The Thinking Man’s War

As America comes up to the 50th anniversary of it signal ‘failure to win ‘ a war, the Vietnam experience is being re-eviscerated, This time it’s being compared to modern war and how we don’t seem to be winning the War on Terror either.

Ken Burns has, supposedly, done to Vietnam what he did for the US Civil War – humanized it, uplifted it artistically, morally, and historically as a ‘high point’, and not a low point in American history.  Study groups and academics are churning out new ‘looks’ at the men and the moments when either America ‘shone through’ or ‘went to a darker side’.  Most of the emphasis is, of course, on ‘shining through’.  There is this piece from ‘War on the Rocks’ written by doctoral student Jon Askonas

The Heroic Leader and the Better War From Vietnam to Afghanistan

America, these days, is ‘gridding its lions’  to do “what must be done” to “de-nuclearize” North Korea.  That’s increasingly looking like the kind of thing that ‘had to be done’ to Afghanistan , Iraq , etc – only possibly even worse, as it could be the ‘Norks’ might ‘nuke’ one of our ‘regional’ allies  or ‘shell the heck’ out of Seoul. A nuclear first strike is probably a ‘coffee and biscotti’ topic  in the White House sub-basement bunker complex – particularly getting the nuclear neighbors ‘on-side’ for letting the good guys do that.

What level of ‘getting for letting’ would be indicated in order to insure against General Dreedle just ‘going nuts’ and getting ‘the inevitable’ done at the same time?  Trump would have to send Melania as a ‘human shield’ to Moscow and Ivana to Beijin or Shanghai with a couple of her kids. While Trump might want them to take a couple of the Obama administration,  or a few DARC’s – Putin wouldn’t trust Trump as far as a B-2 Ghost could ‘toss’ the new GenX tactical-nukes. The Chinese are just ‘saying’ not much and ‘doing’ even less.

But so what?  North Korea has been threatening world peace since it caused that post-war police action at the behest of Uncle Joe.  Since then, all it has done is require the presence of a couple of US army divisions and an east Asian air force,  standing-by to guard the SORKs and their Parallel. Sure there were a couple of post-war ‘close calls’,  but America has been ‘a buttress’ against talking peace with commies and much interested in changing the Nork domino.

What is happening now, in Korea, is just a logical extension of what has been SOP there for 70 years,   ‘modified’ by America’s recent humanitarian rambustuousness. After Bushco the Second decided that Clinton made ‘too sweet a deal’ to get the NORKs  to discard their nuclear industry, the Kims watched him ‘go to work’ in western Asia and thought, ‘Should he ever get out of that quagmire,  the east might really be red – with blood. Best have something in the arms locker to make the shaolin warrior-monks tug a little longer on the prepuce of fortitude.’

It took the Koreans an administration and a half to become really terrifying and they’re (or we’re) turning the ‘skeer’ into a  ‘national emergency’.  Americans are being treated to how Israelis feel living under a Gazan rocket barrage – or the thought of one.  We’re giving the Israelis  the tools they’ll need to do their ‘jobs’, so why should we leave ourselves out of ‘the danger’  ….  or ‘the solution’?

We can take some comfort that, for all the hoo-hah and rattling sabres,  if push comes to shove,  it won’t be on the UN’s dime,  or with the UN’s blessing – America is going to have to ‘go commando’ on the NORKs on its own – and take the risks of a nuclear conflagration. For,  without some ‘jaw-jaw’, the NORKs are going to ‘eat grass’,  as Putin said, rather than disarm themselves in front of American threats and aggression.  There is nothing in it for them to quit  – and Trump Inc is too dumb to realize that.

Nuclear tests 1945 to 1997: We had this stuff stopped and then we started ‘missing it’? (actually after the first couple of blasts – we can do all our ‘testing’ in a Math Lab)

 

Nuclear Tests: 1945 -1997

 

 

 

 

 

The Outrage that Got Away

Just after the latest Assad ‘killing his own people’ farce, a real outrage did occur. It was roundly ignored in western media because, very obviously, the good guys, or the Moslem extremists we’re backing in Syria,  did it. They made a video record of their attack and they very obviously targeted a defenseless ‘enemy’ civilian population.

