#3
...I'm going to stand up for Trudeau just a bit here - Boopsie is supposed to be something of a ditz; it's possible that he's trying to show her as not knowing it's been debunked.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
12/29/2014 5:20 Comments ||
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#4
IIRC he lives in NYC. He'll soon fit in as it devolves back to the 70s which he never left.
#5
If Trudeau wants to do a political cartoon he should put it on the editorial page and be a political cartoonist. Best place to put it, other than some of the obvious choices (canary cage, kitty litter box, etc.), is in that rag, the NYTs.
#1
REMF Keyboard Commando gets an ARCOM for bitching at people online? Giving an MI desk weenie 1SG An ARCOM for this? Break out the Golden Kneepads.
Just completely devalue the 2 I got for actually doing things that were mission related and oiperational.
Whats next, they going to cheapen my AAM by giving one for faceboook activity? Give away JSCM for posting status during joint ops (unlike the nasty-ass extended field duty I had to do in a third world armpit full of very unfriendly and aggressive locals). How about they go ahead cheapen my Bronze star by giving her one for Tweeting their "combat" status from a HQ building far in the rear with the gear? Put a V device on there too, for "Vocal". Yes, I am being sarcastic but I mean it. That AAM I would sneer at her for wearing it.
In the immortal words of Hawkeye & Trapper John's driver, SSG Gorman from the movie MASH... "Goddamn army."
#3
By the way, the RIGHT way to handle this isn't to rat people out to higher echelon, nor to troll them and launch a bitch fest at them - which she had to subsequently attempt to hide (didnt work).
If she knew the individuals and thier unit, it would have been a simple matter to use the NCO channels to get hold of their topkick, or PSG, and handle it there.
If this is what the Army has become, then I have to recommend against anyone joining as a career.
#4
She's got a great future ahead of her monitoring social media sites, reading other people's mail and reporting on them at No Such Agency. I'm submitting OS for an 'impact' Rantburg ARCOM for his #3 and #4.
#5
ARCOMs became the 'good conduct medal' for a tour way too long ago. Why bitch about an entire system that was compromised eons ago when 'awards boards' were established stripping award authority away from the level that's in the friggin regulation to higher echelon to 'insure' consistency and when too many became PCS awards purely based upon rank.
#7
Yep, you could get into a mess of a fire fight, call in air strikes, direct fire, rescue the wounded and lead your men to victory over a superior force and get a Bronze Star with a "V" device, the Bn CDR hovering over the scene gets a Silver Star and an Air Medal.
Posted by: Bill Clinton ||
12/29/2014 8:39 Comments ||
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#11
Have to wonder why she was 'trolling' the web; but then again maybe not. Her reputation probably preceded her and she couldn't even get a date at the figs store.......
The deadline for the drawdown of foreign forces from Afghanistan is here. Only about one-tenth of the once 140,000-strong foreign force will be in Afghanistan in 2015 and that number will decrease in years to follow.
Williams said in recent years the security issues in some northern provinces such as Kunduz and Faryab has rivaled known hotspots in southern and eastern provinces such as Kandahar, Helmand, and Khost. He said the Taliban has been able to advance its cause there using ethnic kin as a vanguard. But Williams noted the Taliban has been successful in including members of other regional ethnic groups.
Semple concurred, saying, "over the past few years...the non-Pashto-speaking Taliban of those areas, the Uzbeks, Tajiks and Turkmen, also have mobilized and they're now some of the Taliban fronts in the north." Semple added that in some northern provinces such as Kunduz, Takhar, and Faryab, Taliban operations are run "by commanders from the ethnic groups based in that area, not just the Pashtuns."
The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) is the region's best-known militant group, and it is an ally of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. The IMU was in northern Afghanistan in late 2001 and suffered heavy losses in the U.S. bombing campaign. They fled into Pakistani tribal areas, but are spreading again into northern Afghanistan.
Semple said that Afghanistan will remain at war through 2015, but the government "is not about to collapse imminently, the government will still be charge in Kabul and in the provinces but will have to fight." Williams added, "Don't forget that the Afghan army and security forces still have 344,000 troops and we look at history, the [Muhammad] Najibullah regime lasted for years after the withdrawal of Soviet support forces."
