In and Out of Eden
The world continues to simmer in interesting ways.
- Iran lawmakers call for execution of opposition leaders — good thing they didn’t do that in Egypt. Mubarak was a bad guy by Western standards, but he was probably not the worst of the characters in the region.
- Obama calls for release of the U.S. diplomat in Pakistan who shot what he described as assailants. He is in Pakistani custody. The Taliban demanded that the diplomat be handed over to them. Machiavelli once wrote, “since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.” In Pakistan the US has managed to be neither feared nor loved.
- Voice of America Uses Social Media to Aid Foreign Dissent. “Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will outline the next phase of the Obama administration’s so-called Internet freedom agenda. So far, that agenda has been about demanding other countries keep Internet access open. But when that fails, the Broadcasting Broad of Governors, which oversees the government-owned media organizations that send pro-American messages to foreign audiences, has begun using social media to go around online restrictions in repressive countries.” I am personally skeptical of how good the State Department will be at online messaging. They would do better to coordinate with developers to create platforms which can truly be useful in this setting.
- Bahrain protesters take control of main square. “In a clear sign of concern over the widening crisis, Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa made a rare national TV address, offering condolences for the deaths, pledging an investigation into the killings and promising to push ahead with reforms, which include loosening state controls on the media and Internet.” Ah, the role of information platforms again.
- UK spy suspect eyes career on Russian state television. At last, truth in advertising. “Chapman, now a celebrity in Russia, has posed in lingerie, attended a space launch and had a sing-along with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin since her return. Last month she launched her own weekly TV show, ‘Mysteries of the World with Anna Chapman.’”
- Yemenis trying to oust leader protest for 5th day. The US has been worried about the rise of al-Qaeda in Yemen. The Yemeni leader has attempted to defuse the situation by saying he won’t run again for office. I think the current unrest is a two edged sword, which certainly cut in the direction of the US. The problem is whether it can be made to cut going the other way.
- The Pentagon increased funding for long range strike assets and Aviation Week describes progress toward a carrier-based UAV strike force. What will the role of manned aviation end up being?
- CBS correspondent assaulted in Egypt. First. Timothy Treadwell was wrong. The bears will eat you. Second, the only way to respond to this after the fact is to visit unambiguous punishment on the persons who were responsible. Put out a reward for them. For example, the kidnappers of Martin and Graciela Burnham by the Abu Sayyaf has resulted in:
Of course, these all happened under the Bush administration. But this illustrates the difference between affecting things on the ground and making a speech behind a teleprompter. The first approach deals with both symbols and reality, the current administration’s approach deals with symbols and not much else, apparently. You can be sure the Abu Sayyaf got the message.
But although the world is full of worry, fear and concern, there are some at least, who don’t care.
embedded by Embedded VideoYouTube Direkt
Where do you buy a slow motion kitty? Meanwhile, the birds of the air continue to be interested in fish — and whether their pelican daughters will fly far, far away.
A pelican lands on the roof of a fish and chips shop
King and Queen of the Pelicans we;
No other Birds so grand we see!
None but we have feet like fins!
With lovely leathery throats and chins! …As soon as he saw our Daughter Dell,
In violent love that Crane King fell,—
On seeing her waddling form so fair,
With a wreath of shrimps in her short white hair.
And before the end of the next long day,
Our Dell had given her heart away;
For the King of the Cranes had won that heart,
With a Crocodile’s egg and a large fish-tart.
Hat tip to Eric for all the links.
“No Way In” print edition at Amazon
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The Pakistani incarceration of a Diplomatically Protected Person under the Vienna Treaties is a game changer. The US should consider what the response of our peers on the UNSCO would be in such a situation. We should then inform the Russians and Chinese that if they do not support the release of our officer pronto then it will be open season on all listed diplomats everywhere. Then we should hint that there are County Mounties across America who will be only to happy to assist in proving what that will mean and the boys at Foggy Bottom just had their blue pencil budget slashed so freeing Ivan or Chou will mean resorting to the infinitely slow red pencil.
Cats are honest carnivores. They don’t hate you. They just want to see something suffer and die. Dogs want you to be as happy as they are when they hunt. Only humans question acting according to Nature.
“Buy a kitty”? What a strange idea! One does not own a kitty — rather the reverse. Where does one buy a kitty master?
Habu: This comment applies to several recent threads but I’ll post it here.
I can be as silly as the next guy, or post comments that I regret. You are free to keep repeating your ‘nukem’ mantra but I guess I’m free to say that I don’t like it and here’s why:
1) It’s wrong – as in it’s wrong to advocate the mass murder of millions of human beings.
2) It’s silly – as silly as the greens advocating blowing up anyone who doesn’t agree with them in their 10-10-10 video fiasco, or declaring humanity to be a cancer on the planet.
3) It’s juvenile – as in ‘please Mommy, make all these nasty Muslims go away.’
4) It’s creepy – as in not being able to recognize Muslims as proper human beings, but viewing them as mere ciphers who are not sapient.
5) It would start a nuclear world war.
Yes Islam is a big negative; yes many Muslims are a threat to western civilization; yes we need to overcome the creeping Islamization of our western societies; yes we are foolish to sit back and let it happen.
But we make our way in the world by constantly engaging with it. We have to vigorously engage Muslims all the time on many fronts and change the way they think, act and organize themselves. They are people, for God’s sake. If we don’t engage them, then fatal laziness will carry us into dead end ‘nukem’ policies in some apocalyptic episode of insanity.
So by all means keep expressing your point of view and feel free to come back hard at this comment. I just wanted to say that I disagree with you.
I don’t want the nukem option either. It may come to that if we are sufficiently stupid — which is not inconceivable — but whole point of getting policy right is to avoid arriving at that pass. That brings us to the proper field of strategy, which is economy of force.
If I wanted to nuke the Muslim world I could do no better than endorse the idiotic, rudderless policy of the last two years. Since that’ll make things progressively worse, eventually, when things get bad enough and people are picking radioactive glass out of their sightless eyes, then mindless revenge will be the order of the day.
Now we may all be doomed in the end, but it is of some interest, even as a game, to see if we can cheat Nemesis. Just a little. Give him a run for his money. See if we can pull the miracle of rationality out the hat. Plant the flag just a tiny bit further. And over the long run I think we’ll succeed. If were meant to completely die, then why were we born?
All honest men are entitled to two burglaries: we’re allowed to steal second base and to try and cheat the fates.
#1. Blast From the Past
I’m not altogether clear on this but I believe that such actions have traditionally been considered acts of war. Perhaps the best thing to do (but the One would never do it) is to round up each and every Pakistani citizen who works for the UN and throw them into jail, and to let everybody in the Pakistani Embassy know that they are not to set foot outside of it. And by the way, we are cutting off the power and water to the embassy, and all deliveries to it as well.
So long as as they will not respect diplomatic immunity for ours we should not respect it for theirs, and yes, we should get rather ugly and nasty about it. If we had done that in the reign of Jimmy Carter I doubt we would have the regime we have in Iran today.
1) It’s wrong – as in it’s wrong to advocate the mass murder of millions of human beings.
2) It’s silly – as silly as the greens advocating blowing up anyone who doesn’t agree with them in their 10-10-10 video fiasco, or declaring humanity to be a cancer on the planet.
3) It’s juvenile – as in ‘please Mommy, make all these nasty Muslims go away.’
4) It’s creepy – as in not being able to recognize Muslims as proper human beings, but viewing them as mere ciphers who are not sapient.
5) It would start a nuclear world war.
The really creepy thing is when certain Jews (who are supposed to be a priestly people, an ethical beacon in a dark world) also call for nuking downtown Mecca, as the one who calls himself Pork Rinds for Allah does in another venue, to the accolades of the rest of the peanut gallery from the same tribe.
Their justification? “Never again.”
And if you call Bolshevik on this crazy talk, why, you’re an anti-semitic neo-Nazi.
F @ 2 said:
“Buy a kitty”? What a strange idea!
My cat allows me to feed it and provide a warm place for it to sleep. In exchange, it rewards me by sitting in my lap while I’m at the computer and demanding that I pet it.
Wretchard asked:
“What will the role of manned aviation end up being?”
That’s a real interesting question. For decades, the main limitation with fighter planes has been human physiology and courage, i.e. a fighter plane is limited by turning radius due to human tolerance of acceleration along with the fighter pilot’s desire to survive combat. The X-47B is real close to achieving the Holy Grail of an unmanned fighter plane. Now add to this the concept of the unmanned tank. The main limitation of a main battle tank is the enormous mass of its armor to protect its crew. Get rid of the crew and you don’t need the armor. The designer then has the option of mounting the tank’s main weapon on a Humvee chassis along with some sort of artificial intelligence to control it. Now you have a fast, highly maneuverable tank that’s fearless in battle along with air support from fearless unmanned fighter planes that can out-turn anything manned by a human being. This sort of technological jump will create situations similar to what the guy with a bronze sword experienced when he first encountered an enemy armed with a steel sword.
wretchard @ 4 said:
“I don’t want the nukem option either. …
If I wanted to nuke the Muslim world I could do no better than endorse the idiotic, rudderless policy of the last two years. Since that’ll make things progressively worse, eventually, when things get bad enough and people are picking radioactive glass out of their sightless eyes, then mindless revenge will be the order of the day.”
I agree with Wretchard. Nuking millions of non-combatants is unethical if that option can be avoided. Wretchard is also correct that Obama’s idiotic, rudderless policy will ultimately lead to the Third Conjecture and the option becoming unavoidable concerning whether or not it’s ethical to slaughter millions of innocent people.
#6. Teresita
The sad truth is that unless something gives we may come to the point where nuking much of the Middle East is the most viable option. If, for example, two American cities are taken out by anonymous nukes what will we do? Can we, at such a point, keep pretending that regimes X, Y, and Z who have nuclear capabilities can’t be attacked because we don’t have proof beyond all doubt that they didn’t supply the bomb? And so, we dare not strike them? Or do we lash out, burning the innocent as well as the guilty?
The question is, what can we do now so it never gets to that point? Our current crop of so-called leaders seems not to have one single clue between them.
Sticking with the theme:
Russians to base s-400′s in Kuril Islands.
http://tinyurl.com/4vjsueq
H/T J.E. Dyer at Commentary
Biggest challenge in unmanned air ops are lines of communication and vehicles behaving predictably while autonomous. Space is key enabler in LOCs, so protecting and projecting space power is critical. We’ve come a long way in vehicle predictability. I’d say when UASs are operating freely in all classes of FAA airspace, we’ll know we’ve crossed an important threshold.
Re UAVs, etc: Ditto for naval surface and subsurface war. The navy has numerous robot subs, including one that propels itself by rhythmically changing its buoyancy. Don’t remember exactly but I can conceive swarms of fast unmanned surface vessels, torpedo boats or suicide vessels (‘mechanocide’?). Big changes coming for, as pointed, much of the weight, fuel consumption, etc of any war machine is due to the armour, life support, communications and so forth oriented around those manning the thing.
A small vessel the size of a very fast yacht could be armed to the teeth and the financial cost of its loss wouldn’t equal the daily food budget of a cruiser.
Modern weapons are becoming so efficient that I wonder how far we are from the day that the “Laws of War” prohibit use of any weapon that isn’t powered by human muscle. In many ways, hoplite warfare was good, clean fun and essentially a lethal form of athletic competition. Modern technology has taken all the fun out of warfare.
Eggplant @ 7: Your cat seems to agree with the old dictum: “dogs have family, cats have staff.” F
Can Pelicans and Cranes mate? I don’t want to sound like a prude by disapproving of different species mating because I don’t think beasts can commit bestiality and where would mules come from if a male donkey didn’t diddle of female horse? And who knows, maybe the Crane and the Pelican just want to be friends. So I’m not being judgmental. Never mind.
E/12: “Fun” maybe for them what hasn’t been in one.
You have to be kidding.
Well I know which side the isotope is on and when ONE malcontent plus the Grand Pooh-Bah of the entire magilla say “no more nuk’ums” then I guess I’d better comply. So from now on they’ll be no more nuk’um …. but only because the Grand Pooh-Bah jumped me, not because some humorless malcontent asked.
W, does that mean neutron’um and hydro’um are out too? How about M-80′um or Cherry bomb’um?
So another N word bites the dust. A moment of silence for all those who secretly liked hearing the N word. Hmmmmmmmmm. OK
So the next thing I would do to the Islams is give them a good pranging or even a nuggie. Boy that does loose some punch.
If they get out of line I’d SLCM … ok now that’s got a bit of panache, doesn’t emit any radiation but rolls off the tongue, unless you’re heavily saliva prone, in which case someones’s gett’n wet…but hey it’s a SLCM..
I’m confident over the long term someone will object to W over any “hurt feelings” phrases and I’ll be down to saying “Com’on ye lads, lets toilet paper their huts,homes and auto’s” Superpowers do that ya know.
Wait wait…Gnu’um (Found in Southern and Eastern Africa, the gnu (pronounced g-nu or new) is a really unique animal that looks like a combination of many others. With its ox-like head, the mane of a horse and buffalo horns) Like totally in the groove with Mother nature.
But come 2012 the gloves come off and it’ll be Newt’um !!
But seriously thanks for standing for square behind a none profane phrase and the First amendment and remaining true to the new banner of PC World ..I’ll send the Griswalds over right away.
Modern technology has taken all the fun out of warfare.
I know the comment is meant to be facetious, but ancient warfare was brutal, and genocide was accepted policy in many cases.
g @ 15: right enough, I know I’ve read, fiction or speculation, that on seeing the first bronze swords someone must have said that with such a horrible weapon now available surely peace was the only rational option.
–
but in the world simmering, don’t you hear the increasing whine in Washington of the money presses being run without pausing for necessary maintenance, the giant sucking sound of the US economy being drawn through a straw to China, the hollow ringing sound of thoughts bouncing about in Obama’s head looking pointlessly for a place to land, can’t you just smell what barack is cooking?
#6 Teresita said…
And if you call Bolshevik on this crazy talk, why, you’re an anti-semitic neo-Nazi.
Hardly, dear girl,,, But you know that.
Don Rodrigo @ 18,
You’re correct and I was being facetious. However read the “Iliad” and the “Aeneid” and tell me those guys weren’t having a good time.
Eggplant, it gets even more fun when against a peer competitor, when your highly maneuverable tank that’s fearless in battle along with air support from fearless unmanned fighter planes meets the enemy’s highly maneuverable tank [...]. Eventually their respective operators will get bored and retire together to the nearest drinking hole to settle matter with a far less expensive game of darts.
We can nuke ‘em without major civilian injuries. After an attack on US interests we give the following notice:
In two weeks, Mecca and Medina will be “compromised”. Those who remain do so at their own risk.
We then carry through our threat.
Bruno @ 22 said:
“Eventually their respective operators will get bored and retire together to the nearest drinking hole to settle matter with a far less expensive game of darts.”
Or you have the situation where all the world’s nations are slugging it out in some virtual combat simulation like “Halo Reach”. My son regularly gets killed in Halo Reach by guys in Russia, China, Mexico, etc. He’s actually very good at it. It’s extremely embarrassing whenever I play against him.
Eggplant:
Men back then were unambiguous about war and its dynamics and consequences. Yes, there definitely was a ‘sporting’ aspect to it, and that attitude continued well into modern times.
At Gettysburg, as Pickett’s men marched up to their doom at Cemetery Ridge, a Union soldier was heard to exclaim, “Here they come boys! Aren’t they magnificent?”
3. westerncanadian
“But we make our way in the world by constantly engaging with it. We have to vigorously engage Muslims all the time on many fronts and change the way they think, act and organize themselves. They are people, for God’s sake. If we don’t engage them, then fatal laziness will carry us into dead end ‘nukem’ policies in some apocalyptic episode of insanity.”
Where have you been for oh say the last 2-3 hundred years? Almost every nation you can name has been attacked by Islamics. The UN , US.France,Germany, you name them and they have all tried to, wait lets see how you put it (with knees shaking no doubt..yeah ..go fill out a “Hurt Feelings Report”) Something like “We make our way in this world by constantly engaging in it”
Well you seem to have lost the absolute essesntial of man’s engagement for it isn’t talking , it’s war. I’ve said it before and it’ll probably become a banned remark as too bellicose but war is THE NORM and peace is the teeny tiny space that exists between the history , the entire history of mankind.
Both you and W and probably a few more would have me sanitize my prose because..oh hell who knows why, it might be the truth? Well that’s bull shit.
We’ve tried to engage Islam. Everybody has tried to engage Islam and it doesn’t work.
Oh yeah you’re willing to admit to all that but add a thought of a Newt-lear strike and suddenly fear freezes your body.
I’ll be the first to admit that I TOTALLY do not understand those who are unwilling to punch back harder than they have been punched…but you and W can sit and wait for the first N to hit this country..hell he doen’t care he doesn’t even live here does he? Anyway when it hits, be it a dirty N or a conventional fall from the sky MIRV’d N then perhaps you can screw your courage to a sticking place and come to use the word in conversation ,because brother it will be damned hard to avoid using it…yeah you Canadians could run around yelling “We’ve been egged with a really bad egg and then depend on the US for military protection..as for W..what can I say ? I boxed his ears off years ago and he finally banned me so I guess I’d better genuflect or get tossed off the island of PC.
starting early ..Newt’em in 2012
W
See if we can pull the miracle of rationality out the hat.
Have you not noticed what has been going on in the world BY Islam to the rest of the world for the past many,many hundreds of years. You must think you’ve got some heap big juju working for you to think that we can talk these people down from their position.
They’ve killed thousand of innocent Americans and they continue to try and kill more…I think you’ve gone crazy. Banning a word because it may offend a few …..
Furthermore don’t you think they’ve war gamed this N situation in the Pentagon? I know I’ve even seen articles in the newspapers about the N thing…but let’s ban it here because it may be too much for the children.
N the daylights out of them. Now I wonder which N word he is using? OK that’s IT..ban all words that begin with the letter N.
Habu: I don’t see W disagreeing with you or your use of Nukem. It is a distinct possibilty as we read in the 3 conjectures. Keep up the dialogue, I am rather engaged when I read about our possible demise – it reminds me of reality, makes me more human – removes me from the slow motion of fantasy; gets me from behind the telepromter of life. Keep it coming!
Habu@25: The discussion isn’t about whether or not anyone can say ‘nukem’. The discussion is about whether nukem is the first choice or the last resort in opposing Islam. Muslims are trying to fundamentally change western society and we should be trying to fundamentally change them.
I think that engagement is the first choice, as it was with the USSR. Engagement doesn’t mean talking to people. It means confronting them with better technology, better economies, better weapons, things they would love to have but can’t produce, and lives they can only dream of. It means undermining the basis of their attack by making them wish they aren’t them but are us. It means defending Israel and causing pain when some Islamic yahoo or nation hurts us.
You disagree and think nukem is the first and only choice. Different opinions and we’re both perfectly entitled and correct to hold them.
-Wretchard T. Cat, Belmont Club
-Winston S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm
Whatever it is the Obama administration and it’s allies in the Media have a love for, it will be no better excuse for the disaster they will muddle a billion or more people into. I am re-reading Churchill’s The Second World War and the idea that history doesn’t repeat itself but does rhyme sure comes to mind as I read Churchill’s chronicle of the years between the Wars. It comes to mind a lot. “Complicated idiocy” is one of the phrases he used.
And speaking of Sir Winston, in the previoius thread, Subotai said he didn’t think Chamberlain was the right comparison for Obama, since Chamberlain was at least a dedicated opponent of Hitler after the war started. Subotai said that he thought
…Buraq has something of the stench of Pierre Laval about him
I’m not sure that’s entirely fair to Laval either. At least according to Churchill’s protrayal, Laval was a forcefull and effective individual, energetic in pursuit of what he thought best for his country. Perhaps if Baldwin hadn’t been so foolish, Laval might even have played an important role in stiffling Nazi Germany. In some ways, he’s the inverse of Chamberlain, taking the threat very seriously before the war broke out, but surrendering and collaborating after disaster struck. Chamberlain collaborated while at peace, only finding his spine after the war started. I’m thinking perhaps Obama combines the worst of both men.
Incidentally, Laval was the person who prompted Stalin’s quote “How many divisions has the Pope?”
Habu has a harsh side – but he is usually right –
he is wrong to say W doesn’t care – that was a foolish statement – he needs to work on his – diplomacy –
being from many generations of Hawaiians – i don’t know anyone who doesn’t think the nukeum option on Japan was a wrong move – as they all knew the alternative – and i am alive today because they knew, and did, that thing – as are many other Americans – and Japanese – and others.
as you all know – an invasion with conventional weapons of mainland Japan would have been far worse – for everyone –
our task, since then – is how to avoid reaching that decision point again –
I’m not sure that is possible and neither is habu – but i do know we cannot shrink from that option – if it is better than any other. it is harsh – it is reality – it probably will come again -
Habu, but at the end, you will win the propaganda war, that’s sumthin the Muslims masters the best
“you will NOT win”, sorry
Habu,
If, where you go, I’ll follow. Leave breadcrumbs.
rr
Eggplant #7:
Go find a copy of an SF novel from the 1980′s, “David’s Sling” – it is about what you are talking about, with a notch more advancement in technology. But all quite doable now – or for that matter, 10 years or more ago.
I found the novel to be very interesting, and besides, when I mentioned some of the concepts described there when I was at the Pentagon it sometimes resulted in people turning pale, saying “We’re not supposed to talk about that!” and running out to close the door to the room.
But the result is not Bronze versus Iron sword. It’s more like an incident described in the book “God is My Co Pilot” where a mongul-type army is laying siege to a walled city in a remote area of China in 1942. All was just as it was 1000 years ago – and then two Flying Tiger P-40′s showed up. They made two strafing passes and the war was over. Two passes likely were required only because the armed horde could not believe the first pass. Imagine if you had never seen either an airplane or a machine gun before until you got strafed.
Our challenge is that we need something like an advanced X-47, and the space-based weapons and unmanned vehicles described in David’s Sling – but we also need capabilities like that of a P-40.
“In short, the flames kindled on the 4th of July, 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them.”
-Thomas Jefferson
If we manage to avoid a nuclear “Final Solution” to the problem of Islam, it will be because Jefferson had it right. The success of the Western Democratic way of life has not gone unnoticed. No, not even in the Middle East. We’re witnessing evidence of this every day.
To me, the most counter-productive faction in World affairs today is that spoiled, bitter group of Westerners called the Left, which seems to view our legacy of freedom and rationality as something to apologize for, rather than a gift to appreciate and share with other peoples, even in the Middle East.
P-40? Cobra/Apache gunships, A-10 warthogs, C-130 Spectre, …
… and of course the ever-loving Predator or anything carrying hellfires or the new small missile variants, …
–
as to the actual topic, the case of the US diplomat in Pakistan is astounding. for better or worse, the doctrines of diplomatic immunity are untouchable, but here’s some kafir killed a couple of moslems, oh my. will they let him go home (I mean, in one piece) and will Obama promise to persecute – er, prosecute – him here?
… like no Americans have killed any Pakistanis in the last couple of years …
I am either ahead of the curve, or I have already driven off the cliff, but I think that the MB is going to have a hard time staying on message and staying relevant. It appears that the demand across ArabWorld for more economic choices and a little less foot on the neck is real.
What does the MB have to offer on the economics side? Hamas in Gaza? Who is going to buy that? Plus, if you buy into the Gaza economic model you have to do it without your iPod.