What we saw of the massacre was ‘given out’ as ‘payback’ of some kind for the alleged  ‘atrocities’ done by the Assad regime when it liberated our ‘poster city’ for western-based Jihad in West Aleppo.  Even that latter point failed to mention that those ‘victims’ were involved in another of the Assad regime’s – ‘move them instead of maim them’ population swaps – the main reason why any Jihadis weren’t carried out (some were) .

These ‘victims’ were  pro-regime people who had been besieged, for 3 years,  by AlNusra/AQ/ISIS forces in their Idlib town,  being swapped for a an anti-Assad population being moved to rebel held areas. And many of them – including children – failed to make the swap.

The following post is graphic – although President Trump wouldn’t find many of these dead babies beautiful, – or worth a humanitarian bombardment of somebody.  It should be required watching for moral relativists like Nicky Haley.

 

 

 

Another Big Fat Conspiracy

How did Putin steal the US Presidency from Hilary Clinton?  The short answer is ‘We don’t know.”

The more nuanced answer is that ‘we do know’ because a ‘private internet security company’, in California, has detected traces of what he calls a Russian hacking group busting into the DNC server and stealing email. He also detected ‘Russian’ hacking in an attempt, he claims, to make electronic voting machines on Illinois  register a different vote than was entered. And then there is the Wikileaks ‘dump’ of email relating to Hilary Clinton on a number of different issues – released shortly before the vote. Along with what is claimed to be a constant barrage of ‘false news’ written in Moscow and published in US media,  there is, according to a 12 page Security report on the subject, a clear and present indication that Putin has been personally doing the ‘hokey pokey’ with America.

This has been maintained as the fundamental understanding of ‘what’s up’ and has been further extended and expanded to an investigation that Trump was in cahoots, or was possibly even being blackmailed over some micturating prostitutes, with or by Moscow to gain the throne and then sell America down the  proverbial (or in Bennie Arnold’s case the Hudson) river.

A meeting with the Russians this weekend past has provided the latest grist for that mill and US media has been ‘chunnering’ that Trump blabbed the ‘down and dirty’ on some very tip-top secret US ‘intel’ about an  ISIS plan to change civilization.

It just so happened that the same day this story broke – so did another – a report on the mysterious death of a Democratic Party IT worker called  Seth Rich.  Rich was found, dying of two bullet wounds, on a Washington street early last year.  His death, ascribed by police to a botched robbery in which Rich was not robbed, has been investigated by a man hired by the Rich’s family.  That investigator is now claiming to have been told, by police and FBI contacts, that Rich’s laptop, sequestered by police as part of their investigation. reveals details of possible contacts, over a period of time, between Rich and Wikileaks. There has long been a ‘counter story’ to the ‘Putinic plot’ to ‘bolshoi’ America, that someone inside the Democratic Party may have been releasing their communications – John Podesta’s email indicted he was of that opinion.  We know for fact that much of the damaging information about Clinton, released late in the campaign and which caused the FBI to announce “an investigation” – was released by the NYPD after they seized a laptop belonging to Jeffrey Wiener (‘see Jeff’s dick’ fame) – the husband of Clinton’s personal assistant Huma Abedin – and on which they found an amount of Clinton/ Democratic party material.

An upcoming release of further information , it was claimed , would detail some of this contact with Wikileaks.  Wikileaks founder Julian Assange went on record to talk about this slaying and while making no admissions that Rich was his source, nonetheless offered a reward for information leading to the arrest of Rich’s killer.

If any of this is correct it could indicate that the conventional wisdom governing America, its government and its foreign policy in regard to Russia is, essentially, like the WMDs of the BushCo era,  another load of bunkum and hooey causing great destruction and accomplishing little or nothing.

This story is well detailed on Mnar Muhwesh’s  alternitive news site ‘Mint  Press’.

Mint Press Investigation

“St Petersburg Metro Terror Attack: Who Were the Victims?”

