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Area: WoT Operations    WoT Background    Non-WoT        Politix   
Egypt vice-president resigns on final day of referendum
Today's Headlines
Headline Comments [Views]
Page 4: Opinion
11 18:08 Frank G [336108] 
1 21:18 Redneck Jim [336095] 
1 16:30 M. Murcek [336070] 
3 21:15 Redneck Jim [336109] 
1 11:18 JohnQC [336070] 
Page 1: WoT Operations
2 18:26 Bright Pebbles [336083]
5 20:23 Pappy [336096]
8 19:26 gorb [336083]
2 10:44 Redneck Jim [336070]
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8 23:24 trailing wife [336098]
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1 05:36 Hupert Omuque5563 [336075]
2 12:32 Shipman [336122]
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4 15:13 trailing wife [336076]
2 13:01 Secret Asian Man [336090]
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Page 2: WoT Background
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1 10:18 Redneck Jim [336067]
9 19:33 JosephMendiola [336107]
8 21:40 Redneck Jim [336097]
7 20:11 JosephMendiola [336098]
1 11:53 Pappy [336068]
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5 22:22 Rambler in Virginia [336099]
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Page 3: Non-WoT
7 15:24 AlanC [336076]
1 11:53 Frank G [336066]
2 20:42 JosephMendiola [336090]
3 23:23 Thing From Snowy Mountain [336087]
4 13:56 Shipman [336067]
Page 6: Politix
9 19:25 JosephMendiola [336097]
10 20:34 Pappy [336082]
7 14:01 Shipman [336069]
-Signs, Portents, and the Weather-
Farming the Sahara and the End of Malthusianism
Russell Mead.
Malthusianism is a psychological disposition more than an intellectual conclusion...
Posted by: Pappy || 12/23/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || [336109 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Deep beneath Africa, under some of the hottest and driest places on earth, lie vast reservoirs of fresh water. 100 times the freshwater that exists on the continent’s surface.” Tapping that water could transform dry and barren land into wet and fertile oases.

Question is, how can you convince the Fremen without Muad'Dib to lead them?
Posted by: OldSpook || 12/23/2012 2:52 Comments || Top||

#2  And will he launch a planetary-wide jihad, just to mix up the gene pool, if he does emerge?
Posted by: lotp || 12/23/2012 9:33 Comments || Top||

#3  I'd favor NOTHING until Islam is eliminated, not that Islam itself is bad, but the Murderouus wackos are dead and gone(And no oil) then let them rot in peace WITH their Allah.
Posted by: Redneck Jim || 12/23/2012 21:15 Comments || Top||


Home Front: Politix
"My heart is not in the coffin with Inouye/And I must not pause in my telling of me."
Posted by: Korora || 12/23/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || [336108 views] Top|| File under:

#1  I hide myself inside the shadows of shame
The silent symphonies were playing their game
My body echoed to the dreams of my soul
This god is something that I could not control
Where can I run to now?

Black Sabbath's Megalomania
Posted by: Besoeker || 12/23/2012 6:03 Comments || Top||

#2  The interesting thing here is not that our current POTUS is overly full of himself, but that the article is in Slate, not exactly your typical conservative news mag. Are we finally seeing the start of a preference cascade?
Posted by: SteveS || 12/23/2012 10:51 Comments || Top||

#3  "Senator Inouye was a hero. If he were alive today, like me, I know he would be enthralled by my speech. He was lucky to have lived long enough to see my re-election, probably the proudest moment of his life"
Posted by: Frank G || 12/23/2012 11:59 Comments || Top||

#4  Are we finally seeing the start of a preference cascade?

No. It's a peep of discontent; a minor quibble. No doubt the White House has taken note of Ms. Yotte's scribbling and will, at some date in the future, prepare a suitably disproportionate display of disapproval for her.
Posted by: Pappy || 12/23/2012 12:06 Comments || Top||

#5  Damn Frank, that's was just mean. Accurate as hell, but mean. Also stealing it with no attribution, will just change for the next Corps.
Posted by: Shipman || 12/23/2012 12:54 Comments || Top||

#6  The only quibble I have with Frank's paraphrase is that all Obama-related personal pronouns need to be capitalized (as in Me, My, His, Him) in order to display both Obama's stunning level of narcissism and his...sorry, His...followers' unthinking, slobbery worship.
Posted by: Ricky bin Ricardo (Abu Babaloo) || 12/23/2012 13:44 Comments || Top||

#7  Frank went to a State College and missed the finer points of Autocracy and when to salute yur betturs.
Posted by: Shipman || 12/23/2012 13:58 Comments || Top||

#8  I stand corrected and on bended knee.