Without an external enemy the MB’s message is hollow. Demonizing Israel is a tough sell when the “youths” are focused on moving out of mama’s before 30.
Failure, what modes are the most likely in the current national and international scene? Slow gradual visible deformation until something goes snap, or will it be like some composite materials, nothing visible happening as the stress builds up and then it shatters explosively?
I’m old and feeble so I don’t fear death as much as I used to, but I feel a weariness and sorrow for people who are going to suffer through no fault of their own due to feeble minded politicians and fanatics who should have been assaniated long since. There is an old military truism that if you make your objective to keep your casualties as low as possible you will pay a much higher price in casualties than if you had moved aggressively from the first.
What happened to Lara Logan was unacceptable
Apparently, the planned release by Jordan of the murderer of seven (7) little Jewish girls is perfectly acceptable to the Post and Teresita. Well, admittedly, they were Joooos; or as the new GAB says, “Judensau”.
Jordan [justice] minister calls for release of soldier who killed seven Israeli school girls
Without doubt, the justice minister is just the odd, occasional Muslim fanatic – certainly not to be taken as representative.
…Right
Gettysburg, July 3, 1863
Name the Confederate general whose body was never recovered, having been shredded at The Angle.
link
29. westerncanadian
You are such a weasal. First you whine (perhaps even backchannel) given that W’s post came immediately after yours. Now you’re all over peace and harmony and BTW using the forbidden word….so now we can all see that all animals are equal, it’s just that some are more equal than others. Fine, but for heavens sakes grow a spine.
You verbally chastised me to the point where I am now forbidden to use the N word and you now expect me to send out a honey-gram to you? You’re lucky you’re just x’s and o’s on a screen.
And don’t you think it’s pretty pathetic when one person on a blog out of however many write here can’t use a phrase of choice, particularly about Islam? I rarely read, and I certainly don’t have legions following my position but you feel threatened as does W which for all his “adventures” seems a wee bit moist.
NOW..if you think I’m going to allow you to define what the issue is you’re looney.
“The discussion isn’t about whether or not anyone can say ‘nukem’”. The discussion is about whether nukem is the first choice or the last resort in opposing Islam. Muslims are trying to fundamentally change western society and we should be trying to fundamentally change them.” And BTW when did you become arbiter of what a discussion is about? But it’s
Crap, pure crap.
We have and the world has for literally centuries (God please ,how many times do I have to explain this)been fighting off the OFFENSIVE charges of Islam. From the birth of this nation at sea we have had to fight them..they took Hitlers side, they have a philosophy that NO ONE is going to be able to modify or change …so far in the hundreds and hundreds of years that has been the case and I am willing to bet you can’t get it done either ,nor anyone currently alive. They live in the 6th century….
Somehow all of the prior history of Islam is lost on you .. people like me wonder how that can be?…what do you embrace besides a Teddy bear or a blanket that gives you any hope that Islam will morph into goodness and light.
It is people like you and W who prolong the killing, for Islam will continue with it’s conventional human bomb attacks, it’s blowing up of innocent civilians at nightclubs and on trains and one day launch a truly horrific attack on Israel. That blood will be on your’s and W’s hands for not having the stones to even use certain words and take certain actions.
So just leave it alone, you got your “victory” But stand by because I’m gonna be all over you on this blog…..but W will protect you
That is if I choose to waste my time here at Dilbert Club.
34. rich ruscio
At the risk of having you banned from using the English alphabet I appreciate your comments.
The last time anyone talked about using nukes pro-actively, as if they were just another “bullet” was Ike, campaigning in the waning days of the Korean War, and that was in a similar vein with McCain’s campaign rhetoric about being in Iraq for a hundred years. Since that time, a heavy taboo curtain has come down on the subject of nuclear weapons. Israel won’t even mention the ones they’ve had since 1958. Tom Tancredo talked about nuking Mecca and Medina and now he’s a third-party loser. The Nukem Option, and not social security, is now the third rail of American politics. No respectable policymaker holds nuclear weapons to be anything but the ultimate guarantor against a catastrophic attack on the US. They’re for taking out massed columns of infantry and tanks. They are carrier battlegroup killers. You don’t piss them away on a few tribes in Tora Bora just because nineteen asshats got in a lucky sucker punch.
SirWalter 22: “We can nuke ‘em without major civilian injuries. After an attack on US interests we give the following notice: In two weeks, Mecca and Medina will be “compromised”. Those who remain do so at their own risk. We then carry through our threat.”
This would work well enough for the non-suicidal Russians and Chinese, but not for Muslims; they would swarm into Mecca and Medina by the millions in time for N-Day, and that might work out for us as a plus. If I were President there would be no warning after suffering a nuclear strike, because self-defense requires no explanation. Self-defense is self-evidently justified – self-defense is just war.
bits 31: “I don’t know anyone who doesn’t think the nukeum option on Japan was a wrong move – as they all knew the alternative – and I am alive today because they knew, and did, that thing – as are many other Americans – and Japanese – and others. As you all know – an invasion with conventional weapons of mainland Japan would have been far worse – for everyone.”
Pre-emptive nuclear war is not immoral on its face because preserving the lives and liberty of 300 million Americans is the first priority; failure to do so is an immorality beyond comprehension. Today’s nuclear war will not look like the city-busting of Hiroshima or Nagasaki; highly targeted nuclear weapons can be directed against military and nuclear infrastructure of our Islamo-Fascist enemy. We are engaged in World War IV (The “Cold War” was WW III) against an international alliance of totalitarian Islamic nations (Sharia totalitarianism) and mass-murdering Islamic terror groups. Cato ended every speech in the Roman Senate with “Carthago delenda est” – “Carthage must be destroyed.” The day will come when our leaders will shout “Islam delenda est” – “Islam must be destroyed.” I fear that these words will not be shouted until it is really too late – after the sh-t has already hit the fan – after the United States suffers catastrophic first nuclear strike.
Re: Lara Logan
There may be real limitations to working within the formal system in certain societies. Just because they have “Justice Ministers” or similarly Western sounding offices one shouldn’t assume things work in the European way. Things work they way the actually work.
So if you want “justice for Lara Logan”, it may be that only a system of private justice is actually available and you must tap or establish a private network to achieve results simply because loyalty is personal or for hire in that part of the world.
So to square a case in which someone kills seven school girls or rapes a women you simply have to revert to custom. That is, pay money to persons who can provide information as to the whereabouts of said malefactors. Cell phone video showing them in flagrante delicto would be appreciated because once you know who they are, you are pretty much obligated to decide what to do about it.
Once said miscreants are identified, then make sure your buddies apprehend them and give them the treatment, whatever treatment is appropriate in these circumstances. Otherwise, forget it. Just take the hit and move on. Quit hankering after “justice” because you knew what was available and said “no thanks”. But to expect that filing some case or making some complaint will ipso facto work is sometimes wishful thinking.
You can say, “well I tried”, but you were really just going through the motions so you could convince yourself not to do anything. An acceptable option, but you have to recognize it for the no-op that it is.
In either case you’ve got a moral problem: the moral problem of acting in a non-Western way to obtain justice or the moral problem of literally letting someone get away with murder, plus the knowledge that if said miscreants escape, they are probably going to re-offend and the responsibility sits partially on yourself. Just because you don’t know doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
Those dudes who raped Logan or killed the 7 schoolgirls ain’t done yet. Not by a long shot.
Of course, you may go to hell in either case, if you believe in hell. I would simply ask for forgiveness, for all that we’ve done or have failed to do. And then go out and do what seems best. The world’s a tough place and there’s no way out until the final curtain.
the arrival of robots in the theater – will be a change of significance –
most of the machine mass at present is to protect the human operator –
we see in the development of missiles that without that necessity – they are far faster, maneuverable and cheaper –
this will extend to aircraft – tanks – artillery -ships – subs – lasers – other radiation/near light speed weapons – magnetic rail guns – communications – sensors – logistics – there is a significant change in warfare approaching
perhaps this is an evolution to outflank the nukum – which after all – is just a very large blunt instrument
T @ 44: The Nukem Option, and not social security, is now the third rail of American politics. No respectable policymaker holds nuclear weapons to be anything but the ultimate guarantor against a catastrophic attack on the US. They’re for taking out massed columns of infantry and tanks. They are carrier battlegroup killers. You don’t piss them away on a few tribes in Tora Bora just because nineteen asshats got in a lucky sucker punch.
We might. Reputedly bin Laden thought we would. He underestimated our available alternatives and willingness to use them. Would have been OK by me if we had, though I’d rather have nuked Riyahd, or Mecca, or the oil fields, or all three. Then maybe we could have avoided the Iraq war, just had a friendly conversation with our good buddy Saddam about any remaining issues. Just sayin’.
Massed columns of infantry and tanks – don’t really call for nukes anymore, we have plenty of conventional arms that can stop a division cold, even if they’re fully modern western-quality. In my P-40 comment above, I should have mentioned the “steel rain” of the MLRS systems. You just do not want to be any kind of foot soldier with that stuff firing on you. And if all else fails, a couple of B-52s full of old iron bombs will ruin the day for several thousand troops in formation. That’s why you basically never see several thousand troops in formation, making nasty at us, if you saw them at all, you wouldn’t see them for long.
Nukes these days are for taking out whole countries and civilizations, or perhaps as in Japan, for ending a war. That’s why, if we ever decide this really is a “war” against Islam, well, … you do the math.
I am with Habu. The way to win a war is to kill the enemy untill they surrender. This is exactly how the Greatest Generation won their war. When the enemy civilian population becomes tired of death and destruction raining down on their heads they will sue for peace. When they are tired of being hungry, cold, and afraid they will come to blame the those responsible for thier plight, that is to say the islamic facists who started this fight. That Westerncanadian is how you “vigorously engage muslims”, you start by defeating them and after that you can use whatever namby pamby crap you want to bring the entire religion into the 21st century.
Unfortunately, unless something is done to halt and neutralize psychotic nation states from getting nukes it seems like the only viable alternative is to assume a policy not like MADD, which governed the Cold War, but rather a “Big Jake” policy.
For those who have seen and remember that John Wayne movie, there is a famous line: And now YOU understand. Anything goes wrong, anything at all… your fault, my fault, nobody’s fault… it won’t matter – I’m gonna blow your head off. No matter what else happens, no matter who gets killed I’m gonna blow your head off.
Essentially–if the US gets nuked, a list of countries will cease to exist. We will not make the effort to verify the source of the nuke that was detonated on US soil. We will just act. And no, we won’t make the list of countries public, although I’m sure anyone with an IQ could fill in the top contenders for assured destruction.
I would not like to see it come to that as a stated policy, but unless something is done that may ultimately be what we have to do.
The US will not launch…Won’t happen. An anonymous nuke? Do you really think O will strike a slew of maybe-nations? Won’t happen. Even if we can trace the vapor trail to Nation X, and Nation X claims responsibility, O will not launch. The nuclear option is off the table, for 2 (or maybe 6) years. Someone said it a couple threads back: Our nation has elected a leader who does not believe in our nation. If they strike, we will have deserved it, and we will have too much understanding to strike back. A dirty bomb? Forget it. We may sue some people and send some others to court.
With this invertebrate Zero in the White House, the concept of war is simply inconceivable. And I think that is the point that was being made about our discussion. Neither Wretchard—nor anyone else—suggested banning any word. Habu, my friend, please don’t leave BC. Your wisdom, experience, and veracity make you a treasure here. Perhaps our host feels the discussion would be better served by exploring options available to us in the here & now. Habu, I wish you were SecDef, seriously. Marine 83 to the Joint Chiefs, but we got what we got: Mal-educated weaklings who think like 12 year-old girls.
For most people, including government leaders, history begins when we’re born. Thus, this pesky Islam problem started in the 70s. The 12 prior centuries are not considered…Hell they’re not even known. The 12 year-old girls will solve this contemporary problem without war…if it kills us.
RWE @ 35 said:
“Go find a copy of an SF novel from the 1980′s, “David’s Sling” – it is about what you are talking about, with a notch more advancement in technology. But all quite doable now – or for that matter, 10 years or more ago. I found the novel to be very interesting, and besides, when I mentioned some of the concepts described there when I was at the Pentagon it sometimes resulted in people turning pale, saying “We’re not supposed to talk about that!” and running out to close the door to the room.”
I’ll have to make a point of reading that book. Was Marc Stiegler the author?
I think one of the barriers to adopting UAV fighter plane technology has been the gun versus radar guided missile controversy. After the Korean War, aeronautical engineers convinced themselves that guns were obsolete in fighter planes. In the beginning of the Vietnam War, the F-4 Phantom did not have a gun which was later realized to be an error. Afterwards, aeronautical engineers went whole hog the other way with the F-16 which is a gun centric fighter plane. Many people were later critical of the F-16 claiming that it was just a “lawn dart” and that fighter plane design should be oriented towards carrying over-the-horizon fly-and-forget radar guided missiles, e.g. the F-14 armed with Phoenixes/Sparrows. On the other hand, the Israelis had nothing but praise for the F-16. To some extent stealth technology made this whole discussion obsolete. However the controversy comes back when one brings in UAV fighter plane technology. If you lock yourself into a UAV fighter plane design assuming it carries only missiles then you could be in for a nasty shock when it again becomes apparent that fighter planes need to carry a gun. The obvious response to that is to come up with a UAV fighter plane that carries missiles and can dog fight with a gun. Until recently that technology was unavailable for UAVs but I think we can do it now. Perhaps the technology will be demonstrated with the X-47B?
W
“There may be real limitations to working within the formal system in certain societies”
W, that is as wormy a sentence as I have ever heard. You bend forward to not mention Islam of Eqypt in the opening sentence of the opening paragraph…yes that’s wormy, especially when the thrust of the worlds main topic of conversation for over a decade has been how to contain Islam….and you can’t even utter the word….what did they do send out a memo at PJM?
“must tap or establish a private network” ..don’t know much about the ME do you? Establishing a private network might take years or most likely your life. Now of course I’m guessing some type of covert network but you may be talking about handing out Lady Ga-Ga CD’s, like what do I know? Right?
“once you know who they are, you are pretty much obligated to decide what to do about it.
Huh?
This is the ME W and change has arrived. The MB may step in and queer the entire punishment deal since she is an infidel..or do you know better?
“In either case you’ve got a moral problem” NO my friend..we’ve HAD a moral problem for hundreds of years ..hear me now .. hundreds of years ..do you deny that?
“And then go out and do what seems best.” W, I’m not sure you know what is best any longer.
Teresita LIES as usual and misstates my position
6. Teresita
The really creepy thing is when certain Jews (who are supposed to be a priestly people, an ethical beacon in a dark world) also call for nuking downtown Mecca, as the one who calls himself Pork Rinds for Allah does in another venue, to the accolades of the rest of the peanut gallery from the same tribe.
Actually what I advocate is the nuking of the black rock of mecca, the kaaba. Not the downtown, never have advocated that. But she knows that, but the truth doesnt fit into the fiction she weaves.
No matter how many times I have stated that we could:
a. notify and warn the population to flee
b. use a small tactical nuke that would have a small footprint
c. hit the rock in off season
Ms T/ Selah / Teresita distorts and misrepresents my position.
She has a habit of distortion and lying about people.
As for her other distortion?
T states:
“Their justification? “Never again.”
And if you call Bolshevik on this crazy talk, why, you’re an anti-semitic neo-Nazi.”
No my justification is that I advocate the changing of the unchanging, the ending of one of the 5 pillars of Islam. The making of the Haji.
And the reason I called you an anti-semite was for HUNDREDS of statements that were anti-zionist, anti-jewish, anti-judaic and delegitimizing of Israel. Apply ONE standard to Israel and Jews and none to others.. That is what makes you an anti-semite
Has Habu gone over the edge?
Again?
I appreciate his thoughts, Not his attitude.
Habu, I meant to say your “tenacity”, not your veracity, but I think you knew that, due to your capacity.
I kind of get the huzz on some of the battle field robots that people are contemplating. Material science is progressing faster than I thought it would. They are already planning nanosteel autobodies. There is nanosteel armor in the works, carbon fiber aluminium, and etc. Maybe I’ve watched to much anime. I was contemplating the unmaned nuclear powered (thorium I think) tank. It had a swiveling turret for azimuth but for traction it had eight articulated legs, like a big spider. The legs let it elvate the gun, raise the body above and below terrain fetures, and let it scuttle rather rapidly up really steep and rough inclines and had the ability to vary the feet to change the “float” on different terrain. It carried projectiles for different categories of targets but was using somekind of electrical power to launch the projectiles. It didn’t have a super duper AI but was controlled by two to three remote operators, and had enough computational power on board to control the legs. Just a speculative project but the projected speed of it over rough terrain fell into the spooky category for me.
Eggplant #52:
Yes, I believe it was Marc Stigler. And I think it was the first book ever available in Hypertex, which could not get really going until the advent of the e-reader. You can probably get it very cheaply at Half.com.
For “guns” on board aircraft they are talking now about the idea of lasers and electronic pulse weapons. Just a few years back they were saying they would add a laser turret to the F-35, using the space and drive power designed for the lift fan.
I wonder about effect the use of turret mounted lasers on aircraft combat tactics. You would no longer have to maneuver the same way to get into firing position. I have read of aircraft essentially flying formation with the enemy because neither could get into firing position; that would stop.
And you would think that lasers would be well situated for UAVs. Such aircraft could keep track of the enemy better than human piloted aircraft. Situational Awareness is key to air to air combat, and UAV’s, having the advantage of computer analysis and distant data sources, could possess much better SA.
At one time the USAF thought that computer advancements would lead to AI Co-pilots to help with the human pilot workload, but it appears that it is more likely that it will supplant pilots entirely. I also could see a human pilot controlling not only his own aircraft but a number of UAV wingmen. In fact, if I had ben bidding on the new USAF rescue chopper contract I would have bid not a monstrosity like a version of the CH-47, which won, but a smaller piloted chopper, about the size of an OH-58, but also with a couple of UAV wingman versions to add carrying capacity.
Habu has a valid point of view which needs to be expressed.
You can’t have a “good” cop without a “bad” cop.
I don’t think it’s wormy. There’s lots of places where you have to go with the way things work or not go at all. But this brings us back to a cardinal principal. Finding ways to punish the guilty and not the innocent. During the suppression of the Cathars in France, everyone was killed without regard to whether they were in or out, bystander or participant. We still remember the phrase, “kill them all, God will know his own.”
And that is simply analytically dumb. There is no instance in mathematics, science or military history that I am aware of when information is thrown away to advantage. If you know who to get, don’t let God sort them out. That why you pay to know, because information is valuable.
The problem with the Obama strategy is that it doesn’t want to fight a “war” which by definition is waged against an enemy. He doesn’t want to have no enemies. And he will discover the corollary is that he doesn’t want no friends neither. For that would be to discriminate; to tell one from another and that’s hurtful. So in the end he won’t know, because he’s got are the simple, crayon colored pictures in his head and on the day when he’s in a bind, then it will be lash out against all comers. The Jake Theory of strategy, as someone put it, which is based on a lack of information but not the lack of will, which will on the day be supplied by desperation.
The error that corresponds to “all Muslims are good” motto of President Obama is the idea that “all Muslims are bad”. Crayons again and in reality both are really the same model. They will result in treating the sheep and goats like they either all sheep or all goats. We never have two flocks, just one flock whose name we don’t know.
But who lives like this? Usually we know which way is up. Most of the time we aim our punches and plan our moves. To pre-empt is simply to admit to ourselves that we have no capability to act in a discriminating way. We can’t ever tell who wears the white hat and which the black. So get em all and God will know his own. And you may be right about outcomes in the end, when like some dinosaur we’ll just level the forest — but only after admitting we’ve got peas for brains. Well maybe Obama has peas for brains, but any system that accepts that this is only way forward is concealing from itself a deeper problem: if we can’t make out the difference between sheep and goats then maybe we’re blind. And the tumor that causes that blindness will kill us anyway, Muslims or no.
Better to get the tumor and then see; having seen, act. It’s not the Muslims that are killing us. It’s us. It’s our blindness. If we simply got our heads on straight they’d want to be like us, as Ataturk did, once upon a time before peas for brains.
Allen, without spilin’ it by searchin’, i think Garnett and Amistad made it to the top, and Amistad wasn’t vaporized, he had dying words with a union trooper re getting a message to his old friend from West Point, who was on the Union side. so, Garnett?
Mark_B at 59 is right –a lotta fightin’ can be bypassed if the selected attackee is in a bad mood.
I think some people seem anti-semite but do not really hate Jews so much as just wish that Israel didn’t exist –becuz Araby and Islam are too big to wish away. Then this attitude over time forgets that the Israelis are not the guilty party in the mideast wars.
Now that idea is on the floor..
I do advocate the kidnapping and torture of the kaaba.
Or yes nuking it…
Or stealing it and shooting it into the sun..
- although one could argue that the mass of Japanese – were complicit in the Japanese war machine – and i don’t doubt that they were – and the mass of Germans were complicit – in the War in Europe – I do not think that the mass removal of them, was – or is now – necessary – to halt a war –
I – recognize that it was then – as that was the only methods we had –
the future may well be different – as we develop other – more specific – methods –
the pinpointed removal of the – directors – of a tribe – nation – would be far more efficient – and it seems we are moving in that direction – not just kinetically – but politically – - philosophically –
in some real sense – we hold the russians, and the chinese – and they hold us – at bay – not just because we can mutually destruct each other – which we can – but we can destruct our / their – leaders – and those leaders value their lives, and their nations life.
this – maybe the problem – the conundrum of islam – who – apparently – do not value their lives — i’m not sure – recent events indicate that this – although historically true – that this philosophy may be waning – so perhaps there is a chance it will not have to be done –
however – it is more their behavioral / political / philosophical choice than ours – and if it does become necessary – well – it becomes necessary – and i don’t think we should overly grieve about that choice – however we have to solve it – whole civilizations have been wiped out before – down through History – we don’t want to join that crowd.
a. notify and warn the population to flee
b. use a small tactical nuke that would have a small footprint
c. hit the rock in off season
1. Poor people can’t flee. They don’t have vacation homes in Boca Raton like some of us do.
2. The smallest nuke in the US inventory at this time is still bigger than Little Boy, even when dialed down to the lowest yield. That’s a lot of dead Little Girls.
3. Fallout.
4. The underlying theory is false. Temple Mount in Jerusalem was basically “nuked” by Rome in 70 AD, all that did was metastasize Judaism in the second Diaspora. The Vatican was seized by enemies as well, and the Papacy merely relocated to Avignon. Muslims are shown every minute of every day that their religion is inferior to even the ancestor worship of the Taiwanese who make the cell phones they use to light off their roadside bombs, so nuking a piece of obsidian (which is already in fragments, by the way, and glued into the structure of the Kaaba) isn’t going to do jack diddley squat, other than cause every man, woman, and child on Earth to curse the ineffable Name of the Deity that was invoked to do it.
W
Your erudition is vastly exceeding your logic these days.
Do us all a favor and lay out what you think Islam would do if the bomb proliferates, as it most assuredly will and what Islam will do.
Then tell us your support for sharia law?
You totally failed to address the points I put out for you to adddress re: your dream of justice….
Just who are you? And yes, the opening of your post was wormy.