Herbst suggested two scenarios, both of which could cause IMU militants to consider trying to cross back into Central Asia. He said a resurgent Taliban could facilitate the IMU reestablishing safe haven areas just south of Central Asia's border, from which it could launch raids. Herbst said that alternately, if the Ghani government "could assert control throughout most of the country...you might see the terrorists forced out and head back home."
Herbst agreed the IMU fighters "don't represent an existential threat to the government of [Uzbek] President [Islam] Karimov," but he said, "They could, however, represent a tipping force in either Tajikistan or Kyrgyzstan."
I'd love to read reactions from any of the better-informed Rantburg regulars who might be willing to slog through this analysis.
The American people and its political leadership will do anything for the military except take it seriously. The result is a chickenhawk nation in which reckless spending and strategic folly combine to lure our nation into endless wars it can’t win.
#1
The American people increasingly like simple solutions. We live in times similar to the period after WWI when life was good and the world could take care of itself - except it couldn't. The seeds of discord were already sown. Our military will allow us to accomplish much good in the world. We can bring Pax Romanus even to the Middle East if required. The issue is whether the American people are willing to make a 50 year commitment like Germany, Japan or Korea. A 10 year committment to Iraq or Afganistan just brings Vietnam results. A Haitian 5 year whitewash just melts into sludge.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
12/29/2014 1:58 Comments ||
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#2
endless wars
IIRC from a Guinness Book of records entry that in recorded history there's only been like 200 years of peace recorded among those civilized enough to maintain records. The unique position of America between two major oceans allowed it to believe extended periods of peace were normal. That was compounded by the propaganda of one group or another who had the ability to shroud the fact that America was in one state of war or another along its frontier from its inception to the end of the 19th Century when we would pick up fights with external antagonists. When those oceans no longer served as a effective buffer to the outside world, you had the choice to either ride the tiger or let the tiger ride you. That is an ugly truth of history and human behavior.
#4
Ryuge: You summed it up nicely: "The American people and its political leadership will do anything for the military except take it seriously. The result is a chickenhawkshit nation..."
When there is more spent on the Policiatl Correctness topic d'jour than warfighting and the top men are bounced out because the Narcissist in Chief doesn't like what they have to say, how can you think anything but?
It was a running joke that when I first enlisted, gays weren't allowed, then Clinton brought in DADT, and the punch line was" retire before its mandatory. Never would have dreamed that it would come to pass thanks to big ears......
Now when kids ask about a military career, I tell them not only no but hell no. get a real job.
#5
The writer of the article is himself a chickenhawk by the very same criteria he has applied to others. The chickenhawk, as you may recall was the leftist blood libel set against Bush supporters who wants to respond to terrorist activity in Afghanistan and and later Iraq.
The writer is desperately clinging to his glory days of the 1970s when the opinions he expressed in the current article were oh so radical way back in the day.
Now, it's just a lot of tired old leftist bullsh*t from a tired old leftist bullsh*t artist.
The air show in Kurdistan is just to keep things from spinning out of control too quirk.
Obama regime still needs more allies, Castro and an embassy in Tehran with the Mad Mullahs on the side of the Obama regime's side is another positive for the Obama regime.
With socialist latin Americans pouring through the Southern border, and the military being filled with yes people and soon foreigners, America as we knew it will be toast in two years.
The issue is not just international, military, it is also domestic, police.
The regime is trying to tear down the entire infrastructure to the point of chaos.
1,000 teens shut down a mall this weekend involved in a massive brawl, not one arrest. The police are clearly to the point of not even caring to carry out law enforcement anymore.
The Obama regime is the number one threat to national security in every way.
[DAWN] The closer you want to get to eradicating the menace of terrorism, the bigger this menace seems to get.
For the past week, following the attack in Peshawar, our leaders, both in Khaki and Mufti, have deliberated and deliberated. But this piece is not about them and the solutions they might come up with. It is about the sociology of the mindset that either justifies or rationalises terrorism, or impedes tangible action against it.
It is about the failure of the state and the society to come up with a narrative that can defeat the terrorists.
