Tag: war

San Antonio shooting

Another policeman is murdered:

A detective was shot and killed while writing a traffic ticket outside of police headquarters late Sunday morning. San Antonio Police Chief William McManus identified the slain officer as 20-year veteran Detective Benjamin Marconi, 50. He said the suspect has not yet been apprehended, and a motive is not known.

McManus said Marconi had pulled over a car for a traffic violation outside Public Safety Headquarters in downtown. While Marconi was inside his squad car writing a ticket, a black vehicle pulled up behind him and the driver got out, walked up to the detective’s window and shot him in the head, McManus said. Then the suspect reached into the window and shot Marconi a second time, he said.

It’s tragic. It’s horrifying. But the grim reality is that this will not be the last such murder. Until the following steps are taken, expect more of the same:

  • Restore the pre-1965 American population demographics
  • Demilitarize the police
  • End the Drug War.

If you’re not going to work towards, or support, any of those things, then Blue Lives really don’t Matter to you. Sure, you can talk tough if you like, but no one has ever won a 4GW conflict that way.

Aleppo

Putin and Assad are such monsters that it really defies all imagination. They have both ISIS and the various rebel groups on the verge of defeat through their ruthless strategy of carpet-bombing children’s hospitals, kitten sanctuaries, nunneries, and humanitarian food distribution centers.

How the God-Emperor ALREADY saved the world

I have spoken to several Europeans in the aftermath of the US presidential election, and they’ve all been very curious about what happened, and how it was possible for Donald Trump to win when everything they had heard from their medias indicated that he was a) very, very bad, and, b) certain to lose by a huge margin.

Of course, they were even more deluded than the US electorate, as the European media took the already misleading US narrative and exaggerated it, just as the US media does the same thing in reverse.

What is interesting is their reaction to finding out that Hillary Clinton supported NATO membership for both Ukraine and Georgia. It can be best described as “aghast”. Learning about Hillary’s foreign policy on Russia also suffices to convince them that Donald Trump was, in fact, the vastly preferable candidate. One man even said, “well, no wonder he won, given that he was clearly running against a madwoman.”

Unlike Americans, Europeans take the idea of war with Russia very, very seriously and understand it is something to be absolutely avoided at almost all costs. There are still millions of people who remember the brutal swath that the Red Army cut across Eastern Europe on its way to Berlin. They also understand that a considerable quantity of the natural gas that heats their homes comes from Russia, and that the first consequence of any military action will be for that pipeline to be shut off.

Very, very few Americans or Europeans understood just how serious the danger that Hillary Clinton posed to the world was. First, she supported NATO membership for Ukraine:

The former U.S Secretary of State is a far more vocal critic of Vladimir Putin than her party rival Bernie Sanders. She has argued that Ukraine deserves more military equipment and training and financial aid (the latter dependent on the government’s ability to carry out the necessary reforms). The U.S. Democrat’s frontrunner for the White House has also urged other E.U. states to be more committed to sanctions and has supported the strengthening of ties between NATO and Ukraine (unlike Bernie Sanders who sees NATO expansion as a provocation against Russia).

Second, she supported NATO membership for Georgia, who had already started and lost a brief war with Russia after being encouraged to join NATO in 2008.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Washington will continue assistance to Georgia in the field of security and defense and supports country’s NATO membership. The Secretary spoke at the opening of the U.S.-Georgia Strategic Partnership Commission plenary session in Batumi, Georgia. Georgia is strategic partner of U.S. as regards the issues of regional and world security. She stressed that increase in combat readiness of Georgia and matching it with NATO standards continues within the framework of agreement reached by both countries’ presidents, Gruziya Online reports.

Third, the woman who would likely have been Secretary of Defense under Hillary favored direct military intervention in Syria and called for spending $3 billion on military assistance for Ukraine.