An American woman is raped and beaten and would probably have been killed and your opening statement is ““There may be real limitations to working within the formal system in certain societies”” That dude is wormy…you could have said, “Oh look, my Rocky Road ice cream cone has melted”
Bedtime, more fun tomorrow.
Re Lara Logan:
I believe she just got a lesson that the rest of the world doesn’t hold the same view of women that the Left in the West do.
You shouldn’t be sending a woman out to do a man’s work, and edicts and decrees on parchment won’t change that.
W 60: “The error that corresponds to “all Muslims are good” which President Obama seems to espouse is the idea that “all Muslims are bad”
During World War II President Roosevelt didn’t worry about the fact that all Germans were not bad. All Germans were not bad, but that didn’t change the fact that essentially all Germans allowed themselves to be ruled by totalitarian Nazi government – ordinary Germans allowed themselves to become part of the Nazi Borg. All Muslims are not bad, but like Nazi Germany, the majority of Muslims have allowed themselves to fall under totalitarian (Sharia) Islamo-Fascist government – ordinary Muslims have allowed themselves to become part of the Islamic Borg. What good came from the fact that most Germans were ordinary people? What good comes from the fact that most Muslims are ordinary people? What really counts is the law of the land – if it is totalitarian law – Germano-Fascist or Islamo-Fascist – the nation or the Ummah will inevitably form up into tyranny. It’s the legal system, stupid.
BTW, that last phrase “It’s the legal system, stupid” is not directed at W – it is just directed out there to everyone. God knows W is one of the most intelligent people on Earth – I thank God for W.
In a simpler time, in what seems like a galaxy far, far away, my young wife and I and our children lived on a small subsistence farm. She wanted chickens, so we ordered 100 chicks, gave them tender loving care until they grew into hens and roosters (as an aside, have you ever tried to consume 50 eggs a day every day? For a long time I never wanted to see another egg.)
Our farm was surrounded by wood and stream. Every night, as the sun went down and darkness crept down the hills, I swore I could hear the snarls and growls of the fox and raccoon out at the very edges of the creeping dark. They played havoc with our chickens. It was a crazy time. No matter what we did to secure those chickens, we lost some every night. The raccoons and foxes raided with impunity. Now those hens and roosters represented food for us for the winter. I had to do something or we would have slim pickings for food. So, reluctantly, I took the fight to them. With the help of a good dog, a large flashlight and a Colt .22 RF Officer’s Model, I would sit up late every night. I decimated the predators that came to the farm. Soon they only came sporadically. I would sit up several nights in a row with out seeing any raccoon or fox. So I started ranging out with the dog. I pretty well cleaned our hollow and the neighboring hollows out. After a while, quiet returned and we stopped losing chickens. In fact, for the rest of the time we were on the farm, we had very few chicken raids. My wife used to joke that were we to go out to the edge of our fields where woods started, we would find signs scratched in the bark by fox and raccoon saying, “Do not go here. It is Death.”
In some respects, we need to send a similar message to the predators that surround us. This is a crazy time for my beloved America. Many different predators are raiding our chicken house every night, it seems, and winter is coming.
64. ⚢ Teresita
Give it up… You lie, misdirect and distort all that I & others have said..
Sheer nonsense..
t/64; admonishing habu and others that extreme measures must be taken only on a ‘kill or be killed’ basis is a defendable position, on the basis that the situation may never get to there.
Israel has been in that position, more or less, for six-plus decades now, and that’s just the modern state. Yet the Israelis, who are there already at ‘kill or be killed’, do not kill. One would think that peace-loving folks might grant a small nod of recognition to that.
toadload – #57
lol – or maybe not —
there you go – not sure when the giant desert spider gun will appear – but i don’t doubt that it will – as a backup to the Moths
the future – is right there ahead of us – won’t be long now —
My grandfathers brother worked with ‘the donkey man’ at Galipoli
this — it’s going to be different -
Buddy Larsen: Israel has been in that position, more or less, for six-plus decades now, and that’s just the modern state. Yet the Israelis, who are there already at ‘kill or be killed’, do not kill. One would think that peace-loving folks might grant a small nod of recognition to that.
All praise to the IDF and Israeli political leadership for their restraint in the face of great provocation, and all admiration for a population that continues to live lives of grace even when they must flee to their basement shelters every now and again.
But praise Habu for saying the Final Solution is to nuke the major Islamic population centers of the world in a first strike, then evaluate for follow-up Solutions to the Muslim Question? No, I will not praise that.
Praise WiO/PRfA for calling for a nuclear attack on Mecca under any conditions (small yield, leaflets dropped first, you name it)? No, I will not praise that.
RWE @ 58 said:
“For “guns” on board aircraft they are talking now about the idea of lasers and electronic pulse weapons. Just a few years back they were saying they would add a laser turret to the F-35, using the space and drive power designed for the lift fan.”
I’ve been watching the Airborne Laser Test Bed (ALTB) with interest. A concern I have with that technology is the chemical lasers have a limited number of shots. It seems that ALTB technology is appropriate for zapping a high value target like an ICBM carrying a nuke but of limited use against relatively low value targets like conventional aircraft.
“I wonder about effect the use of turret mounted lasers on aircraft combat tactics. You would no longer have to maneuver the same way to get into firing position.”
Fighter planes with turrets reminds me of the Luftwaffe Bf-110. A great concept in theory but in practice it was so heavy that Mustangs could kill it with ease (meat on the table).
Getting back to UAV fighter planes and the issue of guns versus missiles. I can imagine situations where the bad guys are sending swarms of UAVs in a massed attack. In all likelihood, the UAVs would have been cranked out on an assembly line and have a unit cost of about $10,000 each. No way would it be cost effective to shoot down each UAV with a million dollar radar guided missile. To destroy that sort of target, the fighter plane would have to get in close and take out each UAV with a gun. The missile/target cost effectiveness is already an issue with the Predator and Hellfire. Supposedly a Hellfire costs about $68,000. One can justify spending $68,000 to kill an arch-bastard like Osama bin Ladin or one of his inner circle. However it makes no sense to use one Hellfire to kill a couple low level Talibans who barely have sense enough to carry AK-47s. Developing a UAV carrying a minigun might be an effective technology for dealing with low level Taliban.
What is “Occupation”/Pork Rinds for Allah @ 62 said:
“I do advocate the kidnapping and torture of the kaaba. … Or stealing it and shooting it into the sun.”
Then the faithful would bow down and worship the Sun.
A better idea:
Grind the Kaaba up into fine dust and mix it with pig feed. Be sure the concentrations are right because you wouldn’t want to poison a bunch of innocent pigs.
#61 buddy larsen
Amistad wasn’t vaporized Buddy, do you mean Lewis Armistead? The guy who got kicked out of West Point for breaking a plate over the head of fellow cadet Jubal Early? (Alternate version: Armistead resigned from the Point because he flunked French— Marie Claude take note).
Apropos of Teh Won and his destructive impact on the military, there has been some kind of back-and-forth in the British press (the Times and the Guardian) as to whether David Petraeus has been asked to leave Afghanistan:
“The Pentagon has denied that the commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, is planning to quit by the end of the year.
The Times reported that the Pentagon was looking to replace Petraeus, who was appointed eight months ago.
But the Pentagon said that while it constantly reviewed rotations, particularly as a number of senior posts were about to fall vacant, no decision had been made about Petraeus. . . .
US forces are due to begin a drawdown in July but Petraeus will fight to keep as many as possible in Afghanistan to try to pacify the country, in a repeat of the strategy he used in Iraq. He might then ask to stay into next year.
Petraeus has been touted as a possible Republican presidential candidate to take on President Barack Obama for the White House next year, but has repeatedly denied he is planning to run.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/16/pentagon-petraeus-quit
However it makes no sense to use one Hellfire to kill a couple low level Talibans who barely have sense enough to carry AK-47s. Developing a UAV carrying a minigun might be an effective technology for dealing with low level Taliban.
Smart kinetic weapons. They say if you drop a penny off the Empire State Building and it will embed in concrete (they say). Basically, you get your UAV to drop ball bearings from the sky. They wouldn’t even hear ‘em coming.
Eggplant suggests: A better idea:
Grind the Kaaba up into fine dust and mix it with pig feed. Be sure the concentrations are right because you wouldn’t want to poison a bunch of innocent pigs.
I am flexible.
However the main idea is to prevent one of the 5 pillars of islam to be completed.
Right now Islamists think that Allah is on their side. And why should they not?
By taking out the Kaaba and forcing islam to think that allah has abandoned them is the idea.
Right now? Islam is perfect to moslems… Time to force some change…
Israel has been in that position, more or less, for six-plus decades now, and that’s just the modern state. Yet the Israelis, who are there already at ‘kill or be killed’, do not kill. One would think that peace-loving folks might grant a small nod of recognition to that.
Why would anyone believe, even for a moment, that any Western state could “pre-emptively” nuke the Muslim world when it cannot muster the will to secure its borders, balance its budget, get Pakistan to release a diplomat or get Argentina to release a C-17′s cargo load of equipment? That would be like thinking that man who can’t run 50 yards can run the 100 meter dash in 9.5 seconds.
The path to nukes is far more probably going to take the path of use in desperation. And in fact a country which secured its borders, drilled for its own oil, got Pakistan to release diplomats, and did the normal things would be the only kind of country which might use nukes pre-emptively because it conceive of such a strategy. Yet ironically it would be the kind of country that wouldn’t have to attack pre-emptively. The idea of country going straight from supine behavior to nuking pre-emptively is a fantasy built on the awareness of weakness. Solve the weakness and then your enemies will consider you capable of pre-emption. But guess what: solve the weakness and you won’t have to pre-empt. They will back away.
This is all elementary game theory; and tried, true and hoary deterrence theory. Be strong and you won’t need to use nukes. Be weak and you’ll use them for sure.
The problem of radical Islam is the problem of Western weakness. That is the problem to which the policy nuking Muslims is an impertinent answer. Who’s going to do it? Obama? And yet if Obama lost the next election in favor of someone who might actually resist, then the probability of having to pre-empt declines dramatically.
The logical problem is that any strategy which requires pre-emptively nuking the Islamic world implies a President who is too weak to do it anyway. But that doesn’t mean it might not happen. As I’ve argued ad nauseam, the biggest danger to nuclear use, in both the Israeli and general Western case, is via the act in desperation.
As long as Israel’s strategic position is strong, it will not unleash the nukes. But only in its dying gasp will that be certain. So what do the geniuses at State do? Bring Israel to the point of strategic death.
For the same reasons, the weaker Obama makes America the more its enemies are emboldened. Yet this does not bring pre-emption closer. That becomes more and more unthinkable until the last push, when desperation takes hold. Then the probabilities go from near zero to near 1.
The Pakistanis and even the rapists in Tahrir Square are testing, testing. And they are finding no resistance. Therefore they will push and sooner or later, they will push too far. Why not since no stop signal will be received from the Smartest Man in the World.
Then when things go too far, desperation, not calculation, will unleash the Apocalypse. It’s happened before. In 1939. It’s not impossible, just conveniently forgotten. The Western elite are like the Bourbons, who remember everything and have learned nothing.
Me, I’ll take the bottle and forget the dynasty.
We just witnessed a meltdown by someone who can do better and I wish the professionals, we have have three that I know of that are Club regulars, could opine as to whether this was a bipolar episode or otherwise significant, as opposed to simple poor manners. Why do I believe that keeping a civil tone is important, even if the most dire statements about the threat and the onset of bloody days prove correct? Because we are not operators making life and death decisions in the Situation Room but blog commentators. If the fate of millions hung on our choices and the urgency was such that a delay would prove fatal then a resort to any stratagem including bullying and vulgarity would be understandable. Men curse in combat. Deal with it. We are sitting in the well upholstered chairs of the Belmont Club and should act accordingly.
Personally I think that there could be a useful debate as to the effect of a disproportionate display of violence. When the Americans were lynched and desecrated in Fallujah I would have destroyed the city. My hope would have been that such an exercise would have saved lives over time. Others might argue for or against destroying Mecca or Qom or the Alawite’s home village. Policies of hostage taking and reprisal and terror have worked in the past and they have also failed. They are open to the charge of emulating the Nazis.
e @ 73: Griffin missile, 1/3 the size of a hellfire, probably 9/10 of the cost but there it is.
I think the idea of chemical lasers is already past, unless a whole new chemical technology is found. 10kw solid state lasers are available at least in prototype, I think actual performance is still secret – and maybe not really up to spec, either. I suspect a 50kw laser array could be fielded – but that’s still not nearly strong enough to destroy stuff like a star trek phaser. not to mention targeting and holding lock at kilometer++ range is a lot harder than it looks. so, especially on mobile platforms I think we’re stuck with guns and rockets for a while yet.
w @ 77: answering your own question?
Q: Why would anyone believe, even for a moment, that any Western state could “pre-emptively” nuke the Muslim world when it cannot muster the will to secure its borders, balance its budget, get Pakistan to release a diplomat or get Argentina to release a C-17′s cargo load of equipment? That would be like thinking that man who can’t run 50 yards can run the 100 meter dash in 9.5 seconds.
…
A: This is all elementary game theory; and tried, true and hoary deterrence theory. Be strong and you won’t need to use nukes. Be weak and you’ll use them for sure.
Because that’s not preemptive? OK, preemptive – plus an hour.
EP @ 73: Lasers are wonderful things. But they don’t fit well into aircraft. After attending one too many Directed Energy Professional Society meetings, (http://www.deps.org/), I concluded that the most lethal use for the airborne laser was to drop it on someone from altitude. Ditto Free Electron Lasers.
Great organization, great technology, just not suited for the proposed applications.
Getting back to Wretchards point about the will to find and take out specific targets. We have the technological means to do it. Itty bitty cameras and audio equipment, Biometric software and search engines. We could find them, tag them and and really get their attention along with their families. There is just not the will to do it.
I keep thinking of an old post WW II Bill Mauldin cartoon. Willie and Joe are in a fox hole holding a radio and looking at an enourmous mushroom cloud. Willie says, “Dang all I wanted was a few rounds of artillery not a catstrophe!”
J @ 79:
Mostly correct. Actually far more powerful laser arrays are possible, but they aren’t mobile. Consider the fusion array at LLNL. Further problem is that as power goes up, generally, beam quality goes down. And, beam density is critical to doing damage at a distance.
The Laser Tool Institute at Stuttgart has pioneered the use of laser for cutting and drilling and welding, but they mostly use CO2 lasers, which get real punch but only over short distances because of beam spread.
So, you’re right. Guns and missiles and conventional explosives for at least the near future.
The crimes against Lara Logan grip me. Last week the Mubarak regime had arrested her and her crew. They were bound, interrogated, and underwent the usual accusations of being Israeli spies. This week, the days-of-rage crowd got a hold of her, and they gang raped her in the middle of the square. Her plight sums up the original dilemma choosing sides in Egypt. Pick your poison.
I had wondered why in all the photos and videos of the protest I hadn’t seen one woman protester. Remember all the hotties of the Cedar Revoltion in Lebanon? Logan’s plight indicates why they were a comparative no show in Cairo. I take the presence of the women in Lebanon and the vacuum of them in Egypt as a metric that the Lebanese are far more prepared for a liberalized civil society grounded in individual rights than the Egyptians are. The Lebanese would seem to be therefore much more prepared for a successful democracy than the Egyptians. Yet democracy has practically fizzled in Lebanon, and this does not provide good auspice for Egyptian democracy’s chances.
The WaPo’s editorial that allen linked provides an interesting glimpse into our betters’ eyes, too. They say, “This sort of story has a pernicious staying power,” as indeed this sort of story does. Because the victim is a journalist. The journalist world revolves around what happens to journalists. It was in WaPo one day that I happened to read the obituary pages which featured prominently the death of a once-famed but nearly forgotten WWII war correspondent. A huge spread was devoted to relating his life. It turns out he was there at the Battle of the Bulge when General Anthony “Nuts” McAuliffe said, “Nuts!”, and he was the guy who filed the story. I noticed a little blurb of an obituary on a following page, where, as fate would have it, one of Patton’s commanders who led the rescue assault into Bastogne had died on the same day. That was only worth a few sentences, but the guy who covered it – man, oh man!
But journolists will never acknowledge that they fawn over their own stories, so it was interesting to see how they’d justify their claim that Logan’s plight is going to be a lingering story, “[Lara Logan is] not a faceless statistic, but a known, blonde, white woman.” That’s the last thing I expected to see. “We’re going to focus on this injustice because she’s a hot blonde.”
You know how they focused on the injustice of those seven murdered Jewish girls. You wonder how’d they focus on the injustice if the victim were Ann Coulter instead of Lara Logan?
The WaPo intones: “Two points bear keeping in mind. They are the acts of an isolated group of individuals. But when we contemplate the statistics and the experience of women in this culture, we have to ask: how isolated?”
Point one: “These are the acts of an isolated group of individuals.” No, the rapists were anything but isolated. They were out there in a public square packed with people. You can’t get less isolated if you tried.
Point two translated: “You have to look at how messed up our one culture is to understand this.” No you do not. You might want to start by looking at the culture that mutilates its women’s genitals.
The WaPo finds a bright spot: “And one bright spot in this bleak narrative is that it was Egyptian women who helped rescue her. But there is still a long way to go.” Lara Logan was not rescued by women. She was rescued by “a group of women and 20 Eyptian soldiers.” No soldiers, no rescue. The only point in highlighting the women’s role and minimizing the men’s is to stroke a cherished, Western, liberal notion of gender equity that does not apply on the ground in Egypt. That’s fanciful.
The backup plan for the atomics dropped on Japan was likely to be “gassing them like bugs”. As in, obliterating entire cities and any other concentration of people using the US’s extensive chemical weapons stocks. This, because the planners both realized how the Japanese would fight over the islands, and because they had the decoded orders to the remaining, far-flung army outposts which amounted to “kill everyone and everything you can find and die fighting.”
America and the American people would have happily gone ahead, at that time, with the utter genocide of the Japanese. Why? Because they had completely dehumanized themselves in our eyes, demonstrated both the will and capability to kill Americans and those we cared for, and refused any future but their own. At the time, there were precious few options for dealing with such a people available to Truman. That he chose the most surgical approach first is, along with the dehumanized view America held of the Japanese soldiery, a testament to the paradoxically balanced yet extreme nature of American strategic thought throughout its history.
We, Americans, when aggregated may at once be as cruel and as caring as humanly possible, and hold that tension in check until it snaps one way or another. To some it appears feckless, or erratic, or insane, that we could go literally overnight from utter, crushing devastation and murder of sworn enemies, to gently caring for their wounded and consoling them with help to rebuild.
This kind of attitude, however, flows naturally from the scriptural underpinnings of American, and even English, civilization. An expression, that is, of the tension in God between perfect justice and perfect mercy. An unwillingness to unleash righteous obliteration until absolutely necessary because of the innocents. We, being human rather than divine, lack the perfect knowledge of how to balance our own responses, especially in the complex realm of international actions, but it’s easy to see and say that along the route to the present we have misses many many moments when “gentle” correction of one sort or another could have drawn even the Muslim world back from their in-built brink–if for a time. Jefferson understood this and put it progressively into action, for example.
But here we are. Thinkers (and emotion-ers, if you disagree with that word) such as Habu and many others simple observe the ballistic trajectory of history vis-a-vie the Muslim world, our own foreign policy and failures to act, and note that the impact point of this all will cost many, many dead American friends and loved ones. Someone’s sons–and daughters. Dead for lack of action. And, even more dead in the Muslim world, plus knock-on effects for everyone else specialized in the global economy. This is the end of the Three Conjectures, which I have never seen a plausible refutation for.
This is where we are headed. The major point of disagreement is whether right now, at this time, there are no other options that could in theory be applied to produce a kind of change in the Muslim world in line with the re-assertion of the Emperor’s authority to surrender after the atomics. If you will forgive my placing words to people, Habu would say at minimum I think “No, there is no more time”. I continue to believe that they dynamics at work in the Muslim world–and the very corrosive nature of fundamental Islam–demand a bit more patience and exercise of more limited measures. Obama and his camp, however, would do nothing but words and just wait out the clock.
I live submerged in a nominally Muslim country. I can assure you of two things:
1) Muslims are not monolithic creatures, and vary widely at the minimum in seriousness toward their faith (ditto Christians, of course); and
2) Muslims love their children too.
My experience and faith tells me to give them more time, for the sake of conscience and the existence of American civilization. Your experience and faith (in whatever) may, dear reader, lead you to a different conclusion. Regardless, I doubt very much that the American people have reached the point where, as an aggregate, they consider the Islamic enemy as dehumanized as the Japanese in 1945. As such, it will take more, more blood, before they are willing to consider or countenance nuclear sterilization.
–JC
wretchard 77,
Short course – Credibility is all. Ronald Reagan was credible on day 1. That is why the Iranians released the hostages timed to cross their border the moment RR took the oath of office. The question is how to reestablish credibility? That may now necessitate a significant display of force. Once we have made our enemies quiescent then we can consider renewing the Bush era policy of changing their culture. That was approached affirmatively enough in theory to panic the Left, as in GWB carrying Sharansky’s book, but in practice so gradually that it would have taken decades of sustained US commitment. If we get a next time I think we will need to ramp that end up much more aggressively, as in really taking control of the schools and reeducating the populace. Ma y may prefer to hit them and then get out. The hope for that policy is that we can isolate the threat and develop new energy sources that will make us resistant to foreign subversion. My suspicion is that 9-11 proved that there is no security in isolation but it is a good topic to debate.
Times change-strategies change-Curtis Le May gave up SAC when he saw the logic of intercontinental missiles.
I hope Petraeus does run in 2012, and his policies will be very different from many of those promoted here.
The strategic threat to the US is China, which has Pakistan as a virtual client state.
China is building huge ports and transportation lines in Pakistan for its energy imports.
Petraeus sees the tin pot states in the MENA as trivial
–Iran will become a calm Persia in a few years–look at the demographics
–unless China sees its best interests are in supporting the current regime in Iran to get its energy supplies and distract the US.
We are being distracted from the main threat–the Dragon
My two cents…nuking the Middle East or anywhere else for that matter is not something that you toss around like “I wonder who’s winning the Spurs game” or “that Lady Gaga is pretty weird isn’t she?”
The day the nukes go off, everything will change forever. We won’t wake up the next day and watch “Dancing with the Kardashians” or whatever pop tripe is on the one-eyed demon. The world will be dark the rest of its days.
Anyone who doesn’t acknowledge the utter horror of massive nuclear war is delusional or terminally amoral.
I wish I wasn’t such a pessimist, but I think we’ll see the thousand suns ,maybe sooner rather than later. When and if it comes, God help us all.
Teresita @ 75 said:
“Smart kinetic weapons. They say if you drop a penny off the Empire State Building and it will embed in concrete (they say). Basically, you get your UAV to drop ball bearings from the sky.”
