Ask George Smith e-mail: webmaster at dick destiny
Thems the critics and nobody else love. And thems the crowds go see.
Comedy, too. Nazis on the Dark Side of the Moon. Hilarious. Everyone loves the camp.
Ginning it up for something shot in Afghanistan or what passes for a beaten up Islamic country ten years on … Boring!
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Remember the saying? As signs of Iran war fever build in the mainstream press, no one asks why, once again, we’re priming the pump for the beating up of someone smaller and weaker.
Over the Christmas holiday I read Neptune’s Inferno, by James D. Hornfischer, a book on the naval battles that took place off Guadalcanal in the Second World War.
Post Midway, the Imperial Japanese Navy was still exceptionally powerful.
It fell to the US Navy to keep what became known as the Tokyo Express, the IJN’s resupply sorties to its army on Guadalcanal, from tipping the campaign against the United States.
It was a near thing.
Casualties were great. No quarter was asked, none given. And the US Navy almost always went into action out gunned. American naval men expected to lose their lives against an enemy considered highly trained and possessed of fearsome night-fighting warships.
It’s an excellent account, one that underlines how different things are today.
The US war machine never clashes with someone who stands a chance. It faces no IJN. It isn’t ever in combat with anything like the Wehrmacht in Normandy.
I can’t dredge up a single instance of the US fighting anyone it could have lost to in my lifetime.
As a consequence we have a country where everyone pays lip service to the military on holidays out of a guilt and obliged behavior coerced by being allowed to be largely exempt from war and its consequences.
And we have an entire class of people in the national security apparatus who spout rubbish about how they’re underwriting and guaranteeing my right to say stuff like this by dint of their patriotic
duty. It’s like being in a bad movie.
How many Americans can even name the generals who are in charge of the fighting?
Who remembers who was the architect of the campaign that
invaded Iraq? Where is Tommy Franks now? Who cares? (Even the man’s own vanity page doesn’t mention the invasion until the fifth paragraph. He knows as well as anyone, I bet, he wasn’t exactly outmaneuvering Erwin Rommel at el Alamein.)
No matter how daring or satisfying the takedown of Osama bin Laden was, it also invites unfavorable military comparisons with WWII.
In 1943, American fighter planes ambushed the architect of Pearl Harbor, the IJN’s Isoroku Yamamoto, killing him when his transport flight was shot down over Bougainville Island in the South Pacific.
Japan was still a formidable enemy.
By contrast, Osama bin Laden was killed a decade after 9/11, at a time when, if one measures by operational tempo, al Qaeda was and is for all intents and purposes, destroyed.
So as the drums beat louder (here’s the Short Count, aka Arnaud De Borchgrave, cluing us to an October surprise) and the secret war against Iran threatens to turn public, the US military — in this case, the navy — will find itself going into action against an “enemy” that stands
not even the slightest chance.
The rest of the world knows it, too.
There will be nothing good from this, no nobility, no feats of military leadership to be remembered years later, no stories worth repeating.
It will be another case of the world’s biggest, wealthiest and most fearsomely armed military, taking a couple weeks to crush the over-matched, in the process uniting another entire middle eastern country against us.
The country, the military, the people in Neptune’s Inferno are all long gone.
Reading it raised the question: Do our current military leaders think of themselves as those who have common tradition with the sailors who went down fighting in the Slot?
Maybe. If so, perhaps they’re also greatly deluded. In 1941, the entire country took part in the war. In 2012, not so much.
Just don’t bother us here, please.
Culturally, we now we make two types of war movie. It is proof of the
uncomfortable split and shared guilt in American society. It shows
the recognition that the military does things in our name, things most
people have no interest in coming to grips with.
The first type of war movie are those audiences are reluctant to see because they’re too close to the real. The second kind, which so many like to see, have no connection with reality.
The first kind, based on books published in the last decade on the war are made on small budgets. They comprise documentaries or recreations.
None of them make money. Hardly anyone sees them. They’re painful, all unpleasant. No one pays them the slightest attention except a few entertainment critics.
