THE CHROMIUM KNOT and TIN-POT PARADOX
One of the greatest comics ever written is Hellblazer, an urban fantasy about a dirtbag Londoner wizard named John Constantine who is constantly getting himself into and out of the worst kind of trouble imaginable. (1) Imagine if Philip Marlowe did exorcisms. If you know Garth Ennis, you know exactly the type of story this is gonna be. (2)
In one of the best Hellblazer stories, pack-an-hour-smoker Constantine gets his smoker’s-cough checked out. The docs tell him he has cancer. He’s terminal. He can’t heal it with magic. So like an Irish folk hero, he cooks up a puckish plan to con the devil. Devils, actually. There are three kings of Hell: The First of The Fallen, Azrael, and Beelzebub. Constantine has been a huge pain in the ass for all three kings of Hell, and Constantine is a man who is definitely going to Hell. A friend tells him that The First has dibs on his soul and is frothing at the mouth in anticipation of torturing Constantine for all eternity. How’s that Constantine boy gonna get out of this bucket of syrup?
As Constantine is hacking his final breaths, The First shows up at the wizard’s deathbed to claim his soul. But then Azrael shows up, too. And Beelzebub. As it turns out, Constantine sold his soul to all three of them. The three kings of Hell all have a rightful claim to Constantine, but they all want him so bad, they are unwilling to compromise or share. They hate him that much, they’ll go to family court before sharing custody. Since none will compromise, it’s a sure thing that there will be 3-way war in Hell, and none are willing to do that.
There’s only one thing the kings can do. They heal Constantine and effectively make him immortal until they can hammer out a bargain.
After his resurrection, Constantine immediately fires up a Silk Cut cigarette. Perfect ending.
I only told you that story so I could tell you this story…
The BRSC
Lately, state actors have been weakly sort of admitting that maybe, possibly, shutting the schools down for a year wasn't such a great idea.
Schools, how could you do this to our children?
It wasn't us. We aren't experts on diseases. We simply followed the advice of the CDC.
CDC, how could you do this?
It wasn't us. We don't have any control over schools. We were asked to give a broad recommendation, which we did. We can't dictate policy to schools. That's their job.
In this fantasy, school closures just happened spontaneously. No one decided they should close. It's no one's fault. It’s like an act of God or a natural disaster. These things just happen. No one will be fired for the error. Such is life.
I used to drive a forklift in a warehouse. If I managed fuck up at my job so badly that it measurably dropped the IQ of America’s school children, I would get fired. I don’t know what it’s like at your job, but I definitely wouldn’t be allowed to finish my shift.
Let me introduce you to the BRSC, what I call The Bureaucratic-Responsibility-Shifting-Complex, an inter-agency consensus on making accountability disappear. Removing accountability isn’t a power. It is power.
ACCOUNTABILITY
“The powerful need to be held accountable!” is a combination of exhausting, impotent words.
No.
The powerful will not be held accountable because power can’t be held accountable. Power can be measured in unaccountability. Power could even be defined as unaccountability.
Powerful people won’t be held accountable until they lose power. You cannot skip that step. Gadhafi had power. He had unaccountability. Then he threatened the petro-dollar. Then Gadhafi got Ghadafi’d, which means ass-raped to death by a bayonet. Ghadafi had power. The CIA introduced him to the limit of his power. Then he found consequences.
Iraqis who witnessed the bottomless evil of the Little Boots of Baghdad first-hand are not confused by this. (3) They do not need it to be explained any further. They get it because they lived in an unvarnished world.
For the rest of you, I have to write a whole damn essay.
SWORDS AND DRONES
Our military structure itself lends itself to removing accountability at every possible level.
There was a time when wars were fought between people a few feet away. You had to look at someone’s face, swing a sword, and watch them die. And once the battle was over, (presuming you weren’t dead, dying, or mangled so bad you’d never be able to plow your field again) your final duty was to render aid to the wounded enemy by walking through the fields of slaughter and mercifully hurrying their departure with the tip of a spear. You had to be the one to bury your dead. You had to be the one to tell their family.