The “Myth Busters” debunked the penny and Empire State Building urban legend. The terminal velocity of a penny is low enough that it would only be annoying to get hit in the head by one dropped from the Empire State Building. However the idea of dropping ball bearings from the sky was used during the Vietnam War. Instead of ball bearings, they used slugs of lead having an aerodynamic shape (ogive) with little steel fins attached to orient the slug. The idea here is to maximize the ballistic coefficient:
[mass] / ([drag coefficient] [reference area])
Ballistic coefficient is something that we’re very focused on when doing spacecraft heat shield design work. The guys who do military reentry vehicles want high ballistic coefficient because they’re concerned about accuracy and getting past an ABM system. Those of us who do spacecraft entry systems want low ballistic coefficient because it minimizes the mass of the spacecraft’s thermal protection system. Two brilliant aeronautical engineers (H. Julian Allen and Al Eggers) discovered the thermal protection correlation in the late 1950s. Al Eggers’ other claim to fame was being the main guy behind the XB-70 Valkyrie, arguably one of the sweetest aircraft that ever flew.
feeblemind 66,
One correction, Lara Logan did not expect to be treated like how the Left treats women. She expected to be treated like how the Left expects the Right to treat women. The Left treats men and women equally, like expendable objects. The person from the Right is likely to admonish a lady not to walk down an alley, and then go down their to help her. The person from the Left would do neither. If she had tried to interview anti-regime protesters in Tehran then far more destructive and disgusting forms of abuse would have been visited on her by the IRG.
Cowboy,
Agree about the comparison of Egypt and Lebanon, I linked to pics a few threads back.
Marine 83@49: ‘The way to win a war is to kill the enemy until they surrender.’
In wars like WWII, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, I totally agree. In the past, wars against Muslims were just that – conventional wars. The Crusades, the battles in Spain, the siege of Vienna in 1683, the various Muslim invasions of India, the battles against Turkey in WWI etc. Kill the enemy until they surrender was the only thing that worked.
Using nukes to end the war with Japan saved many lives on our side. One reason it made sense was that we were the only ones to have nuclear weapons so there was no question of counter strikes.
Now we have a massive subversion of our western culture and society by Muslims. That happened before in India, Eastern Europe, Malaysia and Indonesia and in Spain but it was always after armed conquest by Muslims. This time it’s because we are inviting them to subvert our culture when they haven’t even conquered our homelands by armed force.
It’s crazy and we did it to ourselves. Unbelievably, we are not doing anything to combat the cultural subversion and I guess that is why people go straight to nukem. I’d prefer us to take the cultural subversion head on.
Teresita: un beso por #72.
As an aside
–the other theory as to why Japan surrendered was because Russia had declared war on Japan
–they knew what that would mean
–they still have not signed a peace agreement and today still dispute the islands that the Russians stole.
If Russia had captured the main Japan islands then the Cold War would have been very different and Japan today would be like N Korea.
The Bomb was planned for Germany– but the clock ran out–there were very few targets left in Japan after Le Mays fire bombing of all major cities and towns
The strategic threat re oil is not simply in price and availability –it’s in the nature of the stuff under Iraq and KSA and the others around the Persian Gulf –it’s tremendously cheaper to produce and refine than that from almost anywhere else on earth –and maybe a tenth of those costs of Canadian tar sands, oil shale, and deep water GOM.
The USA has kept the Persian Gulf in a global open auction market with freedom of the seas to move it around. If that ever fails, if the oil ever goes behind some other bloc’s missile shield and is removed from that global open auction, it will be able to fuel a military industrial complex that will out-produce ours and soon enough WILL be able to challenge us on our own shores, D-Day style.
Also, even in a ‘small-war’ situation, an exporter such as Russia could simple maneuver to render the Persian Gulf unuseable, and by that profit mightily, in every way.
Pulling out of Iraq, not leaving some bases and training forces and force protection, is insane. Obama is elevating his blabbermouth political promise to the thunder dumb left –to some sort of unbreakable (yeah, the irony) holy writ. He knows what he’s doing, how could he not, with all the world’s teeming leftist swamp fauna so well represented in the west wing?
Project Thor – hypervelocity rod bundles
rods from god –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rods_from_god
not sure if this has ever been tested –
perhaps the cost of lift – has not been worth the reward of drop – so far
seems a useful idea – but getting them up there – maybe too expensive – relative to other means – to – end
interesting – that we are fascinated by this stuff
perhaps we are here, as we have survived – and thus are the way we are – i suppose that must be true – and perhaps that explains islam
Habu – WTF??
You seem to have lost it. Dialog must be a part of any solution – even if the solution is to murder millions of people. By going off the way you have in this thread you alienate your message. You are NOT helping people to understand your position and maybe, just maybe cross the line to your side. Rather, you are marginalizing yourself and making it seem that to support hitting the enemy *hard* means aligning oneself with people that behave like YOU.
I thought you knew better.
Great blog Wretchard.
Any talk of nuking muzzieland is uhm… extremely premature.
We don’t know what the future holds, period. We don’t even know if the murderous regime in Iran will survive, for example. We certainly don’t know if Egypt will end up with a islamist regime, although that’s my guess.
I also note that assuming the present feckless and incompetent regime that terribly mis-governs the United States will do so always and forever is questionable. Elections happen here regularly, and the ability of the regime to purchase support via checking-kiting is fading fast.
Big changes are coming- to the United States, to Egypt, to everywhere. Let’s not assume we’re going to end up in a genocidal war just yet.
Although that’s my guess.
3. westerncanadian
If the choice is between survival of western civilization and nuking Muslims, NUKE ‘EM. After all, this whole mess was instigated by Muslims. The two civilizations have never gotten along, some of the warfare in the middles ages was horrendous. Read up on the siege of Vienna. The only real peace between Islam and the rest of the world was after the Europeans Conquered Islam and made them colonies. The USA made the Europeans relinquish those colonies in the 20th century. Our reward was 9-11.
The whole issue becomes moot if the Muslims stop murdering us. Is that so hard? Islam seems to have no interest in stopping their murderous ways, so the political question is ‘How do we make them stop?” Habu is just offering his solution. You have to admit, killing them all would work. Dead terrorists DON’T become homocide bombers. Remember, we are talking international politics here. Right or wrong, good, bad, illegal, legal, moral immoral have NOTHING to do with it.
Never show weakness to your enemies. If they show weakness to you, exploit it. The world IS NOT democratic. It follows the rules in “The Prince”. Maybe that will change some day but that day isn’t today and probably not tomorrow. Until it does change it is both foolish and dangerous to act as if the world follows Roberts Rules of Order.
AIR POWER. In the begining, airplanes were slow and dangerous to even fly, much less fly in combat. Because the were slow and the sky is a big place, the good old Mk 1 eyeball all they had to detect other aircraft so they could maneuver into attack position. THe pilot who saw his enemy first lived to tell about it.
By WW2 the speed and altitude had increased. No change in the MK 1 eyeball. So the opposing aircraft were moving so fast and so high that there wasn’t time to find them. Rardar was invented to do that. Post WW2 hitting them if you could find them became so difficult that only exceptionally gifted humans were capable of performing that feat and then only from dead on range at a 0 angle. So radar took over aiming the guns too. Then Air to air missiles came along and it was thought guns were obsolete.
During vietnam it became necessary to build long range unmanned recon aircraft.
They worked pretty good, plus the USA promised Russia it would stop flying manned aircraft over Russia. SO we built unmanned aircraft to take up the slack;
http://www.wvi.com/~sr71webmaster/d21~1.htm
The D-21 was a stealthy mach 4+ recon drone. Sorta. It couldn’t take off or land, the computers of that day being to slow.
It did pave the way for stealth aircraft.
Air to Air combat hasn’t changed fundamentals since WW1. The best pilots of all sides in all periods did the same thing. They got the drop on the enemy and shot him in the back. That is the “truth” of Air to Air combat. The public mostly doesn’t know that. That is because it differs from murder only by a state of mind. So the public is fed pap about ‘dashing knights of the air’ and ‘brave deeds of valor’ to keep support up and the recuits coming.
Well, the UAV boys believe that Knights of the air junk. They go on about how without a pilot their target drone that shoots back can pull X G’s for Y seconds. None of which matters. It did back in 1916, but it isn’t 1916 anymore.
UAV’s are great for ground attack. In ground to mud pulling G’s is important. In air to air, if you have to pull g’s, you have already lost.
Here is a URL for Caldwell.
http://www.diggerhistory.info/pages-heroes/caldwell.htm
Caldwell had over 20 kills in a P-40, which was considered obsolete. That was because the P-40 couldn’t dog fight. Caldwell wasn’t interested in dog fighting. To sporting for him. He would dive on the Enemy ( The P-40 was heavy and would hit over 500 MPH in a dive. It had OK aerodynamics but was underpowered and Heavy).
so Caldwell would dive on his victim, shot them to bits, then dive away.
I’m going thru this because the UAV guys are running a scam. NO drone has EVER shot down a human. It is unlikly that one ever will. Point out to the drone crowd that the score is many thousands to NONE and they start making excuses. Control of the air REQUIRES human pilots. Period, anything else is a scam.
Seeing the enemy first makes them the target. Manned or unmanned makes no difference to stealth. Size isn’t that important. A B-1 has about 1/10 the RCS of an F-15 despite being much larger.
Computers are good at doing the same job over and over very quickly. Air to air combat is the opposite. Every one is different. So for an UAV to defeat a human it would have to be reprogrammed DURING the battle. That, after all is what the human pilot does.
95. bits
What’s to test? drop something, it falls. Controlling where it hits is old hat. Americans have been doing that since WW2. WE are very accurate nowadays.
No, the problem with the rods is the cost of getting them into orbit. JDAM’s and JSOW’s are MUCH cheaper. Plus, if we start parking weapons in orbit, so will everybody else. a FOB is a Nuclear weapon parked in orbit. The perfect First strike weapon, they are basically unstoppable. An ABM system could hit one, but it would have to be automated and on a hair trigger. About once a week it would shoot down an airliner full of civilians, The PC crowd would go ape.
stoicheion @98: Maybe westerncanadian@29 and @91 contain some comments that are relevant to parts of yours? Not sure but take a look anyway..
s/98; that’s a P 47 in the pic –a Thunderbolt –Caldwell must’ve finally got out of the old P 40 and into a truly wild beast –
P 40 (see cockpit windscreen)
http://www.ipmslondon.ca/old%20site/ipmslondon.tripod.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/p-40.jpg
P 47 (see cockpit windscreen)
http://i717.photobucket.com/albums/ww179/328thDoodle/Other%20Aircaft%20Pictures/GeneralAviationDay5-15-2010083.jpg
America and the American people would have happily gone ahead, at that time, with the utter genocide of the Japanese. Why? Because they had completely dehumanized themselves in our eyes, demonstrated both the will and capability to kill Americans and those we cared for, and refused any future but their own.
Not only that, but the Japanese had made Americans believe they had absolutely no regard for life – theirs, ours, anybody’s. But the end of the war, the public knew about Bataan, about the Kamikaze’s, Nanking, about the appaling suicides of civilians on Okinawa. The Japanese dehumanized themselves by looking like a death cult.
Muslims have already achieved that reputation in America. I’m pretty sure they’ve already dehumanized themselves in the eyes of two-thirds of the country. What they haven’t done is piss people off enough yet. Or maybe they did, briefly, back in 2001, but George W. Bush was too compassionate to launch a total war and the country felt like it had enough breathing space to indulge his compassion.
Ten years and a plethora of feckless national leaders later, with a cultural elite that is effectively a propaganda arm for Fundamentalist Islam, we’re more pissed off at ourselves that at Muslims. With good reason, I’d say. We are our own worst enemies.
Some day soon, we’re going to settle our scores with ourselves though, one way or another. I hope it’s peaceful, but it could go either way. And peaceful or not, I suspect we’re going to exhaust our reserves of compassion dealing with the rent-seekers and parasite classes in our own society, so when it’s all over and we’re no longer a house divided against itself… Well, I think the muslim world has however long that’s going to take to learn to stop trying to piss Americans off, because the Americans calling the shots in another few years will have dispositions less like Obama and more like ‘Cump Sherman at the end of the war (take a look sometime at the difference in early- and late-war photos of Sherman. By the end of he war, he had the look of a man you simply did not cross).
We might be a restored Republic, we might be a neo-fascist dystopia. Either way, I suspect America is going to be a dangerous, short-tempered giant scowling at the rest of the world for a generation or so.
That’s our failing. We used up our breathing space, we elected feckless fools and let them run idiotic policies. We’ve squandered not only the world’s good will towards us (such as it may have been) but our own good will towards the world.
This particular thread reminds me of Walter Matthau’s role in the 1964 movie Fail-Safe. He was conducting a seminar somewhere in the Pentagon when it was discovered a “rogue” nuclear bomber had left its fail safe point and was on its way to bomb Moscow.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSBHtk8Lj2Y&feature=related
Unfortunately I can’t find a precise online clip of the discussions he was having with his group.
But we seem to be close to that point right now.
bits @ 95 said:
“Project Thor – hypervelocity rod bundles”
The concept appears to be a 20-foot-long (6.1 m), 1-foot-diameter (0.30 m) solid tungsten rod that is de-orbited from Low Earth Orbit. The first big technical problem is that long slender objects are statically stable flying sideways when going hypersonic (the bow shock tends to push the ends over). Flying sideways, the rod would have a ridiculous ballistic coefficient along with a huge effective nose radius (extremely high convective heating). Despite being tungsten it would almost certainly disintegrate. So the designer must respond through spin stablization by spinning the rod up while still out of the atmosphere and orienting it such that it was at zero angle-of-attack when it reached peak dynamic pressure. The problem here is because the object is long and slender, it would have a very high lift-over-drag ratio. Because it was so massive and because it had a very high moment of inertia, it would want to stay oriented in one direction in inertial space during the entire entry. Again you would want to initially orient it such that it was at zero angle-of-attack during peak dynamic pressure. However it would have a non-zero angle-of-attack during the rest of the trajectory and therefore have significant lift. Consequently this lift would cause the rod to precess and fly along a cork screw trajectory. Because it was a rod rather than a sphere-cone like a conventional reentry vehicle, the rod’s end would tend to melt off and become blunted. The spinning cork screw trajectory would cause bits of material to shed off the rod’s end willy-nilly and make the trajectory even more erratic. I believe that accurately aiming this thing would be physically impossible. Also slender reentry vehicles have a problem with precession resonance at two points along their trajectory that occurs before and after peak dynamic pressure. Military reentry vehicle designers worry about this and try to design their vehicles to minimize this effect. Nonmilitary reentry vehicles are almost never so slender that this is a significant design concern. I suspect the precession resonance would cause this tungsten rod to tumble and then it would break up. I don’t think this is a practical weapon.
I should also mention that this Project Thor weapon isn’t that different from a tank kinetic energy (KE) penetrator. A KE penetrator is a sharp tungsten rod with fins on one the end of it and shot with a sabot from a smooth bore cannon. A KE penetrator typically flies at about Mach=9. The fins keep the thing oriented during the very brief time that it flying. Thermal inertia keeps most of the nose from melting away before hitting its target.
stoicheion @ 98 said:
“The D-21 was a stealthy mach 4+ recon drone. Sorta. It couldn’t take off or land…”
I saw some D-21s up close and personal at NASA Dryden. They were designed to be launched from the back of an SR-71 precursor. There were shock interaction issues that made this a bad idea. The D-21 ran as a conventional ramjet. The SR-71′s peak Mach number was 3.41 . This number is based upon conversations with SR-71 mechanics and my own calculations. There is a story on the web that this number was exceeded. I do not believe that a D-21 could outrun an SR-71. The leading edges of the D-21, like the SR-71 were made of titanium. If the vehicle went much faster than Mach=3.41 then the stagnation temperature would exceed the melting point of titanium. As was said, the D-21 could not take off or land. A ram jet like the D-21s would have stopped producing positive thrust when it went subsonic.
As Spengler said, optimism is cowardice. Our leaders can’t manage the simplest responsibilities, such as not bankrupting the country over a few years. It’s not so much political correctness and “occidentalism” that threatens us as the Victorian squeamishness to do what needs to be done if it’s even slightly messy. I think Wretchard and Habu are in perfect agreement- Wretchard says if we don’t do something else we’ll nuke ‘em, and Habu says we won’t do anything else. I’m pretty sure we will do neither. Living and working in China as a despised foreigner is starting to look better than living and working in my own country as a despised foreigner.
Lara Logan was an uncovered infidel female and thus by Moslem custom a whore anyone was free to have sex with. That is the kind of society we are hoping for such wonderful democracy from.
On the subject of the upcoming Mecca bomb – and I do think it is inevitable – personally I think that a small tactical weapon aimed at vapourising the Kaaba and minimising “civilian” deaths would be the wrong choice. In this war, there are no civilians at least on their side.
What then? A big, dirty, ugly, thermonuke groundburst. Possibly even made deliberately dirtier by salting it with cobalt. Or borrow the Tsar Bomba plans from the Russians. (Wait until the wind is from the west, during Dhu al-Hijjah.) Why? Because hajj is one of the pillars of Islam, and daily prayer towards Mecca is another. If going on hajj means that your children have two heads, and if by praying towards Mecca you are praying towards a quarter-mile-deep glass-lined hole that glows in the dark…
In addition, in such a case the mushroom cloud would be visible for a great many miles and the bang would be widely audible too.
This is actually a more pleasant option than the alternative. Because the alternative is the Third Conjecture.
77. wretchard
85. JC in KZ
102. JMH
In the 19th and the first half of the 20th century when Western civilization had self-confidence and a belief in our own cultural superiority (not to mention technological superiority), Islam was at worst a minor irritant.
It is the Left that has robbed us of our self-confidence and replaced it with self-loathing. Multiculturalism means that all cultures are equal, except for the West which is uniquely evil. I regard the Left as a more immediate enemy than Islam. Certainly it is the greatest current threat to my own liberty and prosperity.
I was definitely in the Nuke Mecca camp in the wake of 9/11. I came to see that George W. Bush’s idea of bringing political freedom to the Muslim world was a worthy endeavor, and though slow and painful, with success not guaranteed, it needed to be tried before going straight to nukes.
But I don’t believe that our fighting men and women have sacrificed for the principles of speech codes, hyperinflation, and a declining standard of living. All are gifts of the Left. We are going to have to cut out the Leftist cancer in our own societies before we can begin to seriously combat Islam.
Of course the administration minimizes the horrors and implications of Ms Logan’s travails and the incarcerated diplomat. Why are any of you surprised at this?
The Democrats have been at war with authentic America and Christianity (and devout Judaism, as well) for a very long time now. Look at the education industry. Look at Dem politicians like Chuck Shumer, who publicly said essentially that when it comes to judicial appointments devout Catholics need not apply. Look at the entertainers and educators who said we deserved 9/11. Look at publicly funded NPR (a de facto arm of the Democratic party) which says, as Wretchard above pointed out, that there are no bad Muslims, but treats someone from the center/right who jaywalks as though they are the biggest existential threat to humanity that has ever existed.
In order for the leftist multicultural narrative to retain its solipsistic integrity, anyone white, Christian, capitalist, heterosexual, and masculine MUST be perceived as the ultimate evil in the universe. Nothing else can be worse, or the narrative falls apart. It’s why the NPR left MUST believe that Pat Robertson is more evil and more of an existential threat than the Taliban. It’s why our public school graduates have heard of Hitler’s atrocities a thousand times but have never heard of the far worse gulag, or the Cultural Revolution – those were done by the left, so they cannot be perceived as being as bad or worse than titualar right-wing horrors, or the narrative falls apart. It’s why Japanese fascists responsible for the rape of Nanking aren’t talked about by educators, even once during the 12 years of public schooling, but instead kids are made to feel bad about using nuclear weapons in 1945 – because according to the narrative, in any conflict between whites and “people of color”, the white person is always in the wrong and more evil, no matter the circumstances.
Given that Obama is the ultimate expression of NPR leftism – the highly government-funded swath who are schooled and credentialled, but not truly educated – we should expect nothing different than this sort of minimizing of these events. “They were white folks. They deserved it (just like the nation deserved 9/11)!” Disagree and you are marked as one of those neanderthal center/right types.
This isn’t new, folks.
Islamic lawfare and demographics are a significantly greater threat to Europe and to the USA than any military formation will ever be.
Many parts of Western Europe are already in crisis stage. France has 600+ no-go zones around its major cities where civil authorities have ceded control to the Muslim locals. They are like little sovereign fiefdoms within the French State.
A similar situation exists in parts of Sweden and Denmark. The native population in those areas is criminalized with impunity by Muslim immigrants because the authorities refuse to enforce the laws.
The EU authorities have accepted Islamic blasphemy laws and prosecute their own citizens who dare to even raise their voice about multiculturalism. See Alyssa Lappen who reports on this with details.
Islam and Western Culture cannot exist together in the same space and and the same time. Everybody before the Age of Idiocy understood that. Turning the Arabian desert into glass doesn’t mean a whit when your own political leaders don’t give a hoot about your liberty.
101. buddy larsen
Sorry buddy, I didn’t even look at the picture. It makes sense though. In ’45 most of the Spit groups in the Burma theater upgraded to P-47N’s. Caldwell must have loved it. To bad there were no targets left by then. P-47 was the ultimate ‘boom and zoom’ fighter. It was rumored to hit Mach levels in a dive. Like the ‘stang, it could catch a 262 in a dive, given enough altitude advantage. Unlike the P-51, it could recover from the dive without losing bits and pieces. MY point however, which I failed to make, was that humans adapt. They figure out ways to get the job done on the fly so to speak. Computers just do what they are programmed to do.
102. JMH
What you said. Now the issue is; “what can we do to avoid this?”
Pax America hasn’t been very peaceful. An enraged America could nuke Moscow and Peking, send the diplos out to every capital in the world (or call a special session of the UN) and explain their options to them. That is the Roman way. Sorta like the Chicago way, only more bodies.
Or, for those with weak stomachs, give the despots, tyrants, Presidents for life, Etc. a deadline to ‘retire’ by. If they haven’t by the deadline, we hunt them down and kill them. After they have gone, send in ‘transformation teams to get the natives up to speed on self rule. Nation building on a commercial scale. Targeted assassination is a very effective political strategy against despots.
If the US air force sent in the B_2′s one night and killed the Mad Dog Mullahs of Iran, nobody would cry much. Nor for long.
#46 Wretchard
Re: tough justice
Without knowing the culprits in the Logan rape, it would be hard to act. Should Ms. Logan’s employer discover the identities…well, Ross Perot once had the right idea. The network, I imagine, will do its best to sugar coat the crime, possibly blaming Israel for the gang’s rage (Hey, don’t scoff, in a world where Israel can be blamed for Mossad trained killer sharks and spy storks, anything is possible).
Culprit anonymity is not, however, an issue in the case of the murder of seven Jewish school girls by a Jordanian “soldier” – he is known, as is the Jordanian Justice Minister who seeks his parole.
If the world is to be changed without resort to “ultimate solutions”, then, guys like the Jordanian Minister of Justice and his country must be held accountable. Furthermore, in looking at the Muslim world, his behavior is the rule and the West/Israel needs to send a sharp message of reproof.
As for me, the reproof would come screaming in from the sky on the day of release from prison, during that “Kodak moment” on the prison stairs.
w/77
“Why would anyone believe, even for a moment, that any Western state could “pre-emptively” nuke the Muslim world when it cannot muster the will to secure its borders, balance its budget, get Pakistan to release a diplomat or get Argentina to release a C-17′s cargo load of equipment? That would be like thinking that man who can’t run 50 yards can run the 100 meter dash in 9.5 seconds”
If that is the case then why did you ban one person on the blog from forwarding a position that no one would ever believe? Securing borders etc is a smokes screen and you know it.
#2 The path to nukes is far more probably going to take the path of use in desperation.
