Category: Politics

In the ‘ Telegraphing Mosul’ article, 2/17 Air Cav reports on 11/25/2016 that ISIS is killing thousands of civilians and/or using them as shields against the Heroic Forces (Iraqis/Peshmerga/ whoever).

November 25, 2016 at 10:09 am 2/17 Air Cav says: I agree except there’s the political fallout from killing thousands that one claims to be trying to save. It’s a bit of a sticky wicket. The thing is, there was an inevitable quality to it, so I can only guess that the Heroic Forces banked on ISIS taking off in a convoy of pickup trucks.

Ex-PH2 says: If there is political fallout from the deaths of all those people, it should land on ISIS/Daesh. They are invaders, usurpers and thieves following a death cult. They could have simply asked for space and probably gotten it, but they did not do that.
They are going to go on with this mass slaughter, regardless, and it is not the fault of those outside in the Iraqi/Peshmerga/Other groups. There exists a naive idea, a hallmark of media stupidity, that with a quasi-political group like Daesh, there is anyone at fault other than the group doing the slaughtering.

Like it or not, it is true. The fault lies with Daesh/ISF/ISIS, or whatever they style themselves now. They set up a death cult in 2014, attempting to overthrow local governments, destroy property, swallow up land that did not belong to them, and create havoc by recruiting followers in distant lands through the magic of the internet. They have repeatedly displayed behavior that is not just sociopathic but also psychotic. If it is not psychotic to tell a six-year-old child to hold up the severed head of someone just slaughtered so that his picture can be taken and publicized on the internet, then what is it?

Is there a difference between these people and the Viet Cong? The VC also recruited children to join them. Some of them were boys who were barely 13 years old and had no idea why they were doing what they were told to do. But it was not the death cult built by ISIS/Daesh. Pol Pot’s relationship with the Khmer Rouge was closer to Daesh. ‘Kill anyone who will not join, and anyone over XXX age’.

ISIS/Daesh is nothing more than politics disguised as religion. Where have we seen this before? Lenin, Trotsky and the purges of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 grew into the USSR under Joseph Stalin. Hitler found his way into power with his speeches and controlling the press, among other things, rounding up not just Jews, but anyone deemed defective or who disagreed with him, or was ethnically undesirable. More recently were the Hutus v Tutsis in Rwanda, wholesale slaughter in other parts of Africa, Milosevic’s rampages through Eastern Europe, and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and trampling the Kuwaiti people, which got the US into a local war you may or may not have heard of.

The brutality that these people have perpetrated on the innocent, has shocked and will continue to shock, a population that seems to think it’s not real until they are confronted by it. Sensationalism in the press is, and has been, the order of the day since some newly-minted wet plate photographers like Carol Szathmari, an Austro-Hungarian photographer decided to go onto the battlefield during the Crimean War and record what he saw. He was the first real combat photographer. The mobile darkroom was improved and Matthew Brady and others like him took advantage of its improvements to record the results of battles during the US Civil War. The results were too shocking for publication.

When ideology is used as an excuse to dominate people and slaughter those who refuse to join up or who disagree with the ideology, the fault lies on the shoulders of the Ideologues, not those who try to stop them. Ideologues cannot be bargained with nor can they be trusted to keep their word, or abide by any agreements they sign. Must I bring up Neville Chamberlin’s idiotic agreement with Hitler over the Sudetenland? To people like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, and al-Baghdadi, and never mind which ayatollah is now in charge in Tehran, a bargain with them is seen as a sign of weakness and stupidity. They wait until your back is turned and you’re gone, thinking you’ve solved the problem.

Well, you haven’t. They go right back to what they were doing before you bargained with them. How else do you account for the return of al Qaeda to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and new ransom demands by Tehran? Must I remind anyone here that as soon as the US began to withdraw from Vietnam in 1973, General Giap started planning the takeover of the South, and put Van Tien Dung in charge of invading the South all over again? Would you like to review those films of NVA tanks rolling into Saigon in 1975?

So what are we facing? Is it continued long-term, siege warfare that wears everyone down to nothing, as happened for us with Vietnam and with Afghanistan for the Soviets? As 2/17 Air Cav has said, flattening the city of Mosul would be an effective way to end this dogfight, but there are 1.5 to 2 million people in Mosul who will be killed in the process.

They’re civilians. They are already being slaughtered by ISIS/Daesh, regardless, because that is what those inhuman slugs do. The ISers have no conscience, no sense of what is right or wrong, only that Death is their real God and they will do anything to please Death. No matter what is done by the Heroic Forces, those people are going to die, period.

