Flatten the area of Tripoli where it is believed he is holed up with a human shield surrounding him. Kill all those people and get it over with. Implement total war for a week, and cockroach Gadhafi will be entombed in a pile of rubble …
As of right now, no one knows what will be the result of the Mideast rebellions. No one knows – or is telling us – if Iran or the Muslim Brotherhood is behind the scenes bankrolling or fanning the flames of the Mideast rebellions to re-establish the Islamic caliphate …
The Obama administration is backing all of the Mideast rebellions. From Egypt to Libya, there’s not a word of caution from the Obama administration about these rebellions; not a word of caution about what the new political environment will be if the rebellions succeed. The president’s radical America-hating chums obviously continue to influence their community organizer.
Obama administration types are not just throwing caution to the wind by backing these rebellions. They are throwing the world into a potential hotbed of life-threatening extremism …
It would be wise to be very cautious and suspicious of the rebellions in the Mideast. Too many violent rebellions in that part of the world have led to brutal regimes who maintain power through genocide, societal destruction …
Wrong about everything. And stupidly so.
Worth reprinting because the GOP is the party of Ted Nugent. And it’s silent today, unable to react to Libyan news because it means the president’s policy, despite how much it hates the guy, didn’t hurt the situation.
The GOP hated the Libyan conflict because it was its leaders didn’t start and had no power over. And while it loves war in the Middle East, it’s internal logic and hatred of the president prevented it from having any view of events which made sense.
We continue with our quality programming in a moment.
DD blog needs your help. I’m not too proud to beg.
The economic crash of 2008 has been as hard here as everywhere else.
Since stepping into cyberspace in the early Nineties everything written has been provided largely pro bono. And this is the first fundraiser of any kind that I’ve held.
Originally, I went under the rubric of the old electronic Crypt Newsletter, an e-zine devoted to hacker culture, specifically that centered on the worldwide network of young computer virus-writers.
Much of the work published through it was aimed at increasing public understanding of issues in cybersecurity and the hype-laden subjects of cyberterrorism and cyberwar. That continues to this day.
In 1994 some of the earliest published content was used in The Virus Creation Labs, a book on the old computer virus underground published by American Eagle. Interesting side fact: While the book is now technically out of print, the publisher decamped to Central America before 2000, convinced the country would overturn or that hyperinflation would come about as the result of the Millennium Bug.
By 2004 I had moved to a slightly different place at GlobalSecurity.Org, still doing pro bono public research on various security topics.
This work moved into the domain of poison recipes, specifically those for ricin and alleged home-made chemical and biological weapons, which had originated in the American survivalist extremist fringe during the Eighties. By the Nineties these tracts had been migrated to the Internet and simultaneously translated into Arabic.
In terms of practical things, this was one of the first places you could see at least one of the claims made by the US government, delivered by Colin Powell in his address to the UN Security Council, on reasons for war in Iraq, shot to pieces.
The London ricin ring as a link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda had been part of Powell’s presentation and the material published at Globalsecurity destroyed it.
At the time, the US news media largely ignored this but the work could not be erased. History had its way. (Examples of the news on the ricin trial in the US news media are here, at the Washington Post; and from Newsweek.)
Around 2006, the public work was formally moved to Dick Destiny blog.
Material published through here pushed back against mainstream and government claims that al Qaeda had capability in biological chemical weapons and that documents found on the Internet conferred equal capabilities to any jihadis interested in them.
While unpublicized that effort has been a success.
With the help of others the official public position was modified. One example was the grudging concession in the 2008 report from the US Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism: “We accept the validity of intelligence estimates about the current rudimentary nature of terrorist capabilities in the area of biological weapons … ” (Page 39.) Those intelligence estimates were not furnished by the US government’s analytical apparatus. They came from the work of outsiders, from here and analysis provided by colleagues.
Other proof is the anecdotal evidence that mainstream news is no longer littered with scare pieces insisting that al Qaeda men in some broken down hideout can make WMDs because of global access to terror capabilities granted by the Internet. Still, occasionally I have to issue burn notices on retired CIA men who resist getting the message. One example of such, from last year, is here.
