Tag: war

How the Rabid Bat was born

Fred Reed tells us of the future history of America’s next generation air superiority fighter:

In early 2035, the thirty-fourth year of the war against Al Qaeda,
 the Pentagon issued a White Paper saying that the F22 Raptor, the
front-line fighter plane of the United States, was nearing the end of
its useful life and needed to be replaced. Not everyone agreed. Various
budget-cutting organizations argued that the Raptor had never been used
and thus no one could tell whether it had a useful life. Anyway, the
job of the Air Force, killing third-world peasants and their families,
had been co-opted by drones. America didn´t need a new fighter, said
the critics.

The Air Force countered that the new plane would look feral
and make loud, exciting noises. To this, critics could find no
rejoinder. Design studies began.

An early question was what to call the new fighter. By
tradition, aircraft were named after aggressive but unintelligent birds
(F-15 Eagle, F16 Fighting Falcon), unpleasant animals (AH-1 Cobra,
F-18 Hornet) ghosts (F-4 Phantom, AC-130 Spectre) or Stone Age nomads
(AH-64 Apache). However, something with more pizzazz was needed to get
funding through Congress.

Discussion ensued. Suggestions were solicited from The
Building, as the Pentagon calls itself. These ran from “F-40 Screaming
Kerblam” to the politically marginal “Horrendous Dyke,” whose author
believed that it would depress enemy fliers. Going with zoological
tradition, the Air Force wanted to call it the Rabid Bat. A
congressional wag weary of military price tags  suggested “Priscilla,”
because that no pilot would then go near it and the country would be
spared the expense of wars.  (His idea of painting it in floral
patterns was not taken seriously.)

A national transgender- advocacy  group favored “Susan B.
Anthony,” but this was held to be disrespectful of Ebonics, and in any
event Anthony might be Susan. It was hard to tell about these things.

The Air Force prevailed. The Rabid Bat was born.

Loud exciting noises! You can’t front on that. The sad thing is that it isn’t any sillier than putting female combat troops on the front lines.

Fascist “anti-fascists”

The government has taken several steps toward open civil war in Greece by attempting to criminalize the political opposition:

Nikos Michaloliakos, 56, was arrested on Saturday morning on charges of
founding a criminal organisation, with arrest warrants issued for dozens
more party members and lawmakers, officials said.  The arrest of Michaloliakos, along with 13 other party members including
spokesman Ilias Kasidiaris, comes as part of a wider crackdown on the
far-right group following the murder of anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas by
an alleged Golden Dawn member, which sparked riots across the country.

Pavlos Fyssas – known by his stage name of Killah P – was stabbed to death in
an Athens commuter town on September 17, triggering violent anti-fascist
protests across the country.

At least 10,000 people demonstrated in Athens on Wednesday in a protest
organised by left-wing political parties and unions. Golden Dawn has denied it had anything to do with the killing, but he was
stabbed to death by a self-proclaimed supporter.

The so-called “anti-fascist” protests are tiny compared to the general strike with which the Greeks have been protesting the government. To put it in perspective, this is as if Bill Clinton and twelve Congressional Republicans were arrested because Tupac’s killer was a self-proclaimed Democrat.

Both the Egyptian and the Greek governments are making the mistake of forcing their populist political opposition to turn to violence. The popularity of Golden Dawn and the Muslim Brotherhood are only going to increase as a result of this shamelessly political stunt, especially in contrast with openly anti-democratic governments that are shamelessly robbing the people on behalf of the IMF, the EU, and other globalist institutions.

The irony is that the Eurofascists are attacking their critics as fascists while operating in an observably fascist manner in cooperation with the international corporate megabanks. Meanwhile, in Italy, the resignation of Berlusconi’s alllies appear to have brought the Letta government down and made it likely that the anti-Euro Movimento 5 Stelle will soon come to power.

All five ministers from Silvio Berlusconi‘s centre-right party said on Saturday night they were resigning from Italy‘s
grand coalition government in a dramatic move that plunged the country
back into political uncertainty and raised the possibility of fresh
elections.

Note that Berlusconi’s action was the direct and predictable consequence of prosecutorial actions directed against him by his political foes.

Greek military union challenges government

A statement released by the Special Forces Reserve Union demands the resignation of the government. From Zerohedge:

Greek government authorities are on alert after a union of Greek army reservists of Special Forces issued a statement urging the Greek administration to step down and make way for a national unity government. As Keep Talking Greece notes, the statement on the union’ website included 15 demands – including the resignation of the Greek President – and urged people to gather at the infamous Syntagma Square on Saturday. The statement was interpreted by some as a call to a “coup d’etat” – denied by the union – but prompted Greece’s Supreme Court to meet to discuss it.

