Semitic Anti-Semitism

During the most recent Gaza War, left-wing Israelis demonstrated against the violence, only to be met by right-wing Israeli violence.

http://www.juancole.com/2014/09/government-inciting-israeli.html

The Narrative of 60 plus years may fall apart. What would we do without our Narrative?


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The Fog Of War

The phenomenon called "fog of war" usually occurs during intense battle, when information flows are interrupted, passions are high, and smoke obscures the fields of battle. No one can be sure what's going on.

Here in the USA, we have improved on the concept, and we have extended the fog of war even to the planning stages.
We started this process back in Iraq in 2003, when we mislaid the files containing the plans for what to do once the shooting stops. This ran at the same time as the Afghanistan war when we pushed the enemy out of the country, but notoriously failed to destroy his ability to re-infiltrate Afghanistan and to wage war.
A war which does not destroy the enemy's ability to wage war is more like a pugilistic walk in the park.

Concerning the entity now known as Islamic State, the Congress has voted to support a vastly flawed plan.
(Can you imagine what would happen if the idiots actually were not dysfunctional and were able to come together effectively to "run" our own country?!  It makes one tremble.)

Now Iran will not back the US led Alliance of Airplanes against IS, but will support Syria and Hezbollah in their fight against IS.
Of course, the USA, true to its long, long, long history of arming people and seeing those arms later turned against the USA itself, will "vet" Syrian rebels and supply the "good" rebels with arms to fight IS. (How we determine the "good" rebels probably comes down to asking them to pinkie swear that they will not use US weapons against US soldiers and people.)

Since Assad and Hezbollah will continue their fight against Syrian rebels - even the "good" ones - the two efforts against IS will soon find themselves at odds, and the independent efforts will soon turn from merely being uncoordinated into being actively deleterious to each other. Then the match will be "Advantage, Islamic State!"


... AND, in case you have not noticed, by doing this we have introduced ourselves into the middle of a religious civil war!

Sunni versus Shia. Our allies - Saudi Arabia, Qatar, etc. etc. - versus Iran.
The one thing everyone has agreed the USA should never do: step into a religious civil war in the Middle East, has just been accomplished by our elected leaders.

No fog in that war, pal. We got a pretty good idea what's going to happen.
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TransperceMer / Sea-Piercer

Libyan Parliament Currently Operating from a Floating Ferry
http://mashable.com/2014/09/10/libyan-parliament-ferry/

Libya's elected government has fled escalating violence in the country's capital, and taken refuge in a Greek ferry in the neighboring port city of Tobruk, according to news reports.

A large ship usually used to transport cars between Italy and Greece was hired at the last minute to accommodate Libya's parliament, the Guardian reported. Elected in June, the officials were originally set to meet in Benghazi, but changed course due to intensifying conflict...

If you have seen the film Snowpiercer ( Transperceneige ), you will recognize the theme of human events carried on in the universe of Continuous Transport.
Many science fiction stories have involved generations living on starships in their centuries long journeys to far away stars. That is pretty much Continuous Transport. It is Irony in an enigmatic cocoon: human nature remaining the same while the environment radically changes; immobilis in mobile.

We are Captain Nemos, however; we seek mobilis in mobile: change within change.
If we do no change, we will never arrive at our far-off goal.

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World War E

World War E
(Ebola)


A call to violence flies the wind,
and wakes the sleeping horde;
display butterflies unpinned,
resurrected from their board!

Crack!  The specimen window glass
like a stone back rolled;
life and death in stark contrast,
command as quisling lord!

The rumor’d wars, the pandemics
us to their bidding bind;
we cannot run, we cannot mix,
as the civil knots unwind!


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Written September 17, 2014 upon hearing about President Obama's plan to combat Ebola.
Disease, Poverty, and Ignorance are much greater enemies than ISIS could ever hope to be, for all that is needed for peace is for enough men to kill each other and to exhaust the capability of warfare.

I greatly disagree with arming the Syrian rebels, for that is exactly how we helped to created ISIS, which itself followed our Frankenstein-like creation of Al Qa'ida.
To continue to follow such a grotesque and monstrous policy is the path to ruin.

Hopefully, we may reclaim ourselves by the much more difficult battle against Ebola, which requires a commitment to the world for the present and for the future, and whose aim is solely that of the welfare of the peoples of the world.

