Archive for the ‘Terrorism’ Category

A special plea to all people of good faith in the world…

Wednesday, February 23rd, 2022

Let’s support the Ukrainian freedom fighters!

There’s a real possibility that Putin’s stormtroopers will overrun Ukraine. Whether that occurs or not, all people of good faith, especially Americans who pretend to be for freedom, despite Trump and his minions’ efforts, to be defenders of the free world, should make a solemn vow to support Ukraine’s freedom fighters. We know Ukrainians can fight. They ousted a Putin puppet, and they’re better prepared now than when Putin took Crimea.

Yes, Ukraine isn’t a NATO country yet, but so what? We must support the battle against Russia. If it comes to supporting resistance against Russian occupiers, though, that should still occur! We can turn Ukraine into another Chechnya for the Russians, only this time making Ukraine Putin’s Afghanistan.

If we don’t stop Putin now, he will move on to realize his dream of reconstituting the Soviet Union. The way Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland rejected the Soviet hegemony in the nineties still eats at Putin. He’s out for revenge, that’s clear, and he’s willing to ruin Mother Russia to get it. Let’s make sure he pays that price.

Sure, worldwide sanctions against Putin and his oligarchs and their finances are good—I proposed that to @POTUS and @SecretaryBlinken in a tweet—but they’re probably not enough. Putin laughs at them, although his inner circle might not. We must also stand up to all attacks on democratic countries and freedom everywhere they occur.

Let’s all take a solemn oath to do just that! We’re at a tipping point in world history not seen since the second world war, where we can either be smart and halt the march of fascism in the world, or we can surrender to it.

The Yemeni genocide…

Tuesday, November 28th, 2017

The Saudi Arabian prince isn’t just another Arab strongman consolidating his dictatorial power; he’s also creating his own Hitler-like genocide against the Houthis in Yemen. His secretive and despotic government supports Sunnis in Yemen.  Because Iran supports the Houthi Shi’ites there, Saudi Arabia is using starvation and cholera as weapons to murder the Houthis. These include women and children, innocent victims of an evil regime.

The NY Times in a rather misleading article called the prince’s actions another manifestation of the Arab Spring. Far from it. I guess the Times’s writers went into a trance with things like allowing women to drive, as if cosmetic changes in this dark and closed society could turn Saudi devils into angels! This is all just spin conjured up to distract the West, and the NY Times swallowed it and extolled the virtues of the “new regime” in a piece of irresponsible journalism at best and unpaid Saudi propaganda at worst.

The rotting core below the tip of this reformist iceberg is dangerous and depressing.  The images of starving and sick children on the November 19th segment of CBS’s Sixty Minutes should make anyone who isn’t a neo-Nazi cringe and grimace. Conservatives in the U.S. generally don’t watch Sixty Minutes, but they should have watched this episode, especially considering the NY Times blatant bias. Starvation and cholera aren’t pretty wherever they occur, but weaponizing them is a new invention. Leave it to the duplicitous Saudis to turn them into weapons in their campaign for political and religious domination in the region.

The Saudis didn’t just settle with creating modern terrorism. Most of the 9/11 murderers were Saudis. Bin Laden was a Saudi. And the Saudi government funds religious schools that brainwash young men so they become violent terrorists—Saudi terrorists. ISIS never became a 16th-century-style caliphate; Saudi Arabia already was long before ISIS! If Iran is a rogue nation, so is Saudi Arabia. They both destabilize the region via their radical brands of Islam. Their only commonality is their hatred for Israel. Neither nation is any friend of the U.S. or the West, yet the very military equipment we’ve sold to the Saudis is now used to murder Houthis in Yemen.

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Reasonable gun control…

Tuesday, October 17th, 2017

Too many of us interpret the Second Amendment incorrectly.  It states: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms should not be infringed.” Let’s ignore the incorrect English—the Constitution is full of illiteracy, at least in modern terms, which often gives rise to misinterpretation. But please note the emphasis on militias—the word is even capitalized. Gun fanatics focus on the last clause and take it out of context, thinking it says everyone has a right to have a gun, “keep…arms,” as well as carry them, “bear arms.” That’s crock, of course, but maybe understandable because gun fanatics often don’t know anything about American history.