Does it make sense to flatten the place and poison the soil for the next 2,500 centuries, IF those people are going to be killed, regardless? And will it stop this from happening again?

To put it in more relevant terms, if you know that someone wants to kill you, no matter how nice you are, are you going to just let him slaughter you over nothing? Or will you say, “You want to talk to God? Let’s go see him together. I’ve got nothing better to do.”

by Ex-PH2

When I was fixing supper Sunday night, I used leftover pasta from another meal. It was rustic pasta, comes in a cellophane pack with seasonings, and costs about $2.00 at Aldi. (Love that store. They have the egg noodles back now!) I had already thawed some chicken to cook and mix with the leftover pasta, so I cut the chicken into one-inch strips, heated the big cast iron skillet and added extra virgin olive oil to it plus a half spoonful of leftover bacon grease for flavor, and started cooking the chicken.

Mind you, this is a dish made mostly of leftovers. All I did to season the chicken was add garlic salt and Mrs. Dash Garlic/Herb. It is so loaded with flavor. After the chicken cooked, I added the pasta to it, stirred it, turned the heat down, and put a lid on it and let it simmer for about 15 minutes, then took the lid off and seasoned it again with that Italian herb mix you can buy everywhere. Then I let it sit for a minute. The aroma flooded my little kitchen. I put enough for one serving on a plate, added the cheese I had already shredded along with carrots and radishes, and sat down with a good book, good food and a pot of hot tea and enjoyed my impromptu supper. I had turtle cheesecake for dessert, too, and I did finish the book I was reading.

While I was cleaning up, I wondered just how many of those noisy Disgruntleds protesting oppression and misogyny have ever made an impromptu dish like that out of leftovers and basic materials. How many of them can actually cook a meal instead of sliding onto a counter seat at a restaurant and demanding vegan scrambled eggs, or just nuking everything in the microwave? How many of them have created a new electronic device that will let a doctor miles away monitor your pacemaker, which is 10% the size of the one my father wore? Have any of them written a fantasy novel destined to become a classic of its generation? Has even one worked as a CGI artist for a film studio? Or found a new comet during nightly observations? Or spent even a few hours a week trying to engineer a way to filter potable water from any source, including floodwater?

They groove on modern technology. They are Facebook adept, twitterpated to the Nth degree, loaded to the hilt on their Kindle, Nook or tablet with books (which they don’t read). They use it, yes, but have they come up with a better version of those electronic libraries, one that will produce the hardcover version in the blink of an eye? And if they want this stuff, then why do they despise wealthy people and big corporations, when the very people who invented those things built multinational corporations out of nothing but a bright idea and are now stinking rich because of it? Are they going to stop buying their precious technocrap as a protest? I doubt it.

Has any one of them even figured out the means of creating a mechanism that can take air, water, and some basic elements and produce edible, nourishing food from it? That idea has been on Star Trek since the 1960s. It’s called a replicator, and it will produce food and water, as well as materials for shelter and clothing. The medical tricorder has been under development for some time now and may be available very shortly. Biobeds may show up before long, too.

They holler about misogyny, quite a bit. Locker room talk upsets them. Oh, yeah? Here’s some real misogyny for you, Sweetcheeks.

Try wearing a corset and hoops or a bustle and carrying a child in your bellies, you bimbos. Try working on a steaming hot summer day, boiling laundry like your great-great-great-grandmother did, or making soap that had to be used for personal cleanliness, shampoo, and laundry. Try being the newly immigrated Irish lower housemaid whose job was to carry 5-gallon cans of hot water up the back stairs to the bathtub of the lady of the household, for the princely sum of 10 pence a month plus your keep. Or imagine being one of the women who found work in a spinning factory, running the yarn and thread spinning machines, with no face mask to prevent cotton or silk dust from getting into your lungs and no protection from the machines, but because you’re a woman, you’re not allowed to wear pants to work, and your long sleeves, apron and floor-length skirt could easily get caught in the running machinery and maim or kill you. Try being someone who would lose your job if you didn’t show up to work because the 1878 blizzard blew into Chicago and New York City from the Northwestern Territories in Canada, and you had to plow your way through 6-foot drifts or lose your job… but if you slipped and fell or were overcome by cold, you froze to death on the sidewalks – and all this, so that you wouldn’t lose your job.

Still think you’re underprivileged and impacted by mystic misogyny somehow? Well, if you got pregnant by mistake and you couldn’t find some old crone with a twig to get rid of it for you, then you’d better pray to whatever God you believe in that when it came time to deliver, the doctor (if you had one) actually washed his hands. And if you were married to anyone in the upper classes or the growing middle class, you were expected to give birth to boys, because #FAMILY NAMES MATTER! and girls were useless things. Yeah, that’s right – you were only good for one thing, and that was bearing children, preferably boys.