In modern times, very few soldiers get that close. The over-hyped Spartans didn’t believe in archery. They thought ranged weapons were for pussies. That’s one reason they got smoked by Persia. Personally, I think losing is for pussies, but hey, I'm not Frank Miller. Fast forward to the non-Greek Alexander the Psychopath, a man celebrated for conquering the world. He accomplished this by making his spears twice as long. That was basically their whole gimmick. The eternal Persian Empire had 9-foot spears got styled on by 18-foot spears. The moral of the tale is this: range is everything.
Allow me to introduce the drone strike. (4)
How does a drone strike happen? (5)
CIA gets word about some bad dude who needs to get got. How do we know he's really a bad dude? We gotta take their word on it.
They talk with lawyers to make sure it’s legal to kill them. (Spoiler: it always is.)
Someone has to step up to the plate and make an assassination nomination. Valid departments are State Department, DOD, DOJ, DHS, CIA, Joint Chiefs, NCTC, or the Treasury. Yes, The Treasury can request assassinations, I’m not making that up.
They write a dossier on the bad dude, and why he needs to get got. The odds are stacked against him because the entire purpose of it is to make the case to kill the dude. No one’s writing a counter-brief about why he’s a really cool guy who should live.
That dossier gets handed over to an inter-agency group called the National Security Staff. They have meetings to look over the dossier and see if they agree that the allegedly bad dude needs to get got.
If they like the bad dude for deletion, they hand off the "nomination package" (that’s what it’s actually called) and give it to the "Deputies Committee," who are the seconds-in-command of all the agencies at the NSC. These panels are secret, and they don’t keep any publicly-available records about how they decide.
The Deputies Committee decides whether to greenlight the droning for the nominating agency. The deputies share their decisions with each of their bosses at each of their agencies.
The nominating agency can authorize a bad dude deletion if…
the agencies also agree. If you’ve been paying attention, that means that the Treasury Department has to rubber stamp each and every airborne assassination. Again, I’m not making this shit up.
the agency boss has to email/text/Slack-chat the President (or however they do that)
They have to get word back that the President has seen it. The president doesn't have to give a thumbs up or down. He only has to be aware that the decision was made. Bear in mind, this is the only time a democratically-elected person—the only person allegedly accountable to the voting public—interacts with the assassination bureaucracy
HOWEVER. The President must personally approve the fly-by shooting IF…
They’re going to assassinate an American citizen. The procedure for the extrajudicial assassination of American citizens is written in their own documents.
The Agencies don’t have a consensus, but the nominating agency won’t let it go and insists, and the president has to actually make a decision (God forbid!).
Someone calls someone up wherever-the-fuck airfield, and (probably) some Air Force officer is given the disposition matrix. The CIA tells them they have perfectly solid information that Bad Dude will be at this place at this time.
The Air Force (or whoever) has their intelligence people run some air recon from a drone, or maybe use the CIA HUMINT assets to recon from the ground.
That airborne photography is handed to another intelligence officer who analyzes the shadows and shit and tries to determine if they are adult men with weapons. By "adult men" they mean any male ages 13+ (6)
That intel gets greenlit (or not) by some CO, who then calls his CO. Then it’s finally handed off to some O-3 or higher who actually flies the thing.
Finally, the RC airplane nerd point-and-click vaporizes a wedding.
I went through all of that to make this point: The guy who pushed the button is ignorant of 99% of the steps that preceded him.
With so many people involved, every person in the chain of decisions can tell themselves, “I wasn’t the one who fucked up. I was just following orders. I didn’t have all the details. Someone else should have figured it out before (or after) anyone talked to me about it.” That ability to plausibly deny your own culpability, even to yourself, is why firing squads had one rifle loaded with blanks.
Zebra stripes aren’t to camouflage them from their environment. Zebra stripes camouflage individual zebras within the herd. Zebras are each other’s camouflage. One zebra out in the open is fucked. The more zebras in a herd, the better the odds for each individual zebra.
