GPOYW: Hazmat party!!!, originally uploaded by JW Doom.

PPE is way cool, dude!

I’m at an “occupational health center” o be fitted for a respirator. The privacy notice says that they can release my personal (or protected?) health information in order to protect the President.

No shit. They must have wrote that into HIPAA.

Really, I don’t think that fucking guy, whoever it is at the moment, is that important.

GPOYW: New gym, originally uploaded by JW Doom.

Very green, very dark.

GPOYW: Action flashlight!, originally uploaded by JW Doom.

Looking into a duct. It was dirty.

GPOYW: Here again?, originally uploaded by JW Doom.

Back at Crappy Other Building. Yay.

GPOYW: Not exciting, originally uploaded by JW Doom.

So much fun to be had all alone at Crappy Other Building.

The only way jobs are created is when businesses hire people.

Witness:

“But Hanauer says the economy is like an ecosystem and that its lifeblood is the spending power of the middle class, not people like him [he's a venture capitalist - JW]. He says business people spend their time fundamentally on two things: creating sales and cost containment. Or, as he puts it, “how to not create jobs.”

“The fewer jobs you can create, for the revenue you create, the more profit you make,” Hanauer says. “The only time that businesses create jobs is when middle-class consumers essentially put a gun to our heads, in the form of orders for products that we can’t make ourselves, and then we hire people and create jobs.” ‘

Every politician, pundit or shill talking about the government “creating jobs” should have this tattoo’d on their stomachs, upside down so they can read it in the shower.

From the title you can probably guess I was in favor of the invasion of Iraq. There’s a difference, you see, between something being a bad idea and something being done badly. Invading Iraq was a good idea, even if the reasons W gave were complete horseshit.

There were no nukes in Baghdad, al Qaeda wasn’t particularly interested in Saddam. The casus belli were (was? I’m no Latin expert) weak. At least from a just war standpoint.

But from a geopolitical standpoint (because “just war” is one of those neat philosophical ideas that evaporates when it comes into contact with reality) there was no good reason for the Anglo-American alliance to not invade Iraq in 2003.

First, we’d been at war for over 10 years. An complete reading of history will say: Iraq War (1990-2012). America and Britain alone were responsible for containing someone who was in a position to fuck up a critical, delicate part of the world AFTER he got his ass kicked once. France didn’t help, Russia didn’t help, China didn’t help. Hippies driving to protests didn’t help. We’d been fucking with Hussein long enough and it was time for him to go.

As an aside, so what we supported Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war? Realpolitik, look it up (which should not be taken as an uncritical endorsement of political realism).

Second, you’ll recall, Saddam was an asshole. No one disputes that.

Third, and the point in my analysis, bases. America’s allies in the middle east are either small or unreliable. Or both. A big ass Rammstein type air/army base in northern Iraq would have put given us a stable, large point to project power from and specifically put us in a good position to intimidate two major state sponsors of terrorism, Syria and Iran.

I will allow, in hindsight, the possibility that the effort as Bush saw it was doomed. Iraq was never going to be a Jeffersonian democracy. America isn’t and really never has been good at subtlety, which made for a quick war and a bad occupation. The Bush administration was a bunch of incompetent boobs whose only basis for decision making was political advantage. Rumsfeld in particular was an idiot, even though he got an undeserved hard time for repeating truths like “you go to war with the army you have” and “there are things that you don’t know you don’t know.” But the best thing that could be done for the American military would be turning the Pentagon into an insane asylum, so Rummy was a contribution more than a cause.

So, yeah, the Iraq War was a horrific failure, but it wasn’t a bad idea.

One of the (few) great things about working in an 80 year old building is putting yourself in the heads of people for whom the things they did were clever and novel.

Like using screws to hold in light fixture covers. Once, mass thread cutting was advanced technology.

Or using hallways to carry return air, so that when one uses a hallway one is walking through what everyone else has exhaled.

If someone did either of these today that person should never be allowed to design or install anything ever again. In the 20s, it was brilliant.

GPOYW: Dark in here, originally uploaded by JW Doom.

Right by the fire escape, of course.