Wait...F&CK THAT BENDED KNEE SH&T. Corrected, OK
Posted by: Frank G || 12/23/2012 14:00 Comments || Top||

#9  I luvs ya', #8 Frank. ;-p
Posted by: Barbara || 12/23/2012 16:50 Comments || Top||

#10  The decorum on this site at weekends goes down faster than Barnie Frank in a sauna.
Posted by: Bright Pebbles || 12/23/2012 17:19 Comments || Top||

#11  BP - Facebook *like* if I could
Posted by: Frank G || 12/23/2012 18:08 Comments || Top||


Audit Fort Knox - WhiteHouse.gov Petition
by bigjim-CA

I started a petition on WhiteHouse.gov for something that has been bothering me for some time. A full and open audit of the gold reserves at Ft. Knox. I believe there is a lot of secrecy surrounding what is actually in there and probably for good reason. I don't expect this admin to do a damn thing about it, regardless of how many signatures it gets, but it should be fun to see them dodge.

Lets give it a whirl and see.
Posted by: bigjim-CA || 12/23/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || [336095 views] Top|| File under:

#1  I'm in favor, but NOT getting my name on the Governments computers as a subversive, so not signing.
Posted by: Redneck Jim || 12/23/2012 21:18 Comments || Top||


Home Front: WoT
Jew Without a Gun
I am republishing my three-part series about the LA Riots of 1992 in which Karen and I and the children were trapped for several frightening hours. We were unarmed, helpless save for our wits. The police were conspicuously absent and the bad guys, frequently armed with heavy weapons, owned the streets. It was a defining moment in my life. I'm reposting this series as a cautionary tale...
Seriously intense -- and written by a professional scriptwriter. I remember watching the stories from Germany, but clearly never understood what it was like from the inside.
Posted by: Pappy || 12/23/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || [336070 views] Top|| File under:

#1  I recall the North Hollywood shoot out. The police were seriously under-gunned. They had to obtain sufficient firepower from local gun stores to cope with a couple of bank robbers who had full auto AK-47s, body armour and armour-penetrating rounds. Police departments learned a lot of lessons after this shoot out. Same lessons applies to civilians for self-defence. You just never know when things are going to go to hell completely in a riot, a home invasion, a disaster, or a car-jacking.
Posted by: JohnQC || 12/23/2012 11:18 Comments || Top||


India-Pakistan
Waiting for Malala to grow up
[Dawn] WHEN the state and the political elite of the country cannot be on the same page even on how best to deal with an existential threat to it, is there a point in debating anything else?

The Taliban and their various franchised terror groups keep attacking at will, killing innocent, ungunnies, women and kiddies. And we cannot respond because there isn't a 'consensus' on how to.

The state of Pakistain continues to resemble a crumbling edifice. Today, it is an assault on an airbase, tomorrow on school-going girls. Then, a girls' school is blown up, a bus is stopped, with Shia passengers identified, pulled off and executed.

Condemnation follows. Both from you and I. And from those whose responsibility it is to safeguard the life and limb of every citizen. But if we cast our eye over the past so many years we see very little beyond words.

When it appeared the army may have been prepared to somewhat distance itself from its obsessive belief that the jihadi ideology coupled with nuclear weapons and conventional forces offered the most robust defence of the country, the civilian political elite balked at the prospect of a clean-up.

To some action against militancy was an ideological issue so they opposed it, others let anti-Americanism dominate their response while some felt that any such an exercise would jeopardise or at least delay the next general election due in the coming months.

Swat's Malala Yousufzai was shot and maimed in October. The attempt on the life of a teenager for the crime of wanting to go to school was justified by the Taliban 'because she represented and promoted western culture/values'. The outrage was spontaneous, widespread but to no avail.

As November was drawing to a close, 12-year old Mehzar Zehra was gravely maimed in an armed attack when she was being driven to school by her father in Bloody Karachi
...formerly the capital of Pakistain, now merely its most important port and financial center. It may be the largest city in the world, with a population of 18 million, most of whom hate each other and many of whom are armed and dangerous...
. The ostensible reason for this attack was that they were Shias.

And December saw multiple attacks on women in Bloody Karachi and Khyber Pakthunkhwa in which a number of them were killed.

What did Naseem Akhtar, Kaneez Fatima, Madeeha, Fehmida and others have in common? They were poorly paid (on a daily wage of Rs250) health workers contracted to visit dozens of homes a day to make sure children received their polio
...Poliomyelitis is a disease caused by infection with the poliovirus. Between 1840 and the 1950s, polio was a worldwide epidemic. Since the development of polio vaccines the disease has been largely wiped out in the civilized world. However, since the vaccine is known to make Moslem pee-pees shrink and renders females sterile, bookish, and unsubmissive it is not widely used by the turban and automatic weapons set...
vaccine drops. Given the security environment generally and specific threats to polio workers their work was marked by valour.