The second kind are done on giant budgets, no expenses are spared, and the heroic US military is engaged against giant talking robots or unspecified alien invasion forces with firepower far in excess of anything the good guys bring to bear until the final ten minutes of the last reel.
Lots of people see the latter. Big names like to show the square heroic jaw while acting in them.
The latest, Battleship, advertised during the Super Bowl, has Liam Neeson as everyone’s favorite grizzled military leader.
It’s another in the line of couldn’t find anyone big enough for a fair fight so they made someone up.
It may be fair entertainment but it’s nothing to be proud of. The psychology exploited may have something to do with the lack of overwhelming enthusiasm for national war-on-terror victory parades.
Who would we celebrate victory and success in an existenstial struggle over? Aliens? Robots?
No, those people on the other side of the globe, who it has been decided need pre-emptive destruction, ten years after the fact, because the fear-based economy says so,
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Today the Alyona Show at RT covered accelerating drone seepage into US airspace, specifically the passed legislation green-lighting it. Over the past couple weeks, it’s also been subject to treatment at Steve Aftergood’s Secrecy Blog, one post of which notoriously generated a hailstorm of crazy wrath from the Drudge Army.
Drone are already used in the US. However, the new push is mostly all about money. Defense — read private contractor — spending in the areas of drone manufacturing and design, as well as cybersecurity, are two places relatively immune from future budget-cutting.
And the Alyona show aptly points to a chart on lobbying efforts from the drone industry and a startling but not unexpected doubling in greasing for it in 2011.
The drone industry knows there’s a good chance homeland security dollars can be used to lease drone flights to all manner of local government — read police — departments through the US. It’s a type of distributed payment in which the entire taxpayer base is used as a bank for what are effectively local point sales.
It’s been used throughout the last decade to equip police departments with all types of military equipment in the name of the war on terror. Leasing or buying drones, while much more expensive, is not fundamentally different.
Anyone who doubts this practice should probably review South Pasadena’s acquisition of a totally unnecessary armored car, as noted here a week or so ago.
If Burbank, for example, can have an armored car for a quarter of a million dollars on a grant from Homeland Security, why not a Predator drone for a couple million.
Southern California, including Pasadena, already has an able police air force, of sorts. It employs helicopters and over the course of fifteen years I’d have to say they’ve been cost effective. The Pasadena air force — one helicopter — has been successfully used to track and pin individuals of interest to the police (like car thieves or single gang members) using spotlights and infra-red optics. However, it is hard to imagine that a drone could do such a job better but not hard to imagine it being done and costing a lot more.
All because of the natural tendency, established in the last decade, in which police departments always wish to acquire additional military capability as long as they don’t have to pay for it from their local budget. And, with Senior Fellow GlobalSecurity.Org hat on, that is how I assume drone services will be offered to them by the industry.
In a Monday post at the Secrecy Blog, entitled “DoD Envisions ‘Routine’ UAS Access to US Airspace,” Aftergood includes a claim by a member of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International drone industry lobbying group:
“Over the next 15 years more than 23,000 … jobs could be created in the U.S. as the result of UAS integration into the [National Air Space.]”
When industry trade groups are boosting something they always include job creation claims as enticements.
Using simple arithmetic it is easy to put such claims in their proper perspective.
Using the drone industry’s own figure on job creation,. that’s 1,533 and one third jobs/year. Spread over a country the size of the United States at 311.5 million.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the employment/population ratio is 58 percent, which means 180.7 million people in the labor force this year.
Here’s the calculation:
1,533.33 divided by 180,700,000 = 8.48550083 × 10-6
That is, drone work is projected to contribute 8.48 x 10 to the MINUS SIXTH POWER, in terms of relative percentage to the current labor force.
Yeah, we need to so keep those unmanned aerial systems assembly lines humming and growing.
In other words, economic benefit to the middle class economy, outside of the profit to the manufacturers in the arms industry, is trivial.