You want to vote? Well, sorry, but you’re a woman. You couldn’t possibly understand any of the issues we’re discussing. Go out alone, day or night, with no chaperone? You MUST be a prostitute! You MUST be! Decent women didn’t do such a dreadful thing! You still think you’re oppressed? Baby, you don’t know your butt from a hole in the ground about oppression.

I can’t figure out any purpose of the Disgruntleds beyond making noise and causing disruption and destruction. In my humble opinion, they can’t make something out of a bright idea or raw materials. They can only copy or use what other people do, and/or produce noise and dissent. If they want to bitch about real oppression, we can round them up and drop them off in Venezuela, which is nearing complete implosion, or North Korea, where half the population is still starving to death. If they want to come back home, they will have to agree to become productive citizens and place value on real freedom, and learn some manners.

What point is there to their existence? They’re planning a ‘Million Woman March’ in Washington during Inauguration Day. They want ‘stuff’, but they don’t want to work for it. They want a ‘better’ world, but they’re already living in it. Is it our fault that they’re too dumb to recognize it?

It’s difficult to avoid politics these days. It’s everywhere. What stupefies me, though, is how no one has learned any lessons from the last few months. The Left hasn’t learned that their behavior over the last few years contributed to the rise of Republicans. Their participation in Occupy Wall Street’s and Black Lives Matter’s pointless theatrics ran off anyone who might have crossed the aisle to vote for their candidate (if their candidate hadn’t been the most corrupt person in America).

Everyone who doesn’t bow down to their empty platitudes are racists and Nazis. Just yesterday, Howard Dean called Steve Bannon a Nazi. The words have lost all meaning and just rolls off our backs now.

My liberal “friends” on Facebook are trying to guilt me into apologizing for my vote for Trump because somehow my vote means that I’m a racist, misogynist lout. Despite the fact that I decided to never cast a vote for Hillary Clinton back in 1994.

The Right is just as blind to the rise of Trump. They’re back to playing the Goldilocks game of “this porridge is too hot, this porridge is too cold” by poo-pooing every cabinet choice as “not conservative enough“. Ted Cruz, although conservative enough, he wasn’t American enough, Marco Rubio was American enough, but he wasn’t conservative enough…blah, blah, blah. So after eliminating all of the candidates for superficial reasons, we get Trump.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m glad we got Trump, but only because getting Trump means we don’t get Hillary Clinton.

I ruined her life. At least that is what she told me. It had nothing to do with me ripping her from the arms of her teary eyed mother and dragging her half way around the world. It was much worse than that. Suzie-Q and I have been together for 45 years and married for 44 of them. Since she is typically cheerful and often tells me how handsome I am, (love is most assuredly blind) I surmised that she meant I disrupted her long established daily routine. For all of those married years, I went to work every day. Often the days were long and too often a day at work turned into a month or two. During that time she worked some outside the home but mostly she was and still is, thankfully, a homebody looking after important things including our son.

This summer past, I retired for the second time. You old Soldiers know that being a two time no-go is a bad thing so I am intent on not becoming one. I fully intend to survive and succeed at retirement this time. It is hopeful that Suzie-Q can also survive my retirement. We took a month’s time traveling. With vacation over, it slowly began to set in that I was unemployed. Then Suzie-Q had a rotator cuff repaired. I am about out of house projects, but before I can move forward into my final career (it is a secret and has nothing to do with the rumors about me being considered for a job on the Trump cabinet), I have to get her through her physical therapy and have her ready to move back into the starting rotation by spring. So, I have been hanging out – probably too much – and helping out with the house chores. Occasionally, my work passes the scrutiny of Household 6 (HH6). For the non-initiated, HH6 is the call sign for the household commander. It is the well-deserved term of endearment for the anchor of any military family. As I am sure my son would agree, most certainly the anchor of ours. My retirement has disrupted her routine for a time, but probably falls just short of ruining her life. She is a career Army wife. She will improvise, adapt and overcome. Or she will restrict me to the garage until I learn how to act.

Quite some time ago, I bought an Internet radio. Actually we are on our second one. I have pre-set a number of radio stations. Being of the hippie generation, my first choice was a 60’s rock and roll channel. Because now that I am retired, “time is on my side, yes it is.” This is the channel where Suzie-Q first heard here favorite 60’s tune. Can you guess it? Suzie-Q by CCR and that is why I call Mrs. Chom Su, Suzie-Q. After that a 70’s and 80’s channel, prime country, outlaw country, southern gospel and some talk radio.