Not bad for a blog.
Since then regular readers know I’ve kept up the fight while expanding into system domestic problems of economy and inequality which threaten the nation’s security in ways foreign threats during the war on terror never could.
This short history touches upon why the work has mattered. And so I ask for your help in keeping it moving forward and vital. Please help spread the word.
Donations are taken through PayPal. And you can still contribute without a designated PayPal account. Just page down to “Don’t have a PayPal account?” and click “continue.”
[The] Administration defines hostilities – an interpretation concocted over the objections of two top Pentagon lawyers – as a condition that exists only when U.S. troops are in a position to be fired upon …
With the libertarian-leaning GOP freshmen and progressive doves up in arms over the “war,” Boehner has little choice but to address the issue. But he wasn’t about to allow his conference to pass an extreme measure defunding all U.S. action in Libya, which would freak out the European allies who are leading the mission.
The only change would be a ban on attacks by drones or manned aircraft.
Sales of smart bombs and cruise missiles to Little Tommy Atkins and the rest of the toadies and pantywaists to remain bullish. Raytheon and Lockheed Martin CEO’s continue to report good quarterly results.
No real concern over terrible trade imbalance with China due to deindustrialization of almost everything but arms manufacturing.
The Senate Armed Services Committee urged China to let investigators travel unfettered to the Chinese mainland to probe reports that Chinese-made counterfeit parts are making their way into U.S. weapons and other electronics …
A range of U.S. companies interviewed by the committee, from military contractors to consumer electronics makers, have pointed “almost totally and exclusively” to China, and more specifically to Shenzhen, in Guangdong province, as a source of counterfeit electronic parts, Levin said.
Ultimately, he said, what was at stake is the U.S. ability “to have reliable weapons for bombing paupers and selling to panytwaists worldwide” “to defend itself with weapons systems that we can rely on.”
The country is weary of war, but the story Rubio tells, with eloquence and passion, is still tremendously appealing — the story of a great republic armed and righteous, with no limits on what it can accomplish in the world.
This is a story that many conservatives — and many Americans — want to believe. Once, I believed it myself.
But that was many years and many wars ago, and now I think Rand Paul is right.
This just in time to merge with Congressional House reluctance to go along with the President on regarding Bombing Moe as “not war.”
It’s not war, is the reasoning, if it’s by remote control.
Anyway, it’s not that they’re suddenly pacifists, it’s that they’re for any way to mess with Obama.
However, Moe stubbornly refuses to die or go away and Little Tommy Atkins and Co. have to keep re-ordering American smart bombs.
So the only difference taking the President out of the equation with some invocation of Congressional war powers is that it will only slightly slow down drone manufacturing and sales at General Atomics.
At this point the strategy of bombing paupers is not changeable. In fact, if the President were to suddenly advocate a draw down in the pauper-bombing mission planner, the Republican Party would quickly adopt a position for restoring the primacy of bombing the world’s beggars and pantywaists, or as Ross Douthat writes:
Rubio is the great neoconservative hope, the champion of a foreign policy that boldly goes abroad in search of monsters to destroy … His maiden Senate speech was a paean to national greatness, whose peroration invoked John F. Kennedy and insisted that America remain the “watchman on the wall of world freedom.”
Defense Secretary Bob Gates complains about NATO pantywaists:
In Libya, Gates said, “the mightiest military alliance in history is only 11 weeks into an operation against a poorly armed regime in a sparsely populated country, yet many allies are beginning to run short of munitions, requiring the U.S., once more, to make up the difference.”
He had me on the floor with that one. Bombing Moe is the “mightiest military alliance in history?” In his mind. WWII conveniently thrown in a black hole.
The thrust of it: European nations aren’t spending enough on their militaries. And they are reluctant warriors perhaps being tired of being hectored to fight in Afghanistan.
This will not be popular with Little Tommy Atkins or the friendlies on our northern border. Who have had to reorder smart bombs and missiles from our weapons shops.