The American Revolution was started by militias. Those ragtag groups of men armed themselves and fought the British. Let’s forget the point that they were terrorists terrorizing the Brits by any modern interpretation, and they were primarily driven by greed: Why should the Brits make all the money from trade? The writers of the Constitution are recognizing militias and their importance in “winning our freedoms” (they’d be aghast at the taxes we have to pay now, of course—they’d probably have fought the Brits even sooner).

In other words, my interpretation of that badly written Second Amendment is that men in t\]militias have a right to arm themselves and carry their weapons. Duh! But considering that our militias are now institutionalized as the states’ National Guards, which the federal government can send to fight and die overseas, no one else has the right to own and carry guns. Like driving a car, it’s a privilege, not a right. We can regulate drivers’ licenses so DUI assassins and incapacitated people, physical or mentally, can’t wreak havoc on our nation’s streets and highways. Because gun ownership is a privilege, why can’t we do the same with guns?

Moreover, we regulate the condition and type of vehicles people drive, in particular, keeping them from being killing machines—none of those James Bond cars where the hubcaps become claws, for example. Why can’t we regulate the types of guns people own and how they use them?

The answer to the last questions seems to be that the NRA and all the gun addicts are binary thinkers, but so are those who want to do away with guns entirely. Gun ownership isn’t a binary issue like many people think it is. It’s not 0 = no one can own a gun, versus 1 = anyone can own a gun. There are many shades of gray between 0 and 1 here, and people have to become smart about gun control. Idiots’ solutions don’t work! Moreover, the Constitution isn’t much help here and just leads to confusion.

What are some reasonable gun control options that the NRA and gun fanatics refuse to accept? Banning of all military-style weapons is one. Assault weapons, even semi-automatic ones, and, of course, all automatic weapons must be banned. You don’t need one of those for sport or hunting, and you don’t need one to protect your home either. Gun manufacturers should be allowed to sell them only to the military and law enforcement agencies. And those gizmos (“bump stocks” are the current words in vogue) that convert semi-automatic weapons into ones of mass destruction should also be outlawed, period. When you can buy such gizmos at Walmart, you know something is terribly wrong with America.

Many people who bow their heads to honor gun victims as Trump et al did after Las Vegas, and then go on to do nothing about reasonable gun control, are hypocrites. Bowing heads is a stupid PR moment—“See America, we care!”—and of no real comfort for the dead and wounded and their families and friends. That’s why survivors and others outraged by incidents of gun violence fervently protest for more gun control. America is doing nothing.

Or, should I say, politicos are doing nothing, because a majority of American voters want reasonable gun control but can’t seem to vote out the jerks in government who feed off the campaign funds provided the NRA and similar groups. Hypocritical devils, all of them. People bowed their heads for the victims of Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, the Orlando nightclub shooting, and the Las Vegas massacre; people bowed their heads for many other incidents too numerous to name here. The NRA and the gun fanatics bow their heads too, but they’re hoping concerned people forget all about Las Vegas until the next time…and the next…and the next. By doing so, they and we encourage domestic terrorism. The NRA is the largest and richest organization that supports terrorism. They are at least as bad as Sinn Fein and probably  ISIS because they’re American terrorism’s lobbyist and political wing.

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What your smart phone cannot do…

Thursday, March 3rd, 2016

People are addicted to their smart phones, so much so that they walk into fountains, kill pedestrians and other drivers, and expose themselves to scam artists, muggers, and perverts.  Beyond that, or bloviating about trivial matters, or being a narcissistic showoff on social media, what can a smart phone do for you?  Depends on who you are, of course.  I’ll turn the question around and discuss what your smart phone CANNOT do.