Problem is I never hung out much in the kitchen. I was either working in an office 50 miles away or in the bunker. For the past 2 years, I worked from home. Down in the bunker, I listened to whatever I wanted while working. Working in total silence is not good for me. I need background noise to dissipate the tinnitus, sometimes it is music from the media player and often it is talk radio.

If you were a fly on the wall in our kitchen, Suzie-Q would chase you down and you would meet a fate similar to Larry the Lizard’s. What I meant to say was that if you were a fly on the wall in our kitchen, you would see Suzie-Q sipping her morning coffee and contemplating life with 60’s rock “groovin’ on a Sunday afternoon” playing in the background. Not long after, you would see her pop an exercise DVD into the player and imitate a herd of horses running around just above the bunker – not the sort of background noise I prefer. Later, when she is chopping up something or other or doing something at the sink her body moves to the music – all of the time. There is something disconcerting about a woman dancing around a pile of future salad vegetables with a butcher’s knife in her hand. But a word of caution, this is not the time to sneak up and goose her. Experience has taught me that most times are not good for that, but certainly a bad idea when she is holding a large sharp knife.

Being an old Soldier, time and circumstances permitting, I am accustomed to heading for the chow hall around noon. One such day, Suzie-Q was be-bopping around to her background music while putting some lunch together for us. Looking up at the wall clock I saw that it was just after noon. I switched the radio channel. She stopped moving and asked, “What is that awful music?” “That is the Rush Limbaugh theme song”, I replied. “Is he a new DJ? I never heard of him.” “No he’s not a DJ…” just as Mr. Limbaugh belted out, “Greetings, conversationalists across the fruited plain,”, and then I got the look. After 45 years, a lot can be communicated with a look. I gave here that smile she pretends to love so much and we went back to barefootin’ with Archie Bell. As usual, lunch was great. I thanked my Suzie-Q and slid my chair back right about the time the Animals were belting out “we gotta get out of this place…” so it was back to work in the bunker and listening to Rush. We are going to make this work, “if it’s the last thing we ever do, cause girl there’s a better life for me and you.”

© 2016 J. D. Pendry

The blog for the Arkansas Times is reporting that our attorney general, Leslie Rutledge, is in New York meeting with Trump transition planners. Rutledge, a diminutive fireball conservative elected two years ago, is quoted:

“My interest is in helping the Trump administration,” Rutledge told reporters as she arrived for meetings at Trump Tower in New York. “Whether that’s continuing on as the attorney general of Arkansas or (working) in the administration, then my ears are open.”

It’s the first of those two options, “staying on in Arkansas” that sets my antennae tingling for the simple reason that Rutledge is one of two state attorneys general in the country who have undisputed standing to investigate the Clinton foundation. The other state is New York, but their thoroughly politicized, Democrat attorney general would never lift a hand against the Clinton’s no matter how outrageous their corruption. Both AG’s have standing by virtue of the physical location of foundation offices within their borders.

Rutledge, however, could do a great service for both her own considerable political ambitions and the Trump Administration by accepting the Trump’s justice department hand off the hot potato investigation and prosecution of the Clinton Foundation corruption. Trump could quietly lend Rutledge’s own limited investigatory resources the far greater capabilities of federal agencies to build a lock-tight racketeering case against the Clintons and then quietly fade from the scene before Rutledge (soon to become the world’s most famous state attorney general and a household name) announces the indictments.

Think about it for a moment: Trump could mollify those demanding his promised Clinton investigation by saying that it was ongoing and as president and chief judicial officer he could not comment further all while having his justice department and the FBI quietly continue their own investigations into Clinton’s obvious security violations. But, and it’s a big but, by receding into the background, Trump could fade the heat from angry Democrats that he is persecuting his political opponents. And if Rutledge brought in some quick convictions or plea deals from some of the lower hanging fruit on the foundation staff, all eyes would be on her from that point on until she could either indict or, in a highly unlikely move, clear the Clintons.

If Rutledge were to gain convictions against the Clinton’s, most of the bloodlust on the right would likely be sated with even minimal state sentences. Moreover, Trump would have fulfilled his vow, through a state surrogate, to prosecute Crooked Hillary, and AG Rutledge would be world famous, likely the federal attorney general in a second Trump term, then Arkansas governor, senator, U.S. Supreme Court, who knows where that kind of fame, the woman who nailed the Clinton’s, could take her. And wouldn’t it be so fitting that The Clinton’s should get their comeuppance back here in Arkansas, where their decades-long career of corruption began?

Anyone think perhaps Donald’s thinking the same way I am?

Crossposted at American Thinker

I may hate Info Wars, but this is damned funny.