I’m reblogging an article written by English reporter Graham Phillips on his Blog.  Phillips is a long time reporter/commentator on the Ukraine and the current situation there.

There is little love lost between him and the current Ukrainian government –  which has declared him ‘persona non grata’, raised charges against him in England and  threatened him with arrest and prosecution in Ukraine.

Right wing groups in Ukraine have posted a 50 000 Euro ‘reward’ for him on their  ‘patriotic’ web sites.

Here’s  the link to his blog:

Graham Philips: Who Were the Victims of the St. Petersburg Subway Bombing?

The White Helmets

Coming to an HBO/Netflix outlet near you, the saga of those who so willingly go into deadly places to rescue innocent victims.  This is waaay better than the 9/11 firefighters who survived – the white hats apparently never complain about being ‘used’,  or developing and work-related illnesses. Aside from the white hard hats and sharp, da-glo rescue vests and, perhaps, the ‘team’ T-shirts – these could be rescuers from anywhere, but they’re not – they’re ‘ours’.

If there is any particular skill that Syrians have developed over the past 4 years, aside from moving themselves away from danger and hopefully into the EU, it is digging the stay-behinds out of the rubble that four years of war fighting and aerial bombardment  have spread over much of the country.

Whammo! Some humanitarian, or otherwise, drops some ordinance and faster than one can say ‘open sesame’ they’re hauling kids of every age out of the wreckage. The news and various ‘reportages’ (now there’s a new word)  are filled with the stuff. It’s the photo-op, human interest material that we don’t get from dead babies or relaxing tank crews. But until the ‘White Helmets’, it was rarely done professionally, neither the rescue crews,  or the videographers who filmed them.

But that’s all changed,  thanks to a few bucks from western NGO’s – there are ‘professionals’ – both in the rubble and recording them –  in Dolby and HD. Western organizations – usually affiliated with the distaff (ie non-Assad) side of the Syrian struggle –  sponsor these guys. And sometimes, it seems, they hold back until a video recorder is in place before they go to work. The photography, too, seems to bear the mark of a ‘professional staging’, sorely-lacking when the world was being ‘sold on’ Assad’s poison gas offensives.  Hell,  we’ve now got a ‘poster child’ for what Assad’s done to the poor democratic jihadis and ‘their kids’.

(Bana Alabed – a 6 year old girl from, Aleppo  made a series of heart tugging videos begging sympathetic westerners to come and bring peace with them. She and her family were evacuated by Assad’s forces and they all a lit in Turkey where Bana has taken again to the appeals for help and money. Interested Syrians identified the ‘sets’ she used outside her parents apartment building and just round the corner shopfront her father used to recondition ISIS weapons.  Bana’s safe but going home again is no longer an option for her folks.)

http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/21/middleeast/bana-alabed-erdogan-aleppo/index.html

Very soon we’ll have an HBO/Netflix extravaganza to sell America on

everything right and pure being done for America’s interest in seeing Assad off.  Up close and personal we’re gong to get to know those great guys who don’t pick sides, who’ll rescue a Christian or a Shiite, or a stray European.  But we won’t see them ‘back off’ as they did when some ‘rebels’ were forced to saw the head off a 12-year-old ‘government spy’.   But heck,  that crap happens, apparently,  on all sides. Except when the Assad is using barrel bombs and gassing the Syrian people.

I was watching the trailer last night to the haunting strains of a tune all Syrians would no doubt recognize from American radio: ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’.  Maybe they have saints in Islam, the Sufis do, but they aren’t the ‘stoic’ kind of Moslems who want to turn Syria back into a theocracy.  But this subject isn’t for Syria, it’s for America and we’ll see the kind of ‘stuff’ a Nobel Prize was designed for.

White Helmets Trailer

In a ‘sop’ to the bloodshed they didn’t complain about,  the American glitterati universe is a-twinkle with ‘the word’ that the ‘White Helmets’ merit  what Obama got for nothing. A campaign is being organized to develop another international coalition to ensure the Nobel panel doesn’t mistakenly award ‘the gong’ to somebody else.  But I wouldn’t bet that,  if successful, these ‘concerned citizens of Terra’ abiding in the land of Brangelina would want to  challenge the conventional wisdom that this war doesn’t need to stop until Assad goes.

