not to do.

    • Hook 'Em 2
  5. Who made him some kind of hero? The foreign policy establishment. It's like giving Yasser Arafat the Nobel Peace Prize. I never heard him contribute anything good or insightful. It's like doubling down on stupidity.

    I don't condemn him nor approve of him. I just wonder why people thought he was relevant to anything.

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