Day: October 31, 2019

Closing Thought–31Oct19

BOO!

Happy Halloween!

They are “the Best of the Best of the Best”…this is how we talk about our elite special ops troopers.

Visit exotic lands meet interesting people and kill them…..a great enlistment slogan…..

The beginning of our special ops was copied by the SAS in WW2……these were elite troops that did a marvelous job during war…..so when I read an article about the special ops troopers in the UK I was surprised….

Faced with a recruitment crisis, the United Kingdom Special Forces (UKSF) have been forced to put up advertisements to attract fresh blood into their elite ranks.

Posted in the British Army magazine Soldier, the advertisement is specifically geared toward the Special Forces Communicator (SFC) career field.

The advertisement states that “The Special Forces Communicator is [sic] selected for their technical acumen, tactical abilities and physical robustness to deliver and enable Special Forces information whenever needed.”

The career field was activated in April and falls under the Royal Signals (R Signals), which is one of the British Army’s combat support branches. Upon completion of a physically and intellectually arduous six-month selection and training pipeline, SFC operators are assigned to the 18 (UKSF) Signals Regiment. The Special Forces Communicator’s Course is comprised of six phases:

Warriors needed: Recruitment crisis forces UK SOF to put up advertisements

I ask my UK readers to let me know how accurate this article is…..

Be well Be safe……

I Read, I Wrote, You Know

“Lego Ergo Scribo”

Let’s Be Exact

The definition for the adjective “EXACT”…..”

adjective: exact

  1. not approximated in any way; precise.

Now that is by the rules of grammar….but that does not mean the it is according to Trump, as we know he makes up his own rules as he goes along………

I bring this up because of the overuse of the word “exact” by the president when talking about the ‘transcript’ of the phone call he had with the Ukrainian president.

When he released a “transcript” of his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, President Trump called it a “an exact word-for-word transcript of the conversation, taken by very talented stenographers.” Trump could not have been more explicit in his claim that the White House had, in full transparency, published a complete account of the call. “All you have to do is read what they wrote down, the stenographers,” Trump said later, “They wrote down an exact call.”

(Intelligencer)

Well that constant claim by Trump is what he does best….LIES!

But Hell do not believe me for I am a “Never Trumper” (so I have been called because I will not blindly follow this person)…..below is the ‘transcript’ of the phone call…..

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trumps-ukraine-call-transcript-read-the-document

I bring your attention to page one of the transcript and the paragraph that begins with the word ‘caution’……

Sorry Donald but it is a Memo not an ‘exact’ transcript of the phone call.

Maybe some of the ‘geniuses’ in the White House should explain the difference to our president for apparently he knows not.

And then a US Army soldier stepped forward…..

Democrats said Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman’s more than 10 hours of testimony Tuesday on Capitol Hill in the Trump impeachment inquiry was “extremely disturbing,” and key among the details was his description of the July 25 phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky, as well as its accompanying transcript—which, per CNN, Vindman said was “mostly accurate.” However, three sources said to be familiar with Vindman’s deposition tell the New York Times that Vindman testified certain words and phrases were left out of the White House memo of the call—omissions indicated by an ellipsis in at least one case—and that he tried to get them put back in. In some cases, his edits were incorporated, but two notable ones were ignored, he said.

One part of the Trump-Zelensky conversation Vindman said had vanished was when the Ukrainian president directly mentioned “Burisma,” the name of the energy company that Joe Biden’s son Hunter worked for. Instead of “Burisma,” “the company” was used in the transcript. The second omission Vindman flagged, noted by an ellipsis: a part in the chat in which Trump mentioned recordings of Joe Biden, a seeming reference to a 2018 event in which the ex-VP talked about trying to convince Ukraine to dump its prosecutor general. There were three transcript ellipses in total, which now raises questions about the other two. In September, the White House said the presence of the ellipses didn’t indicate “missing words or phrases,” but a “trailing off of a voice or pause.” It said brackets or redaction indicators would’ve been used for missing words or phrases.

The GOP attacks on the person of this war veteran is despicable….soldiers do not have a political ambition…..Trump and the slugs would know this if they ever served in the military of this country.

The GOP can kiss their support for the military good-bye because all along it was a spurious support at best……fake concern from fake people.

I Read, I Wrote, You Know

“Lego Ergo Scribo”

That Armenian Genocide Thing

For over 100 years the Armenians have been trying to get the world to hold the Turks responsible for the deaths of thousands of Armenians during and after World War One….

And for that century the Armenians have been trying to get the world to recognize the genocide…….The US in the past has ignored the genocide because Turkey was a valued customer and ally…..

On the eve of World War I, there were two million Armenians in the declining Ottoman Empire. By 1922, there were fewer than 400,000. The others — some 1.5 million — were killed in what historians consider a genocide.

