Author: VD

Hank writes: VD you continue to assume that I’m for big government. You know better than that by now. Bringing up the effectiveness of Soviet censorship doesn’t reduce the threat posed by these extremists here. Was the massacre of Christians in Turkey during World War I have any less barbaric because it wasn’t nearly as efficient or far reaching as the massacre of Jews in World War II by Germany? No social, religious or political affiliation is above falling into the traps of abuse of power like this. It just so happens that it is the neo-cons and religious right who are doing it in this country right now…. I’m all for libertarianism. Let’s give it a whirl. If big transnational corporations don’t swoop in and take over everything it just might work.

Hank, you can rant about the dangers of Christian extremism all you like, with my full and cheerful blessing, as long as you stay true to the idea that expanding government power is not the answer to solving any of society’s ills, whatever we perceive them to be. It’s a major conceptual breakthrough for anyone, of any political stripe, to realize that advocating central state power for their own purposes is tantamount to advocating that same power in the hands of the enemy. There is always a Commodus waiting to wear the purple.

If Hank and his fellow leftists are willing, I’ll be delighted to help them ensure that there isn’t any central state power for Christian extremists to abuse. All the more enthusiastically if these “Christian extremists” are the likes of the current Republican leadership.

From the Daily Reckoning: As far as what’s happening over here… first, in Fallujah, the Marines were doing well until they ran out of gas, literally. The real reason the Marines had to start their truce/cease-fire strategy is because the coalition forces are running extremely low on fuel right now. We first heard about it maybe 10 days ago or so from some Army 5th Group Special Forces guys who were complaining to us, saying how even THEY had been ordered to ration fuel.

Considering that Special Forces guys get the best of everything and get first dibs on everything, including fuel, we knew the shortage must be pretty bad. Sure enough, just a couple days later, the Army 1 star, who runs the base where our compound is located, implemented strict refueling policies, severely limiting how much gas we can take per day. They’ve gone so far as posting guards at the fuel points to measure how much gas is pumped per vehicle, per day, with everything getting logged on their clipboards. It’s definitely a change. The 1 star didn’t tell us where the fuel shortage came from, but it is probably a mix of poor planning and recent fuel truck convoys from Kuwait being either delayed or cancelled due to the increasing number of attacks. Anyway, that’s the reason the marines had to slow down in Fallujah. Once the fuel problem gets taken care of, the Marines will probably pick up the pace again. Fallujah is going to take a couple months, not a couple weeks….

We knew things would get worse before June 30th, and they have. Things will probably continue to get worse. It’s already been established that both the new Iraqi military and Iraqi police are pretty much worthless and cannot be trusted. So much so, that the Army requested Kurdish soldiers to come to Baghdad to replace the Iraqi soldiers currently providing security for the army bases here. The Army knows the Kurdish soldiers can be trusted and are loyal to the U.S., unlike the Iraqi soldiers. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when a few thousand Kurds show up in Baghdad armed with AK47s. But that’ll only be one of many future problems.

The Army recently extended the tour lengths another 4 months for a lot of their guys who have already been in the Middle East a year now. Their morale and motivation was already non-existent before the extension; now these guys, tens of thousands of them, are just taking up space over here.

I know it’s still early in the game, but you can pretty much write off the entire U.S. Army (with the exception of their special forces and maybe their aviation units) as being “operationally ineffective” in the future (i.e. completely worthless to the coalition from here on out, except to suck up food and fuel). Generally speaking, the Army is incompetent in these types of environments: only Marines and Special Forces guys do well in a place like this. Special Forces because they’re so precise, and Marines because they’re so disciplined… and ferocious.

The Army is just making things worse for the coalition. The Army is intent on having its presence seen and felt in Iraq because they think that will make everyone think they are in charge. What they don’t seem to realize is that a large military presence is the one thing, pretty much the only thing, the Iraqis can’t tolerate. Despite reports by the news media to the contrary, Iraqis don’t resent the humanitarian projects, or the rebuilding effort, or even the U.S. being in control of the government until the transition. Sure the Iraqis want to be in charge, but the majority can tolerate the situation until a transition happens, even if it’s months down the road. But what they can NOT tolerate is waking up every day and seeing army tanks and Bradleys rolling through their towns and villages. And they can’t tolerate being stopped by endless Army checkpoints on the highways, which were set up by commanding officers who think terrorists and insurgents haven’t figured out a way yet to avoid those checkpoints. That’s what the Iraqis resent and can’t tolerate, along with a thousand other ways the Army makes its presence felt (and I didn’t even mention having your door kicked in at 2 am because of some “hot Army intel”). Until the Army realizes all of this – which it seems like it never will – things will only get worse. And in response, the Army will just increase its presence.”