ID a song.  I heard an oldie the other day.  I could hum the melody.  Loved the piano riffs.  But if I hadn’t been able to remember the name of the performer, I could have never answered the question: Who’s that performer and what became of him?  (It was Richard Marx, by the way.  He’s going on tour and has a new album.)  Song recognition isn’t covered by voice recognition.

Make par in golf, or catch a fish.  It might know what those things are, but it can’t do them.  And it can’t help you do them either.  Smart phones are just limited little computers, apps are just limited little programs, and neither of them are really smart.

Write a novel.  Beyond mentioning the obvious that your smart phone can’t create any of the elements necessary to spin a good yarn, try writing a novel with your thumbs!  Voice recognition technology, you say?  Try it.  You’ll be spending so much time editing that you’ll scream for your laptop.  Or join Jack in the Cuckoo’s Nest.  But maybe all those badly edited ebooks are written this way?

Help you find God or inner peace.  It might hook you up with the latest online quack who calls her- or himself a preacher, but God doesn’t answer a smart phone call and the internet offers no inner peace, just a bunch of random stuff that obeys Sturgeon’s Law, not God’s.  You can obtain more peace by putting your phone on a tile floor and stomping it into pieces.

Make popcorn.  Tres important, mes amis!

Offer a substitute for a loved one’s hug or kiss.  You might find a dating site or attract a pervert on Facebook (is that what the new “love” emoticon on FB is for?), but your smart phone is not much of a companion, in spite of your obsession with it.  Moreover, anyone who kisses her or his iPhone or Galaxy screen is just asking for a major bout with the flu, unless s/he puts hand sanitizer on that screen often enough.  That would have the advantage of making it slippery so thieves couldn’t grab it as easily…or make it drop to that tile floor and shatter into pieces!
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Ways to let ISIS win…

Tuesday, December 15th, 2015

Given that the Donald and the other GOP candidates have made the rest of the world and many in the U.S. wonder what’s happening in America, the Land of the Free, it seems appropriate to list the things that we’re doing or might do to let ISIS win and return this world to the Dark Ages.  The GOP candidates own a lot of the hateful rhetoric described below—I refuse to believe all GOP voters do.  Here’s the list:

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Discriminate and persecute Muslims.  Trump and his supporters seem to forget that there’s freedom of religion in this country.  The Founding Fathers thought that this right was so important, it’s the first sentence in the Bill of Rights: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….”  Trump, of course, is using hate and paranoia to pander to his base, which seems to represent about a third of GOP voters—that in itself is frightening—but he’s also proposing something he could never deliver without amending the U.S. Constitution.

While Islam faces the same problems as Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, and their offshoots and alternatives—how to maintain an ancient faith in a world that’s increasing secular and expecting spirituality and beliefs to be more of a private choice, not a public demonstration that infringes on others’ rights—its members, as do all religious members, need to eschew discrimination and violence and convince its members to control and ostracize those members who turn to them.  Every religion has a bloody past.  The world must move on.  Religious strife does NOT belong in the 21st century.

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Who are the criminals?

Tuesday, December 8th, 2015

This ramp-up to 2016 elections has been noted for outrageous statements from the wannabe presidential candidates, most notably from the GOP side.  Just recently Ted Cruz opined publicly that all the criminals are Democrats.  He went on to say that’s why liberals or progressives are so easy on crime and want to reform prisons and reduce sentences.  This buffoon’s bombastic and bloviating blathering (I can alliterate with the best) might have its genesis in the Canadian’s desire to out-trump Trump, but it’s an insult to most of the voting public: does he actually believe any sane person will buy into the sewage effluent springing forth from his mouth?  (Note that I said “sane person”; there are rabid elements in our society who will believe anything—Trump depends on that.)

Only two states allow felons to vote while in prison.  I assume a corollary to that factoid is that only two states allow felons to register as a member of a political party while in prison, but maybe that corollary is wrong.  Some people argue that disenfranchising felons isn’t a good idea—I’m not one of them (if they want their civil rights, they can stay out of prison, except when it comes down to wrongful convictions)—but the current state of affairs implies that the prison population isn’t comprised of registered Democrats.  So, the brilliant senator who should be a terrible embarrassment to the state of Texas (they have to own up to many embarrassments, of course) must be saying that there are criminal elements who haven’t been caught yet…and they’re all Democrats?