As David Fromkin put it in his widely praised history of World War I and its aftermath, “A Peace to End All Peace”: “Rape and beating were commonplace. Those who were not killed at once were driven through mountains and deserts without food, drink or shelter. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians eventually succumbed or were killed .”

The man who invented the word “genocide”— Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer of Polish-Jewish origin — was moved to investigate the attempt to eliminate an entire people by accounts of the massacres of Armenians. He did not, however, coin the word until 1943, applying it to Nazi Germany and the Jews in a book published a year later, “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.”

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/ref/timestopics/topics_armeniangenocide.html

Now that the Turks are on the new “shit list” it is time for the US to step up….

The U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to recognize the mass killings of Armenians a century ago as a genocide, a symbolic but historic vote instantly denounced by Turkey.

The Democratic-controlled House voted 405-11 in favor of a resolution asserting that it is U.S. policy to commemorate as genocide the killing of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1923. The Ottoman Empire was centered in present-day Turkey.

The vote marked the first time in 35 years that such legislation was considered in the full House, underscoring widespread frustration in Congress with the Turkish government, from both Democrats and President Donald Trump’s fellow Republicans.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-turkey-armenia/u-s-house-recognizes-armenian-genocide-backs-turkey-sanctions-idUSKBN1X82LY

This vote does little but to make the Congress appear to actually give a crap about what Turkey is doing in Syria.

A little history in the region and it involves the Kurds (remember them?  They are those people that the media is so concerned about)….those same people also participated in the genocide of the Armenians…..

Not widely known in the United States, but very well known in the region, is that among the most enthusiastic participants in the Armenian massacres of 1915 were Kurdish Muslim tribesmen, who largely inhabited the same regions of Anatolia as Armenian Christian peasants. This fact also goes unmentioned in the New York Times piece, but can be found by a casual perusal of Wikipedia, and the associated footnotes.

The Ottoman government of World War I (whose most important leaders, such as Kemal Pasha and Enver Pasha, were actually Albanians by ethnicity) considered Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians as a potential fifth column for the Russians, and made every effort to encourage Muslim attacks on them. The best parallel is with anti-Jewish pogroms in Czarist Russia of that same era, which were encouraged by government officials but mostly carried out by local Polish and Ukrainian peasants.

Kurdish Participation in the Armenian Genocide

It is all a game.

Sadly this is NOT the way to carry our foreign policy……it is childish and wimpy.

Turkey is pissed!

Turkey’s President Erdogan declared that he “strongly condemns” the House resolutions, calling them a “slander against our country,” and “the biggest insult toward our nation.” Turkey also summoned the US Ambassador to warn of a breakdown in US-Turkey relations.

This could indeed have long-term ramifications, because with all these US Representatives now having publicly voted to recognize the genocide, it’s going to be really hard for a future US government to unrecognize it to make Turkey happy.

Will greed replace outrage?

I Read, I Wrote, You Know

“Lego Ergo Scribo”

AQ Makes A Comeback

All the reporting from the MSM lately has been about the terrorist group, ISIS and very little has been reported on that other group, Al-Qaeda….

It never really left the region but a recent report points to a resurgence of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan……we are talking about AQ not the Taleban….not necessarily the same group although sympathies overlap.

We have lost our concern over AQ after the death of Osama and the rise of ISIS,,,,the world took their eye off this group of terrorists……and in doing so have made this rise possible…..

Al Qaeda has prioritized its re-entry into Afghanistan since 2014, when the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) drew down forces.[3] Al Qaeda Emir Ayman al Zawahiri announced the formation of al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) in 2014, a move intended to counter the Islamic State’s declaration of a so-called caliphate in Iraq and Syria as well as exploit the ISAF drawdown.[4] Al Qaeda’s re-entry into Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan forced the U.S. to resume counter-terrorism operations there in 2015.

Senior AQIS leaders and Taliban commanders are co-located in Afghanistan today, signaling an enduring and high-level partnership. American and Afghan forces targeted a joint Taliban-al Qaeda compound in Musah Qal’ah District, a Taliban stronghold considered the group’s de facto capital, in Helmand Province on September 22.[5] Multiple Afghan security organizations reported that the operation killed senior AQIS leader Asim Umar and a courier who connected AQIS leaders to Zawahiri. Afghanistan’s intelligence agency and a U.S. official have since confirmed Umar’s death in the raid.[6] The operation also targeted several Taliban commanders from districts in Helmand Province.[7] It is a sign of the extent of al Qaeda’s return to the area.

http://iswresearch.blogspot.com/2019/10/al-qaeda-expands-its-presence-in.html

Further Reading:

https://lobotero.com/2018/07/06/does-anyone-remember-al-qaeda/

Never turn your back on a dangerous animal……

I Read, I Wrote, You Know

“Lego Ergo Scribo”