How long has it taken us to respond to a crisis which is not political and whose implementation is not problematic? The photo above is from the following blog article:
http://leschroniquesderorschach.blogspot.com/2014/03/une-epidemie-debola-ravage-la-guinee-et.html

Les Chroniques de Rorschach
samedi 22 mars 2014
Une épidémie d'Ebola ravage la Guinée et la Sierra Leone 

The date is Saturday, March 22, 2014 and the title is "Ebola epidemic raging in Guinea and Sierra Leone".

So it has been at least all of 2014 until now that the world is mounting a response that might possibly succeed.

Let this also be a warning to those who think the elites that run the world are competent to maintain the health and well-being of the world community.

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Evolution And Its Discontents

 

Thomas Huxley, Known As Darwin's Bulldog

A Lady said that Evolution was a scientific theory - just as the Gipper, better known as Ronald Reagan said - and she agreed: just a theory.
She then asked me if I believed in Evolution.

I answered that although the science of living things seems to be the correct arena in which to have beliefs or disbeliefs, I had none: I neither believed nor disbelieved.

Interestingly enough, she disbelieved my seriousness. It was her "belief" that I was somehow "pulling her leg".

However, I have no rods on the anvil nor any ferric materials in the fire. Evolution is an old friend - I recall reading about Darwin, Huxley, Leake, and Bishop Usher when I was in grade school. Yet I have no reason to establish a full-blown "Belief System" (or, "BS" as it is abbreviated) about the whole thing.

Were I in research, now, that is a different case. Were I researching, say, worms and amoebae or lichens or some ratty little mammals that I had to chivvy from their burrows and rush to the laboratory mazes, I would probably need to have a BS.
Or if I had to, say, bet money on some future life issue, like "should I move to an island nation if climate change is true, and the ocean levels will rise 20 feet over the next trimester of the CO2 cycle?", then I would probably have to swat, study, and set up a proper BS.

Otherwise, no. The Belief System is potentially in me (as Aristotle would say), but it is not everywhere present in force at all times.

I then told her that God and the Holy were not properly "beliefs" at any time or place. I left her in a state of disheveled disbelief. She said hotly that I acted as a capricious and arbitrary cad.
I said "Arbiter, Non Modo Arbitrario"
("An Arbiter ... referee, judge, moderator; any good-type of notion that deals with placid reason and virtue... but not Arbitrarily!")
At which point She-who-must-be-obeyed, who had sat silently during this vaudeville of belief,  took straight aim at my shins under the table and delivered a stealth kick of 20 megatons! Later she said she would have kicked the other lady, if she had had a clear shot.

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IS ?

Gates Of Mordor 

(Doubling for the Gates Of Hell)

This is not an essay on Heidegger and Being, meditating upon "what-is" and "what-is-not".

What-is-not is our dreams, and What-is is our comeuppance, chickens coming home to roost, and a game of pick-up-sticks in which we have been granted the guarantee of grasping the night soil end of the stick.

It is about the new War against IS, ISIS, or ISIL.

(1)
In the Washington Post we read:

Arab states willing to join air fight against Islamic State in Iraq, U.S. officials say
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/arab-states-willing-to-join-air-fight-against-islamic-state-in-iraq-us-officials-say/2014/09/14/7bdbe1a4-3c41-11e4-b0ea-8141703bbf6f_story.html?hpid=z1

PARIS — Several Arab states have offered to conduct airstrikes against militants in Iraq alongside the efforts of the United States, U.S. officials said Sunday as the Obama administration sought to bolster its case for action against the Islamic State.
“A lot of this is still in the discussion phase, but I want to be clear that there have been offers, both to CENTCOM and to the Iraqis, of Arab countries taking more aggressive kinetic action against ISIL,” including airstrikes, a senior State Department official said in Paris, using an alternative acronym for the militant network...

Lucky old stiffs are we, to have the Battlestar Islamica Rangers of Saudi Arabia and Qatar and Dubai come to our cause, especially since they were the ones who funded such mercenaries in Syria in the first place.

What will happen when IS sees the mighty air forces of civilization arrayed against their iniquities!!

Will they tremble in fear and remorse? Or will they skedaddle into heavily populated areas and cities, thereby ensuring that any air strike will inflict the maximum collateral damage and death among the civilian populations?