Do try to keep this in mind when the armchair heroes who’ve never been within three thousand miles of Iraq blather that all we need is to keep our fighting spirits up. An army still fights on its belly, and even the best soldiers are only as capable as their supply line. More important, perhaps, is to remember that armies are designed for killing people, breaking things and winning wars, not nation-building. Failure does not only stem from lack of ability or will, but also from conceit. To me, the very concept of nation-building sounds almost as wildly hubristic as the fatal conceit, socialism itself.

From Slate on Eric Harris of Columbine infamy: These are not the rantings of an angry young man, picked on by jocks until he’s not going to take it anymore. These are the rantings of someone with a messianic-grade superiority complex, out to punish the entire human race for its appalling inferiority. It may look like hate, but “It’s more about demeaning other people,” says Hare.

A second confirmation of the diagnosis [of psychopathy] was Harris’ perpetual deceitfulness…. Harris claimed to lie to protect himself, but that appears to be something of a lie as well. He lied for pleasure, Fuselier says. “Duping delight”—psychologist Paul Ekman’s term—represents a key characteristic of the psychopathic profile.

Messianism. Superiority complex. Pleasure in deceit. I don’t know why, but a vision of the Clintons just popped into my head.

I really don’t understand the phenomenon of leaving one place because you don’t like it, then working to make the place to which you’ve escaped more like your previous place. I was reading George Will’s column, which mentioned that Arizona is becoming more liberal because of Californians fleeing the disaster that liberals have made of California. I’ve seen a similar phenomenon in Florida, where people move from the North because they like the sun and low taxes, then immediately begin complaining that the public services are not as all-ecompassing and why doesn’t Florida just institute a state income tax so that the state government can provide [fill-in-the blank] like their old state does.

Either embrace your new culture or stay home. It’s that simple. I hate The Gap on every corner phenomenon. That doesn’t mean we should ban it, but at least think twice before you go buy an overpriced fake Italian coffee at Starbucks and consider patronizing the local coffee shop on the corner instead. And forget The Gap. Their clothes are the epitome of bland and boring anyhow.

Scott Breed writes to WND: It is our obligation to vote and to vote prayerfully. If you think conceding the presidency of the United States — to a person who is as outside the will of God as John Kerry seems to be — is OK as long as you maintain the principles of your vote, you are making not only a grave political mistake, but possibly a grave spiritual sin.

This cretin attempts to argue that since no man is perfect, you must vote for the lesser of two evils. What a load of literal non-sense. There is a massive difference between voting for someone and refusing to vote for his opponent, and it is significant that he can’t even quite bring himself to utter the words that not supporting evil is “a grave spiritual sin.”

A general warning to Christians: if you feel the need to preface a statement with “possibly” or “could lead to” before a statement on sin, then stop and rethink what you’re about to say. Nine times out of ten, you’d be much better off shutting your trap before you make an ass of yourself.

George Delano must be in trouble if his supporters are feeling the need to accuse others of grave sin for not supporting a man who repeatedly offends their conservative principles. Now there’s a Christian notion if I’ve ever heard one – sell out your principles for worldly power. This would be outrageous if it wasn’t so outrageously stupid. President Bush made a calculated decision to move to the left. Neither he nor his supporters should be surprised or upset that those of us on the right have no desire to see that he maintains his power. If the Republican Party will not support individual freedom, Constitutional rights, national sovereignty and small government, it has no reason whatsoever to expect that those of us who do will continue to support it.

If you genuinely like George Bush and his performance in office, then vote for him, by all means. But if your only reason for supporting Republicans is that Democrats are worse, you are politically rootless. You have no principle except your misconceived pragmatism. That argument will never change. You will never leave the Republican Party, no matter what they do, because the Democrats will always be worse as the two parties drift slowly, but surely, towards their bipartisan destination of all-powerful state.

Hank writes again: I’m deeply troubled by the actions of the neo-cons and Christian extremists in the FCC and DOJ. I’m more appalled at the entire lack of reaction by the populace in general. Combine this with a total apathy about the removal of our rights by USA PATRIOT Act and the Bush administrations insistence on scaring people into believing they have to surrender their rights to have them protected, and I don’t see this country’s democracy lasting much longer.

There’s your answer, Hank. What would possibly be the purpose behind an alliance between the secular Jewish neocons in the administration and their nonexistent Christian extremist colleagues? So now the FCC is full of Christian extremists… really? Did the fact that the secular Soviets had a far more rigorous policing of art than the FCC has ever envisioned escape your attention? Or that the FCC was stricter 50 years ago? How many of those seven words can’t we say now?

The truth is that what you rightly fear has nothing to do with Christianity or even religion at all. Liberals, neo-cons and compassionate conservatives alike are uniting to destroy the remnants of the Constitutional republic that remain. This Christian extremist loathes the Patriot Act, would ban the FCC outright and despises the Bush administration’s use of the oldest totalitarian canard in the book – put your faith in me and you will be safe. And yet, as a liberal, would you turn to the central government to stop this? Only the central government is the very instrument of all of this!