Experts say the exercise involves in excess of 80,000 workers with some 33 million children to be vaccinated. Now the fate of the programme is in limbo. Who'd blame the health workers if not a single one ever agreed to step out of their home for the vaccination programme?

Let me declare a personal interest here. I contracted polio when I wasn't even three. I can walk on my own but have restricted mobility. In the early 1960s the knowledge of the virus and its symptoms was so sketchy that I was ill for a number of weeks before a diagnosis was made.

I was fortunate in having devoted, doting parents (and lovely siblings) who spared neither effort nor whatever little material resources they had to ensure my upbringing in an environment free of complexes, sent me to good schools and supported me hugely in early life.

The best orthosis was always fitted no matter how they had to cut corners elsewhere to be able to pay for it; the best physiotherapy was made available. The list is endless and I could go on about how blessed I was after my initial misfortune.

But that isn't the point. Even with a middle-class family, its values, resources and an indescribable amount of love behind me, life wasn't (and isn't) easy. When you are growing up and all the children around you can run while all you do is watch, imagine the frustration every day.

Although I have always believed I am more 'normal' than many able-bodied people, it is also a fact that when you go through most physical activity, and I am not talking competitive sport here, at about a sixth or a tenth of the pace of the rest of the world, you are always playing catch up.

Boy it gets exhausting. Sometimes you just want to stop. That's me. Imagine the life of a polio victim in a poverty-stricken environment. With physical disability would inevitably follow challenges in earning a livelihood through manual labour. A begging bowl and reliance on others the next step.

Today such dilemmas are easily avoidable but we have created a society where the simplest of issues become the most complicated, with the result that we don't shy away from putting even our children at risk.

The reader, one is certain, must get fed up when all columnists do is write laments, pen elegies and practically little else. I have often wondered if among the handful of readers who still read the op-ed pages of a newspaper there is growing irritation at the subject matter of columns such as these.

One so wishes to focus on the positive, but also has to reflect reality which keeps getting direr all the time. One can only ignore that at the risk of appearing delusional. Let me sound positive for a change.

A befitting response to the attackers would be for the president, the governors, the prime minister, the chief ministers along with their cabinet members, opposition politicians and the military leaders to go to each attack site and personally administer drops to the children there.

Now wouldn't that be an uplifting, positive sight? But I suspect it can only be a reality when 15-year-old Malala and others like her grow up and assume leadership roles in Pakistain for that sort of courage and conviction is nowhere in evidence right now.
Posted by: Fred || 12/23/2012 00:00 || Comments || Link || [336070 views] Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistan

#1  You get more of what is subsidized. Sooooo...
Posted by: M. Murcek || 12/23/2012 16:30 Comments || Top||



Who's in the News
25[untagged]
6Arab Spring
5Govt of Pakistan
3Govt of Syria
2Govt of Iraq
2al-Nusra
2Govt of Iran
1Salafists
1Taliban
1al-Qaeda in North Africa
1TTP
1Boko Haram
1Hezbollah
1Lashkar-e-Islami

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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.

Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.

Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has dominated Mexico for six years.
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Meet the Mods
In no particular order...
Steve White
Seafarious
tu3031
badanov
sherry
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Bright Pebbles
trailing wife
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Two weeks of WOT
Sun 2012-12-23
  Egypt vice-president resigns on final day of referendum
Sat 2012-12-22
  Scuds pummel Syrian rebel positions
Fri 2012-12-21
  U.N. Security Council Approves Mali Intervention Force
Thu 2012-12-20
  Yemeni President Restructures Army, Removes Saleh Cronies
Wed 2012-12-19
  Three more polio workers shot in Pakistan; eight dead in 48 hours
Tue 2012-12-18
  Syrian rebels take control of Damascus Palestinian camp
Mon 2012-12-17
  Rebel Offensive In Hama
Sun 2012-12-16
  Rockets Fired on Peshawar Airport, Five Dead, Dozens Injured
Sat 2012-12-15
  Tunisian Salafists attack bar, call drinkers 'infidels'
Fri 2012-12-14
  Coca-Cola resumes its production in Somalia
Thu 2012-12-13
  'Friends of Syria' Recognize Syrian Opposition
Wed 2012-12-12
  Syria Fires Scud Missiles at Insurgents, U.S. Says
Tue 2012-12-11
  North Korea 'launches long-range rocket'
Mon 2012-12-10
  Rebels Seize Chunk of Aleppo Base as Fighting Rages across Syria
Sun 2012-12-09
  Mohammad Ahmed Almansoor Drone-zapped in North Wazoo

Better than the average link...



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