Terrorists of all hues — Al Qaeda, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and its countless affiliates, Afghan Taliban and its affiliates like the Haqqani network, India-focused terror groups like Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and sectarian terror groups like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi — use two weapons: incredible hatred towards their victims and a narrative to convince and recruit new supporters to the cause.
This narrative of victimhood, denial and conspiracy theories can easily be deconstructed and dismantled. But what with the rising anger in the country, fracturing of the society and the general iffiness of the times we live in, no one has done anything substantial about the issue despite harping on about it at great length.
It is time we change that.
After 9/11, the United States knew whom to blame and the nation’s anger was projected outwards. After 7/7, the United Kingdom knew whom to blame, and the country was able to vent its anger. After Mumbai attack, India too, vented its anger on Pakistan and somehow managed to cool off.
In Pakistan, though, where the state had pandered to extremist inclinations for long, at the time of 9/11 there was a dictator in place, whose rise to fame and then power owed a lot to the Kargil debacle. When General Musharraf decided to take a U-turn in his Afghan/Taliban policy, he gave his people the wrong reasons for doing so.
Instead of telling them that extremism of all kinds is bad for the country; that it can easily turn against the country's own people and that nation states are held accountable if found guilty of exporting destabilising ideologies beyond their borders; he told the nation that had Pakistan not taken the step, it would have been bombed back to the stone age.
That was an admission not of flawed policies but merely of foreign pressure.
At the time, there was neither any parliament nor the free media we see today. Lack of proper debate turned the country’s anger inwards. Later, conspiracy theories of sorts would emerge, people living in denial would scavenge western media sources for whatever half-truths would fit into their narrative.
Today, we have a developed popular narrative which says that Islam is in danger, that Pakistan is about to break; all of this is linked to belief in the end of time.
All faiths have eschatological predictions. Since each brand of 'endism' focuses on end of the universe, the predictions are found to be dire and can easily be exploited at any time of adversity. Our local religious extremists and televangelists have very effectively inserted these prophecies into the reactionary narrative. By raising doubts about some of the most well-documented historical developments and mixing it with this narrative, the terrorists have managed to win over a host of fence-sitters.
Posted by: Fred ||
12/29/2014 00:00 ||
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[DAWN] A curious column in an Urdu daily recently asked whether all those Pakistanis who have been holding candlelight vigils for the victims of terrorism, have become Catholics?
The writer seemed quite incensed by the ever-growing practice of men, women and children lighting candles in the memory of the many Pakistani civilians and soldiers who have been butchered by armed extremists.
He thinks this is a ‘Catholic practice’. The display picture of the author suggests he is way beyond middle-age. So I wanted to advise him: Sir, be wise, not just old.
Nevertheless, his silly question and allusions did make me wonder, how many forms of bigotry based on both ill-informed as well as diabolical distortions of faith a Pakistani has to face even if he or she just wants to quietly express a moment of sadness about an heartless act of brutality supposedly perpetrated in the name of the Almighty.
It’s easy to pinpoint those who proudly claim that the murdering of men, women and children (by them) is some kind of a holy duty ordained by the Almighty for the establishment of a sacred Utopia on Earth. It has also become easy to point out the ‘apologist’ — that strange, sly creature using public forums to diplomatically rationalise and at times even justify what are sheer acts of barbarity by those he has a soft corner for.
But the recent wave of unprecedented anger cutting across a majority of Pakistanis after the monstrous terror attack on school children in Peshawar by armed extremists, is giving birth to yet another, subtler, breed of apologist.
The exhibitionistic extremists are being condemned like never before and their apologists are being shamed in the media in ways that have clearly flabbergasted them.
So it was only natural (especially in a troubled society such as ours) that the lunatic fringe now generates a more subtle brand of apologists into the mainstream scheme of things.
The newspaper column deriding all those Pakistanis who hold candlelight vigils as possible Catholics is a good example of what this new kind of an apologist is all about.
The wise gentleman had nothing much to say about the Peshawar tragedy, nor on the overwhelming issues of terrorism and extremism that are devouring the country. He had nothing to say about the military operation against extremist militants nor on the much anticipated plan of the government to roll out a strict anti-terror policy.
No, sir, these seem to be minor irritants for the gentleman compared to the apocalyptic practice of (supposedly) behaving like Catholics by holding candlelight vigils!