The woman expected to run the Pentagon under Hillary Clinton said she would direct U.S. troops to push President Bashar al-Assad’s forces out of southern Syria and would send more American boots to fight the Islamic State in the region. Michele Flournoy, formerly the third-ranking civilian in the Pentagon under President Barack Obama, called for “limited military coercion” to help remove Assad from power in Syria, including a “no bombing” zone over parts of Syria held by U.S.-backed rebels. Flournoy, and several of her colleagues at the Center for New American Security, or CNAS, have been making the case for sending more American troops into combat against ISIS and the Assad regime than the Obama administration has been willing to commit.

Meanwhile, Russia has consistently warned, since 2008 when Ukraine submitted a Membership Action Plan and Georgia indicated its desire to do so, that it would respond to any such actions by invading and conquering both countries. This is just one of the many implicit warnings delivered.

Admission of Ukraine and Georgia to NATO will place Europe on the verge of a large-scale crisis, Russia’s Permanent Representative to NATO added. “One can’t imagine the situation when those countries [Ukraine and Georgia] keep cherishing the hope to join NATO and the alliance really plans to admit them, as this would explode the situation and put Europe on the brink of a crisis, whose size and scale can’t be imagined today,” Grushko said.

The warnings are not, as some foolish neocons insist, mere bluff. Russia has already invaded both countries for much smaller provocations than NATO membership. I strongly suspect that the troop movements that were taking place on both sides, which combined consisted of nearly one million troops, indicate that if Hillary Clinton had been elected President, Putin would have ordered the invasion and occupation of Ukraine before January.

I think the idea was for Crimea to become a NATO base as part of this ongoing campaign to surround Russia which has clearly been in the works now for the last 25 years despite the fact that when the Soviet Union fell in 1991 and even before that, the end of the Warsaw Pact, there were assurances that were given to Russia that NATO would not move eastward. Twelve new countries have been added to NATO since that time and Ukraine would have been number 13 and would have been actually I believe the most dangerous from Russian point of view…. I think that it is clear that the United States is pursuing what it views as its interests as it always does, the United States government. In Syria, in the Middle East and in regard to Russia and we, I believe, are very likely to see an even more aggressive policy in Europe against Russia if Hillary Clinton and her entourage come into power with the November 8 election.

For 25 years, the US has been knowingly playing a dangerous game, trying to see how far they can push Russia without provoking it to war. As her record in Georgia, Libya and Syria clearly shows, Hillary has no strategic vision, no understanding of war, and would have almost certainly erred on the side of excess provocation.

Many congressional members say that Putin has not been deterred, but he has, to some degree, because if he wanted to he could order the full-scale invasion of the entirety of Ukrainian territory. That he has kept Russian direct personnel support for the separatists’ brutal aggression relatively small (1,000 military and intelligence personnel by recent NATO estimates) demonstrates that his decisions are rational (to him) and done with some awareness of the likely consequences.

And that is why Donald Trump has been one of the most effective Presidents in U.S. history, even before he has taken office.

Migrant nightmares in Sweden, Germany

Back in September, Breitbard reported that 80 percent of Swedish police were considering quitting. Two months later, Sweden is hemorrhaging police and now has more than 55 no-go zones where the Muslims rule:

SWEDEN is on the brink of becoming a lawless state as the police force is losing the battle against unprecedented levels of crime and violence amid a growing migrant crisis.

The Scandinavian country is facing an existential crisis with on average three police officers handing in their resignations a day. If the alarming trend continues, and police officers continue to resign more than 1,000 officers will have quit the service by New Years.

Since the migrant crisis began last summer, Sweden has been hit by a series of brutal crimes and violent incidents. In 2015 alone Sweden, with a population of 9.5million, received over 160,000 asylum applications and the country is expected to take as many as 190,000 refugees, or two per cent of the population, by the end of 2016….

Currently there are more than 6,000 suspected crimes that are unsolved in the area and 400 of these cases are suspected to be rapes, murder or attempted murder.

Mr Stjernfeldt said the figures are alarming and police officers are constantly forced to work overtime  in an attempt to solve the reported crimes. The Police Association admitted it fears the public will lose faith in the force and their ability to protect citizens if the situation is not resolved.