I won’t dwell on the absurdities Cruz has said and is saying more than this.  Instead, let me turn the question around: why doesn’t the GOP own up to the criminal label?  Let’s start with the NRA (there are many other examples, including the pro-life rhetoric—the GOP has no commitment to protecting lives AFTER birth!–but the slavish pandering to the NRA is the most deadly one).  Every NRA member is a criminal because s/he enables murderous elements to commit atrocities against innocent victims.  This lobbying group pushes back on every reasonable move to limit arsenals like the one the recent California shooters possessed.  It’s become so bad that the NY Times decided to put an editorial about this on the front page last Saturday (the first one since 1920 and not strong enough in my opinion—I don’t have to coddle readers, but the Times still does).

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The case against ideology…

Tuesday, September 15th, 2015

Ideological truth is an oxymoron.  We spent the last two centuries debunking ideologies—all the different –isms, like Marxism, Nazism, Zionism, Socialism, Communism, and so forth.  We are still fighting some of those.  They’re like shingles—dormant viruses that awaken from time to time to attack the body politic.

This century we are increasing our understanding of how the human brain works.  It has a marvelous capacity for reason and logic, often creating great thoughts, inventing new technologies, and making works of artistic splendor.  It also has a nasty way of getting its wires crossed, short-circuited, and contradictory to common sense and logic.  The latter problems can often be described as brainwashing when it comes to ideologies.  Brainwashing can be inflicted by others, or it can be self-inflicted.  Ideologies are often the tools for doing both.

Small-minded people become easily addicted to ideologies.  The latter provide a closed system of minutia that’s attractive to such people, easy solutions for problems perceive in their lives, real or imagined, simple solutions that ignore complexities and conflicting relationships to other problems.  An ideology is a one-size-fits-all approach to a small life of parochial thought that allows people to get on with their mundane and sometimes suffering lives.  Ideologies encompass religion; they’re all the opium of the masses.

We can’t be too vocal in our condemnation of power-hungry demagogues who exploit these weaknesses of simple-minded people.  A radical iman preaching jihad is the scum of the earth.  But a Marxist preaching about how wonderful the world will be when workers rule, or a priest telling impoverished peasants their reward will be in the hereafter, these are in the same class and deserve condemnation too.

But those who swallow this malarkey also deserve condemnation.  They are negating their human potential to do and create great things; they are living a life of lazy intellect by accepting ideological truths as fact.  There are no seven virgins awaiting the suicide bomber; there is no worker’s paradise awaiting the Marxists’ followers, only a brutal dictatorship of the proletariat; and there is no place among the angels awaiting the pious and exploited peasant.

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Time for remembrance…

Friday, September 11th, 2015

Remembering 9/11 shouldn’t be a NYC event, or events at the sites where the four planes crashed.  It should be a national and world event.  Nearly 3,000 innocents died that day at the hands of Muslim jihadists, most of them Saudi Arabians who graduated from that country’s religious schools.  Bin Laden, the planner and cheerleader for the terrorist dogs, was also Saudi.

But we can’t blame one nation or a respected worldwide religion for this attack.  We must blame a terrorist ideology that exploits poverty and ignorance to brainwash its adherents and condones the torture and murder of innocents.  Religion is just the cover story—no true religion can ever condone such treacherous deeds.

We must carry on the fight against terrorism, imported or domestic.  At the same time, we can never forget the innocent victims of these terrorist attacks or the friends and families who are still grieving.  Too many Americans have forgotten.  No one should, because we are all targets now.  To give up the fight would dishonor the innocent victims’ sacrifice.  Their murders won’t be avenged until terrorism is stopped.

I lost friends and a relative that day.  I won’t forget.  You all know me as a compassionate and progressive person.  But I have no compassion for terrorism or its practitioners, only loathing.  On this day, I’ll try to get beyond that, though, and just remember who we lost on 9/11.