Get it?
Murder by bureaucracy. No one is 100% guilty because everyone is 0.03% guilty. Each and every cog in that machine is replaceable by a bureaucrat who would do the exact same thing under the same circumstances. Drone operators never have to look into the scared eyes of a stranger as they push an iron blade into their belly. They don’t have to hear the gurgling sounds as he uses the last air in his lungs to say the name of his pregnant widow. Drone warfare is a process. It’s meetings. It’s emails. It’s paperwork. It’s corporate. It would put Patrick Bateman on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Tim Pool said recently that Obama should be brought on murder charges for assassinating American teenager, Abdulrahman Al-Aulaqi. As big a deal as that would be, it would be only a small dent in the BRSC. Obama is not nearly enough. You also need to charge the head of the State Department, DOD, DOJ, DHS, CIA, Joint Chiefs, NCTC, and the Treasury under his tenure. You need to bird-dog the intel source and arrest him. You need everyone in that entire chain arrested and charged, except maybe the 0-3 who flew the damn thing.
TWO CASES
It pains me to say anything complimentary about communism and monarchy, but I can use two good examples of where they actually get this right on occasion.
CHY-nuh
In 2007, Chinese courts sentenced the head of their FDA to death because he was caught approving untested drugs in exchange for cash on the backend. They estimated 10 people died because of his corruption. Good. Fucking good. If Zheng Xiaoyu worked at a McDonald’s in Corpus Christi and dosed customers’ Big Macs with dangerous drugs and killed 10 people, he’d be doing the electric jig, too. In 2011, two officials were executed for taking bribes. The officials didn’t even kill anyone. In 2021, the Chinese government killed a banker for the same crime. Do a search for “China executed official,” and you’ll discover that it happens all the time.
Ask yourself this. What would happen if there was incontrovertible evidence that Fauci was taking kickbacks from Pfizer to look the other way about lethal vax side effects, circa June 2020. I don’t mean good evidence. I mean impossibly perfect evidence, like a video of him personally accepting a see-through plastic bag full of $100 bills from Albert Bourla, and saying, “Thank you for this money in exchange for deceiving the American people about the potential risks of vaccinations. I hope to see you at the Moloch orgy this weekend. Hail Hydra.” Do you believe he would get the death penalty? Would he even eat a misdemeanor? Maybe. But not in an election year.
Do I trust the CCP to execute only the guilty? Fuck no. Do I believe that the ones who got executed may have been executed for other reasons, like disloyalty? Fuck yes. Do I think a lot of corrupt officials get a pass because they play ball? Abso-fucking-lutely.
The point is, China does, occasionally, hold its own people accountable for actual crimes. It fucking pains me to the core of my soul that these commies are better at this than America is. It’s unacceptable. But at least they continue in the proud communist tradition of stacking other communists. For that, I salute them.
ENGLAND
The last time a king fought in a battle alongside his troops was in 1761. Big props to George II for that.
It used to be common for kings and lords to fight in battles. They put their own life on the line every time. That matters. The troops could see their leader was willing to do what he asked his subjects to do: face death. And not just the King. He’d bring his brothers, his sons, and his friends. A king risked himself, his dynasty, his succession, and his name itself. I have huge respect for this.
In modern times, war is waged between octogenarians, sacrificing strangers who the same age as their great-grandchildren. They throw the youth into a wood-chipper, human sacrifices on the altar of national glory, people too young to be trusted with a can of beer, but mature enough to operate a mk19 fully-automatic grenade launcher.
A knife fight would be more civilized. I’d rather Vladamir Putin and Joe Biden settle their differences with a good ol’ fashioned Tahaddi than through their present. All wars are proxy wars while the young and broke fight on behalf of the elderly and thieving.
DETROIT’S FINEST MAYOR
I’ll tell you the truth about the people who run things. It’s tricky for many people to grasp.
No one wants to be King. They want to be barons and viscounts.
With great power comes with great responsibility. “Fuck that! What’s the point of power if you have to be responsible for shit?” Very few people have the ego or inclination to accept both of those things. “No no no. I'll have a full order of power, with responsibility in the side, thank you.”