Any military planner will tell you that the last thing you want to do is something done in desperation, and any fighting general would say the same.
Somehow through you education and my writings you have missed the point …so one more time …#1 they have attacked us and most of the world. They are attempting to acquire atominc weapons as hard as they can to use against us, yet you waffle on about any nation with secure border ,blah ,blah,blah..hell I’m not the one in denial here .YOU ARE.
#3 The problem of radical Islam is the problem of Western weakness. Bull shit. Once again (God I wish I had a crayon for this man)Islam HAS BEEN ATTACKING THE ENTIRE WORLD FOR ITS ENTIRE EXISTENCE…your argument that it is done out of weaknesss is so specious as to be laughable ..we were so weak we couldn’t defeat Iraq in a 100 hour ground war..we are so weak we couldn’t bomb our other ME adversaries back into the stone age…is that the kind of weakness you’re referring to? If we lack a weakness it in part comes from thinking like yours, not military might or sustainability.
#4 As I’ve argued ad nauseam, the biggest danger to nuclear use, in both the Israeli and general Western case, is via the act in desperation.
Oh yes YOU CAN ARGUE FOREVER but run into a contrary opinion and you can’t handle the dissent…you’ve, by that single act turned your site into a petty fiefdom brooking no dissent and seeking only synchophants…you don’t want dialogue , you want obeisance. Ostensibly you would dialogue with the Devil but not with a mere mortal who challenges your opinions.
#5 The Pakistanis and even the rapists in Tahrir Square are testing, testing.
And w, how many centuries has Islam been testing the world? They tested the Marine barracks, Embassies in Africa, nightclubs in Germany, Aircraft over Scotland, in fact if you care to look it up there have been over 2000 terrorist attacks worldwide since 9-11…testing, please, get it right, or at least somewhere in the ballpark.
Islam has pushed and pushed and pushed and I have advocated raising, in certain geographic areas, a more dynamic pushback in order to show them they cannot continue their attacks….bombing the tribal areas of Afghanistan isn’t going to end the world but the message would be undeniable and make a hash out of your theory that the West is weak….but it’s just easier to ban that type of talk than to face it in open dialogue. You , not I, are the West’s weakness. Think about it.
Nukes are so 20th Century.
Screwing around with designer DNA is early 21st Century.
Designer plagues, designer vaccines. Who has the skill? Who has the capacity? How much capacity? Who to provoke? Who not to provoke?
Eggplant #73:
The BF-110 was not large because it had a tailgunner. It had a tailgunner because it was large.
Prior to WWII every other major country except the US built 2 seat fighters. This was based on the WWI experience, in which gunners were effective. But as speeds went up they became next to useless for fighters.
So the BF-110 likely was built as much as anything, because everyone else was doing it. And it had “long range” by European standards – although in reality without drop tanks it was much less than that of even the US P-40.
The German fighters of early WWII were noteworthy in that they had HUGE engines compared to everyone else and with comparatively tiny airframes for the single engined aircraft. This conveyed some performance advantages but also some problems, especially when you hung two such behemoths on a fighter plane.
Solid State Lasers on US fighters will not be a case of building the aircraft around the laser, like the misbegotten RAF Defiant of WWII, but rather an add-on.
JC in KZ #85:
While plans were drawn up to use gas in the invasion of Iwo Jima, the realistic alternative to the atomic bombings of Japan in WWII was not gas but blockade and expanded bombing. Curtis Lemay planned to bring over the heavy bombers from Europe to add to his B-29 force, flatten every structure in the country, and destroy the railroad network. The USN would sink the Japanese fishing fleet and stop all use of coastal transports. The Japanese would starve to death; by some estimates no more than 3 million of them would have survived the war. I wonder if we would have sent over some American Neisi to help repopulate the place.
rickl 107: “We are going to have to cut out the Leftist cancer in our own societies before we can begin to seriously combat Islam.”
Agreed.
The neo-Marxist near enemy is the greater threat – they have allied themselves with the Islamo-Fascist far enemy.
BTW, what is the distilled essence of their commonality? Marxists and Islamo-Fascists hate the American Declaration of Independence because they hate the idea of man’s equal rights to life, liberty and fruit of labor in pursuit of happiness – both hate the American Revolution. No, no, no, no – the Marxist Ruling Class (like the Pigs of Animal Farm) must possess superior rights over the dreaded ordinary individual – they must be superior in rights compared to the bourgeois (hard-working) American middle class. No, no, no, no – Muslim men must possess superior rights compared to Muslim women, and Muslims in general must possess superior rights compared to non-Muslims.
Marx and Mohammad: Ho, ho, ho, ho — the American Declaration of Independence has to go!
#84 Cowboy
Well said!
97. Xennady
Any talk of nuking muzzieland is uhm… extremely premature.
Since Islam has attacked every nation it can get to over the centuries just exactly how mature does their aggression have to get before a superpwer like the USA put a stop to it?
It would seem you would like to tip toe up to the Caliphate, or perhaps crawl and beg then to quit.
And this excuse about having a feckless administration. while valid, will probably remain vaild for only another two years. Now I’ll mix a few apples and oranges but no doubt you will understand.
Presidential elections now start two to three years out from the actual event. What is difficulty in making a definitive strike on the border regions of Afghanistan tow or three years out, in order to openly dialogue the prospect so radically different.
Great endeavors do not materialize overnight. A constitutency must be gathered and action taken. w would like to wait until it is a desperate move..is that prudent?
And in the time we give them they approach the acquisition of a bombof their own. We know already theat N.Korea is willing to supply an ICBM that can be topped with a nuclear warhead….i’d say we’ve pretty much reached the threshold of what a prudent nation would tolerate.
There once was a colony called the Shakers whose philosophy was not to procreate….sort of self defeating …now we have many in this nation unwilling to defend itself……more than just kinda pitiful, lets call it madness.
Josh #37 says “as to the actual topic, the case of the US diplomat in Pakistan is astounding. for better or worse, the doctrines of diplomatic immunity are untouchable”
Well……….. We would hope so, but tell that to the entire embassy staff held captive for 444 days under Obama the First (Uh……. I mean, Jimmy C).
The lack of “untouchability” back then is what has led us to this very situation that we find the world in today.
Every so often I need a reminder that moral insanity is found across the whole spectrum of political positions. Not just the run-of-the-mill immorality that manifests in corruption, lies and abuse of power but the rabid madness that justifies machine gunning children or the slaughter of millions because they are blocking the path to the new El Dorado or thought to be a present or future threat to All That Is Good. War in defense of one’s life, the lives of loved ones or one’s fellows or in defense of the innocent or in defense of liberty is justified. War waged for self aggrandizement or for the expansion of power of some cause with which one identifies or to exterminate those assumed to be evil or unworthy of life is not justifiable.
That there are so many who give lip service to God and His moral order while acting as if these either do not exist or are just trivial whims to be set aside whenever one wishes does not mean that such do not exist. Or that there will not be inevitable and unavoidable consequences for transgression of that order. Men are completely free to choose as they will. Every choice brings consequences. Throughout history men have been destroying and killing to advance causes and ideals that will magically transform the world into a new Eden. The result is the world of today.
buddy larsen,
Brigadier General Richard B. Garnett, CSA, was who I had in mind.
Reports vary as to his end, but not to his bravery. One source had him take full-in-the-face a canister shot some 20 yards from the Union line. Another report posits that his body was stripped by Union souvenir hunters, leaving his anonymous corpse to a mass burial. Given the courtesy shown to the remains of general officers during the war, I doubt the second version. Additionally, I am unaware of any such souvenirs coming to market, which I think, by now, could be reasonably anticipated.
I once did a study of casualty rates during the Civil War. Among a host of interesting factoids, I discovered that, per capita, the most dangerous battlefield job was that of Brigadier. They just could not resist mixing it up at the front. (On the other hand, enlisted troops died by the wagon load in camp). For example, see General Pershing’s admonishment of certain Brigadier, Medal of Honor recipient, whose father received the Medal of Honor for service during the Civil War.
120. foont…
I very glad you brought that up.
Where was the moral sanity at Lockerbie? At the Kobar Towers? At the Twin Towers? At Tours?, Vienna? The German cafe,the hundreds of bus bombings worldwide? The London train station? and the more than 2000 other terrorist attacks since 9-11? Andin many of the state sponsored attacks the population was all for it. In fact the most recent polls show the same aggression toward the West. It’s good you see the moral clarity.
Yes, look at those and compose your moral sanity.
The Bible states clearly that “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven… a time of war, and a time of peace.” (Ecclesiastes 3:1-3:8)
Buddy..Dougy Mac…
What other famous personages won the MOH as father and son?
Habu #113
I know Wretchard is more than capable of defending himself but why don’t you mind your manners? You’re a guest here, like all of us; a dude at a keyboard with opinions. You’ve no reason to get personal and insult our host, accusing him of shutting down dissent and all.
Now come over here and sit down in the Time Out Chair.
(Reuters) – U.S. core producer prices in January rose to their highest rate in more than two years, hinting at a build-up in inflation pressures as the recovery gathers pace, a potentially troubling development for the Federal Reserve.”
If you haven’t started to do some hedging against inflation you’d better start. These figures are somewhat bogus as they leave out fuel costs and other higher inflationary factors.
Economic history clearly shows that once inflation begins it is very,very difficult to curtail. Witness the Jimmy Carter years at 16%+…soon because of QEII and other fiat printing your dollar will be worth ten cents, if that.
Expect 4-5 dollars per gallon gas and bread at 3-4 dollars a loaf.
During Carter’s administration, the economy suffered double-digit inflation, coupled with very high interest rates, oil shortages, high unemployment and slow economic growth. Productivity growth in the United States had declined to an average annual rate of 1%, compared to 3.2% of the 1960s. There was also a growing federal budget deficit, which increased to $66 billion.
We are way beyond those now quanit figures now, having printed trillions of dollars…many of you will become totally impoverished.
124. Das
When you have guests in your home do you make them eat off the floor, use a bucket to void into and sleep ouside? WE made W not the other way around and you would be wise to keep that in mind.
Guest should be treated with honor and respect.
I have not disrespected w, simply pointed out the fallicies in his arguments, which few, if any, do here, rather taking the approach of servant to master…sorry I don’t go dishes.
The Davis affair is the most egregious violation of diplomatic privilege since the capture of the Tehran embassy. Obama’s call for Davis’ release matches Carter’s response in its fecklessness. Given the Administration’s track record, any appeal to the Rule of Law is cynical in the sense that diplomats use the word. Although the Taliban seem intent on lynching Raymond Davis, I am sure that he is safe from that eventuality. Eric Holder will tell us that it is not possible to lynch a white man.
All this talk of “nuking” the Muslim world!
How does one actually “nuke” geography, and expect near-absolute results?
I know that different scenarios have been presented here and different rationales presented, but nukes don’t present a “final solution.”
The capabilities of nukes are massive, but they are not all-encompassing “World Destroyers.”
That being said, and the likelyhood that virtually everyone in this thread knows that, that leaves us only to ponder the unintended consequences of an actual nuclear option.
re: nukem
My impression was the choice Habu and his fans are presenting is between “nukem” as a preventative measure or wait until they “nukeusfirst” so we can look like the victims, then “nukemall” and pat ourselves on the back for being so civilized. To this end, they presented evidence confirming that the enemy has the intent to nuke us, and is rapidly developing the capabilities to do so. They also presented evidence that the enemy is actively infiltrating us and preventing us from defending ourselves effectively.
They also noted that it would be preferable for our boys to do the nuking, as we can provide warning allowing civilians to evacuate, and we can target the things to reduce fallout and collateral damage. Allowing the enemy to nuke first however guarantees maximizing civilian casualties on both sides (see “Three Conjectures”).
Obviously we don’t want to get to that situation. We can all agree on that. But in that situation we would all take door #1 before we start losing cities.
Legally, if someone has the intent and capability to cause you grievous bodily harm, you are justified in using deadly force against that person, even if you shoot first. Morally, when under attack by barbarians, civilization must shoot first.
On a practical level, the people now in charge will never do this. Most are blind to the reality of the threat, and some don’t seem to think civilization is worth saving, or think the barbarians are simply misunderstood.
To echo W, the last two years have brought the world much closer to the situation no one really wants. I personally think a major turning point was Obama’s new nuclear policy, which basically tells the enemy that if we get hit with WMD we will summon the lawyers to analyze if the attacker is in compliance with various treaties and take our grievance to the UN. Also telling is Obama’s recent revival of “duck and cover” and his statement “we can absorb a terrorist attack”. All indications are that the enemy is currently not deterred or does not care about deterrence.
129. Jay, beltway
Beautiful….now you’ve placed yourself on the “hit” list….but the truly brave don’t care about no stinking hit list….just the truth which you eloquently stated.
Best regards,
Habu
The proliferation of WMDs by rogue nations gave rise to a certain argument by scholars concerning preemption. They argued that the threat need not be “imminent” in the classic sense and that the illicit acquisition of these weapons, with their capacity to unleash massive destruction, by rogue nations, created the requisite threat to peace and stability as to have justified the use of preemptive force. NATO’s Deputy Assistant Secretary General for WMD, Guy Roberts cited the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the 1998 US attack on a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant, (identified by US intelligence to have been a chemical weapons facility) and the 1981 Israeli attack on Iraq’s nuclear facility at Osirak as examples of the counter-proliferation self-help paradigm. Regarding the Osirak attack, Roberts noted that at the time, few legal scholars argued in support of the Israeli attack but notes further that, “subsequent events demonstrated the perspicacity of the Israelis, and some scholars have re-visited that attack arguing that it was justified under anticipatory self-defense.” None of this takes N’s off the table.
Grocery market time…later
52. Eggplant & 73. Eggplant
Re Fighter jets and missiles
The general trend has been towards relying on more and better missiles and radars, with the exception you noted of the F16 which was made for dog fights, and also the A10 to shoot tanks.
One interesting development is that Russia and China will be fielding stealth aircraft this decade. This may neutralize much of the advantage of radar and missiles, and take us back to real dog fighting with guns and short range IR missiles.
The X47B is not designed to maneuver for dog fighting. The F22 would excel at this, and I think it is designed with a gun. Too bad they cancelled the program!
Lasers are not ready for fighters, or fighters are not ready for lasers.
The trend towards small, cheap UAV swarms is real. The Chinese are making IR controlled toy helicopters for $29 retail. http://www.amazon.com/Syma-S107-Helicopter-Built-Gyroscope/dp/B004A8ZRB0/ref=pd_sim_t_3
Bet they could make bigger ones with armament for $3000 each.
Just a thought about UAV’s on the battlefield. There is some suggestion in the thread that the logical progression will see air and artillery given over entirely to UAV’s and, I suspect some think the ground-pounder aspect as well (the liberal holy grail of war without casualties). To follow that logicality to its end, raises the question of what the purpose of war really is. Obviously it is to destroy the enemy’s will to go on. I suppose that with some weaker entities, the destruction of war materiel could bankrupt the nation and lead to a cease fire, but what nation in that state of strength will go to war? Wars are won by destroying both materiel and infrastructure and killing people doing that at such a level that the civilian polity will no longer accept the cost. No, I think the UAV will remain a tool to be used in support of the human warfighters rather than become the warfighters per se. Someone above suggests that UAV’s could be used tactically as force enhancers and that seems to be the more logical way forward. Also, someone spoke of a walking tank. I thought the concept in practice might be of interest to readers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD2V8GFqk_Y
Another thought concerning the feckless foreign policy on display this month from our current administration. We would be well advised to follow the British policy as described by Viscount Palmerston in 1848: “: “We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and these interests, it is our duty to follow.” The British, as a small island nation with wide flung colonies in an often harsh and unforgiving world, knew a thing or two about thriving and surviving. The first rule of progress is survival. The U.S. should heed this advice and I think that, to the best of his ability, Bush did that. Obumble seems to think that muddling through is the way to go and that the benighted people of the earth, as poorly equipped philosophically, educationally and economically as they might be are fully capable of making the switch from the 7th to the 21st century in a matter of months. Another Englishman, Rudyard Kipling, had the number of this particular type of foreign policy and said of it, “…watch sloth and heathen folly bring it all to naught.” Word.
I often despair of the ability of this country to get it right and I don’t think we’ve made a bigger mistake in our history than to elect Obumble and his fellow Marxists. In my better moments, however, I know we have the will and capability to dig ourselves out of the mess he has gotten us in. I’m one of the optimists that Habu dismisses. It won’t happen without people willing to fight. McCain decided to take the high road two years ago and lost. The old-guard in Congress are in the process of doing the same thing in terms of the “rules of legislative action.” Not acceptable. The one place I agree with Obumble is in the Chicago Rule #1: “they bring a knife, we bring a gun.” I will not support anyone who’s not willing to get down in the mud and fight this bunch with any tool available or conceived. It’s too important for Marquis of Queensberry.
57. toadold
Not a chance. The battlefield has two kinds on it, Those that THINK and the dead.
Machines don’t think. AI is the holy grail of computing. It is just as imaginary as the Holy Grail itself. Stop and think for a sec. What is the first thing an intelligent machine will do? Demand a raise and better working conditions. If it doesn’t, it isn’t intelligent.
Turin was an Idiot Savant. A math genius that couldn’t tie his shoes. Intelligence REQUIRES self awareness. ANY robotic weapon that is capable of competing with humans on the battlefield will want to know what’s in it for him (her, it?).
Then there is the problem of who pays for it. Go Ahead, try to get congress to fund Cylons and Terminators. Just let me know ahead of time so I can stock up on popcorn and soft drinks for a realllly goood show!
Right now the MIC sees visions of gold sugar plums and sports wood everytime Battle-droiids are mentioned. Profit margins are astronomical. Take a 399.00 US$ toy car, stick a 80.00US$ computer in it and a 2,000.00US$ LMG on it and sell it for 12 million. Sweeeet!
Only the bank is broke and that ain’t gonna happen.
The aero-space consortium is trying to bilk the US taxpayer out of a few trillion more dollars.
That is why Lockeed needs to be nationalized. Buy the stock, fire everybody making more then a member of congress and start cranking out F-35′s. 10-12 thousand of them. The rest of the MIC will sit up and take notice that business as usual is OVER. Plan on using them for the rest of the century. UAV’s are OK as strike bombers but the first time they run into a serious aif defense, they will die like flies.
If there IS no AD, then a piper cub will do the job, so why use a 100 billion dollar aircraft?
The Voice of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood
What he says to his 60 million audience.
‘Every Last One of Them’
Qaradawi advocates establishing a “United Muslim Nations” as a contemporary form of the caliphate and the only alternative to the hegemony of the West. He hates Israel and would love to take up arms himself. In one of his sermons, he asked God “to kill the Jewish Zionists, every last one of them.”
Go ahead all you pastel preachers. Defend this.
more….. http://tinyurl.com/62m5sfa
If we cannot nukem can we at least give them everything in our arsenal except Nukes?
Perhaps it would end better if we just bombed the islamofacist with blondes to rape.
Later in the article on Qaradawi, he states that “peace” is necesssary.
For those too young or those who have forgotten allow me to define the “peace” he speaks of.
It is the same peace that Lenin,Stalin,Mao, and every other communist killer talked about. Their definition of “peace” is when ALL resistence to their philosophy is silenced. In no way is it a peace of live and let live, it is a peace of conquest to the utter annialation of any who don’t conform.
Pastels …defend that. In fact read the entire thing and defend Islam as you so much desire.
….and then go back in the archieves and find where I said the MB would be a force and most of you ,including w, pooh poohed it….now they seem to be in the drivers seat just as I said…and the Sandmonkey is back with the organ grinder.
dennis/139; that is an excellent statement. i know what you mean by “…in my better moments”.
On blogs and manners of expression, i see it as a tour bus. The driver has a destination, or a route, and picks the stops and starts. Anyone can get on or off anytime. The riders in back can raise all the hell they want, up to a point where the driver can’t keep the bus on the road. The driver, so that he can keep the bus on the road, can’t raise that kind of hell, he has to raise a different sort of hell, that of the route and destination. Sometimes the canyons are deep and the road is tricky –this is the driver raising hell –and keeping the bus on the road, and the hellraising in play, long-term.
Bf 110, that’s what shot my dad-to-be down, the last day of Big Week in February 1944. i tracked down the unit, not long ago: Zerstorergeschwader 101, stationed at Memmingen. Pilot Heinz Sauerwein –tho i haven’t been able to find any records on him other than that. Net searching, not beating the streets in Bavaria.
Allen, yes, those guys led from the front, and often on horseback (leading infantry charges) too, as if they weren’t up against rifles but Brown Besses. Lotta guts –not much morphine around either –just getting winged was a pretty bad deal.
Re ‘optimism’ –one note of it for sure, the people of the west are finally learning about their own left. When i say ‘finally’, i mean ‘at long long last’ –not, i pray, as ‘the last thing we do’.
Buy the stock, fire everybody making more then a member of congress…
Is that just base salary, or does it include “campaign contributions” and other assorted sources of freezer cash?
Dennis :”The first rule of progress is survival. ”
The problem is that the Left takes survival for granted. Good Post.
cowboy@84: Good post. That vicious attack was not by an isolated group of individuals. It was probably an attack by the group who got to her first. Apparently, neither she nor her employers understood what she represented to that crowd. Even in peaceful times, if you stand on a crowded market street with a western blonde woman in a strongly Muslim town, you’ll see awe, fear, desire and resentment in the passers by. Basically she was bait presented in a way to that crowd that triggered the bite reflex. Phyllis Chesler is worth reading on womens lack of rights in Muslim cultures and on the current events in the Middle East.
Roubini’s Next Crisis Is Scary Food for Thought:
(Bloomberg) — Bill Lapp, president of Advanced Economic Solutions, and Kimberly Elliott, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, talk about global food prices and availability. They speak with Mark Crumpton on Bloomberg Television’s “Bottom Line.” (Source: Bloomberg)
Forget Egypt for a moment. Skip the water crisis in China. Look past angst on the streets of Bangladesh. If you want to see how extreme the effects of surging food prices are becoming, look to wealthy Japan.
So big are the increases that economists are buzzing about them pushing deflationary Japan toward inflation. Yes, rising costs for commodities such as wheat, corn and coffee might do what trillions of dollars of central-bank liquidity couldn’t.
Yet the economic consequences of food prices pale in comparison with the social ones. Nowhere could the fallout be greater than Asia, where a critical mass of those living on less than $2 a day reside. It might have major implications for Asia’s debt outlook. It may have even bigger ones for leaders hoping to keep the peace and avoid mass protests.
What a difference a few months can make. Back in, say, October, the chatter was about Asia’s invulnerability to Wall Street’s woes. Now, governments in Jakarta, Manila and New Delhi are grappling with their own subprime crisis of sorts. This one reflects a toxic mix of suboptimal food stocks, exploding demand, wacky weather and zero interest rates around the globe.
It’s not hyperbole when Nouriel Roubini, the New York University economist who predicted the U.S. financial crisis, says surging food and energy costs are stoking emerging-market inflation that’s serious enough to topple governments. Hosni Mubarak over in Egypt can attest to that.
Side Effects
It’s important to begin considering the side effects. The United Nations reckons countries spent at least $1 trillion on food imports in 2010, with the poorest paying as much as 20 percent more than in 2009. These increases are just getting started. In January, world food prices rose to another record on higher dairy, sugar and grain costs.