The Swedish public shouldn’t lose faith in the police force, but in the politicians. Electing the Sweden Democrats followed by the 100 percent repatriation of every migrant and Muslim in the country is the only answer that will avoid massive violence.

Things are little better in Germany, which has also descended into lawlessness, as the police now say “We are losing control of the streets”:

Germany took in more than 1.1million migrants in the past year and parts of the country are crippled with a lack of infrastructure. Now the true reality is hitting home ahead of next year’s elections as the far right surges in the polls threatening to topple the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) leader Mrs Merkel.

According to a report by the international policy council the Gatestone Institute, local police in many parts of the country admit that they are stretched to the limit.

The report states: “The rape of a ten-year-old girl in Leipzig, the largest city in Saxony, has drawn renewed attention to the spiralling levels of violent crime perpetrated by migrants in cities and towns across Germany.

“During the first six months of 2016, migrants committed 142,500 crimes, according to the Federal Criminal Police Office. This is equivalent to 780 crimes committed by migrants every day, an increase of nearly 40 per cent over 2015. The data includes only those crimes in which a suspect has been caught.

“Thousands of migrants who entered the country as ‘asylum seekers’ or ‘refugees’ have gone missing. They are, presumably, economic migrants who entered Germany on false pretences. Many are thought to be engaging in robbery and criminal violence.”

According to Freddi Lohse of the German Police Union in Hamburg, many migrant offenders view the leniency of the German justice system as a green light to continue delinquent behaviour, says the report.

He said: “They are used to tougher consequences in their home countries. They have no respect for us.”

Meanwhile a female police officer has admitted that officers are under attack and that the courts are a “joke.”

Americans should not be smug about this. The challenge is posed to the entire West, as in addition to being invaded from the south, tens of thousands of Muslim immigrants have been permitted entry to the USA in 2016.

The Center for Immigration Studies, which favors lower levels of immigration, estimated in a report released Tuesday that more than 3 million foreigners moved to the United States in 2014 and 2015. The total foreign-born population in the United States in 2015, 43.3 million, was an all-time high. At 13.5 percent, immigrants now make up the largest share of the population in 105 years.

Forget the Global War on Terrorism and fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here. The orcs have invaded the Shire.

The loosening grip of empire

Fred Reed explains why the Empire needs a war:

The United States is not in danger. The Empire is. This is not good. Empires, the Soviet Union notwithstanding, seldom go quietly. Either Washington gambles on war of some sort against Russia, or Russia and China, in the desperate hope of reversing things, or the Empire gets slowly eaten. Or not so slowly. Once one country pries itself loose, many may rush for the door.

New York may go for calculated war against Russia–say, cyberwar expected not to turn into shooting war, shooting war in Syria not expected to turn into global shooting war, global shooting war not expected to turn into nuclear war. This will be a crapshoot. Note that America has badly misguessed the outcomes of every war since Korea.

This is why the American election actually matters, unusual in Presidential contests. It is Blowhard against Corruption, a swell choice, but Trump is firmly against war with Russia, and Hillary for. Her military understanding is that of a fried egg.

The woman is both a fool and a knave but, it seems, Trump has talked trash, and therefore she will likely be President. Weirdly, the future of the world depends on how an excited electorate of political middle-schoolers responds to one candidate’s dirty talk. From a curmudgeon’s point of view, it is pretty funny. It is funnier if one lives outside of the radiation footprint.

But back to business. The seaboard Axis of Evil needs a war because almost every tide runs against it. Proximately, the Axis has pushed China, Russia, and Iran together against the Empire. (First rule of empire: Do not let the dissidents unite.) Many signs suggest that the world, or much of it, is beginning to see China as its future. The BRICS, the SCO, the NDB, the AAIB–all exclude the US. China becomes the major trading partner of country after country. The twilight deepens.

I find it very difficult to believe that the Imperial USA is dumb enough to directly start a war with either Russia or China. But I don’t find it at all difficult to believe that they are foolish enough to expand the current wars-by-proxy and risk a disproportionate response by one or more of the enemies they have unnecessarily provoked.