You won’t find many politicians with dreams of global empire, conquest, or futuristic post-scarcity robo-communism. Anyone who entered politics with those ambitions has to adapt to reality. Those who don’t are weeded out. What they want is so much more petty and embarrassingly obvious.
They want to be a big shot, and not have to do anything.
They want to always get a table reservation at a fancy restaurant when they call. They want to be at the same parties as the other famous people. They want to be the person that cops and feds won’t bother with for the petty shit that the rest of us would get fucked for. They want to be able to say, “Do you know who I am?” and when they don’t, they can show them. They want to be able to fuck people for the pettiest imaginable grievances.
They don't want to be Abraham Lincoln or Saddam Hussein. They don’t want to be Vladamir Lennon or Emperor Palpatine. They aspire to be Kwame Kilpatrick. (7)
They don’t have a vision. They don’t want to get shit done. They want to be the guy that other people need to come to when other people want to get shit done. They want to be the turnkey for the bureaucracy. They want to be the person other people need to cozy up with to succeed. They want to be the border guard between failure and success. They want to have people working for them that screen out the riff-raff and only calls from people who matter to ever reach them.
Case in point: ignoring COVID rules. Again, what's the point of having power if the rules still apply to you? It doesn’t even make sense.
Most days, it's just a grift and unearned fame. If they incidentally turn America into a Baptist theocracy or a Dengist theocracy (whichever floats their boat), well… that's a nice cherry on top.
THE BIGGEST KNOT
Uncle Ben could have been more accurate if he told Peter, “With great power comes great responsibility, whether you like it or not.” The BRSC cannot continue like this forever, and we are getting damn close to forever. We’re at a weird moment in history, facing down a Gordian knot made out of a chromium chain.
In 2016, Donald Trump led the chants of "lock her up" about Hillary Clinton, the renowned 0 and 2 presidential loser.
In a world with justice, she would be locked up. She broke laws that, if peasants such as you or I broke them, we would be in prison for years. An ex-Navy buddy of mine worked on the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise (which is great, cus he's a Trekkie) and he told me that if any one of them brought a USB drive onto their aircraft carrier and plugged it in, they would be court-martialed and put in prison for a decade. Brass absolutely was NOT fucking around. What Hillary Clinton did was much worse, which is why the head of the FBI James Comey was sure to warn the rest of us that the peasants would be punished to the full extent of the law if they did exactly the same thing. (8) Only Hillary Clinton is allowed to break that law because No One Is Above The Law ™ except for all the people who obviously are.
Trump did not make good on that chant. As a reward for his mercy (or weakness), he has spent the last 7 years swatting away felony accusations. He didn't lock her up, but her friends are trying in earnest to lock him up.
When Trump was saying it, people compared it to tin pot dictatorships, where people who lose elections also lose their freedom for the crime of being a threat to the winner. Fair enough. America happened because—and ONLY because—George Washington stepped down voluntarily. America would have been toast if Adams ordered the arrest of Jefferson.
But there are countless criminals in DC and Langley who never have to answer for their crimes. The team they play for won't punish them, and the other team is squeamish because they understand what it could start.
Every couple years, we endure endless threats to pack the court, and it never gets packed. No one dares to do it because they understand what happens next: If one team packs the court, the other will retaliate by packing it back. The court would increase exponentially with every new administration until we hit a quantum court, in which every person in America is a SCOTUS justice. Likewise, you start prosecuting former politicians, you can expect to get the same treatment the day you leave office. You elections season is bad now? Imagine if politicians know they’ll do prison time if they lose their election. Ballot harvesting is kids stuff compared to what they’d do to each other.
BUT I DID EAT BREAKFAST
For the sake of argument, let’s put aside the truth of Trump's guilt or innocence and agree, momentarily, that all of it’s true, including the stuff we know isn’t true. (9) Let's say every big accusation against every major political figure is true. Bill Clinton is a serial rapist. George Bush personally installed the thermite in Tower 7 on 9/10. Obama is a Muslim Manchurian candidate activated to destroy America. Trump is a Russian asset and guilty of whatever the hell they're accusing him of lately. Biden molested his daughter and gets kickbacks from Ukraine. Let's say it's all true.