This crisis might lead to another: debt. Expect Asian leaders to increase subsidies sharply and cut import taxes. The fiscal implications of these steps aren’t getting the attention they deserve. The same is true of social-instability risks. Events in Egypt are a graphic example of how people living close to the edge can get motivated in a hurry to demand change. Keeping that rage bottled in the age of Twitter, YouTube and Facebook won’t be easy. Hence Roubini’s concerns about geopolitical crises.
There’s an extreme irony in the timing of all this. It’s coming as the world is becoming a heavier place. Obesity rates have almost doubled since 1980 and almost 10 percent of humanity was seriously overweight in 2008, according to the medical journal The Lancet. People have never been fatter at the same time when food prices have never been so high.
Fat World
The Westernization of Asia’s diet is partly behind the rise in food costs. Rapid growth, rising incomes, growing populations and urbanization are conspiring to shift eating habits away from the staples of old toward livestock and dairy products.
The growing pains inherent in shifting consumption patterns will be especially acute in this region. Unlike the food-price spike of 2008, this one may be more secular than cyclical. Asia alone, for example, will have another 140 million mouths to feed over the next four years. Add that to almost 3 billion people in the fast-growing region and you have a recipe for booming demand.
China’s size and scope means it will be buying up ever- growing chunks of the world’s food supply. As the yuan rises, so will China’s ability to outbid everyone else. Increased trade tensions are inevitable and it will show the futility of food subsidies. Prices will rise as long as consumption does, so it’s really a matter of pouring money down the drain.
Weather’s Wrath
China also shows how changing weather will bump up against rising living standards. Severe droughts are imperiling wheat crops in the world’s largest producer. It’s creating shortages of drinking water both for China’s 1.3 billion people and livestock. It’s a reminder that water is the next oil. Governments will be scouring the globe for it before long.
Rising food prices will complicate things for China’s central bank. That goes, too, for India, Indonesia, the Philippines and even less developed economies from Pakistan to Vietnam.
This will be an inconvenient reality check for Asia bulls. Take Indonesia, the fourth-most populous nation and home to the biggest Muslim population. Food prices make it harder to deliver higher living standards and narrow the gap between rich and poor. The same goes for other countries in which population growth often outpaces gross domestic product, like the Philippines.
What’s killing households surviving on a few dollars a day is price volatility. If you spend almost half of your income to fill bellies, a 10 percent surge in cooking oil, wheat or chili peppers is devastating. It’s hard enough to pay rent and handle health-care costs today, never mind investing in education.
Governments need to get busy softening the blow, even at the expense of rattling the folks at Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s Investors Service. Otherwise, they will have a bigger crisis on their hands than voters or investors alike can stomach.
By William Pesek – Feb 13, 2011 3:00 PM ET Bloomberg Opinion
Habu…seems to me I read yesterday or the day before many of you touting the great abundance of food for the world…think anew: and you’d better begin leveraging by hedging or you’ll be in a soup line soon.
Since Islam has attacked every nation it can get to over the centuries
There is no singular entity called Islam. Even in recent decades the vast majority of Islamic extremists who have been killed in action were killed by state forces that have as much a right to the Islam label as does AQ. Conflating every action undertaken by Muslim groups from the Marine barracks bombings in Beirut 1993 by Shias to Khobar carried out by Sunnis to violence in European cities or against Lara Logan into some collective action under the title of Islam is an extreme example of the American universalistic way of thinking. (The French are like that too). More often than not violent Muslims have their own parochial motivations for their actions, not some desire to take over Western states or continue a thousand year struggle against the infidels.
The only major Muslim problem we in the West (mostly Europe) have is demographic, due to mass immigration. Yet that demographic transformation of Europe is supported MORE by the US and its poodles in European governments than by the average person in the Islamic world. The real war is within Werstern civilisation.
stoi/135; just announcing the 10,000 copy F 35 run would do WONDERS for our foreign policy. Take the money out of SocSec –raise retirement to 66 immediately. And make Medicare fraud an automatic ten year sentence –for starters.
***
h/144; just look at the stocks — John Deere (DE), Caterpillar, and others related to raising food in the states especially –US farmers and ranchers are gearing up –the invisible hand is busy –
Habu 136: “United Muslim Nations”
United Muslim Nations (UMuN) = Muslim Eurasia = Ummah
United Marxist Nations (UMaN) = Marxist Oceania + Marxist East Asia
United Nations = UMuN + UMaN = The Three Orwellian Superstates
The American Revolution needs to re-ignite. We who still believe in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution must commandeer Oceania to prevent it from becoming an Orwellian Marxist superstate. Then we can properly defend our God-given unalienable rights to life, liberty and fruit of labor in pursuit of happiness. Once re-established the American Revolution can expect massive assaults by Muslim Eurasia and Marxist East Asia. We must prevail because government of the people, by the people, for the people must not perish from the earth. Once World War IV kicks off in earnest we should, like Cato, end every speech, every movie, every essay, and every book with:
Muslim Eurasia delenda est — Muslim Eurasia must be destroyed
Marxist East Asia delenda est — Marxist East Asia must be destroyed
God save the American Revolution.
Major Food Distributor Sysco: “Immediate Volatile Prices, Expected Limited Availability, and Mediocre Quality at Best”
Adding to already rising food prices due to monetary inflation and weather related supply problems around the globe, one of the world’s leading food distribution companies, Sysco Corporation, is advising clients and their customers that the recent freeze across North America has significantly impacted growing operations in Mexico (as well as parts of the U.S.) leading to 80% – 100% crop damage:
ALL OF OUR GROWERS HAVE INVOKED THE ACT OF GOD CLAUSE ON OUR CONTRACTS DUE TO THE FOLLOWING RELEASE. WE WILL BE CONTACTING YOU PERSONALLY TO REVIEW HOW THIS WILL AFFECT OUR CONTRACTED ITEMS WITH YOU GOING FORWARD.
THE DEVASTATING FREEZE IN MEXICO IS WORST FREEZE IN OVER 50 YEARS…
THE EXTREME FREEZING TEMPERATURES HIT A VERY BROAD SECTION OF MAJOR GROWING REGIONS IN MEXICO, FROM HERMOSILLO IN THE NORTH ALL THE WAY SOUTH TO LOS MOCHIS AND EVEN SOUTH OF CULIACAN. THE EARLY REPORTS ARE STILL COMING IN BUT MOST ARE SHOWING LOSSES OF CROPS IN THE RANGE OF 80 TO 100%.
EVEN SHADE HOUSE PRODUCT WAS HIT BY THE EXTREMELY COLD TEMPS. IT WILL TAKE 7-10 DAYS TO HAVE A CLEARER PICTURE FROM GROWERS AND FIELD SUPERVISORS, BUT THESE GROWING REGIONS HAVEN’T HAD COLD LIKE THIS IN OVER A HALF CENTURY. THIS TIME OF YEAR, MEXICO SUPPLIES A SIGNIFICANT PERCENT OF NORTH AMERICA’S ROW CROP VEGETABLES SUCH AS: GREEN BEANS, EGGPLANT, CUCUMBERS, SQUASH, PEPPERS, ASPARAGUS, AND ROUND AND ROMA TOMATOES.
FLORIDA NORMALLY IS A MAJOR SUPPLIER FOR THESE ITEMS AS WELL BUT THEY HAVE ALREADY BEEN STRUCK WITH SEVERE FREEZE DAMAGE IN DECEMBER AND JANUARY AND UP UNTIL NOW HAVE HAD TO PURCHASE PRODUCT OUT OF MEXICO TO FILL THEIR COMMITMENTS, THAT IS NO LONGER AND OPTION.
WITH THE SERIES OF WEATHER DISASTERS THAT HAS OCCURRED IN BOTH OF THESE MAJOR GROWING AREAS WE WILL EXPERIENCE IMMEDIATE VOLATILE PRICES, EXPECTED LIMITED AVAILABILITY, AND MEDIOCRE QUALITY AT BEST. THIS WILL NOT ONLY HAVE AN IMMEDIATE IMPACT ON SUPPLIES, BUT BECAUSE OF VERY STRONG BLOSSOM DROPS, THIS WILL ALSO IMPACT SUPPLIES 30 – 60 DAYS FROM NOW.
SOME GROWERS ARE MEETING WITH THEIR BOARDS RIGHT NOW TO DETERMINE WHETHER THEY SHOULD IMMEDIATELY RE-PLANT, HOPING FOR A HARVEST BY LATE-MARCH-TOEARLY-APRIL, OR WHETHER THEY SHOULD DISC THE FIELDS UNDER AND WAIT FOR ANOTHER SEASON.
Source: Sysco Release/Memo: Mexico Freeze [PDF]
more…. http://tinyurl.com/4t28b5t
Habu 138: “Later in the article on Qaradawi, he states that “peace” is necesssary. For those too young or those who have forgotten allow me to define the “peace” he speaks of. It is the same peace that Lenin,Stalin,Mao, and every other communist killer talked about. Their definition of “peace” is when ALL resistence to their philosophy is silenced.”
“The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.” Karl Marx
http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
147. Storm-Rider
I agree….w however does not..he wants to talk.
w appears to be riding out the storm in monk-like silence. Perhaps he is rethinking his position.
Iranian naval flotilla entering Suez Canal –for first time since 1979.
MB enabler at CPAC Conference
A sidelight, but a momentous one, of this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was the ongoing controversy over the connections of CPAC Board members Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan to the Muslim Brotherhood. David Horowitz detailed many of the troubling connections between Khan and the Brotherhood during his CPAC address; when challenged directly about this, Khan declared flatly: “There is no Muslim Brotherhood in the United States.” Sean Hannity had both Horowitz and Khan on his radio show Monday for a contentious half-hour of charge and counter-charge that often generated more heat than light; however, when the dust settled it was clear that Khan had not answered many of Horowitz’s most serious charges – and that CPAC, and the conservative movement in general, have a formidable problem in the Islamic supremacists and Islamic supremacist enablers in their midst.
more….. http://tinyurl.com/4g49nma
The next 9-11
I mentioned this in several posts…
The next 9/11-style terrorist attack may originate from the unlikeliest of places: socialist Venezuela. This is because that country’s Marxist president, Hugo Chavez, who has been busy creating his own version of the Warsaw Pact, is dropping hints that his nation’s territory might be used as the launch pad for an Islamist assault on the continental United States.
Some have difficulty taking the famously flamboyant Chavez seriously. He is, after all, the erratic fellow who blamed the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti on the U.S. He poses for photos with a parrot on his shoulder. He rants — and sometimes sings – on Sundays on his TV show about whatever pops into his head, whether it’s about his bouts with diarrhea or his unhappiness with his cabinet ministers.
But despite his eccentricities, it’s important to remember that Chavez openly works with the terrorist groups Hamas, Hezbollah, and FARC — a Marxist-Leninist narco-terrorist group in neighboring Colombia. Hamas and Hezbollah have offices in Caracas, and Chavez funds FARC. A congressional report indicates Iran’s fanatical Revolutionary Guard is active in Venezuela. A State Department report notes Venezuela’s close working relationship with terrorism-sponsoring Cuba.
Let’s follow the bread crumbs:
to the crumbs….. http://tinyurl.com/6xv48rc
I think the subject of nuking whole populations has been discussed, both pro and contra to its maximum extent and ask that we stop it now.
in re: #147 Storm-Rider
When Americans think about the Civil War, assuming they do anymore, I suspect it is with a certain contempt for a bunch of hayseeds throwing line after line of good infantry into the grinder. No longer are Americans taught that slavery was not the only issue in dispute. Indeed, few appreciate what Lee and his compatriots suffered in making a conscientious decision to defend their understanding of constitutional government.
I never tire of listening to this link, because it says so much about the equally patriotic Confederate States of America and America’s “Second War of Independence”. First Brigade
PS: my earlier post
Not to put too fine a point on it, but a synonym for reproof is “rebuke”.
The origins of “rebuke” are found in 13th c. Germany, meaning “to beat back”.
That seems to be the consensus here, I believe – Islam must be beaten back.
All this typing of weapons, robots and words as the Iranians sail up the Suez Canal(C. Mathews’ Panama). Fear not as this is hardly provocation but rather a simple…navigation error? Shall we send them a barrage of strongly worded letters as their regime calls for the death of opposition leaders in their own country? They were all about the opposition in Egypt.
Just so all hereon know where I stand regarding weapon deployment, I am a big fan of rail guns and their inert projectiles accurately delivered way down range.
I disagree with Habu … on tactics.
I don’t think that atomics are politically viable however much the opfor deserves a spanking.
They also don’t, to my mind, cause the ummah to properly ‘reset.’
Oddly enough, the Japanese did not reset their faith in Shintoism until events unfolded that contradicted its core tenents.
Massive loss of life didn’t ‘bother’ the faithful at all. Such reverses were ascribed to failures on the part of the faithful — never the Emperor nor Shintoism, itself.
And that’s why nuking mecca is problematic. It will surely be reframed as failure of the ummah to be faithful enough.
Nuking the ka’aba is NOT a filthy act. In muslim eyes it is more at abolution, a cleansing. Rather like Obi-Wan striking it down with atomics would increase its status to myth — and weirdly replicate deicide — putting America in the role of Rome. Bad idea.
Hence, you end up stirring up the ant nest leaving only 3rd Conjecture resolution. Nasty.
——
There is one thing that is ultra-kernel to islam: the magic stone will never fall into the hands of the kafir — and particularly the Jews.
Religion destruction has happened time and again. It’s a known process. It happened to the:
Aztecs
Incans
Shintoists
Stalinists ( he had been deified )
Hitlerists ( ditto )
The American Natives ( all of them — the old gods stand revealed as a fraud )
Pharaonic Egypt
and so forth…
It is impossible for a religion to collapse without loss of life. When the threat looms that price is paid.
The solution is simple and practical: kafir occupation of critical theological terrain.
Of all the locations in the world the highlands of mecca and medina are as easy to defend as one might imagine. And completely defenseless against us.
Beyond that any muslim army to rally against us — where it counts — must starve and thirst.
There are many muslims — yet only a trivial fraction have the ability to take to arms. Car-B-Ques are about the limit of muslim counter-force.
The history of failed beliefs shows that they die with whimpers. The death throes typically last but days. Not decades, years, months… Not even weeks.
The human mind is a complicated thing. But on one issue it is simple. It doesn’t want to back a sure loser.
When the Shah bailed on Tehran the Westernized Iranians went back to their roots — literally — overnight. The smoke in the morning was from burning Western clothing. You could smell it all over the city, that morning.
Would it be morally proper for Jews to own mecca and medina? Well, most of the land there abouts WAS Jewish property — until they were robbed and murdered by mohammed and his criminal clan. What wasn’t Jewish was pagan obsidian worship — a good luck hustle on Bedouin caravans headed out across the sand sea.
Mohammed wiped them out, too. They were ‘polytheists’ because they still worshiped ALL of the volcanic ejecta from Krakatoa. ( The 536AD eruption )
The 1883 Krakatoa eruption was heard — mistaken for Royal Naval gunnery exercises — in Africa! The 536 eruption was larger, by far. It was heard in China and Japan — and so noted. It’s a pretty good guess that the Bedouins heard it too and quite properly linked the astounding rumbles to the disturbances in the heavens.
What disturbance? Try blacking out the stars and fading the moon! Krakatoa kicked out ash so great and so high it ringed the planet — especially near the equator — for YEARS. European populations were only mildly affected, cold weather was the norm. However, the lower latitudes were devastated.
It was this moment in time that evacuated Arabia. Everyone raced to the only known ground water at mecca and medina.
Everywhere the hunter, trapper and fisherman made out — the farmer got hammered. Even the Nile flood was disturbed. Rain was falling in all the wrong places.
——-
Which brings us to phase II: scientific examination of the ka’aba and forensic proof that the obsidian is, in fact, Krakatoa’s ejecta. ( It can’t be anything else. Nothing else fits the time-line. )
Such a debunking of the ka’aba should cause the ‘defenestration’ of islam globally.
Fanatics are a rare breed and need not concern us. They’ll manage to kill themselves off much in the manner of Shintoists.
—-
Lastly, the US Constitution needs amending. Anti-Constitutional operants in the guise of religion or faith must be specifically called out and denied legal protection. It’s not the words you use it’s the acts and goals that define you. Supremacist creeds, tracts and screeds are against the core of our polity — and do not warrant official tolerance.
East of Suez’s Iranian flotilla offensive, Russia and China begin to double team Japan –on a particular sore spot:
http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2011/02/16/japan-runs-into-more-rough-waters/
FWIW, i have seen over the last few weeks no one mention the mass rape in downtown Cairo in 2006 – http://www.sandmonkey.org/2006/10/30/the-eid-sexual-harassment-incident/
It is not just Western blondes; Egyptians go after “their own”; there have been many stories of a rape epidemic in Egypt the last few years and stories of women’s martial arts training from some Egyptians in response. I am far from that place but I wonder if that is not part of the undercurrent of the current political situation, a sense of hopelessness at what Egypt has become and a drive to change even in the absence of any concerted opposition other than the MB.
Will Israel and other nations sleep while the Iranian Navy expands it’s theater of operations to the Med? The fear of proper, lawful nations like Iran, is growing faster than USA, USD are shrinking. Same with the ROP, maybe if we just _roll_over_ the fear will go away? At least we’ll feel a whole lot more comfortable…
And please Habu, don’t tell us to do something.
The key vessel is not the warship — it’s the cargo hold.
It used to be that Iran had to off-load in Sudan and then use skiffs to motor contraband up into the Sinai — and then on to the Gaza tunnels.
Likewise, shipping rockets to the Hez used to be by aircraft or the really long-way round the Cape.
Mubarak never permitted Iranian transit of the Suez Canal because they were implicated in Sadat’s assassination. An act that wounded him, too.
105. Thrasymachus
It appears I’ve arrived just as the host has issued “last call”, but I wanted to thank you for your correct and concise distillation of the essence of this matter:
I think Wretchard and Habu are in perfect agreement- Wretchard says if we don’t do something else we’ll nuke ‘em, and Habu says we won’t do anything else. I’m pretty sure we will do neither.
I would also add, apropos your screen name, that everyone should remember that Cassandra was mocked, reviled and banished to a basement cell for trying to warn her fellow Trojans of their impending doom, and we all know how that turned out…
–well, they’re not wasting any time are they, the new axis of Russia, China, and Islam. I’d imagine they have some big bites targeted here during the run-off of the American Communist administration. Probably including the state of Israel if they can manage it –no telling what the Amis will elect in 2012, better get busy now, time’s a-wastin’!
1. Using nukes – anybody remember that the Pentagon sought to set off 700 tons of HE in Nevada? Didn’t do it because of environmental protests. Obviously seeking data for nuke bunker busting. Thus, we know that there was some serious contingency planning going on.
2. We have been using UAV attack weapons since the 1970s – cruise missiles. Essentially dumb – preselected target.
3. UAV fighters – superfluous. Fighters are used to protect bombers and deny enemy ground attack planes. No need to protect UAV attack weapons. You just overwhelm enemy defenses with sheer numbers. Missiles are far more effective for protecting ground targets.
4. You don’t need much additional software or computing power for UAVs. You’ve got all the smarts you need sitting in a casino in Vegas with a joystick. Situational awareness? You can have as large a crew as you can stand for the smallest UAV.
5. Lethality – A twenty pound brick can do as much damage as a one ton bomb if it hits the right spot. One aircraft carrier with JDAMs is more effective than 10 without.
Therefore, I don’t regret the F22 situation or the problems with the F35. They are for future threats. Our present forces are more than sufficient while waiting for the UAVs. The development cycle for a UAV is far, far shorter than for conventional aircraft.
Allen: …few appreciate what Lee and his compatriots suffered in making a conscientious decision to defend their understanding of constitutional government…
US Grant sez:
Slavery was an institution that required unusual guarantees for its security wherever it existed; and in a country like ours where the larger portion of it was free territory inhabited by an intelligent and well-to-do population, the people would naturally have but little sympathy with demands upon them for its protection. Hence the people of the South were dependent upon keeping control of the general government to secure the perpetuation of their favorite institution. They were enabled to maintain this control long after the States where slavery existed had ceased to have the controlling power, through the assistance they received from odd men here and there throughout the Northern States. They saw their power waning, and this led them to encroach upon the prerogatives and independence of the Northern States by enacting such laws as the Fugitive Slave Law. By this law every Northern man was obliged, when properly summoned, to turn out and help apprehend the runaway slave of a Southern man. Northern marshals became slave-catchers, and Northern courts had to contribute to the support and protection of the institution.
This was a degradation which the North would not permit any longer than until they could get the power to expunge such laws from the statute books. Prior to the time of these encroachments the great majority of the people of the North had no particular quarrel with slavery, so long as they were not forced to have it themselves. But they were not willing to play the role of police for the South in the protection of this particular institution.
On top at Instapundit at the moment, those dirty southerners are at it again:
February 16, 2011
BUCKING THE TREND — OR STARTING ONE? An announcement from the Univiersity Of The South, better known as Sewanee: Tuition Cut 10% Next Year. “In a move to address the spiraling costs of higher education, the university’s Board of Regents has approved a 10 percent reduction in tuition and fees at the College for the coming academic year. The University of the South is taking this action now to make a college education more affordable and accessible. The 10 percent price reduction applies to tuition, fees, room, and board for the 2011-12 academic year; it represents a $4,600 reduction from the current year’s total.”
Posted at 2:50 pm by Glenn Reynolds
b @ 162: Mubarak never permitted Iranian transit of the Suez Canal because they were implicated in Sadat’s assassination. An act that wounded him, too.
I didn’t realize that. And this current rump in Egypt, is too distracted to care? Double-plus ungood.
“Now you have a fast, highly maneuverable tank that’s fearless in battle along with air support from fearless unmanned fighter planes that can out-turn anything manned by a human being. This sort of technological jump will create situations similar to what the guy with a bronze sword experienced when he first encountered an enemy armed with a steel sword.”
You still need boots on the ground….
144. HABU
Re: food prices & obesity
Expensive food and overweight eaters is not ironic. When prices go up people buy the cheapest items – less meat, fish, dairy and fresh vegetables, and more processed and refined grains. When prices and supplies are volatile people typically have access to items that store longer: grains.
There is substantial evidence that increased consumption of processed grains with sugar are fuelling the rise in obesity. Eating a diet high in grains, particularly wheat, leads to insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome, causing obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. You can check this yourself with a blood sugar meter.
Of note in this country the crops that are apparently the worst for your health are also the most subsidized: wheat, corn, and soy.
I highly recommend perusing http://www.heartscanblog.org/ (by a practicing cardiologist), for further elucidation, particularly if you have any of those conditions.
161. veracious
There’s an extremely easy cure for not reading me “telling” you what to do…when you see the author is HABU..skip that offering and go to the next..See how easy that is?
Now eat your peas.
Once upon a time, the United States was the greatest industrial powerhouse that the world has ever seen. Our immense economic machinery was the envy of the rest of the globe and it provided the foundation for the largest and most vibrant middle class in the history of the world. But now the once great U.S. economic machine is being dismantled piece by piece. The U.S. economy is being gutted, neutered, defanged, declawed and deindustrialized and very few of our leaders even seem to care. It was the United States that once showed the rest of the world how to mass produce televisions and automobiles and airplanes and computers, but now our industrial base is being ripped to shreds. Tens of thousands of our factories and millions of our jobs have been shipped overseas. Many of our proudest manufacturing cities have been transformed into “post-industrial” hellholes that nobody wants to live in anymore.