The White Hats will last as long as their funding,  and continue after the ‘real’ money goes back to whence it came. For White Hats don’t ‘win’ anything, even saving lives  – except perhaps a public outcry, in America, for more ‘rescue’ bombardment on other Syrians with no hard hats.

You can’t let a good guy down . Or in.

Only yesterday, after mistakenly eradicating some 85 of Assad’s soldiers in an airstrike on a town that had been besieged by ISIS for more than a year, America ambassatrix to the UN, and gender non-specific sorority person,  Sam Power, spent 25 minutes railing about the evil that is Assad and comparing the Russians with terrorists. She forgot to mention the evil that is ISIS – the intended targets outside that bombed town,  and the other reason President Obama said he needed to start bombing Syria in the second place – other than mentioning that America was ‘all over them’.

This stunning cu*nt is a cunning array of stunts herself.  But being serious about Syria?  Hah!

Sam Power an Unapology

America isn’t trying to save Syria from ISIS terror, that’s a made-in-America ‘prawduct’. They’re trying to change the Assad regime. That’s been the truth all along.  Even though it took inventing ISIS, it still hasn’t happened. America needs another ‘groundswell of opinion’ calling for war, in order to ‘go in’ and ‘get that job done’. The target has been ‘prepped’ for four long years, but you know what? America will still be fighting an ‘insurgency’ in Syria and Iraq, and Afghanistan  and Libya and Yemen as long as America exists there.  There are more Moslems, living to-day, who hate what America ‘stands for’ than when Bushco announced they existed. ‘The Long War’ is some really new shit and something Americans have never experienced, or even thought about, or are prepared for. It will hit them someday,  at the Mall,  and prevent them from being the ‘winners’ Bushco Two told them that shopping would make them.

Ain’t none of this going to end well.

PS At the Mall?  I must have been getting the Raelian vibes again – Minnesota

stabbings???

How Crazy Does It have to Get?

An elderly couple in Rome , Italy, were reported to police, yesterday, who attended to them in a suspected case of domestic violence. It turns out all the shouting they were doing was a ‘cri de coeur’ from a pair of septuagenarians feeling very alone in an increasingly frightening world.  It seems the female half of the partnership was in the habit of ‘keeping up with world news’ and tried to keep her husband ‘in the know’. He didn’t like hearing that stuff and an argument ensued.  The police responded by reassuring the oldsters and cooking them some pasta.

The daily news would terrify anybody. Not simply for what happens, but for the increasing evidence that those ‘in charge’ may be profoundly negligent, malignant or just plain stupid.

As evidence of this is the latest result of Olympic doping scandal.

It has been two years since the last Olympics,  in Sochi, where it is now claimed, on the evidence of a pair if defecting athletes, that Russia engaged in a “national program” of fudging lab tests and test results,  to cover-up the already wide-spread allegation that most of its competitors were ‘doping’.  As a result of this, and a Canadian lawyer’s investigatory report,  a number of Russian athletes were banned from current Olympic competition. A substantial number of others – some of whom  have actually tested positive for doping at other venues since –  have been admitted to competition.  That’s not the stupid part. The banning of the complete Russian Para-Olympic team is the stupid part.

These athletes weren’t involved in the Sochi doping – or at least no evidence has been offered of that – but the international organization seeing to ‘para-olympics’ took a ‘brave (politically correct)  stand’ that the IOOC couldn’t,  or wouldn’t,  and sanctioned the Russian team, as a whole,  for what, apparently, their dope-testing apparatchiks at the other Olympics did.  “Russia Lets the Disabled Down” said the headlines. And then the ‘good guys’  ‘nailed’ them worse.

What’s really stupid is that the IOOC would trust any host nation to be ‘responsible’ for dope testing.   That’s just asking for some shenanigans.   If it’s important,  the IOOC should have its own, separate, drug-testing entity, funded out of the proceeds the IOOC already receives from all aspects of the Olympic games.