This puts us in a bind because no one dares punish the guilty. As soon as that first shot is fired, things will go down like in Gaza when Hamas won the first election, arrested the opposition, then temporarily (read: permanently) canceled all future elections. Hamas got democracy so right, they only had to do it once.
Low-tier people are, of course, totally expendable. Attacking the civilian population with lawfare is not tinpot, apparently. Seamen aboard an aircraft carrier do hard time for felonious USB insertions. Secretaries of State like Rumsfeld, however, are ordered to keep doing the job.
It’s like locking your keys inside your car: the solution to the problem is also the obstacle preventing us from reaching the solution.
We can't punish corruption at the highest levels, because we might go into a retaliatory prosecution spiral, and we end up a tin-pot dictatorship.
We can’t not punish the guilty, because unmitigated corruption means you are a tin-pot dictatorship.
I'd love nothing more than for them to investigate each other constantly, imprison each other regularly, and execute each other occasionally. The problem is, these things once started, always escalate. The scariest possible outcome is that one team wins it all. One team and no opposition means even less accountability for their own side than exists right now. In a more perfect world, the bureaucrats would be in a constant state of ruining each other and leaving the electorate out of it.
I hate to be Debbie Downer here, but I don’t have any good answers to this problem.
I have little good to say about the CCP, but I will say this: occasionally, China executes its high-level politicians, continuing communism’s long and proud tradition of killing communists. Sometimes for real crimes. Sometimes for fabricated crimes. But at least Chinese politicians understand that it's on the table. Likewise, medieval monarchs knew that starting a war and losing a war meant that they and their kids died (if they were lucky) or got lingchi if they were unlucky. At least the bad guys get punished once in a while.
Fuckers like Napoleon were punished with a golden parachute, a home on a private island, regular visits by friends, and an allowance. This is the world they want.
Napoleon on Saint Helena, watercolor by Franz Josef Sandmann, c. 1820. What an absolute hellscape.
Longwood House, Saint Helena, site of Napoleon's captivity. The inhuman mistreatment of subjecting prisoners to this adorable home was considered beyond the pale even in Napoleon’s age. Truly the Abu Ghraib of its time.
(1) You might know it as the shitty Keanu movie, Constantine
(2) Besides Hellblazer, Ennis wrote the phenomenal Preacher, the almost-as-good-as-the-show comic The Boys, he wrote a shitload of excellent Judge Dredd books, a great anthology series called War Stories, and the most miserable, bitter, cynical, antihuman garbage I’ve ever read, Crossed. Garth Ennis truly is one of the GOATs.
(3) “Little Boots” aka “Caligula” was the nickname for the Roman emperor Gaius. Imagine if BTK ran a country and openly flaunted his hobbies. Little Boots of Baghdad is my nickname for Saddam Hussein’s psychopathic rapist son, Uday, a guy who murdered his dad’s driver with an electric carving knife at a dinner party in front of the 1st lady of Egypt.
(4) Anyone who reads this and has the actual thought, “AKSHULLY it’s not TECHNICALLY a drone, it’s an RPA, and you need to be a pilot, 0-1 or higher…” Stop thinking that thought, and rethink your life and all the mistakes that led you to this moment instead.
(5) This procedure all goes right out the window if it’s an “emergency.” Of course.
(6) All males over age 13 are considered enemy combatants and valid targets. No, I’m not making that up. Barack Obama made that up.
(7) A man inexplicably pardoned by Trump.
(8) I spent a lot of time trying to find the video of Comey exonerating Clinton but simultaneously threatening anyone else who behaved identically to her. If someone finds it, send it my way and I’ll update. I don’t believe it’s been fully memory-holed,. It’s out there, I watched it live, but I don't want to make it my life's work finding it.