The 15 Demands…


“OUR PRIMARY PURPOSE DEFENSE OF OUR COUNTRY.
Reservists Special Forces and the Greek people to implementation of Article 120 of the Constitution requires:

1. IMMEDIATE RESIGNATION OF GOVERNMENT of the impossibility of
providing the people as provided in the Constitution at Work (Article
22), health, education, justice, security.
Two. ESTABLISHING A NATIONAL GOVERNMENT PLANS chaired by Supreme
Court of personalities on proven outside politics and consultants from
the Academy of Athens.
Three. SUSPENSION OF APPLICATION NOTICE MNIMONIAKON laws and within
two months, with a ban on participation of all citizens who participated
in the governments responsible for the current economic situation.
4. EXAMINING BOARD of the supreme court and accountability for the
HOW and WHO led us to Catastrophic Agreement Memorandum. Establishment
of Constitutional Court Effective power impose its will.
5. Immediate suspension of dismissal from the State.
6. SUSPENSION further TAX for Family Income up to 25.000 €.
7. SUSPENSION auctions and bank claims until the Completion Audit of Banks of Certified Public Accountants and accountability.
8. Complaint EPACHTHOUS DEBT.
9. PROHIBITION OF SALE PUBLIC PROPERTY, Resume Defence Industries.
10. DIRECT confiscation German (Retail / Business / Office) FULL
COMPENSATION until the Greek government for war reparations and
occupation loan.
11. BREAK THE LAW ON LIABILITY minister and VOULEFTIKIS ASYLIAS.
Regardless of all “THE GREEKS ARE EQUAL BEFORE THE LAW” (Article 4).
12. CONTROL assets of those involved in economic positions of
government, prosecute illicit enrichment and Efficiency to the State.
13. OPERATIONAL CONTROL – LICENSING LEGALITY broadcasters and immediate return to the Greek government debts.
14. Protection from Hostile Elongation at AEGEAN, Macedonia, Epirus,
Thrace and Cyprus, while suppressing the various groups that see inside.
15. REMOVE ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS with a similar promotion in European
countries and the server. EXPORT BAN MONEY Over 20% of the taxable
income of such.
• The KK PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC INVITED WAIVED as an appropriate time to facilitate desired development of the Greek people.
• THESMOS WARRANTOR all of the above may be the ARMED FORCES OF THE COUNTRY AS POWERFUL ANIDIOTELIS ENTITY TO ANY THREAT.
• Bodies SECURITY REQUIRED TO SECURING THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE
ABOVE AND SMOOTH MIGRATION IN ACTUAL constitutional legality. ”

It should be fascinating to see the High Officials of the EU babbling about the need to respect democracy after they initiated post-democratic coups in Greece and Italy. There is no reason why the various national militaries shouldn’t follow their example… and they’ve got the guns.

There isn’t much question that nationalist military governments would be vastly preferable to unelected Eurofascist rule. It is looking like the government’s attempt to crack down on the increasingly popular Golden Dawn was a very, very bad idea that is likely to backfire.

An astonishing coincidence

It’s still so easy. Golf Pro, aka Tad, mocks the idea that Minnesotans have anything to worry about from the Somali jihadists in Minnesota:

I’m positive that comparing Minneapolis to Kenya is a bad idea. They
aren’t really the same place, same culture, same institutions, same
history. Really, there is no similarity. The good folks in Minneapolis
have nothing to worry about.

Meanwhile, back on Planet Reason, the Mall of America has jacked up its security measures. For, we can assume, no particular reason at all.

BLOOMINGTON, Minn.—The Mall of
America has stepped up security after the deadly attack by the Somali
militant group al-Shabab at a mall in Nairobi, Kenya. Officials at the Bloomington mall say some of the extra security
precautions will be noticeable and some won’t. Millions of people visit
the mall and its 500 stores each year. Mall of America says the safety
of its guests, tenants and employees is top priority. Minnesota is home to the largest Somali community in the United
States. At least 22 young men have traveled to Somalia since 2007 to
join al-Shabaab and the FBI says its investigation of the terror group’s
recruiting remains a priority.

Mailvox: the dead horse quivers

SV digs up, from the past, a certain blast:

I read your Sept 6, 2004 review of Michele Malkin’s book supporting internment and I was wondering if you remember or noted where you found the information for this paragraph:

“In January 1942, prior to both Executive Order 9066 and the battle of Midway, the Imperial Japanese Navy possessed 717 carrier-borne planes and 176 ships, of which 15 were troop transports. The IJN’s troop-bearing capacity was about 42,000 men. Reinforcement and resupply required a roundtrip transit of 11,000 miles to a coastline only 1,359 miles long.”