The culture of death loves the holocaust past. The Art of Modern War as set down in the days of World War II by the GGs (Greatest Generation) involved extensive bombing and destruction of civilian areas, a strategy which carried over into the Cold War in the form of Mutually Assured Destruction (of cities) - an Armageddon bullet we dodged once and are eager to confront again.

(2)
The beheading videos seem to be designed to elicit an uncontrolled and inchaote response, which is exactly the way numerous people are responding to them, as if IS were some sort of super-powered Puppet Masters who rule men's minds!

(3)
We ignore natural allies because they are enemies of the Likud party:

Senator Lindsey Graham:

“The first thing I want to tell American people, from my point of view, it is our fight, it is not just their fight,” Graham said. “I will not let this president suggest to the American people we can outsource or security and this is not about our safety. There is no way in hell you can form an army on the ground to go into Syria, to destroy ISIL, without a substantial American component. To destroy ISIL, you have to kill or capture their leaders, take the territory they hold back, cut off the financing, and destroy the capability to regenerate.”

There are troops on the ground in Syria: the Syrian Army and the rebel groups whose fighters are the source of the IS army.

(Senator Graham also said
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2014/09/14/Graham-ISIS-is-an-Army-Of-Islam-Opening-The-Gates-Of-Hell-On-The-World

"If they survive our best shot, this is the last best chance, they will open the gates of hell to spill out on the world. This is not a Sunni versus Sunni, this ISIS versus mankind."

and we may reasonably pause and consider the implications of a very senior US Senator describing important world affairs as if it were all part of a Left Behind novel...
What the heck!)

(4)
We should support in a big way a combination that has a good chance of success.

The people of this area must fight their own wars.
If people wish to kill, they have to do so until they are incapable of continuing. If a outsider or referee steps in and says "Time-out!", then they will only live to kill yet another day.

And they must learn the lessons other nations learned in conflict; they must create their pown heroes and heroines and leaders who will lead a new nation born in their wars.

As it is, the political process is frustrated by interventions.
What would the USA be if the nations of Europe and France were strong enough to have forbade the British to commence hostilities against the colonies of America? Would George Washington have risen to the status he achieved? Would there have been a Constitution?

Those who live by the sword must be schooled by the sword and be sent to after-school detention class, which will be overseen by Mr. Sword

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La Maison De Ma Mere Est Sur La Table...

(My Mother's House Is On The Table...) ... and ready for its new owners.
(I have no idea why I fancy it is "on a table". I wuz reading Mme de Sevigne's letters, and the mood took me into franco-steampunk-o-phile associations.)

My mother's house has been sold and closed on, with nary a hitch... except at the bank where the niceties of Trusts and Trustees and the incorrigibly correct wording of documents of Trusts and financial instruments referring thereto were delved into interminably, while my mother sat there with a knowing look on her face.

The next day she called and asked me how to write a check for my brother.

She had not heard a word the banker had said.

Some things never change, no matter how truthful yet fruitless they have become, and my mother's belief (and - to be truthful - I suppose, mine also) that people tend to mumble, speak inaudibly, and to swallow words at the end of sentences - all of which is clearly true... just ask some foreign guys and dolls that come over here and try to speak to 'Mericans! - leads us into a state of Truth perversely joined from Joy...

For the fact that people mumble cannot be changed, and only by purchasing some sort of hearing assistance device ( such as an ear trumpet ) may we be able to engage in sock-in-the-mouth chit-chat with other blokes and frails.

She resists with the faith of a believer who has found Truth and Frustration, two gunwhales of the canoe of Life spread athwart by Irony.

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Brennt Die Welt?

Is the world burning?

Not really.

ISIS is 2 million young men with no hope and no jobs looking to kill themselves and others, and soon the fund of suicidal young Muslims will be exhausted, and the fire will die.

Russia and Ukraine is a conflagration, but it will not spread like wildfire.

Ebola is rising...
We shall see how the world regimes handle that problem.
Hopefully, we can handle it better than global warming.

America still has no real functioning form of government, and does not look to have one anytime soon.
It does not seem able to confront its problem of racism, nor of gross inequity.
That is a real problem that has been pushed to the back burner, but will explode again soon once the world looks for leadership.

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