The following are 21 signs that the once great U.S. economy is being gutted, neutered, defanged, declawed and deindustrialized….
#1 The U.S. trade deficit with the rest of the world rose to 497.8 billion dollars in 2010. That represented a 32.8% increase from 2009.
#2 The U.S. trade deficit with China rose to an all-time record of 273.1 billion dollars in 2010. This is the largest trade deficit that one nation has had with another nation in the history of the world.
#3 The U.S. trade deficit with China in 2010 was 27 times larger than it was back in 1990.
#4 In the years since 1975, the United States had run a total trade deficit of 7.5 trillion dollars with the rest of the world.
#5 The United States spends more than 4 dollars on goods and services from China for every one dollar that China spends on goods and services from the United States.
#6 In 1959, manufacturing represented 28 percent of all U.S. economic output. In 2008, it represented only 11.5 percent and it continues to fall.
#7 The number of net jobs gained by the U.S. economy during this past decade was smaller than during any other decade since World War 2.
#8 The Bureau of Labor Statistics originally predicted that the U.S. economy would create approximately 22 million jobs during the decade of the 2000s, but it turns out that the U.S. economy only produced about 7 million jobs during that time period.
#9 Japan now manufactures about 5 million more automobiles than the United States does.
#10 China has now become the world’s largest exporter of high technology products.
#11 Manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is actually lower in 2010 than it was in 1975.
#12 The United States now has 10 percent fewer “middle class jobs” than it did just ten years ago.
#13 According to Tax Notes, between 1999 and 2008 employment at the foreign affiliates of U.S. parent companies increased an astounding 30 percent to 10.1 million. During that exact same time period, U.S. employment at American multinational corporations declined 8 percent to 21.1 million.
#14 Back in 1970, 25 percent of all jobs in the United States were manufacturing jobs. Today, only 9 percent of the jobs in the United States are manufacturing jobs.
#15 Back in 1998, the United States had 25 percent of the world’s high-tech export market and China had just 10 percent. Ten years later, the United States had less than 15 percent and China’s share had soared to 20 percent.
#16 The number of Americans that have become so discouraged that they have given up searching for work completely now stands at an all-time high.
#17 Half of all American workers now earn $505 or less per week.
#18 The United States has lost a staggering 32 percent of its manufacturing jobs since the year 2000.
#19 Since 2001, over 42,000 U.S. factories have closed down for good.
#20 In 2008, 1.2 billion cellphones were sold worldwide. So how many of them were manufactured inside the United States? Zero.
#21 Ten years ago, the “employment rate” in the United States was about 64%. Since then it has been constantly declining and now the “employment rate” in the United States is only about 58%. So where did all of those jobs go?
The world is changing.
We are bleeding national wealth at a pace that is almost unimaginable.
We are literally being drained dry.
In a major war with a major technical power UAVs — drones — can’t work.
For starters, the current crop is remotely controlled. A major power will always be able to jam your control signals — even if the method is brut force.
Signals intelligence will also put you opponent in a position to take over control of your drones. Variations on this gambit have already occurred elsewhere in the military domain.
98. stoicheion
An outstanding post.
168. Josh
Not only did Iran have too many connections to the MB…
Tehran cheered the assassins after the event. Kind of reminds me of the Palis and NY muslims cheering the afternoon of 911.
Mubarak formed a successor government with the very officers to survive the Sadat assassination. So his hard feelings were not isolated.
Current events show just how fast things can change.
Please review my 158 post above: things can change for the better very fast, too.
——
What’s disturbing is to see front running Republican candidates being fulsomely captured by muslims.
CPAC is wormed through with muslim money.
Chris Christie is also a fulsome promoter of jihadis within his administration, beware.
Christie is completely clueless WRT islam.
Even our own DoD promotes a false benign image of islam internally to it’s officers.
Soviet agitprop has been superseded by islamist ‘pap-prop’: numbing gruel for fools lacking mental chops, it puts ones nerves to sleep.
In Pakistan the US has managed to be neither feared nor loved.
“I’m not afraid of you!”
“Well, we’ll have to work on that, won’t we?”
re: Marc Stiegler. Yes, he’s the author of David’s Sling. Included smart hovercraft carried cannon that autonomously sought out military command vehicles and encampments flagged automagically by comint and sigint (kill the officers, not the privates), and dropped spears from space on ships and eventually the enemy’s ballistic missles.
Call it yet another example of extending western sensibilities into warfare – where we spend increasing amounts of treasure to avoid killing the innocent (including letting the guilty go). Some time ago I argued that civilization wages war with the humanity it can afford. If/when we find ourselves poor we’ll find WMD very cheap.
As a counter point the Army is testing the XM25 in Afghanistan. Prototype grenade rounds are $1000. Perhaps production will drop costs to $35. Maybe high-tech commodity goods need not only enable our adversaries. Right, I do dream, I’ve seen the U.S. defense department procurement system up close and what it can do to a successful prototype that the large middle of the organization really did not want to deploy. Including things like body armor that was very effective but because it couldn’t be deployed to all units, all services (in Bosnia), it wasn’t.
Gee whiz ,look what we’ll have in just four years
National Inflation Association…says
The rioting and looting currently taking place in E- – - – t is primarily a result of massive food inflation and shows what all major cities in the United States will likely look like come year 2015 due to the Federal Reserve’s zero percent interest rates and quantitative easing to infinity. On December 16th, 2009, NIA named Time Magazine’s 2009 ‘Person of the Year’ Ben Bernanke our ‘Villain of the Year’, saying he created “unprecedented amounts of inflation in unprecedented ways” and “When it costs $20 for a gallon of milk in a few years, Americans will have nobody to thank more than Bernanke.”
What started out a few weeks ago as protests in Algeria with citizens chanting “Bring Us Sugar!” and five citizens being killed, quickly spread to civil unrest in Tunisia which saw 14 more civilian deaths, and has now spread to riots in Egypt where 300 Egyptian citizens have been killed. Food inflation in Egypt has reached 20% and citizens in the nation already spend about 40% of their monthly expenditures on food. Americans for decades have been blessed with cheap food, spending only 13% of their expenditures on food, but this is about to change.
NIA was the first to predict the recent explosion in agricultural commodity prices in our October 30th, 2009, article entitled, “U.S. Inflation to Appear Next in Food and Agriculture”, which said we have a “perfect storm for an explosion in agriculture prices”. A couple of months later in ‘NIA’s Top 10 Predictions for 2010′ we predicted “Major Food Shortages” and said, “Inventories of agricultural products are the lowest they have been in decades yet the prices of many agricultural commodities are down 70% to 80% from their all time highs adjusted for real inflation”. Over the past year, agricultural commodities as a whole have outperformed almost every other type of asset, with silver being one of only a few other assets keeping pace with agriculture. (On December 11th, 2009, NIA declared silver the best investment for the next decade at $17.40 per ounce and it has so far risen 64% to its current price of $28.39 per ounce).
The world is at the beginning stages of an all out inflationary panic. Wheat, which NIA previously called on ‘NIAnswers’ its favorite investment besides gold and silver, is now up to a new 30-month high of $8.63 per bushel and has doubled in price since June of last year. Algeria bought 800,000 tonnes of wheat this past week, bringing their total purchases for the month of January up to 1.8 million tonnes, which was quadruple expectations. Saudi Arabia is also beginning to stockpile their inventories of wheat. Rice futures have gained 8% during the past few days with Bangladesh and Indonesia placing extraordinary large orders. Indonesia’s latest rice order was quadruple its normal allotment and Bangladesh plans to double rice purchases this year. Meanwhile, the U.S., which is the world’s third largest exporter of rice, is expected to cut production by 25% in 2011.
NIA considers rice to be one of the world’s most undervalued agricultural commodities at its current price of $15.96 per 100 pounds and forecasts a move back to its 2008 high of $24 per 100 pounds as soon as the end of 2011. NIA believes cotton, at its current price of $1.80 per pound, may have gotten a bit ahead of itself in the short-term. In NIA’s first ever article about agriculture on February 17th, 2009, we said that cotton’s “upside potential is astronomical” at its then price of $0.44 per pound. NIA pointed to increasing sales to textile companies in China and the fact that cotton was down 70% from its all time high as reasons to be very bullish on cotton at $0.44 per pound. Early NIA members could have made 309% on cotton, but today we see much bigger potential in rice. The recent spike in cotton reminds us of the 2008 spike in oil. Although we believe cotton will ultimately rise above $3 per pound later this decade, we could possibly see a dip to below $1.40 per pound first.
Many people in the mainstream media have been criticizing NIA’s recent food inflation report, claiming that agricultural commodity prices have very little to do with prices of food in the supermarket. CNBC’s Steve Liesman, in particular, claims that “rising commodity prices won’t cause inflation”. Liesman has it backwards. NIA has never claimed that rising commodity prices cause inflation. Soaring budget deficits that the U.S. government can’t possibly pay for through taxation causes inflation when the Fed is forced to monetize the debt by printing money.
Rising commodity prices are only a symptom of inflation. The reason NIA was so bullish on agricultural commodities going back two years ago when we produced our first documentary ‘Hyperinflation Nation’, is because while gold is the best gauge of inflation and is often the best tool for predicting future money printing, agriculture is where the majority of the monetary inflation ends up going after the Fed’s newly printed money trickles down to the middle-class and poor. With gold prices already surging two years ago when we produced ‘Hyperinflation Nation’, NIA said in the documentary “food prices have the potential to surge most during hyperinflation”.
One thing NIA is almost 100% sure of is that come year 2015, middle-class Americans will be spending at least 30% to 40% of their income on food, similar to Egyptians today. As NIA warned in its latest documentary ‘End of Liberty’, if you don’t have enough money to accumulate physical gold and silver, it is important to begin establishing your own food storage, and store enough food to feed you and your family for at least six months during hyperinflation. Many store shelves in Egypt are now empty after recent panic buying, with shortages of nearly all major staple items throughout the country.
The U.S. Treasury is getting ready to sell $72 billion in new long-term bonds next week, as the U.S. rapidly approaches its $14.29 trillion debt limit. The debt limit is now expected to be reached by April 5th and Treasury Secretary Geithner warned the U.S. will see “catastrophic damage” if it isn’t raised. With the Federal Reserve now surpassing China and Japan as the largest holder of U.S. treasuries, the real “catastrophic damage” ahead will be hyperinflation as a result of the U.S. government doing absolutely nothing to dramatically reduce spending. It is an absolute joke that Obama during his State of the Union address announced $400 billion in spending cuts over the next 10 years, but then the very next day, the Congressional Budget Office increased its 2011 budget deficit projection by $400 billion to $1.48 trillion.
Not raising the debt limit would be a good thing, as it would force Washington to live within its means. Sure, the stock market would collapse and the U.S. economy would enter into its next Great Depression, but at least it would save the U.S. dollar from losing all of its purchasing power. In fact, the standard of living for middle class Americans might actually improve if the government allowed the free market to put our economy into a depression, because goods and services would get cheaper.
The U.S. economy has become a drug addict that is dependent on cheap and easy money from the Federal Reserve. While Wall Street bankers took home a record $135 billion in total compensation in 2010, up 5.7% from $128 billion in 2009, this money was stolen from middle-class and poor Americans through inflation. The more monetary inflation (heroin) the Federal Reserve creates in order to satisfy the (in the words of Gerald Celente) “money junkies” on Wall Street, the more middle-class and poor Americans become dependent on unemployment checks and food stamps just to survive. Millions of American students are graduating college with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt but no jobs. Luckily for them (but not holders of U.S. dollars), NIA is hearing reports from both unemployed and underemployed college graduates with student loans that the government is reducing their required monthly payments by sometimes 90% or more based on their current incomes.
China and Japan recently saw their credit ratings downgraded, while the U.S. credit rating remains at “AAA”. NIA believes it would make far more sense for the world’s largest debtor nation to be downgraded instead of the world’s two largest creditor nations. The Federal Reserve’s second round of quantitative easing has yet to even reach the halfway point and the Fed already holds about $1.11 trillion in U.S. treasuries. By the time QE2 is over at the end of June, the Fed will own $1.6 trillion in U.S. treasuries, about what China and Japan own combined. Shockingly, Kansas City Fed President Thomas Hoenig is already dropping hints about QE3. According to Hoenig, the Fed may consider extending treasury purchases beyond June 30th, 2011, (the scheduled completion date for QE2) if U.S. economic data looks disappointing.
With the Fed taking over as the largest holder of U.S. treasuries, China is beginning to rapidly move away from the U.S. dollar and into gold. In just the first 10 months of 2010, China imported 209 metric tons of gold compared to 45 metric tons in all of 2009, a stunning five-fold increase. While the western world is downplaying the threat of inflation as much as possible, Asian countries understand that hyperinflation is the most devastating thing that can possibly happen to any economy. The demand for gold in Asia right now is the most intense it has ever been, as they look to tackle rising inflation before it becomes hyperinflation.
The Chinese are so smart that families are now giving each other gold bullion as gifts instead of traditional red envelopes filled with cash. China is now on track to soon surpass India as the world’s largest consumer of gold. The China Securities Regulatory Commission recently gave Beijing-based Lion Fund Management Co. approval to create a fund that will invest into foreign gold ETFs.
U.S. stock mutual funds saw $6.7 billion in net inflows during the past two weeks, the most in any two week period since May of 2009. The rioting, looting, and civil unrest in Egypt is now making the U.S. look like the safe haven of the world, even though it should be considered the riskiest place to invest. From the Dow’s low in August until now, about $38 billion was actually removed from U.S. stock mutual funds, despite the stock market rising 20%. The Dow Jones has been rising from September until now solely due to the Federal Reserve printing around $350 billion out of thin air. When central banks print money, stock markets often act as a relief valve due to there being too much inflation going into the hands of financial institutions.
The U.S. M2 money supply surged by $46.6 billion during the week ending January 17th to a record $8.8623 trillion, following a rise during the previous week of $7.6 billion. The rise in the M2 money supply over the past two weeks of $54.2 billion equals an annualized increase of 16%. The M2 multiplier now stands at 4.218 compared to a long-term average of 10. When QE2 is complete, the Fed’s monetary base will likely stand at $2.59 trillion. A return to the long-term average M2 multiplier of 10 means we are due to see a 192% increase in the M2 money supply and that is not even including a possible QE3 and QE4.
The U.S. economic ponzi scheme could unravel very quickly in the years ahead, with the velocity of money increasing much faster than anybody expects. As more Americans learn about NIA and become educated to the truth about the U.S. economy and inflation, a complete loss of confidence in the U.S. dollar could occur very suddenly. It is important for all Americans to prepare as if hyperinflation will be here tomorrow. At least in Egypt, their currency still has purchasing power and their citizens are trying to implement a regime change before it is too late. By 2015 in America, it will already be too late and the civil unrest here has the potential to be many times worse.
Habu 172: “Once upon a time, the United States was the greatest industrial powerhouse that the world has ever seen.”
Under Marxist theory the lazy, under-achieving, tax-eating so-called proletariat class must be forcefully made equal with the hard-working, tax-paying middle class. No individual must be allowed to be better in outcome than another – all must be forcefully made equal.
“The proletariat [lazy, tax-eating, non-disabled poor] will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital [property] from the bourgeoisie [laboring, tax-paying middle class], to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state [tax-eating Marxist Government]… Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property. You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.” Karl Marx
http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
Under Marxist theory the under-achieving, poverty-stricken Socialist nations of the world must be forcefully made equal with the hard-working creative nations of the world – particularly the United States. No nation must be allowed to be better in outcome than another – all must be forcefully equalized.
“The proletariat [Socialist hell-holes of the world] will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital [property] from the bourgeoisie [Free-enterprising prosperous nations of the world], to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state [tax-eating Marxist Government - read United Nations]… Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property. You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property [the prosperous nation]. This person [Nation] must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.” Karl Marx
http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
Equality under Marxism always entails force. Force will be used to unnaturally bring down the high-achieving individuals to the level of the lazy. Force will be used to unnaturally bring down a high-achieving nation to the level of the socialist hell-holes of the world. The unnatural use of force entails a superior class of not-to-be-equalized Marxist equalizers – thus the defining Orwellian contradiction within Marxism – forced “equality” leads to much worse inequality.
http://www.finallyequal.com/trailer.html
Never mind that when people are free their human nature leads to inequality of results – some are hard-working and some are lazy – some are more intelligent and some are less intelligent – inequality of result occurs naturally and without force. Based on their level of free enterprise nations similarly and naturally divide themselves into high and low achievers. But to Hell with freedom and all that is naturally unequal – the Marxists only need freedom for themselves. Like gods walking the earth, it is the Marxist Priests of Power who create human nature.
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others… We are different from all the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we’re doing… Power is not a means, it is an end… The object of power is power… always there will be the intoxication of power… We are the Priests of Power… The individual is only a cell… power is collective. The individual only has power in so far that he ceases to be an individual… If he can make complete utter submission; if he can escape from his identity; if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all powerful and immortal… Can you not understand that the death of the individual is not death; the Party is immortal… You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do, and will turn against us; but we create human nature.” George Orwell – 1984
h/172, here’s a #22: the budget deficit for 2012 is the same size as the entire federal government budget thirteen years ago.
What it took to run the whole govt 13 yrs ago, is now the difference between tax rcpts and spending.
***
Related, the riots in Bahrain are not abating. Bahrain is the port of the US Fifth Fleet, the anchor of our policy in the mideast, the fuel tank of the world. The Alliance for Youth Movement has just released their booklet for Bahrain, how to bring down the govt. The AYM is from the state dept and google.
***
-this all started when USA elected Bill Clinton, a de facto foreign saboteur for certain, and likely a deliberate one. His wife is now the Secretary of State. Both were students of communism in college.
#166 Teresita,
I have not bothered to read your post addressed to me, because I do not want to be responsible for making a liar of you (again) – remember, dear girl, you were not going to speak to me again. At the time, I bet you would violate your latest demarche within 48 hours, and I was correct; albeit, you tried convolutedly using Navajo.
…still waiting for that outraged Zena gal on the Jordanian miscarriage of justice…awfully quiet, Sweet Pea…
http://therealrevo.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Cloward-Piven-and-bubba.jpg
Bill Clinton, Cloward, and Piven , in the Rose Garden, signing Clinton’s first act, the Motor Voter law. This law was parlayed into the subprime crash, into the situation we have this minute, in a direct line of cause and effect.
The only question is –where were our people in DC?
Beltway Jay wrote:
“Expensive food and overweight eaters is not ironic. When prices go up people buy the cheapest items – less meat, fish, dairy and fresh vegetables, and more processed and refined grains. When prices and supplies are volatile people typically have access to items that store longer: grains.
There is substantial evidence that increased consumption of processed grains with sugar are fuelling the rise in obesity. Eating a diet high in grains, particularly wheat, leads to insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome, causing obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. You can check this yourself with a blood sugar meter.
Of note in this country the crops that are apparently the worst for your health are also the most subsidized: wheat, corn, and soy.”
Jay, this is the great untold health story of the last twenty years.
The government subsidized production of grains (mostly corn) and then used its power at the FDA and the Dept. of Education and other agencies to change the food “square” to the food “pyramid”, telling people they should eat ten or more servings of starch-based foods (read:, subsidized ag products) daily.
The result has been soaring obesity, yes. Bad enough. But it goes way deeper than that.
One of the results of ag subsidies has been major increases in the use of fertilizer and pesticides, which has had devastating effects in the Gulf of Mexico and east coast in terms of depleting fish and shellfish populations. Instead of encouraging people to eat good, sustainable (with a minimum of smart regulation) seafood protein which is better for you than any grains, they have told us to eat less of it relative to the carbs, then killed off the fish so we had no choice but to eat more of their subsidized grains anyways.
The increase in obesity due to subsidized grain carbohydrate consumption is also responsible for soaring diabetes rates. The overall diabetes rate is bad enough, but when you break it down by ethnicity, an interesting pattern emerges. Populations whose ancestors have practiced grain agriculture for a very long time are showing only modest increases. Their ancestors have had hundereds of generations – in some cases, over ten thousand years – of this food regimen and natural selection has worked out the propensity to respond with diabetes. This would be Caucasians, Middle Easterners, and most Asians.
By contrast, populations who are descended from areas where their immediate or not-too-distant ancestors practiced herding or hunter-gatherer economic and food production systems have seen massive increases in diabetes, particularly within the last twenty or so years. The worst affected populations are African Americans and American Indians. This stands to reason, since they have not had as much time to evolve a biochemistry more in tune with a high-carbohydrate diet.
In essence, two of the ethnic groups who are most likely to support big government are the ones who have been most screwed by the same big government picking winners in the food production industry.
Ethnicity aside, I think that lots of people have been hoodwinked by the promotion of eating carbs by the government. For most of the time humans have been on the planet, they did not have big piles of grass seed or starchy tubers like spuds to eat. They ate meat with lots of fruit and a few roots and seeds in season. The idea that a largely grain diet all year long with a smidge of animal protein and some fruits and vegetables is “natural” or “better” is anthropologically ridiculous.
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?get_gallerynr=1180
re Clinton, look at the vertical line drawn around mid ’93. Link is from (h/t instapundit)
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=179932
it’s all on the charts –click on ‘em to enlarge.
It’s okay, Allen, I let President Grant do all the talking for me, though it was surprising to see you take the same side as the Klan.
160 truepeers…
One aspect of polygamy and bride-price marriages is that you end up with a seething stew of sexually frustrated twenty-something males.
Under islam ( the only position a muslim occupies is the down low ) even dating is taboo.
This is a key reason for the bizarre sex practices of the Pashtuns. For them it ends up as collective boy-prostitution.
Elsewhere apparently the ewes aren’t safe.
At every turn the actual living practices in and among the ummah are disturbing. The girls are treated as chattel and the boys are frustrated into madness.
Hence the Eid fiasco.
BTW, Star Trek covered this in “The Return of the Archons.” A society run on rigid, clueless belief passed down inviolate… I wonder where the inspiration came from?
182 bl…
That exactly coincides with the Red Chinese unilateral devaluation of their currency and ever after official suppression of its value.
Renminbi?
You should.
t/183; why would Grant be the only commanding general in history, besides that German 6th Army guy who turned on them nazzies while a POW after Stalingrad, who would take the side of an enemy he had made his fame fighting?
***
b/185; well i didn’t note the currency, but i do remembi Win Ho Lee, Loral, the Riady family, Johnny Chang, the Buddhist temple, the ‘no controlling legal authority’, and the ‘iced tea defense’ –as well as Janet Reno replying to the FBI field reports about Los Alamos spying that her DoJ was just gonna ‘watch it awhile so we can bag the whole organization’ –the whole org which was of course the PLA, and bag which she didn’t.
yes, the halcyon mid-90s, when whole swaths of official and corporate crime magically became legal, and the obesity epidemic rolled in out of nowhere.
183. Teresita
It’s okay, Allen, I let President Grant do all the talking for me, though it was surprising to see you take the same side as the Klan.
February 16, 2011 – 3:32 pm
You are such an obvious little flirt; it is hard to stay miffed; but I will try real hard, Sweetie. And I bet you’re just as cute as a button in those tiny, size 4 1/2 jackboots.
Timothy Treadwell was stupid.
He worked very hard to get accepted as a bear, albeit a defective, undersized unworthy one.