So why do it? Most probably one was a full-blown apologist, but knowing that the typical modus operandi of explaining acts of terror as being acts of liberation may now sound entirely awful, why not begin to question the religious convictions of those who are getting more press these days for condemning and denouncing what to him were not-so-denouncable.
The new apologists, now unable to confess that they might have been wrong (if not entirely stupid) to have believed that the extremists were actually some kind of revolutionary romantics, have instead decided to wag their fingers at the condemners.
Of course, the old apologists did the same by constantly questioning the religious and patriotic dispositions of the condemners, but before Peshawar, the number of such people was far less than what it is today.
When the populist media was pressurised by the public outrage against the Peshawar attack, it quickly adopted the narrative of the condemners. This was also because this narrative has been mushrooming within the armed forces as well, especially ever since General Raheel Sharif took over as COAS almost a year ago.
When images of civil society members protesting in Islamabad against the radical and controversial cleric of the Red Mosque began to circulate in the social media (with the hashtag, #ReclaimYourMosques), among the many jubilant and passionate comments were also comments such as this: ‘How can they reclaim mosques when none of them (the protesters) even visit them?’
I found such comments to be rather funny, but rest assured, those making them were quite somber. The idea now was to attack the religious convictions of those who were attacking the religious convictions of men who had attacked hundreds of school children in the name of a holy war.
After all, if you can’t join the condemners, confuse those who are now applauding them. Hey, look, they don’t pray; Hey, beware, they are following Catholicism ...
Though the new chief of the Jamaat-i-Islami, Sirajul Haq, has done well to distance the party from the reactionary rhetorical legacy of the party’s former chief, Munawar Hassan, yet, he couldn’t help but recently suggest that ‘some people were using the recent rage against terrorism as a way to expunge religion from school text books ...’
I wonder how by pointing out that the books being taught in our schools and seminaries are riddled with biases, is one is expunging faith from them.
We have been using such text books ever since the early 1970s but have they helped us in building a more literate, morally upright and uncorrupt society? Quite the contrary.
But why worry about school books at this precious and tense hour? What was attempted to be deflected, or expressed? Was it that the outrage against those who exploit and distort faith to justify their violence is an outrage against faith itself? Do explain.
Today more than ever a majority of Pakistanis are on the same boat. Each one of us has to be on the same page as well by setting aside ideological and political biases and grudges. Unity indeed is the need of the hour.
Posted by: Fred ||
12/29/2014 00:00 ||
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"What if I told you," asks a Matrix-themed photo-meme that has been circulating on Facebook, "that you can be against cops murdering citizens and citizens murdering cops at the same time?"
Judging by the past few weeks, this really is a Matrix-level revelation, obvious as it may seem. We have Americans protesting because of police shootings, and we have police turning their backs on New York City's Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio over lack of support after two police were assassinated by Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley, a gunman from Baltimore who said he was seeking revenge for the choking death of cigarette-tax evader Eric Garner.
And, as blogger Eric Raymond notes, the response has been divided: "Because humans are excessively tribal, it's difficult now to call for justice against Eric Garner's murderers without being lumped in with the 'wrong side.' Nor will Garner's partisans, on the whole, have any truck with people who aren't interested in poisonously racializing the circumstances of his death."
This is a tragedy, but not a surprise. Tribalism is the default state of humanity: The tendency to defend our own tribe even when we think it's wrong, and to attack other tribes even when they're right, just because they're other. Societies that give in to the temptations of tribalism — which are always present — wind up spending a lot of their energy on internal strife, and are prone to disintegrate into spectacular factionalism and infighting, often to the point of self-destruction.
Societies that temper those tribal tendencies, replacing them with the mechanisms of civil society, do much better. But there is much opportunity for political empire-building in tribalism, and if the benefits of stoking tribal fires exceed the costs for political actors, then expect political actors to pour gasoline on even the smallest spark.
#1
It's even harder if you try and get nuanced about the actual causes in cases like Garner's. Shall we talk about a law against selling cigarettes as "loosies"? How about the doctrine that any tax no matter how trivial or unfair is worthy of being enforced by lethal force of arms?
The police state doesn't start with the police, it starts with the state and the laws that are written by the state to fund and protect the state.
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.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