A Hillary presidency doesn’t expressly guarantee war, but it does make it the obvious probability. This is something the NeverTrumpers clearly never considered before they struck their epically stupid poses. Hillary is a servant of Empire. Trump is an opponent, which, of course, is why he is so often lumped in with Vladimir Putin.

Missing: US air supremacy

With the addition of their small naval force, Russians are creating a you-can-fly-but-you-probably-shouldn’t zone over Syria.

The combined capabilities of the Russian naval task force and the S-300/S-400 missiles deployed in Syria give the Russians a world-class air-defense capability. If needed the Russians could even throw in A-50 AWACs from Russia protected by MiG-31BMs. What most observers do not realize that is that SA-N-6 “Grumble” which forms the core of the air defenses of the Peter the Great is a S-300FM, the modernized naval variant of the S-300. It is also capable of the amazing Mach 6 speed, has 150km range, an added infrared terminal capability, a track-via-missile guidance system which allows it to engage ballistic missiles and an altitude envelope of 27,000m. And, guess what – the Peter the Great has 48 such missiles (in 20 launchers), roughly the equivalent of 12 S-300 batteries (assuming 4 launchers per battery).

One of the major weaknesses of the Russian deployment in Syria has been the relative low number of missiles the Russians could fire at any one time. The US/NATO could simply saturate Russian defenses with large numbers of missiles. Frankly, they can still do it, but this has now become much, much harder.

Can the Russians now stop a US attack on Syria?

Probably not.

But they can make it much harder and dramatically less effective.

First, as soon as the Americans fire, the Russians will see it and they will warn the Syrian and Russian armed forces. Since the Russians will be able to track every US missile, they will be able to pass on the data to all the air defense crews who will be ready by the time the missiles arrive. Furthermore, once the missiles get close, the Russians will be able to shoot down a lot of them, making it necessary for the Americans to conduct battle damage assessment from space and then re-strike the same targets many times over.

Second, stealth or no stealth, I don’t believe that the USN or the USAF will risk flying into Russian controlled airspace or, if it does, this will be a short-lived experiment. I believe that the Russian presence in Syria will make any attack on Syria a “missile only” attack. Unless the Americans take down the Russian air defenses, which they could only if they want to start WWIII, US aircraft will have to stay outside the Syrian skies. And that means that the Russians have basically created their own no-fly zone over Syria and a US no-fly zone is now impossible to achieve.

This marks the first time that the USA has lost air supremacy in an active conflict in decades. It is yet another sign of a crumbling empire with declining military power. The danger of a Hillary presidency is that she is likely to make the mistake of past crumbling empires in military decline, which is to fail to recognize the significance of that decline, and, through overconfidence, order military action that will lead to defeat.

Neither the US military nor the USA itself is what it was in the 1980s. It is no longer the nation nor the country that won the Cold War. Donald Trump recognizes this, hence his call to Make America Great Again, which is another way of saying Make the USA American Again.

What are they going to do, invade?

Perhaps Theresa May will succeed where Napoleon and Hitler failed:

Britain is sending hundreds of soldiers and hardware to Russia’s borders as part of a huge military deployment. A total of 800 troops, drones and tanks are moving to Estonia next spring, Defence Secretary Michael Fallon said.

The move is part of the biggest military build up of NATO troops on Russia’s borders since the Cold War.

Mr Fallon said the deployment of the battalion, supported by French and Danish troops, will start from May 2017.

800 whole troops. It raises an obvious question: if Britain invaded Russia in 2017, would the Russians even notice?

After all, the British are being invaded by more migrants from the Calais jungle alone than that. Perhaps the British are thinking that if they tell the Russians their soldiers are refugees, Putin will surrender.

A vote for Hillary

Is a vote for World War III. Literally.

On Syria’s civil war, Trump said Clinton could drag the United States into a world war with a more aggressive posture toward resolving the conflict.

