Day: October 30, 2014

ISIS Coalition Situation Report (SITREP) #28

Good day my friends and welcome to today’s briefing…..

The news coming out of the Middle East and the battle against ISIS is slowing down for the media….Kobane is about all we will get from the MSM…….we try to take the reader into the real world of the fight against ISIS.

Unfortunately this means that the briefings will be given less frequently…..I apologize and will return to the daily briefings as the battle heats up…….

Item 1–Iraq forces are attempting to recapture the country largest refinery……

Iraqi security forces said they advanced to within 2 km (1.2 miles) of the city of Baiji on Wednesday in a new offensive to retake the country’s biggest oil refinery, besieged since June by Islamic State militants.

Backed by Shi’ite militias and army helicopters, government forces have swept through a desert area to the west of Baiji, aiming to recapture the city 200 km (130 miles) north of the capital.

 

This should illustrate if the plan they have now is doable……

Item 2–If you will recall we had a new bad guy….Khorsan….remember and we took them on and how did we do?

US officials say that the September attack on “Khorasan,” a US-invented term for a faction within Jabhat al-Nusra, failed even worse than previously reported, and the leaders previously reported killed actually survived.

Though officials claimed to be tracking Khorasan for a long time, experts believe the term was primarily invented to sell the attacks as something other than on Nusra, which in addition to being al-Qaeda is also a close ally of the “moderate” rebels the US always hypes in Syria.

OOPS!  Things are changing and we just seem to be following not leading……

Item 3–The Iraqi Kurds that went to Kobame to assist the defenders may be a constitutional sticking point……

Dispatching Peshmerga to the besieged Syrian town of Kobane is a political move and violates the Iraqi constitution, an Iraqi parliamentarian close to former Prime Minister Nouri-al Maliki claimed in an interview with Rudaw.

“The question is: will this force do anything for Kobane?” Ali al-Adeeb said by telephone from Baghdad Wednesday. “At the moment the force is very small. That’s why I think the deployment is nothing more than a political message,” he said.

A political battle could be the nail that ends Iraqi’s involvement…..bit really but some will want to believe that it will make a difference.

Item 4–I have said all along that the key to fighting ISIS in Anbar will be the tribes and so far the effort has been a dud……

When Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi took office, he was regarded as a moderate Shi’ite leader who could win over powerful Sunni tribal chiefs to the fight against Islamic State.

Three months later, Sunnis who once helped U.S. Marines kick the Islamic State’s predecessor al Qaeda out of Iraq view Abadi with deep scepticism because he has yet to deliver on promises to support their neglected Sunni heartland Anbar province.

The Sunni tribes are an answer for Iraq’s survival…….without them the battle against ISIS will not succeed.

Another day of little real information on the battle against ISIS…..the news will be dominated by the battle for Kobane (a battle that I do not think it is as important as the media wants it to be)……

This concludes today’s briefing……

Thanx for your time and attention

Turn The Page!

2014 Mid-Terms: A Comedy Of Errors

In just days…..Americans will go vote…….if you can call it that…….

I would like to give my opinion of the 2014 mid-terms……I searched for the most appropriate word that could sum up what I think of the election…..after many minutes of thinking I finally came up with the one word that could do justice to this election…..then BAM!  It came to me in a vision……..YAWN!

The truth is I find the whole process this time around to be as boring and as disgusting as any in recent memory…….and I am NOT alone……

The consensus heading into crunch time of the midterm elections is that they’re … boring. (See here and here, or check out a recent Pew poll showing the anemic level of interest among Americans—only about 15% are closely following things.) Midterms always lack the punch of a presidential election, of course, but this year seems worse than any recent one, writes Peter Beinart at the Atlantic. The problem, he argues, is that while 2014 has a number of dramatic races on the local level, nothing is grabbing people in more of a big-picture sense. “There’s no big national issue on which voters feel that they can change the country’s course.”

Go back to 1998, for instance, when the possibility of Bill Clinton’s impeachment hung over the election. In 2002, the nation fretted about invading Iraq, and four years later, it fretted about leaving. In 2010, the economic collapse overshadowed all. But this year, “Americans just don’t believe that as much hinges on their vote.” Control of the Senate? Sure, “Democrats want to win, but they’re not too worried about losing,” writes Ezra Klein at Vox. Even if they do, “they’re likely to take it back in 2016. And it’s not as if much is going to get done in the meantime.” People right now are worried about Ebola and ISIS, he adds, and that gets to heart of the problem of the 2014 election: “It doesn’t seem likely to really change anything anyone cares about.” Click for Klein’s full column, or Beinart’s.

The media has done this with their incessant polls, sometimes hourly, and their wild speculation and their lack of concern for the damage they are doing to the election process.

The real shame is that a right that Americans feel strongly about is taken so nonchalantly.  Some thing as important as the direction of this country is boiled down to a popularity contest.

I weep for this country for if this lunacy continues there is little hope we can survive.even though we have a right to vote.

Sad that this right that we Americans are so proud of has turned into a joke for late night comics.

How to build a better election – The Week

The V (for vote) Day is only days away……I am not confident that the voter will do anything that will help change the downward spiral of this system….I do wish I could be more optimistic….but sadly I cannot.

Almost everybody realizes that the election system needs a major overhaul…..reform will not do it….it needs a change….and before the next election.

This article is a good damn idea….NO!  It is a goddamn excellent idea!

 

How to build a better election – The Week.

Five Crazy Conspiracy Theories About Ebola That Conservatives Actually Believe | Right Wing Watch

God how I love the way that misinformation makes its way into the national conversation……and the stupidity of those that believe it is even more amusing…….

