Day: December 29, 2016

Closing Thought–29Dec16

Karma Is a Bitch!

Listen up!

The year is winding down and a new one awaits its birth…so why not get serious?

The election is over….Donald Trump has won and will become the 45th president of these United States.  PERIOD!

To Dems…get over yourself….you lost for good reasons.  You had a horrible candidate and you did not talk to the people about there concerns.  You see dummies…you believed your own hype and you got your ass handed to you.  We know…you are butt hurt from the loss…just get some Beaudreaux’s Butt Balm and let it go!

To Repubs…..stop whining!  You won let it go!  Stop worrying about what is being said by those on the “Left”…it does not matter!  You won the election now go and try to get through to the American people.  You should had expected everything that is being said…after all you twats spent 8 years doing the same thing with Obama.  You created the atmosphere for all this whining and crying….

Karma is truly a bitch!

All this pathetic whining on both sides is just disgusting….a waste of time that accomplishes nothing but headlines for the MSM.

Try starting a new year with the mindset that the American people, all American people, need our help and for once try and make a government work to that end.

I know…I know…that would be a novel approach that has not been tried for decades…but who knows…it might just work out for the better.

How Goes The “War On Terror”?

Now there is a term we do not hear much these days….War on Terror.

I am sure that it will make the headlines again soon….but until then….

For 16 years we have been waging a war on terror….Bush brought us to this point in our history…..with all that time under our belts just how goes this war?

As the new year begins I ready myself for the class I will teach on terrorism….but we must look at this war with an open mind….something NOT many Americans are capable of doing these days….but I have to try…….

Below are perspectives from the Unz Reader which has a decidedly Libertarian lean to them….but good points one and all……

The twenty-first century, at least up until this point, might well be described as the age of the terrorist. Even though most Americans and Europeans rank terrorism as low among their concerns, the repercussions when a terrorist attack does take place are greatly magnified by the sheer horror associated with the mass killing of innocent people going about their daily lives.

There are a couple of annual reports that look at terrorism as a global phenomenon. The best known is the U.S. State Department’s Annual Country Reports on Terrorism that comes out in the Summer and covers the previous year. It is mandated by Congress and is largely based on Embassy and intelligence community sources.

The Country Reports purports to be an objective review of the year’s terrorist incidents as well as an overview of some of the players to include a discussion of “violent extremism” issues region by region and country by country. It is a valuable resource which provides considerable information on the various militant groups and the crimes attributed to them as well as their involvement globally. But it is nevertheless a government document. The Obama Administration definitely has had a point of view on what constitutes terrorism and how to deal with it based on how the White House would like to frame things from a political perspective. The section on Afghanistan, for example, implicitly makes a case for a more robust American role in the conflict engulfing that country.

read more……

Source: Some Perspectives on the War on Terror – The Unz Review

After 15 years or more….could we be doing something wrong….could whole Western world be doing something wrong?

European political leaders are making the same mistake in reacting to the massacre at the Christmas fair in Berlin, in which 12 died, as they did during previous terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels. There is an over-concentration on the failings of the security services in not identifying and neutralising the Tunisian petty criminal, Anis Amri, as the threat he turned out to be. There is too little focus on bringing to an end the wars in Syria and Iraq which make this type of atrocity unstoppable.

In the aftermath of the killings the visibility of Amri, who was shot dead in Milan this morning, as a potential threat looks misleadingly obvious, and the culpability of those who did not see this appears more glaring than it really was. The number of possible suspects – suspected before they have done anything – is too great to police them effectively.

Source: The ‘War on Terrorism’ Just Keeps Making It Worse – The Unz Review

But not to worry a American general has predicted that ISIS has only 2 more years of existence….

In a Christmas Day interview, Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend, the command of US-led coalition forces in Iraq, faulting the Iraqi military for denying that the Mosul offensive was paused, insisting that “people need to rest” and that the offensive would resume soon.

Townsend also provided an estimate on the overall war, saying it’s going as well as could be expected, and that it’d probably be “another two years of hard work” before ISIS is really defeated in Iraq and Syria, saying that he didn’t want to put a specific timeline on the war.

(antiwar.com)

We start a new year with a new president…..maybe it is time for fresh eyes on this subject….but the question is…are we capable of an adjustment in our reasoning?

My thought is….NOT this time around.

Keep Talking You Dumbass

Since the abstention by the US on a settlement resolution at the UN every right wing dullard has been having a stroke….of course there is always the religious overtones but that has nothing to do with this resolution….it is what is right and wrong and the stealing of land and the destruction of crops to make room for more illegal settlements is just flat out WRONG!

And of course BiBi is butt hurt and doing what most authoritarians do….he is slashing out at the countries that voted against Israel.  To the point of threatening the United States…..

PM Binyamin Netanyahu of Israel and his cabinet ministers are trying to punch above their weight. He wants to punish the UN, and apparently even the United States.

He threatens the one country that made the state of Israel possible….

He also threatens 10 other countries……These countries were Britain, France, Russia, China, Japan, Ukraine, Angola, Egypt, Uruguay and Spain…Israel does not have so many friends that it can afford to lose their biggest supporters….

But by all means BiBi…keep talking….

He then continued, “This is an anti-Israel resolution against Israel, the Jewish people, and the state of the Jews.”  And this is the feeling of many Americans….people who have NOT read the resolution….they do what they do best…regurgitate bullshit!