“Europe’s patchwork of small countries leads to a jumble of small military forces that are not particularly effective if they actually need to go to war, critics say,” reads the piece.
Well, there’s also the fact that their democracies are substantially more representative than ours. And that their civilian populations and politicians and industries are not totally wedded to arms production and continually being on war footing.
Nope, can’t complain much about the Euro-pantywaists here. From this standpoint, it’s good they don’t follow the American way.
And for the sales pitch, trying to keep at least some air pumped into the balance of trade:
“Gates repeated the criticism on Friday, saying that the $300 billion that non-U.S. NATO members spend annually on defense ‘could buy a significant amount of usable military capability.’ Instead, the results are significantly less than the sum of the parts.”
Obey Uncle Sam! Don’t make him angry! Buy more F-16s, attack helicopters and smart bombs, pantywaists!
Our leaders, notably Congress and the administration, are increasingly desperate to rationalize reasons for little recovery in the middle class and high unemployment. So they look to Wall Street, which is doing fine, and economists to tell them it’s all the little people’s fault.
Structural unemployment is what it’s called. It’s an argument that makes the case that rotten is the new good, that nothing can be done because the country has moved on and the unemployed are so because they lack what the country needs for the future. So corporate America has decided to discard them.
They lack the necessary skills.
Except the American middle is not lacking in skills. Working for the census last year made this abundantly clear. The census’ labor, taking a great deal from those knocked into unemployment by the Great Recession, had all kinds of skills and varied training. And they were largely educated. You could not characterize them narrowly — as flawed in their education and training — which is what structural unemployment arguments always try to do.
Today’s news — from this article — delivers all the rancid goods needed to justify walking away from the national mess in the three minutes time it takes to read it.
For example: “Swonk believes that one of the lasting outcomes of the recession will be a skills shortage driven by educational inequality.”
Which, from experience, is rubbish.
The very next graf has one source disputing it, a position also taken by Paul Krugman:
Bart Hobijn, an economist at the San Francisco Federal Reserve, argues against the skills mismatch theory for driving up natural unemployment. Hobijn recently studied the unemployment rate among recent college graduates — who are theoretically resistant to the effects of a skills shortage — and found that they were faring just as poorly in the labor market as others, implying that skills mismatch isn’t having much of an effect on the natural unemployment rate.
Then the man finds a different reason to explain recalcitrant hiring. It’s the extended unemployment benefits, he reasons. The implication that it made people to lazy too find minimum wage work compounded by the fact that employers don’t like hiring low wage workers because, wait for it … they are lazy crap. Although the words “lazy” and “crap” don’t enter the discussion.
The US is great at making weapons and parasite economy stuff — financial services and monetized networked circle jerks (Facebook, Twitter, etc) — and virtually nothing else. And these industries don’t broadly spread their riches to the overall populace. The good fortune comes only to those directly connected to them — a feature of countries which are either saddled with or adopt rising levels of inequality.
One can marvel at the stubborn optimism of the 24-year old, of the ability to get a book contract, and the revelation of information that it’s important to hold onto your laptop. Or you’ll really be in a world of hurt.
Read it. It’s one example of a nation that’s given up on its people.
On the other hand, if you’re in arms manufacturing, things are jolly good.
Weeks ago I predicted Raytheon and others would get great numbers from our Bombing Moe adventure, even once we abandoned the job. Others, like Little Tommy Atkins, for instance, would shoot off all their nice American-made smart bombs and missiles. But Mo would still stubbornly refuse to die or run away, presenting them with the need to order even more from America’s armorers.
And such has been the case. Business at Raytheon has been wunderbar.
From a press release:
Raytheon Company (NYSE:RTN – News) announced today that its Board of Directors has declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.43 cents per outstanding share of common stock. The cash dividend is payable on August 11, 2011 to shareholders of record as of the close of business on July 6, 2011.
Raytheon Company, with 2010 sales of $25 billion, is a technology and innovation leader specializing in defense, homeland security and other
government markets throughout the world. With a history of innovation spanning 89 years, Raytheon provides state-of-the-art [missiles] and [war] support services. With headquarters in Waltham, Mass., Raytheon employs 72,000 people worldwide.