That, apparently, is too hard to do.  Or too expensive. Or something.  But not too  stupid, that part continues.

But while they’re passing out the imbecile awards, you get gob-smacked by the realization that cretins deserve awards too.

In a Florida city of Punta Gorda , yesterday, a ‘local initiative’ to help  citizens  better understand how their city government works, resulted the the shooting death of a 79 year-old woman when a police ‘live role-playing enactment’ of a ‘fire/no fire’  situation went amiss. The woman was one of two participants who volunteered to act out parts in a “Citizens Academy” demonstration.  The police officer who made ‘a mistake’  (by bringing a loaded gun to a ‘dramatic recreation’ do ya think?) and fired the shot that killed her, is now suffering ’emotional stress’ and is off work on administrative leave.  It goes beyond a mere loaded gun. What part of drawing it, pointing it at a civilian and pulling the trigger was deemed to be ‘smart’, or even ‘better helping citizens to understand why police fire their weapons’? Was she threatening life and property? Was she holding a jihadi car bomb or beheadment sword?

I would imagine the other participating citizens, and police officers, might be feeling a little ‘stressed’, too.  Not to mention the mayor, the city ‘fathers’ and the municipal legal team. One could only wonder how her family is taking the ‘accident’.  I have a pretty good idea what the story might do to that Italian Grandmother.

Punta Gorda Citizens’ Academy 

Another Victim?

Help Arthur Silber?

Read Arthur’s Story

Some people have it worse but for Arthur Silber  this is  very bad.

I don’t know the guy from Adam but I’m imagining going around the block in his shoes.  Maybe, by giving a little we can help him see beyond next week with an easier mind?

Please give it your best consideration?

Letterman Scores a Bulls …eye. Sniper-style

But the best part of all was when ‘the Daverino’ started waxing all Hollywood critic-ky about the film.  “Important” is the word he used to describe it, in explanation of an otherwise inexplicable box office bonanza (the highest earning movie of the year – if ever). It was, as Dave intoned to the ‘starlet’,  ‘important’ because it was “about modern times” and about “something that’s going on in the lives of everybody in the world.”

Dave’s retiring, probably none-too-soon, but not soon enough to stop him from laying another dose of the dolt he must truly be under the silk sox and unpressed ‘strides’. He’s pulled a few boners, literally and metaphorically, and presented an academy performance or two in the on-air apology category, but what he did while ‘ennertaining’ Ms Siena Miller on a recent evening, takes one of his proverbial pizza prizes.

American Sniper

Ms Miller was on the show, reveling in her latest success in the ‘blockbuster hit ‘American Sniper (although I’ll bet she doesn’t have ‘points’ in the profits). Dave was at his charming best leering down at the anorexic beauty while reviewing the ‘narrative’ surrounding the film.

Q: How was it working with Eastwood?

Ans: he’s ‘cool guy’ who made fun of her prosthetic baby belly (“Morning fatty!”) at the site commissary. She didn’t comment on whatever on earth possessed the ‘great one’ to substitute a plastic dolly, or the corpse of a real infant, in the big ‘Ah luv mah baybee! But it a-lookin like a sand spider’  PTSD scene.

Working with Hollywood’s leading leading man, Brad Cooper, was a real experience, considering he packed-on close to 200 extra pounds to ‘flesh out’ the heroic sniper. She also referred to a notable speech, or facial, defect portrayed in the first half of the movie, that magically disappears by the end of it.  One would think that improved elocution wouldn’t be a by-product of post traumatic stress but, hey, maybe. Or maybe it was all just a giant Texas ‘chaw’. The ‘meat roll’ at the back of the star-hero’s neck, however, isn’t depicted in any photos of the real McCoy and the lumbering gait of the Hollywood star is contrasted with the ‘Prince of Persia’ gymnastics displayed by a leaner, infinitely meaner, AQ antagonist. Thank goodness wind-sprints and extended sex scenes weren’t part of shooter Cooper’s film repertoire, he might have ‘busted’ Ms. Miller (the film’s endowments were ‘prosthetic’ too?)