And so it goes…

The missing Saudi pages…

Tuesday, July 7th, 2015

For all readers who love conspiracies, here’s a real-life one for you: Nearly fourteen years after 9/11, all the report about that horrific day has been released except for twenty-eight pages classified as Top Secret.  It turns out that these missing pages focus on the involvement of the Saudi government’s role in the attack.  If what’s written there isn’t damaging to the Saudis, why are these pages Top Secret?  Looks like the media might be dancing to the same conspiracy band too—the media roosters certainly aren’t squawking much about it.

In this blog I’ve often referred to the duplicitous Saudis.  Most 9/11 terrorists were Saudis.  We can’t determine the Saudi government’s guilt by association, but I don’t base my claim of duplicity on the nationality of the 9/11 terrorists.  There are other facts that justify my claim.  Maybe the nationality of the terrorists is all just a coincidence—wink, wink—just like it’s a coincidence that bin Laden came from a rich Saudi family.

First duplicity fact: the Saudi royal family has always walked a tightrope by pretending to be friends with the U.S. while supporting oppressive, Sixth Century Islamic rules and sponsoring religious schools where jihad is taught.  Those schools give rise to terrorists in general and the 9/11 terrorists in particular.  Poor saps are educated AKA brainwashed by “religious leaders” who completely distort the teachings of the Koran at best and read into it violence and murder at worst.  They don’t teach; they indoctrinate.  And the Saudi government encourages this by supporting them.

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Sunni v. Shi’ite…

Tuesday, April 28th, 2015

At the time I’m beginning to write this post, a carrier battle group is headed for Yemen’s coast to enforce a blockade against Irani ships attempting to help Yemen’s rebels.  Why?  They’re supporting Saudi Arabia’s bombing of said rebels.  The Saudis announced they were going to stop but the bombing continues.  One problem?  Saudi Arabia is NOT our friend, and Iran is NOT our friend.  Second problem?  This is an internecine dust-up between Sunnis and Shi’ites, so what the hell do we think we’re doing taking sides in a religious war?  Third problem?  Al Qaeda in Yemen has been a severe thorn in our sides for a long time, so who cares if the Shi’ites wipe those particular Sunnis out?

The details: (1) Saudi Arabian royalty, in order to save their well-padded asses, have been walking a tightrope for decades, pretending to be our friends while supporting the Saudi religious schools that instill hatred and produced Sunni jihadists like bin Laden and the 9/11 terrorists.  Why do you think members of the royal family fled the U.S. after 9/11?  Washington knew and still knows, at least in intelligence circles, that Saudis are duplicitous scoundrels.  They don’t want Shi’ites nipping at their backsides in Yemen and probably are rooting for ISIS in their war against Iran-supported regimes like Hassad’s because the ISIS monsters are, after all, Sunnis.  They might be supporting ISIS too; they’ve certainly supported al Qaeda, that terrorist group that now seems tame in comparison to the crazy ISIS wild boars.  For the Saudis, the only good Shi’ite is a dead Shi’ite.

Point (2): How ironic is it that Iran wants to end economic sanctions while at the same time striking out against Sunnis in Yemen?  They and their brethren are the flip side of the Saudis: for them the only good Sunni is a dead Sunni.  Makes me wonder if this internecine battle between rival Muslim sects isn’t all about greed and power and exterminating anyone who disagrees with their warped versions of Islam.  No, not wonder.  Call it bringing out this Hatfields v. McCoy’s battle into the open.  The Palestinian problem, that justifiable desire for a Palestinian state, has receded to the point where it’s become irrelevant to everyone in the region except Israelis and Palestinians, notwithstanding Netanyahu’s stupid ploys to guarantee his survival by painting it as something else.  Instead of sending our sailors into harm’s way, we should just tell the Supreme Leader of Iran’s floundering theocracy to cease and desist, or all talks about lifting economic sanctions are off.

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