`It seems to me that Canada is not alone in misunderstanding its munitions’ requirements,” [John Pike] said. “What kind of war did Canada think it was going to fight? Did they think this war was going to be over quickly or that the Americans would drop all the bombs?”
But Adm. Giampaolo Di Paola, the chairman of NATO’s military committee, has denied that the alliance’s member countries are running low on ammunition.
Uh, yes, yes they did. Now they’re having to reorder stock and so disappointed.
You may have wondered why I stopped updating Bombing Moe.
Well, when Uncle Sam wandered away from the fight because it was obvious people in pick-up trucks who jump up and down on tanks we just bombed don’t make much of a military, I — like anyone with sense — knew it was all over.
Little Tommy Atkins & the Flying Desert Rats weren’t going to get the job done. Neither was Sark. And the Flying Emirs of Qatar are just an assortment of high button bag and henchmen.
After leading the first stage of the Libyan intervention, the US earlier this month withdrew its forces from offensive operations, ceding control to Nato and its Arab allies.
Britain, France and the rebels are increasingly frustrated that neither other Nato allies nor the Arab states are prepared to attack Gaddafi’s forces, insisting they will only help enforce a no-fly zone.
With Britain and France bearing the burden of the ground attack operation, there are fears that the allies lack the military force to shake the Libyan regime.
Mahmoud Shamman, a spokesman for the Benghazi-based Transitional National Council, said the Nato had allowed Col Gaddafi to regain the initiative on the battlefield since it took over from the US.
“When the Americans were involved the mission was very active and it as more leaning toward protecting the civilians,” he said. “Nato is very slow responding to these attacks on the civilians. We’d like to see more work toward protecting the civilians.”
A French official suggested that the US should deploy its specialist ground-attack aircraft including A-10 Thunderbolt tankbusters and AC-130 Spectre gunships, assets that Britain and France lack.
Did they actually think that a bit of the ol’ shock and awe would work this time around?
You’ll have noticed the US news wandered off the topic, too. War? What war? Oh yeah, that one with the guys in pickup trucks getting shot up by Moe after the professionals lost interest.
At a time when companies are redoubling their efforts to find alternative energy sources, the idea is to reproduce and speed up a process which has taken millions of years and which has led to the production of fossil fuels.
“We are trying to simulate the conditions which existed millions of years ago, when the phytoplankton was transformed into oil,” said engineer Eloy Chapuli. “In this way, we obtain oil that is the same as oil today.”
The microalgae reproduces at high speed in the tubes by photosynthesis and from the CO2 released from the cement factory.
Every day some of this highly concentrated liquid is extracted and filtered to produce a biomass that is turned into bio-oil.
The other great advantage of the system is that it is a depollutant — it absorbs the C02 which would otherwise be released into the atmosphere.
“It’s ecological oil,” said the founder and chairman of BFS, French engineer Bernard Stroiazzo-Mougin, who worked in oil fields in the Middle East before coming to Spain.
Ecological oil, as if the new ‘oil’, when burned doesn’t release all the alleged CO2 used making it. All the laws of chemistry, mass action and combustion rewritten.
Five to ten years and we’ll replace Iraq, says the man.
“US oil giant ExxonMobil plans to invest up to $600 million in research on oil produced from algae,” it is said.
About the same amount of money for the first two weeks of the war on Libya. That’s pretty niggardly, considering they’re going to rewrite history and physics.
“Companies, in particular those in the aeronautic sector, have shown keen interest in this research, hoping to find a replacement for classic oil,” it concludes.
And finally, the dilemma of training and weaponizing the Libyan rebel rabble. Can the CIA do it? Or special ops? And what heavy weapons can we ship them, cadged up from eastern bloc and Chinese surplus on the arms trader market?
They would have more ammunition if they did not keep firing into the air … Decisions are often made after heated arguments or by following whoever shouts loudest and despite the courage of some, the tendency is to flee in disarray …
