Author: Zero Ponsdorf

As Jonn noted below Iran is playing games in the straits.

But there IS more gaming going on it seems.

No, not MY paranoid fantasies but in the Puzzle Palace.
Doomsday war games: Pentagon’s 3 nightmare scenarios

The collapse of Pakistan, A militant China, and the collapse of North Korea.

I wonder  if they’ve war gamed the scenario that it seems the Iranis are preparing for?

When I see shit like this I dunno whether to buy more ammo or start looking for unicorns.

I’ll be the old guy singing Kumbaya.

Coupla news stories from up north made me smile.

Show your face!

In a move likely to increase tension with Canada’s Muslim minority, the government said on Monday it would bar all women wearing face coverings from taking part in citizenship ceremonies.

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said he had received complaints from citizenship judges and parliamentarians about veiled women taking the oath to formally become Canadian.

“Requiring that all candidates show their faces while reciting the oath allows judges and everyone present to share in the ceremony,” Kenney said in a speech in Montreal.

“The citizenship oath is a quintessentially public act. It is a public declaration that you are joining the Canadian family and it must be taken freely and openly.”

Phooey on Kyoto!

Canada pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change Monday, saying the accord won’t help solve the climate crisis. It dealt a blow to the anti-global warming treaty, which has not been formally renounced by any other country.

(…)

“To meet the targets under Kyoto for 2012 would be the equivalent of either removing every car, truck, ATV, tractor, ambulance, police car and vehicle of every kind from Canadian roads or closing down the entire farming and agriculture sector and cutting heat to every home, office, hospital, factory and building in Canada,” Kent said.

Something from all those oil sands must be leaking into the drinking water? Maybe we need to distill it and…

I did NOT read the whole article, mind you. It does seem that numbers, and events, are being resurrected to make some point?

Damn those Americans

These paragraphs stopped me from reading further:

So the troops are going home this month, leaving a question mark over what had been one of the chief goals of the war — to nurture a strategic ally in the heart of the Middle East.

They leave behind a legacy that will forever be tainted in the minds of many Iraqis by the casualties inflicted by the American military on civilians. It’s the raw nerve that jangles, a sensitivity that grates on both sides even as the troops stream out of the country.

The Dance begins.

It is rather obvious that we are seeing an attempt to paint those who served in Iraq with the same brush that us ‘Nam vets were painted with? Seems a bit late to the table, mind you, but we will see.

YMMV

Not talking about TSO or Jonn. Although our proximity to those two got me ruminating .

I’ve worked in the recording biz, and for NASA. As far military types go my list is also extensive, but not on point.

Our readership MUST have stories?

The outcry from OWS, Anarchists, progressives, the UN, NOW, LBGT groups, and our folks in DC has been deafening.  Flogging  is a basic human right!

Surely you’ve heard it?

Oh wait, the outcry is only in the Maldives it seems.

When the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay visited the Maldives, she wasn’t expecting to make much of a splash there. Officially the Republic of Maldives is a Constitutional democracy with open elections that any Muslim can vote in (not being a Muslim happens to be against the law in the Maldives). Unofficially it’s a paranoid theocracy based on Sharia law where an Indian teacher who drew a compass had to be hurriedly evacuated after students mistook it for a cross.

The United Nations Human Rights apparatus generally tries to avoid looking too closely at human rights in Muslim countries because it knows exactly what it will find. The Maldives is a case in point. So when Navi Pillay stopped by the Maldives she followed the formula to the letter, praising the human rights progress in the Maldives and after a few minutes of that, briefly suggested that perhaps they should stop flogging women accused of premarital sex.

(…)

Despite Pillay’s careful wording, Muslims in the Maldives reacted by holding a protest that accused her of being a “racist Zionist” out to undermine Islam.

 

The last few years have changed my perceptions of December 7, 1941 in an odd way. Keep in mind that perceptions are not  facts, but more akin to feelings.

I know that we were attacked. War was declared and our industrial and military might exacted a vengeance of Biblical proportions.

“Biblical proportions” is a somewhat over-used turn of phrase, but it’s hard to argue that  what befell Hiroshima and Nagasaki isn’t the nearest thing to fire and brimstone that mankind could produce in the mid 20th century.

But, at Pearl Harbor the Japanese targets were our Navy ships, and the crews were wearing uniforms.

As horrible as the attack and WWII were in general… I’ve felt a kind of nostalgia every December 7th since 9/11/01.

There are no perfect analogies, but perceptions need not be perfect.

YMMV