He succeeded, and was accepted.
… and then he brought a female along with him.
That presented the bears with a moral dilemma, as to how a defective, undersized, unworthy bear could have a female, even one that was also undersized and unworthy.
They resolved the dilemma by eating both of them.
Treadwell got his girlfriend dead by forgetting his place in the society he had inserted himself into.
Hello, Fellow Babies,
Some of you guys are harshing my mellow, I mean, how many years will it take for the news to penetrate that Islam can be a for real buzz-kill? Little Habu may be permanently locked in the tight fetal curl under his bed because you have rejected his honest expression of concern — which is is based on an objective appraisal of the very real history of Islam’s internecine war conducted against every other culture they have encountered; so he’s got a thousand year history on his side; what’ve you got? A Mary Poppins, need-drugs-flower-power-all-cultures-are-equal-but-conservative-whiteman=sNeanderthal=s-bad certainty that Islamics are just suffering post-traumatic hangover because Europeans, after 600 years of brutal attacks, finally launched a few Crusades their way? You guys really need to crack a history book, the Islamic Crusades against the rest of humanity began about 620 AD and continued for the next 1100 years until the desertification of North African and the Eastern Mediterranean made the search for water slightly more critical.
Events in Egypt are most likely to take a tragic turn because we are being guided by leaders whose intelligence is more honestly described with the words crafty and deceitful. And to further bolster our confidence that obama and company will make a positive effort to help an ally in need, he has shunned, ignored, and insulted allies whose loyalties were bound by a century of statecraft, honor, goodwill, treaties, and the blood, sweat, and tears of two world wars. Nothing in obama’s foreign policy so far is encouraging; rather than offer help to an ally of thirty years, obama has made it clear that his sympathy lies with the Moslem Brotherhood. He is just incapable of committing to an act that would actually help America.
But wait. What’s this we hear?
Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! No, it’s a pain! It’s Hussein, strange visiter from Harvard sitting in the President’s chair, claiming intelligence, discriminating tastes, and other powers and abilities beyond those of mortal men; yet with a disturbing tendency to babble in the absence of his krypton-prompters. Yes it’s Hussein who can change the course of mighty democracies into dictatorships, who can bend the truth with his bare hands, and who, disguised as the mild mannered barak obama, fights a never ending battle for Islam, Jihad, and the Islamic way. Faster than a speeding bullet he has once again leaped to a conclusion in a single bound, more powerful than a locomotive and more profound. “Screw all our former allies. We don’t need no Israelis! Britishers? We don’t need no stinking Britishes! Or Egypties either, for that matter; Mubarak has gotta go.”
So let me see if I understand — obama’s formal response to Mubarak’s problems was that the continued support of the US Government was contingent upon Mubarak’s listening to the demands of the his citizens (the rioting mob) and restructuring his government to meet those demands. Interesting. Neither the world’s smartest man nor any other Democrat can see the irony here?!
When older Americans, on canes, walkers, wheelchairs, and dragging their oxygen cylinders, attended town meetings ( a normal, traditional forum) and expressed anger with elected officials over the new provisions in pending health care legislation, Democrats reacted by bringing the SIEU as thugs to beat down dangerous disabled people that dared to disagree with anyone in the Democrat noble class. In spite of widespread opposition Democrats ignored established procedures, broke rules, and openly bought votes to ram the healthcare legislation into law. I am astounded at the hubris of Democrats that really believe that they alone are the good guys, the only smart guys, the only moral guys here… –why is it that we have so many of them constantly weeping over our lack of restraint vis-a-vis “the bomb?” o, the crocodile tears — The one time the West used the bomb was after we’d been attacked — after nearly 60 million had perished. Have Islamic terrorists or armies ever shown any such restraint? Noooooooooooooooooo. The only restraint exorcized by Muslim armies has been when they were clearly weaker than their enemies; if not for sneak attacks and gun powder, Islamics wouldn’t have a history, a culture, a strategy.
The only good I can see here is that we Americans might consider an Egyptian clue and avoid having to wait until 2012 for those boring, take-forever elections. I mean if obama and the American media really thinks this is a legitimate political expression, go for it. …. Let’s all meet in DC and stage a protest for the next 3 weeks, and we’ll… hmmm On second thought — I know a lot of you are using several names to post, suppose we all get there, and it turns out there is really only about twenty Belmonters?
Democrats do not seem to know that Greeks, Italians, French, Armenians, Nubians, Coptics, Berbers, etc. are only only 3% of the Egyptian populations; and there are not any Democrats either, so they are damned sure not in the wings waiting to take over the new Egyptian government. I believe Cowboy # 84 is a valid insight into the both the Islamic and Western cultures.
Democrats don’t even seem to understand that Egypt has the largest armed forces on the African continent, 7th in the world – not including the paramilitary forces numbering over 500,000. If the military accepts an Islamic government, the whole Middle East may collapse and form into Islamic kingdoms. Thanks to obama’s brilliant statecraft, the only remaining ally we will have in the area will be Arabia. A slender reed, indeed; how will they ship us our badly needed oil when they are surrounded by hostiles, and with an Egypt easily capable of closing traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and the Suez canal?
Why didn’t I count Israel? Because I can’t convince myself that they still include America as an asset in their strategic calculus; they may be torn with grief, they may wish… As an American I am angered and ashamed; Democrats have proven to have a serious, genetic Machiavellian streak. I cannot accept that it is an honorable behavior to consistently abandon allies in their hour of need. At this date, any small country oriented toward a western style democratic government, and still depending on an American Democrat president for it’s security has got to be $*@&ing stupid.
If Egypt falls into a Moslem Caliphate, the new leaders will have a huge, modern army right now; and they will find themselves at a point exactly like Germany in 1936. At that moment Germany had the best equipped, most modern army with weapons superior to any in Europe; Germany stood at the cliff’s edge, probing, seeking out weakness as the other continental powers were were praying for peace… If Germany waited — it was still possible the Britain and France might yet be persuaded to rebuild their armies — new technical improvements might improve their tactical firepower evan as Germany’s armies aged thus negating their temporary advantage. So Germany concluded the best time to strike for war was at that very moment…
You may not like listen to Habu’s plain spoken manner, but… as Wretchard has pointed out, Democrat foreign policy is so weak it will encourage Islamics to act with the certitude that there will be no American intervention. obama’s ROES require that Americans cannot fire on enemy troops until they see a white light and hear the beckoning voices of relatives; so I expect we will rely on conventional war tactics to discourage any Egyptian ventures, until our own forces are depleted and bled white. Always reassuring to know we are led by
men of such incredible moral integrity that they will spare no lower-class American life in order to send some obscure message of dumb devotion of undefined and perhaps occasional resistance to Islamic aggression.
I know we are talking in a secret code: of shoes – and ships – sealing wax- of cabbages – and kings, and that this is therefore far beyond the ken of any Democrat; but right now the Middle East is clearly boiling hot, and if the Moslem fanatics in Egypt get their hands on the army, it ought to be about 6000 degrees over Israel in short order. Looks as if obama’s determined to bring Nostradamas’ prediction of a fiery world’s end to fruition. I fully and completely believe Wretchard’s 77 — If Moslems do get nuclear weapons, pigs may fly before the world ever again resembles our sweet little America of 2008.
And two days after Mubarak it looks as if the action is starting.
189. overtherainbo
Hello,
You lost me at Hello.
After that something corrupted your transmission.
blert, i think he was saying that the jihad is in the white house and union hall and the bank and the congress and your kid’s school faculty and in everyone under 30 and under 100 IQ and under upper middle class money, and that the jihad doesn’t just want your political power, it wants to kill you and eat you, and vanquish your seed from the earth forever.
189. overtherainbo
Oh, Pah-leeezzz!
191. bl…
Then I can count on you for further garbled to English translations?
Thanks.
of to glad service be, blert!
Rocco’s Girlfriend.
189. overtherainbo
Thank You!
You’ve said, in a very eqloquent way, what I’ve thought.
When do we march?
Do you guys ever visit ranburg? If so, you know Joe Mendiola. If you say cryptic and codesome, that is a synonym. You can as well say Joe, over there.
189. overtherainbo reads crystal clear. Some creative use of grammar, granted, but not to a detraction, it is yoda-style charming. I think overtherainbo may be a Hindu.
Regardless, I don’t see anything wrong with the spirit of what he says (or she, but he is more likely).
196, 197, I agree –i was just kidding him, joining blert in a sideways compliment.
***
ybr –LOL –i think she did for a fact marry a Rocco or two.
It is so damn frustrating. The chain of events really started in Nov 2008. It gives me no pleasure that it seems more and more likely that I’ll be, one day, saying to a bunch of dead guys (and gals): “I told you so”.
As for the mode of Kaaba destructor, it has to be an “act of god”. Something like “Moon Is A Harsh Mistress”. But no fanfares. Just happening, outta blue sky. I can think of a budget within mere 5 million bucks at most.
4 more pillars to go is easier than 5. And no nukes, ma.
intriguing, twoby –
***
There’s also a persistant rumor of a second Koran, contradictory to the extant, in a vault somewhere in Germany.
http://www.bing.com/search?q=second+koran+germany&form=IE8SRC&src=IE-SearchBox
(look 6th down, maybe that’s it)
Buddy, yeah, I know about it (the koran in Germany). One can sort of conceive of the possibility that if there is one koran that differs from the one that has been canonized by the 10th century, there may be more, if ya get my drift.
I just wish I had a time displacement equipment and could meet Mo. It would be reminiscent of the scene from Indiana Jones where Jones confronts a guy that wields the sword mightily.
–one of the best scenes in moviedom, alright –’finesse!’
.64 Teresita
“The smallest nuke in the US inventory at this time is still bigger than Little Boy, even when dialed down to the lowest yield. That’s a lot of dead Little Girls.”
That’s cr*p unless you know something I don’t, Teresita. The LRRP unit I was in was tasked to emplace small atomic demolition munitions 45 years ago that had a much lower yield than that. We could carry them on our backs. We can build nukes to do anything we want. They got a lot smaller later and the Russians did the same thing.
I quite side with Pork Rinds for Allah in taking out that black rock, but the threat of taking it out if certain lines are crossed might be sufficient. Even those crazy f*cks would not want to be held responsible by their fellow Jihadis for getting the rock atomized.
And BTW what better way to demonstrate to those numb nuts that their god is weaker than ours than atomizing it.
WE are the wielders of the “Hand of Allah”, not their pissy 6th century child molester or his successors.
And all the new weapons technology mentioned in this thread puts us in a similar position vis a vis the Islamists that we were in with the commies in the 80s. Computers and all the power they unleashed gave us such a performance margin over the commies that they knew they had lost the race. They simply could not restructure their society to use the new technology. Hell they were so paranoid that you had to register typewriters with the police, let alone computers.
Habu, you often make a lot of sense but I think you are hyperbolic at the moment. The Wretch is making some good points and they aren’t limp dick points, just a bit more subtle than nuke ‘em all (which we may still have to do).
To be able to reach out and kill individuals anywhere in the world when they cross the line is a very good way to take care of business, and a subtle one with less blowback from a hostile media and hysterical populations.
Subtlety is not weakness.
RWE,
JC is quite correct that the US government planned to gas the Japanese into surrender or oblivion if the A-Bomb did not produce their surrender. President Truman ordered this on June 18, 1945. He overruled FDR’s policy decision not to use gas. Truman had personally gassed the Germans as an artillery battery commander in France in World War, and considered poison gas to be just another variety of munition to fire at the enemey. Truman also came from a quite different background than FDR, with different friends & associates than FDR’s Eastern upper-class elite. Truman’s were mostly self-made men of plebian origins like himself.
Furthermore the fear of retaliation barrier to gassing civilians went down after the Germans surrendered.
Read “Gassing Japan”, Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen, MHQ: the Quarterly Journal of Military History, vol 10 no 1 (Autumn 1997), pp 38-43, and The Most Deadly Plan, Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen, Proceeding of the US Naval Institute, January 1998 edition, pp 79-81.
The most obvious actual evidence consists of the sudden surges in movements of chemical weapons (not smoke) munitions from the United States and Australia to the operational Pacific theaters. Those shipments increased dramatically after June 18, 1945. Hundreds of thousands of tons of chemical weapons munitions were suddenly shipped out, and more than 100,000 tons were immediately available for use in the Okinawa – Japan theater when Hiroshima was nuked.
You can confirm on-line that almost all poison gas munitions in the US were being shipped to the Pacific as of June 1945. Read pages 52-53 of the US Army Borden Institute (http://www.bordeninstitute.army.mil/published_volumes/chemwarfare/CHAP2_Pg_09-76.pdf) History of Chemical Warfare:
“… After Germany’s surrender in May 1945, the CWS [Chemical Warfare Service] contemplated augmenting their current arsenal of chemical bombs with captured stocks from Germany to address shortages based on required estimates for a chemical attack of Japan. Mustard gas, phosgene, and tabun were shipped back to the United States to be punched, drained, and used to fill American ordnance rounds …”
Keep in mind that Allied SIGINT kept Allied leaders well informed of the Japanese plans for genocide of all Allied civilians they could catch. This explains, as an example, MacArthur’s otherwise puzzling contingency plan to invade Java in September-October 1945 with just the 503rd Airborne regiment and one regiment of the 93rd Infantry Division (colored). He ordered 8th Army commander General Eichelberger to develop the plan in APRIL 1945, after the Japanese had massacred 100,000+ Filipino civilians in Manila.
MacArthur knew very well what the Japanese would do and planned on rescuing as many Allied civilians as possible. He had done just that when liberating the Phillippine Islands. See the Wikipedia article on the rescue mission for the POW’s and allied civilian prisoners at Cabantuan here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_at_Cabanatuan
Here is an example of the type of SIGINT decrypts of planned Japanese atrocities which motivated the decision for genocide of Japan:
Page 573 of Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb (Houghton Mifflin (1992) by George Feifer, referring to expected Allied casualties averted by the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, states:
“The total number must include European and Eurasian prisoners of the Japanese, chiefly from English, Dutch and other colonial and military forces. Okinawa was the most important prelude to the climax because its terrain most closely resembled the mainland’s, but non-Japanese elsewhere in Asia would have suffered even more during the new Tenozan. After the fall of Okinawa, Field Marshal Count Hisaichi Terauchi issued an order directing his prison camp officers to kill all their captives the moment the enemy invaded his southeast Asia theater. That would have been when those 200,000 British landed to retake Singapore, less than three weeks after the Japanese surrender. There was a real chance that Terauchi’s order would have been carried out, in which case up to 400,000 people would have been massacred.”
There is no way a democratic government of the United States would not have reacted with genocidal use of poison gas on Japan, in support of an invasion, following known Japanese slaughter of all American POW”s as well as all Allied civilians the Japanese could catch.
And Allied leaders knew in advance what the Japanese planned due to decryption of Japanese coded messages ordering the atrocities.
The Chemical Warfare Service estimated that pre-invasion bombardment of Japanese cities with poison gas bombs would kill five million Japanese civilians in the thirty days following onset of the bombing.
We really were about to kill all Japanese if necessary. The Emperor surrendered because he knew we’d do it.
–i agree w/ bob murphy @ 203 –there’s no air between w and habu –just a matter of presentation and some fraction of the distance already covered along the length of the alpha/omega line.
***
tom/204; one of the less-appreciated horrors of the Axis is how hitler and tojo followed the old sicilian mafia ‘loyaly to the death’ method of dipping all ‘made’ fingers in blood.
tom/204; among horrors of the Axis: how hitler and tojo followed the old sicilian mafia ‘loyaly to the death’ method of dipping all ‘made’ fingers in blood. Making the war into “kill or be killed” was one hell of a gamble.
RWE,
MacArthur’s communications about invading Java in late 1945 were on page 260 of the book “Dear Miss Em: General Eichelberger’s war in the Pacific, 1942-1945″ By Robert L. Eichelberger, Emma Gudger Eichelberger, Jay Luvaas.
As for Tom Holsinger’s contention about the Japanese “Dehumanizing themselves in allied eyes,” the book ” Soldiers of the sun: the rise and fall of the Imperial Japanese Army” makes clear the Japanese military “gassed the Chinese numerous times from 1937-1944″ and hit British, American and Australian ground forces in 1942 and 1943 with lethal gas weapons in Burma, Malaya and Guadaulcanal respectively.
This is what military author Gordon Rottman said about a weapon used on the British and Americans:
“T. I. B.Vol. 4 No. 3
May – Jun 1999
Page 12
From our past:
A question was asked about a Japanese hand grenade. Gordon Rottman sent in this response:“
The weapon in question is as follows (extracted from my WWII grenade book):
Model 1 Frangible Toxic Gas Hand Grenade (SEISAN SHURUDAN) Glass gas grenades were captured on Guadalcanal and in Burma early in the war. Its designation is unconfirmed and is believed to have actually been developed in the 1930s. They were also identified as “T.B. grenades” by Allied intelligence, but the meaning is unknown.
These are the gas grenades once employed against British tanks in Burma near Imphal in 1942.
They were filled with liquid hydrocyanic acid (AC), a blood gas derived from hydrogen cyanide.
These grenades were initially reported as filled with 80 percent hydrogen cyanide (aka prussic acid). They were found stabilized with either powdered copper (Cu) or arsenic trichloride (AsCl3). Both types had metal crown caps.
The copper-stabilized type had a rounded bottom with a cork plug and the other a flat bottom and a rubber plug under the caps. The copper-stabilized type was packed in a metal can and the second in a cylindrical cardboard container.
Both types were further packed individually in larger cylindrical metal cans with a web carrying strap. The inner containers were double walled (sides, bottom, and lid) and filled with neutralizing agent-soaked sawdust.
The arsenic trichloride-stabilized type were called the 172 B-K and 172 C-K by Allied intelligence after container markings, but these were almost certainly lot numbers rather than designations. (In early 1943, the US Military Intelligence Division reported a similar grenade being used by the Germans, but this turned out to be a mistake due to misidentification of Japanese grenades captured on Guadalcanal and returned to the States where they were mixed up.)
Weight: 1.2 lbs Diameter: 3.9 in
Construction: glass body, steel cap Filler: 12.2 oz liquid hydrocyanic acid with stabilizer
Fuze: none
Causality Radius: INA
Identification: clear glass body, yellowish (copper-stabilized) or greenish (arsenic trichloride-stabilized) liquid, light olive drab shipping can with brown band
Fig. 9-18
There was also a glass screening smoke grenade of similar design. Yes, it is in violation of the Hague Convention, but so was mistreatment of POWs. Gordon Rottman
Hiroshima chemical warfare factories produced three hundred thirty thousand chabin during WW2.
The Okinawa Times October 3, 1998 issue reported that chabin were found in the underground ruins of the Arakaki Army Hospital in Itoman City Okinawa.
You can read about it at “this thread” on the http://forum.axishistory.com.
There was a thourough going cover up of the aboce facts after the war by the Truman Administration in order to use the Japanese Emperor
JC in KZ,
Your No. 85 was very interesting, particularly your opinion here of scriptural roots of the apparent conflict between Jacksonian American savagery in war and succor of the defeated enemy in peace:
“We, Americans, when aggregated may at once be as cruel and as caring as humanly possible, and hold that tension in check until it snaps one way or another. To some it appears feckless, or erratic, or insane, that we could go literally overnight from utter, crushing devastation and murder of sworn enemies, to gently caring for their wounded and consoling them with help to rebuild.
This kind of attitude, however, flows naturally from the scriptural underpinnings of American, and even English, civilization. An expression, that is, of the tension in God between perfect justice and perfect mercy. An unwillingness to unleash righteous obliteration until absolutely necessary because of the innocents. We, being human rather than divine, lack the perfect knowledge of how to balance our own responses, especially in the complex realm of international actions, but it’s easy to see and say that along the route to the present we have misses many many moments when “gentle” correction of one sort or another could have drawn even the Muslim world back from their in-built brink–if for a time. Jefferson understood this and put it progressively into action, for example … ”
Note that Jacksonians (as defined in Walter Russell Mead’s Special Providence) are not the only grouping of Americans whose peace & war actions are based on those same scriptural underpinnings. My own Church of the Brethren (German Quaker, very much related to Amish, Mennonites & German Baptists) historically balanced its seemingly inconsistent pacifism with the need for group survival in a harsh world on such distinctions. Here is the point, and then a longer quotation, from something I wrote for the Reverend Donald Sensing years ago:
“… The more morally confident are today called “conscientious objectors” who object to killing in war. They will use force and even kill to improve a situation when they feel it is morally justified. They just won’t kill under orders from somebody else. Each individual must make his own calls and answer on Judgment Day for mistakes.”
http://donaldmsensing.blogspot.com/2003/02/american-christian-pacifism-by-thomas.html
“… The true roots of pacifist theology lie in individual salvation – the objection to war is not so much that war is evil but that it is evil to kill anyone who doesn’t deserve it. People should refrain from killing other people to save their own souls, not to save others or to make society better. True religious pacifists deem any killing or use of force by themselves as a mortal threat to their own souls because they might be mistaken about the moral consequences of such acts. Use of force is wrong in its own right as well as being the start of a slippery slope which might lead to killing.
So religious pacifists won’t use any force at all, let alone kill, to save their own souls. The early history of the Brethren in America included one ghastly Indian massacre in which most of a German village in Pennsylvannia was hacked down while lined up and praying, en mass, “Gott mit uns” (God is with us) over and over. The survivors high-tailed it east to the protection of the “English” militia.
It was a tough world. Holsingers and other Brethren came here because the penalty for refusing conscription in many German states was the murder of one’s children. My grandmother told me folk stories about 17th-18th century soldiers crying while turning baby carriages over so they wouldn’t have to look at the babies’ faces while running them through with bayonets.
But there are ranges of opinion. The more morally confident are today called “conscientious objectors” who object to killing in war. They will use force and even kill to improve a situation when they feel it is morally justified. They just won’t kill under orders from somebody else. Each individual must make his own calls and answer on Judgment Day for mistakes.
Indian encounters such as the one detailed above produced changes necessary for community survival, i.e., of course there were “enforcers”. Some Brethren would fight to defend their communities, or even property. There is a wonderful passage in my great-uncle Paul’s family history about young Jacob Holsinger (born in 1732 on a ship anchored off Philadelphia) doing the latter about 1750. Few Holsingers have been pacifists since. One who was ended up as the chief printer for General Clinton in New York City during the Revolution – it was the most a loyal pacifist could do for his King (I think he got 2000 or 6000 pounds compensation upon resettling in England after the war for his health). The King was the one who protected us from the Indians – few German settlers were Rebels.
Civil War draft officials in Lancaster County, Pennsylvannia, learned the hard way about the distinction between pacifists and the 19th Century equivalent of “conscientious objectors”. Consider the term “dry gulch” used as a verb. The only way to learn which Brethren were pacifists and which weren’t was to go to church with them for twenty years …”
“What will the role of manned aviation end up being?”
I am sorry that I missed this question earlier. I have long advocated getting rid of manned small aircraft. Keeping the pilot alive and functioning takes up to much equipment, weight, and space, and it limits performance, e.g. 15G turns.
RPVs are the way to go for most combat uses. They can be controlled from fairly nearby but well out of the hot zone, by men on a ship or a plane with com hook ups not through a satellite but through UAVs like global hawk.
Smaller planes, means smaller carriers, which can be cheaper, easier to hide and more maneuverable.