This country isn’t and never was a democracy. If you want to defend your God-given (yes!) rights, then cast aside your emotional bond with big government and embrace the intellectual freedom of libertarianism. The love of money may be the root of all evil, but government is evil’s strong arm. Bush and Ashcroft are not right-wing, they are strong government advocates just like Hilary Clinton. Their arguments may be different, but the results always point in the same direction: more central government power, less individual freedom.

Walk into the light….

Hank writes: Those Christian extremists also have the most powerful organization in the world under their direction. That includes multi-trillion dollar power to cripple economies, a defense budget larger than the rest of the world’s combined as well as the ability to annihalate any country they see fit. That’s just what they can do to foreign peoples they don’t like. This says nothing for what they have in store for those of us here. Forgive me if I’m more threatened by the fundamentalists running our govermnent more every day rather than a bunch of penniless Muslims half a world away.

This is stunningly and uncharacteristically poor thinking by Hank. The only way it can possibly be considered even vaguely valid is to define all Christians as extremists. George Bush is a Methodist, which is a liberal mainstream Christian denomination. His administration is full of non-practicing Jews, so much so that its defenders claim that simply to criticize the neocon influence on the administration is tantamount to anti-Semitism. Unless Hank is referring to Focus on the Family, which is much more of a Christian fundamentalist organization than the Bush coterie, he’s simply making statements that would sound more appropriate coming out of the humorless and factually challenged morass that is Air America.

Ironically, one could almost make a better case for the Clinton administration being full of Christian extremists, being that Bill Clinton is a nominal Southern Baptist and his administration was less populated by obviously non-Christian Jews.

Finally, our government isn’t the one with the power to cripple economies. Its part is done. Thanks to years of bipartisan mismanagement and the disastrous leadership of the Federal Reserve, that power now lies with the Chinese and Japanese governments.

Rich Lowry writes on NRO: By my count, the ranks of chastened hawks -chastened in their own differing ways, of course-now includes Charles Krauthammer, David Brooks, and Francis Fukuyama. It’s possible to be sadder, wiser, and still resolved to see this thing through. That’s where NR is, and where, I suspect, a lot of supporters of this war are.



Nation-building is not an appropriate enterprise for a free society. It was a bad idea in Woodrow Wilson’s time and it is a bad idea now. All that we are likely to accomplish in Iraq, I fear, is to enhance the power and ambition of the United Nations. After all, if we turn primary responsibility over to them, who could argue that the organization needs military capability of its own as well as a means of funding it?

As for the chastened hawks, how much longer will it take for them to take the next step and conclude that American troops should not be there, not to mention Bosnia or any of the 100 other countries in which our troops are stationed as they attempt to maintain Pax Americana. The romantic irony of bringing “democracy” to these foreign lands aside, it simply isn’t going to work. The projected stay has now reached 10 years. No doubt it will soon be longer than that.

DS writes of Air America: Decided to listen while driving around the last two days. I get the Portland station. Could not believe the low life attempt at humor. VP Cheney and Justice Scalia being gang sodomized? Saying Bush likes seeing people on fire jumping out of buildings! Not only is it not funny; it is totally disgusting. Even though I think they are helping the Republican cause it’s embarrassing to listen to. The laugh track is worse than Gilligan’s Island. I wonder what they plan to do to sink to new lows.

Go off the air. That’s my guess. Speaking of radio, I’ve been digging up some information on Pirate Radio, Icecast and other Internet radio options. What’s the general preference – and I’m promising nothing – downloadable MP3’s from a web site or streaming from a server? Given that you won’t be able to tune in on your radio anyhow, I don’t see any real benefit to the latter, but lots of additional expense and operating issues. Then again, perhaps I’m missing something. Anyone have any thoughts?

Dr. Kern, of the SKI gold stock analysis system, writes: The great crash of the century has been initiated. Liquidate all assets that can decline in net asset value (stocks, bonds, real estate, gold, but not EE, I Savings Bonds, or cash). As I stated on the triple buy in 12/02, but this time in reverse, all traditional technical indicators of oversold conditions will prove to be wrong. The gold stocks declined today through all stops and although the panic selling is usually indicative of a low, I’ll pick the needle out of the century’s haystack, and indicate SELL EVERYTHING (due to the greatest and truest triple sell [signal] in history). I understand that you will view this communication as being the rantings of a lunatic and a contrary indicator. Do not fight the SKI indices. Please remain out of everything until the patterns indicate that a great bottom has occurred. IT has happened and the indices have spoken.

This is certainly in line with what Bob Prechter said when I spoke to him yesterday. He felt the top of a Cycle, Supercycle and Grand Supercycle Wave 2 was in very recently. I note, on the other hand, that the R/DMA-200 barely been punctured yet, which is my usual buy signal. I won’t get concerned until the R/DMAs drop below .90, which has not happened in this ongoing bull market for metals.

One thing that makes me at least pay attention here, however, is that Kern has been an unrepentant gold bull – he still is, actually, in terms of his logic, he’s just sticking manfully by his system – so this is not someone who is simply a bear by temperament.