I have been a critic of this whole Ebola crisis…..I have stated that it is nothing more than the media milking a story for every ounce of crap they can glean from it…….

And there are the total bullshit from the Right on this crisis……..there are those that believe each and every one of these fear statements…..

Read and report!

 

Five Crazy Conspiracy Theories About Ebola That Conservatives Actually Believe | Right Wing Watch.

Malala: A Woman Of Destiny

There comes a time when the young need to step forward and show the rest of humanity what is right…..Malala Yousafzai is such a person.

This young lady deserves every prize given by humanity to those that put humanity first…..and she shows the world again how a responsible person acts…..

Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani education campaigner shot by the Taliban, has donated $50,000 (nearly £31,000) towards the reconstruction of schools in Gaza.

The Nobel peace prize winner, speaking after receiving the World Children’s Prize for the rights of the child in Marienfred, Sweden, on Wednesday, said the money would be channelled through the United Nations relief agency UNRWA to help rebuild 65 schools in the Palestinian territory.

Malala, who now lives in the UK and has her own fund to help small-scale organisations in a number of countries, including Pakistan, told journalists that children in Gaza had suffered from conflicts and war. The money would help children get “quality education” and continue their life, knowing they were not alone and that people were supporting them, she said.

Where are all the ‘responsible’ individuals?  I am talking about the individual making a difference not some for profit corporation that receives a tax deduction for their “gifts”.

She has my vote, if anyone is asking, for Woman Of The Year.

The world needs more people like this wonderful young lady.  If we had more then this conflicted planet would be a much better place to live..

Why Rocket Go Boom?!

Recently a private company rocket was attempting to re-supply the International Space Station but things did not go as planned….

A rocket that was supposed to deliver supplies to the crew aboard the International Space Station exploded in spectacular fashion just six seconds after liftoff this evening, reports CNN. The good news is that nobody was aboard, and NASA says nobody appears to have been killed on the ground at the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. (“No indicated loss of life,” in NASA-speak.) The rocket’s cargo ship held about 5,000 pounds of supplies and science equipment for the six people now on the space station, reports AP.

The Anteres rocket was launched by Orbital Sciences Corp., one of the two companies (along with SpaceX) hired by NASA to make supply runs to the space station. No word yet on what went wrong. NASA reported “100% favorable weather” and “no technical concerns” just prior to liftoff.

Truthfully, I was going to let this disaster go but…..I cannot now….the media is spending so much time covering it that I just have to interject my thoughts…….

The media reports are speculating on just what went wrong with the launch……the first culprit according to the media is the motor……..

The cause of yesterday’s rocket explosion over Wallops Island, Va., remains under investigation: While a tweet from Orbital Sciences refers to a “vehicle anomaly,” other reports have focused on aging rocket engines. They were built in the 1960s and 1970s to send Soviet cosmonauts to the moon, the Guardian reports.

The  ‘experts’ are speculating that it could have been a biol;d-up of pressure….then there is the possibility of something mechanical or even electrical……

I can save them a lot of time investigating……could it be as simple as the rocket was a piece of CRAP?

Think about it…..thanx to the damn silly program of privatization the space program is being out sourced to corporations that are in it for the profit.  Now how do corporations turn a profit?  by making the product as cheaply as possible.  ERGO….a piece of CRAP!

As far as the engine thing….it is old…okay…. but is not the Russian program using old technology to re-supply the ISS?

You truly want to know what happened?  Putting the future of our space program in the hands of profit seeking companies….this will not be the last problem they will face.

It’s All Obama’s Fault

That seems to be the sport of the year, well in most cases the last 6 years, to blame Obama for whatever is in the news of the day.  The crashed economy, Ebola virus (btw, do we really need a logo for a disease?),………I could continue to list all the possibilities but instead just pick a subject and I am positive that you can find someone who can pin it on Obama.

In the news is of course the outbreak in West Africa…..shootings…..and of course the big elephant in the room…ISIS.

And yes someone is blaming the rise of ISIS on, who else?  OBAMA.

I have heard all the Right wing excuses for the rise of ISIS and even a few from the Left….but the best accuser is a prince from Saudi Arabia……..

Saudi Arabia‘s Prince Turki al-Faisal on Tuesday blamed the United States and Europe for the rise of the Islamic State.

“Had America and Europe listened to the kingdom and provided the moderate opposition with anti-tank, anti-aircraft and artillery weapons, we would not have had to deploy our air forces to face the challenge of [the Islamic State],” Faisal said in the keynote address of the annual Arab-US policy conference put together by the National Council on US-Arab Relations. “These terrorists filled the void because of this neglect of the genuine opposition. And while Assad continued to bomb and gas his people, the moderate opposition had to fight on two fronts.”

Faisal is often trotted out to declare publicly what current Saudi officials say in private. Last year, he told Al-Monitor in an interview on the sidelines of the NCUSAR conference that there was a “high level of disappointment” with the Obama administration’s Syria policy.

May I ask……what prevented these toads from doing what it took to fuel the conflict?

I love it when these people trot out and make public statements to cover their butts.

Saudi Arabia is the home of Wahhabism which is at the core of the extremists beliefs of ISIS and Al-Qaeda.  Plus substantial funding for these groups flow out of places like Saudi Arabia and Qatar..

Yes the CIA is partially to blame for the rise of ISIS….but to lay it all on the shoulders of Obama is just ignorant……I mean would they want the US to lay all the blame on the kingdom and its royal family?

It could be asked….just what did the kingdom do to prevent the rise of ISIS?….they claim they warned the US and Europe of the rise of ISIS but yet did very little to do anything about that rise.

They are safe and secure because they, the Saudis, know that the West will not let anything happen to them …..and why is that?

We all know the answer too damn well……..don’t we?