Less important are the facts here, but just in case you have it:

“The Overlord invasion required 4,600 ships to travel 100 miles under the air cover of 12,000 planes to land 156,000 troops on a French coastline 3,437 miles long. Over the next three weeks, the Allies brought in another 850,000 men, 148,000 vehicles, and 570,000 tons of supplies.”

If I recall correctly, I worked out the IJN numbers from Tony Tully’s excellent The Imperial Japanese Navy Page.  I don’t remember where I looked up the statistics related to the invasion of Normandy, but they’re readily available.

It is a little amusing to look back and recall that some people actually took Me So Michelle’s book seriously at the time. It’s largely forgotten now, but it didn’t escaped my attention how she quickly stopped talking about it in public after I exposed her complete lack of research in support of her attempt to manufacture a retroactive military justification for the historical internment of Japanese-Americans.

One thing I didn’t mention in that article was that the former Marine Commandant’s first reaction, when asked about the viability of a Japanese invasion of the U.S. West Coast, was an instinctive snort of disdain. I mean, the hypothetical invasion is the sort of thing you have to be a complete military ignoramus to even contemplate for a millesecond. Forget Anzio. An IJN invasion of California would have made the Bay of Pigs invasion look sane and conservative by comparison.

The sham of democracy

The gloves are coming off and faux democratic secularists around the world should expect no quarter or mercy from the next duly elected Muslim government to take power somewhere in the Arab world:


An Egyptian court
on Monday banned the Muslim Brotherhood from carrying out any
activities in the country and ordered the seizure of the group’s funds,
widening a campaign to debilitate the Islamist movement of deposed
President Mohamed Mursi.

“The court bans the activities
of the Muslim Brotherhood organization and its non-governmental
organization and all the activities that it participates in and any
organization derived from it,” said the presiding judge Mohammed
al-Sayed.

The court ordered the government to seize the Brotherhood’s funds and administer its frozen assets. The
army-backed government is waging the toughest crackdown in decades on
the Islamist group, which says it has a million members. Security forces
killed hundreds of its supporters and rounded up thousands more since
Mursi was deposed by the army on July 3 after mass protests against his
rule.

The Brotherhood won parliamentary and presidential elections after veteran autocrat Hosni Mubarak was overthrown in 2011.

So, what Turkey and Egypt have taught the Muslim fundamentalists is that if they play by the rules, win popular support, and get duly elected, the secular elite will utilize the military to overturn the elections, ban them, and deprive them of their accumulated assets.

But at the same time, that same secular elite is going to encourage them to settle all throughout the West. So now we have a large group of people who have learned that there is absolutely no point in being restrained by the laws and have no legal alternative to violence, and are being actively aided in spreading as far and wide as possible.

This should end well.

And it is an object lesson to everyone who asserts that the democratic system is the correct and proper way to manifest societal change. It isn’t.  Beyond a certain point, the will of the people is observably not permitted.  Now, I have no sympathy for the Muslim Brotherhood, but I have to question the idea that it is wise to make it so abundantly clear to everyone, particularly those who are quite willing to turn to violence, that there is absolutely no benefit to participating in a democratic system.

It’s only a matter of time

I expect it won’t be long until something this happens in an American shopping mall.  And considering the active link between the jihadists in Somalia and the Somali immigrants in Minneapolis, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it happens at the Mall of America.

At least 22 people are reported to be dead and more than 50 injured as a gun fight continues between police and armed men at a shopping centre in the Kenyan capital Nairobi. One witness claimed gunmen told Muslims to stand up and leave and that only non-Muslims would be targeted when they opened fire at the upmarket mall of the Westlands district around midday today.

At least two dozen people, wounded and dead, were wheeled out on stretchers and in shopping trolleys by security guards, while others were seen walking out of the building, clutching bloodied clothing around their injuries. Locals and tourists who were out shopping on the sunny Saturday in Kenya ran screaming from the building and cars were left abandoned as attackers threw grenades and fired AK47s.

It’s just one more reason to carry, in the unlikely event that you are a reader here who doesn’t carry already.

That was easy enough

Last week, Chelm Wiseman insisted that I and others were wrong about Israel’s support for American intervention in Syria and repeatedly insinuated that our doubts about the supposed Israeli non-interest in American military action in Syria was somehow anti-semitic.

Here are some selections from his comments. The response to the third is mine:

  1. You have only supposition to support they accusation that Israel is in
    favor of a Syria war. If Israel is not behind it then it follows that
    the “elite Jews” are pursuing their own interest (like all elites
    everywhere) not Israel’s. 
  2. You are seeing what you want to see here. This supports my point. The
    fact that they even have to phrase it like this indicates that there is
    not clear support from the Israel. They are not putting obstacles in the way of a US strike? Not exactly an ringing endorsement.
  3. Yes, but there is no source for that either and it comes after a
    statement about Israel deliberately trying to stay on the sidelines of
    the debate. NYT is not a friendly source for Netanyahu, so they can not
    be relied upon to portray him accurately. Stop pretending that they are.