Last week, LA Times Empire’s Dog Feces beat reporter W. J. Hennigan noted a protester at a trade conference for the drone industry, one in which the keynote address was delivered by the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee:
At a conference about the development of drones for use in combat, Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-Santa Clarita) was interrupted Wednesday by an anti-drone protester as he was giving a speech …
McKeon, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, was discussing how efforts to curtail the military budget would hurt national security and the U.S. military when the protester interrupted him.
“These drones are playing god,” she said, carrying a banner that read “Stop Killer Drones.”
The crowd, made up of military contractors, military personnel and industry insiders, was surprised and hushed at first, but began booing when the protester continued to denounce the use of drones in combat.
Within seconds, hotel security personnel surrounded the woman. She was carried out …
Hat tip to Pine View Farm where I noticed the Alyona Show on RT bit.
Predator loans, iPhones and drones … “”The best startlingly real and truthful electric folk rock song this year!” — Joe Morgansternly, The Weekly National Standard Journal & Politico Review
Recommend it. Sing the chorus. You heard it here first.
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“Rebublican-invented, Democrat-perfected, the Heart and Mind-O-Matic spreads hearts and minds all over the region!”
From Mark Fiore. A must see.
It’s a familiar term. It’s what happens when an article you’ve written gets linked to by Matt Drudge.
An onslaught by tens of thousands occurs in the space of a few hours, with almost everyone in it bearing the triple handicap of being nuts, stupid and extremely right wing.
The server may topple from the weight. The e-mail box overflows with slurs and calumnies upon your house. The comments section will be flooded.
A train full of crazy people has arrived, ejected its passengers, now all ranting, cursing and waving nonsensical digital placards. They pay no attention to what you’ve actually published, chew the carpet for a few hours and then depart, never to return.
Tomorrow Drudge will loose his army of fools and cretins on some other person or random net posting. And the entire process will repeat.
In the meantime you’ll be deleting all the comments and mail espousing violence and bigotry.
On Friday Steve Aftergood’s well-known Secrecy Blog was Drudged. A mildly worded post entitled “Congress Calls for Accelerated Use of Drones in U.S.” drew the wrath of the Drudge zombie army.
Aftergood tells DD: “[It] nearly knocked out our website, with over 50,000 page views in 24 hours.”
Sample comment, which may be gone by the time you surf out to it:
What happens when a nation forgets their God and makes football of greater importance on Sundays. And worships the work of their own hands above God. This is what they deserve. But in the end, ??? Those who lead into captivity shall go into captivity???. This system that all these elites are devising to control the masses will become their own prison and it will be just the opposite. It will be used upon their own heads. Our only hope is for a massive solar storm to destroy all the satellites and GPS and Comm of all these totalitarians. The PEOPLE are safe without them and their CONTROL. We have GUNS. So there is another reason these Marxists phags are doing this. To assume total control. Got news for ya. Our GOD is going to take your power and destroy you. Patience of the Saints.
May a solar storm destroy you Marxist totalitarian phags.
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Witnesses say a surveillance drone has crashed into a refugee camp in the Somali capital.
Drones have been used by the U.S. to attack or observe al-Qaida-linked militants in the Horn of Africa nation.
Refugees and soldiers in Mogadishu’s Badbado camp say they watched the drone crash Friday into a hut made of sticks, corrugated cans and plastic bags.
Sacdiyo Sheikh Madar, a refugee at the camp, says African Union peacekeepers came to remove it.
Police officer Ali Hussein says the drone was shaped like a small plane. A similar drone crashed into a house in Mogadishu last year.
Are we threatened by those who live in huts of sticks, corrugated cans and trash bags?
Our national security leadership apparently thinks an awful lot of stupid or just-don’t-care people do.
There’s a deep immorality here. If you don’t see it why are you reading this blog?
Formal addition of a new category: Bombing Paupers.
Best song, ever. Share and post it to places where it will be sure to infuriate. Some people need to be kicked and informed there are many who don’t share their views on US military and technological supremacy.
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