Clinton has called for the establishment of a no-fly zone and “safe zones” on the ground to protect non-combatants. Some analysts fear that protecting those zones could bring the United States into direct conflict with Russian fighter jets.

“What we should do is focus on ISIS. We should not be focusing on Syria,” said Trump as he dined on fried eggs and sausage at his Trump National Doral golf resort. “You’re going to end up in World War Three over Syria if we listen to Hillary Clinton.

“You’re not fighting Syria any more, you’re fighting Syria, Russia and Iran, all right? Russia is a nuclear country, but a country where the nukes work as opposed to other countries that talk,” he said.

It’s good to see Donald Trump pointing out that Hillary will, indubitably, order the US armed forces into war with Russia. However, the real issue isn’t the proxy war in Syria, but rather, the provocative encroachments in Ukraine and Eastern Europe.

The reason Hillary will start WWIII is because she will try to expand NATO to cover Ukraine, which Russia simply will not permit.

“He has opened the doors to the demons of Hell”

Why anyone would still pay any attention to an Obama-voting moron like Walter Russell Mead is well beyond me:

President Obama’s faltering foreign policy has taken another serious hit. It is hard to think of another American president whose foreign policy initiatives failed as badly or as widely as Obama’s. The reconciliation with the Sunni world? The reset with Russia? Stabilizing the Middle East by tilting toward Iran? The Libya invasion? The Syria abstention? The ‘pivot to Asia’ was supposed to be the centerpiece of Obama’s global strategy; instead the waning months of the Obama administration have seen an important U.S. ally pivot toward China in the most public and humiliating way possible.
Duterte clearly thinks that humiliating Obama in this way is a solid career move. He certainly believes that China will support him against the critics at home and abroad who will wring their hands over his shift. He presumably has had some assurances from his Chinese hosts that if he commits his cause to them, they will back him to the hilt.

This points to a broader problem: Obama’s tortuous efforts to balance a commitment to human rights and the niceties of American liberal ideology with a strong policy in defense of basic American security interests have made the world less safe for both human rights and for American security. As the revisionist powers (Russia, China, and Iran) gain ground, foreign leaders feel less and less need to pay attention to American sermons about human rights and the rule of law. Death squads and extra-judicial executions on a large scale: the Americans will lecture you but China will still be your friend. Barrel bombing hospitals in Aleppo? The Russians won’t just back you; they will help you to do it. Obama’s foreign policy is making the world safer for people who despise and trample on the very values that Obama hoped his presidency would advance. His lack of strategic insight and his inability to grasp the dynamics of world power politics have opened the door to a new generation of authoritarian figures in alliance with hostile great powers.

Unintentionally, and with the best of intentions, he has opened the doors to the demons of Hell, and the darkest forces in the human spirit have much greater scope and much more power today than they did when he took the oath of office back in 2009.

Unintentionally? With the best of intentions? Is Mead talking about Obama or himself? Remember, as Mead excoriates Obama’s foreign policy, that he not only voted for Obama, but voted to re-elect him. But it’s not as if Obama’s foreign policy was any better from 2008 to 2012 than it has been from 2012 to 2016.

Moreover, the man quite obviously has learned nothing from his past mistakes. Juxtapose these two phrases from the same article.

  • “Secretary Clinton is well aware of just how damaging the Filipino defection is in Asia; she helped develop the Obama administration’s Asia strategy.”
  • “Should Secretary Clinton make it to the White House, her first and biggest job will be to stop and then reverse the deterioration in America’s global position that her predecessor permitted.”

So, Mead not only voted – twice – for the man who permitted the deterioration in America’s global position, but now advocates voting for the woman who helped develop that failed strategy.

Either Mead is incredibly stupid, or, as with Obama, we need to question whether he serves those very demons to whom the doors of Hell have been opened.

If there is not a Trumpslide on November 8th, there is a very good chance that the USA will find itself at war with a Russo-Chinese alliance. And that is a war that a USA saddled with the incompetent and unwell Hillary Clinton as Commander-in-Chief will almost certainly lose.