There was of course time spent on Siena’s role as the wife of a trained killer. Mrs Kyle has credits on the movie, probably due to her insight and advice on her husband, the man – on his struggles with his demons and, by the end of the movie with his success in ‘overcoming’. And in his desire to help his fellows, even the ‘ nasty little coward who shot Mr. Howard and laid poor Jesse in his grave’ – another ‘important American ‘picher’ about another important American shooter.  Nobody mentioned she was being sued to cough-up  3.1 million bucks  (probably more now) due to the ‘success’ of the ‘story’  – because a part of it, unmentioned in the movie but part of the ‘successful book’ on which the movie was based, was found, in a court, to be an out-and out-lie.

                              Kyle and “Scruff-Face” the ‘bitch-slapped’

Having seen the movie, and thinking perhaps that Dave had skipped some medication, I realized that Dave was a victim of ‘wag the dog’.  Somehow he had bought the staged media reports of ‘world crises’, and ‘evil doings’, and ‘heroes fighting for our freedoms’ as a real part of his life, right up there with taking a dump or keeping his hands off the interns. Like having another row with the ‘harridan’ who had ‘trapped him’ in a ‘loveless’, but very expensive, marriage,  Dave lived the experience of ‘the warrior’, ‘deploying daily’ to ‘keep overwatch’ and ‘save lives’ – that’s about the only thing that I got out of the film that’s “a part of our lives” or the media’s saga of such.  It wasn’t, surely, leaving ones’ family for years spent killing, coming home with ‘troubles’ to be overcome in a variety of destructive ways, or even playing with the baby. If those were the point, why a war movie?  That stuff apparently happens to the guy at the grocery store – a far more common and shared environment.

I’m pretty sure that centering the crosshairs for a body shot on a potential bomber, or dropping a kid by hailing him in the forehead aren’t things any of us do on a regular basis for a living, or simply for ‘some fun’. The bullet’s eye view of Kyle’s ‘long shot’ to take out the AQ sniper is straight out of a video game, along with the cinematographic brain splash. If he was still able  to dream, that one would have made a real killer somewhat damp. Some of us might have found ourselves letting the others exit the theatre first, after ‘experiencing’ that.

By the way,  ‘American Sniper’ was knocked off the number one by the new “Sponge Bob Square Pants’ cartoon.  That’s ennertainiment, and real life.

Hotel Heaven

The nasty Taliban have reprised their ‘Here’s Johnny” at the Hotel Serena in Kabul. Just over a year ago they provided a ‘son et lumiere’ show for the residents of the ‘bund’ in Kabul as they attacked hotel guests in a blaze of gunfire that killed 7. The subsequent all-day onslaught to eliminate the terror was the real show. This year’s event was much more low key with nine – including some very young children – being killed.  No wit has yet  made any remarks about “bringing your children to a warzone” – because, I imagine, this time the ‘bad guys’ did it. But the attack did upset the security applecart.

On the bright side, the attackers were able to use only small calibre weapons rather than the heavy equipment with which these attacks are all-too-often ‘made’. On the brighter side, hotel security responded quickly to eliminate the 4-man threat.

This attack seems to be part of a Taliban ‘surge’ to upset the Afghan election – which the Taliban weren’t slow to compare to the recent “illegal” vote in the Crimea, that is now being condemned by the same “occupying force” that is promoting their version of a vote in Afghanistan.

Other attacks in Afghanistan, yesterday,  prompted one news source to run the headline “War Breaks Out in Eastern Afghanistan”. The editors of this  were never in the Hotel Serena and seem to have ‘missed’ Afghanistan for the last twelve years.

Hard to believe that a year later Afghanistan is still in the news – two bombings in Kabul followed by a good three hour ’round’ of gunfire. And in Ukraine  Crimea is ‘laboring’ under the massive changes  joining Russia (that was a shock – voting to ask the RF for membership status.  That vote too: illegal’) – increased pensions and medicare, and if you’re Ukrainian, more security. The destruction of Eastern Donetsk and South-eastern Lugansk continue,  with some opposition.