    “I caught you out blatantly misrepresenting the NYT article,
    Chelm. And I can, and will, easily find reports of the Netanyahu
    government’s support for American military action in Syria from other
    sources, so banking on the NYT misrepresenting the Israeli government’s
    position was an unwise move on your part.”

And here is a report from Reuters on Tuesday:

Israel wants to
see Syrian President Bashar al-Assad toppled, its ambassador to the
United States said on Tuesday, in a shift from its non-committal public
stance on its neighbor’s civil war.

Even Assad’s defeat by al
Qaeda-aligned rebels would be preferable to Damascus’s current alliance
with Israel’s arch-foe Iran, Ambassador Michael Oren said in an
interview with the Jerusalem Post.

His comments marked a move in Israel’s public position on Syria’s two-and-1/2-year-old war….

“We
always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who
weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran,” Oren
said in the interview, excerpted on Tuesday before its full publication
on Friday.

Note that this is a move in Israel’s public position.  Its private position remains unchanged from before: it wants Bashar Assad to go and it wants America to make that happen. Now, there is nothing wrong with the Israeli position. It may well be in the Israeli national interest; I’m certainly not in any position to judge that. The problem is with those American Jews and their Christian Zionist allies who seek to elevate the Israeli national interest above the American one.

And if it is intrinsically anti-semitic to be pro-American, well, there are an awful lot more anti-semites out there than I had previously imagined.

Obama openly aiding Muslim terrorists

This action is unlikely to help convince those who believe the man is still a secret Muslim that they are incorrect:

President Obama waived a provision of federal law designed to prevent
the supply of arms to terrorist groups to clear the way for the U.S. to
provide military assistance to “vetted” opposition groups fighting
Syrian dictator Bashar Assad.

Some elements of the Syrian opposition are associated with radical
Islamic terrorist groups, including al Qaeda, which was responsible for
the Sept. 11 attacks in New York, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville,
Pa., in 2001. Assad’s regime is backed by Iran and Hezbollah.

The president, citing his authority under the Arms Export Control
Act, announced today that he would “waive the prohibitions in sections
40 and 40A of the AECA related to such a transaction.” Those two
sections prohibit sending weaponry to countries described in section
40(d): “The prohibitions contained in this section apply with respect to
a country if the Secretary of State determines that the government of
that country has repeatedly provided support for acts of international
terrorism,” Congress stated in the Arms Control Export Act.

“For purposes of this subsection, such acts shall include all
activities that the Secretary determines willfully aid or abet the
international proliferation of nuclear explosive devices to individuals
or groups or willfully aid or abet an individual or groups in acquiring
unsafeguarded special nuclear material,” the law continues.

 “The law allows the president to waive those prohibitions if he
“determines that the transaction is essential to the national security
interests of the United States.”” Either Obama is lying and arming terrorists is not in the national security interests of the United States, or worse, those interests are in direct opposition to the national security interests of the American people.

Vladimir Putin on Syria

It is tragic when the ruthless leader of Russia makes considerably more sense, and better expresses American national interests, than the President of the United States:

No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there is every
reason to believe it was used not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition
forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who
would be siding with the fundamentalists. Reports that militants are
preparing another attack — this time against Israel — cannot be ignored.

It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in
foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States. Is it in
America’s long-term interest? I doubt it. Millions around the world
increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying
solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan
“you’re either with us or against us.”

But force has proved ineffective and pointless. Afghanistan is reeling,
and no one can say what will happen after international forces withdraw.
Libya is divided into tribes and clans. In Iraq the civil war
continues, with dozens killed each day. In the United States, many draw
an analogy between Iraq and Syria, and ask why their government would
want to repeat recent mistakes.

At least Mr. Putin has given us a head’s up on what could be the next international false flag: a highly improbable inflammatory attack on Israel by either Iran or the Assad regime that isn’t in response to a US assault on Syria.

Meanwhile, our elected leaders demonstrate that Idiocracy was, indeed, prophetic:

“I almost wanted to vomit,” Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Robert Menendez, (D-N.J.) told CNN. 

He so totally wanted to hurl. So, we should, like, TOTALLY invade Syria. Because Holocaust. Duh.

“Putin’s NYT op-ed is an insult to the intelligence of every American”
— John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) September 12, 2013

No, Mr. McCain, your presidential campaign was an insult to the intelligence of every American. And the fact that you still have a political career at all is testimony to the corrupt nature of the U.S. political system.