The resolution isn’t anti-Israel, doesn’t mention anything about Jews, and doesn’t challenge the Jewish state.  It just points out that Israelis are not at liberty to steal Palestinian land.  The United Nations Charter forbids the acquisition of territory by military force, so Israel’s conquest of the Palestinian West Bank in 1967 is no warrant for it to colonize said territory or to expropriate and keep in a condition of statelessness the people who live there.

Maybe read that paragraph again…..it takes time to get through those pea brains on the Right!

Only a moron would claim antisemitism….the condemnation is of the governmental actions not the people or the religion….there is a difference…look it up.

Plus he, BiBi, is injecting himself into this society…..claims of US behind the vote….

Israel has been voicing its displeasure about the United States’ abstention from a UN Security Council vote Friday that called for an end to illegal Israeli settlements. So has Donald Trump, who’s vowed “things will be different after Jan. 20th.” Now Israel is offering the president-elect what it says is proof that President Obama helped set up the resolution, the Guardian reports. “We have rather iron-clad information from sources in both the Arab world and internationally that this was a deliberate push by the United States and in fact they helped create the resolution in the first place,” a rep for PM Benjamin Netanyahu told Fox News. Ron Dermer, Israeli ambassador to DC, elaborated Monday. “It’s an old story that the United Nations gangs up on Israel,” he said, per the Hill. “What is new is that the United States did not stand up and oppose that gang up. And what is outrageous is that the United States was actually behind that gang up.”

The Guardian notes Israel making this threat to present “evidence” to an incoming president against one still in the Oval Office “appears almost unprecedented.” But the White House insists that while Obama did decide US Ambassador Samantha Power would abstain during Friday’s vote, he wasn’t involved in putting together the resolution. “We did not draft this resolution; we did not introduce this resolution. We made this decision when it came up for a vote,” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, said Friday in a statement. Meanwhile, Israel indicated it’s going to flout the UN resolution and go ahead with plans for thousands of new homes in East Jerusalem, per the New York Times. “Israel is a country with national pride, and we do not turn the other cheek,” Netanyahu said Monday.

Wait!  There is proof?  And how did you come by this “proof”?  Are you spying on your best friend?

Is that a foot sticking out of your mouth?  Need a little hot sauce for that shoe?

Please BiBi…keep talking…..

War Is Good Business

I have long stated that there is NO longer an antiwar party or for that matter an antiwar sentiment among the people the this country.  Both of our major parties are war hawks just different colored ties…..

The Libertarians are about the best party for non-interventionism, by the way that does not mean isolationism, is the Libertarians and to a smaller degree the Green Party….the Unz Reader, a Libertarian publication has done an article on what we can expect in the coming years….

The Establishment and Realist foreign policy communities in the United States often seem separated by language which leads them to talk past each other. When a realist or Libertarian talks about non-intervention or restraint in foreign policy, as Ron Paul did in 2008 and 2012, the Establishment response is to denounce isolationism. As Dr. Paul noted during his campaigns, non-interventionism and isolationism have nothing to do with each other as a country that does not meddle in the affairs of others can nevertheless be accessible and open in dealing with other nations in many other ways. Non-interventionists are fond of quoting George Washington’s Farewell Address, in which he recommended that “The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible… Harmony, liberal intercourse with all nations, are recommended by policy, humanity, and interest.” Establishment pundits tend to dismiss that “little political connection” bit, preferring instead to warn how detachment from foreign politics might lead to the rise of a new Adolph Hitler.

Source: Bipartisan War – The Unz Review

With our last election the American people seem to want a more restrained foreign policy…..but after 20Jan17 the question will be….will we get our wish?

A recent poll by the Charles Koch Institute and the Center for the National Interest sheds new light on why Donald Trump captured the White House. Its results amount to a public-opinion indictment of the foreign policy thinking—and the foreign policy results—of both parties over the past decade and a half. It exposes a divide between the establishment outlook of Washington and public sentiment at large, and the results don’t seem to make much of a distinction between the record of Republican George W. Bush and that of Democrat Barack Obama.

Asked, for example, if U.S. foreign policy over the past 15 years made Americans more or less safe, fully 52 percent said less safe. Only 12 percent said safer, while another quarter said the nation’s foreign policy actions over that time span had had no impact on their safety. The results were similar when respondents were asked if U.S. foreign policy of the past two administrations had made the world more or less safe. Less safe: 51 percent; safer: 11 percent; no change: 24 percent.

Source: Americans Want Foreign-Policy Restraint | The American Conservative

An interesting piece by keep in mind that the Koch Industries were the ones that commissioned the study…..so just how skewed is this?

On another news front about war……

The Swedish government has told municipal authorities to prepare civil defense infrastructure and procedures for a possible war. The move was prompted by Sweden’s return to the Cold War-era ‘Total Defense Strategy’.

The instruction to ramp up preparedness for an armed conflict was sent to municipal security chiefs by the Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB), an authority operating under the Defense Ministry and tasked with civil protection, public safety, emergency management and civil defense.

“This places a high demand on… operational speed, decision making, information sharing, crisis communication, flexibility, robustness and handling secret information,” the letter says, according to Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet (SvD), as cited by the Local.

The instruction follows the revival of the ‘totalförsvarsplaneringen’ – or Total Defense Strategy – which states that defending the nation from foreign aggression should involve economic and civilian measures in addition to military ones. The decision, announced in December last year, was explained by a “worsening international situation” and “increased uncertainty in the immediate area.”

Now that is a reassuring point…..wouldn’t you say?