The New Old Fashioned Hate

17. October 2025 · 1 comment · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun With Islam

Having been raised in the 50ies and 60ies when the horror of the Nazi genocide of Jews remained a very fresh and vivid memory to a generation who were teens or adults during WWII, I’m freaked out almost beyond reason to see that vicious antisemitism AKA Jew-hate come staggering back to life like Freddie Kruger or some other horror movie staple. Of course, now that it is seven decades later and just about everyone who experienced or witnessed the Nazi genocide at first hand is either dead or very old, the horror has been subsumed in popular memory by more recent horrors, real or imagined.

Supposedly General Eisenhower gave specific orders that everything be documented, recorded, photographed, filmed and everyone ought to visit and personally witness, once the Nazi labor camps and all the structure of an organized, industrial-scale eradication of a whole subset of people were found in the spring of 1945. The general, horrified and revolted upon discovering that everything whispered about Nazi evil was not only true but even worse than imagined by the most demented anti-Nazi propagandist, yet was of the belief that if it weren’t documented, that eventually no one would credit the existence of their wholesale, deliberate genocide. A wise man, indeed – because that seems to be pretty much what has happened. Indeed, now it seems that Jews and Israelis forcefully objecting to being genocided again, and taking serious steps to prevent such by hitting back … is somehow even worse than the original genocide, in the eyes of the bien pensant leftists who are large and in charge in the media, the universities and in entertainment these days.

Anyway, it appears that General Eisenhower was depressingly foresighted – that people would eventually forget and deny, given half a chance and in spite of everything that he and others wished to make a permanent record of, at the end of World War II. But there are a lot of us who do remember and see outbreaks of outrageous Jew-Hate as concerning – some because of being Jewish or Jewish-adjacent, having been exposed to first-hand narrations at an impressionable age, or merely by being decent and moral people, unwilling to go along with the hating and hateful mob. From looking at the few remaining reputable media outlets and various news bloggers, it seems like there are more of us in the US than in the UK, and more in what used to be Eastern Europe than in the Western part of it. Being overrun by aggressive Third Worlders and Muslims (but I repeat myself) and run by a native ruling class who seem more inclined to treat such as treasured pets might have much to do with this tendency also. Interesting and depressing to read of British Jews considering emigrating now. It’s violent street demonstrations and personal abuse now, but can official hostility and legal persecutions be around the next corner, as Britian appears to be on the road to Islamic rule? Is New York on the same glide path of hostility towards Jews, under the mayoralty of trendy theater kid Mamdami? Discuss as you like and have insights into these sad developments.

As a post-script, I wonder if the BBC would ever again do a big broadcast story, movie or miniseries about Sir Nicholas Winton, and how he moved heaven and earth to rescue Jewish children from the Nazis before war broke out in 1939 … or would it make the Muslims mad?

Rue, Britainnia

28. August 2025 · Comments Off on Rue, Britainnia · Categories: European Disunion, Fun With Islam, My Head Hurts

I must sadly admit that some mornings, I am no end horrified to read news, commentary and opinions originating from the once-Land of Hope and Glory, Mother of the Free.
How shall we extoll thee, who are born of … someplace else, and paddled there on a rubber raft, fully intending to scrounge generous benefits. The migrants appear to have no other motivation for getting into Britain, other than to use and exploit the place and native citizens in passing as they would a hotel room or a prostitute. In this cynical exercise, they appear to be enabled by a coterie of vicious people smugglers in it for the graft, spineless politicians who despise the people that they presume to rule, and clueless do-gooders performing conspicuous virtue-signaling whose malevolence is possibly only excelled by their utter haplessness… and determination to caution, arrest, or punish anyone not numbered among the protected class who protests the deliberate, calculated degradation of what was once an orderly, high-trust, and relatively safe society.

Sigh. This is depressing for personal reasons; three of my four grandparents emigrated from Britain early in the 20th century and retained every scrap of their Edwardian-era cultural baggage. I remember my paternal grandparents very well as they lived until I was in my twenties; their accents had softened and been worn away almost entirely, but the peculiar vocabulary and idioms of British English were preserved in a kind of verbal amber. This amber was refined and hardened when my mother provided us with kid-lit from that era; Kipling by the shelf-foot, Wind in the Willows, Christopher Robin’s adventures with Pooh, the adventures of Peter Pan, Child’s Garden of Verses – the whole lot. And then I went and read even more of the English lit body of work … to the point where I have since joked that I am fluent in both American and Brit English. When I first set foot in the land of my ancestors, in 1970 and again in 1976, it was an utterly schizophrenic experience. I had never been there, but it was all familiar. I knew this place, the culture, the language, all of it. I had walked it in dreams, through books and media, and the memories of grandparents and great-aunts.

Exhibiting a Union Jack or the red and white cross of St. Andrew appears to be right up there with the Nazi swastika, in the eyes of the British ruling class these days … something to be deplored by all correct-thinking people. The current British government apparently sees nothing unseemly in flying a Palestinian or a Pakistani flag in the same venue. And appear perfectly comfortable with arresting. convicting and imprisoning those mostly pale native Anglo-Saxons who criticize government policies on social media – or who object to having their wives and daughters harassed in the streets by foreign perverts, stabbed at dance class, or at worst and most notoriously, sex-trafficked by a set of long-resident and usually Muslim migrants. Indeed, the British government, bureaucracy and establishment media appeared to have been eager to shelter and protect the ethnic Pakistani sex-traffickers, right down to the present day … just as long as the white victims of such treatment are from working class, disadvantaged or dysfunctional families. Hope and glory, mother of the free, indeed.

The latest incident of this involves a young teenaged girl who brandished a knife and a hatchet in defense of her younger sister – against a couple of people harassing and taunting the girls. Of course the girl with the knife and hatchet was detained by police, as the low-life goaded her deliberately, and videoed the encounter. Of course he would be one of the privileged and sheltered pets of the ruling class crowd, just like the rest of the grooming-gang rapists. I wonder if he teases and torments zoo animals from a safe distance, or large dogs behind fences, too. (Long discussion thread here, to include more information and a give-send-go page for the girl – who likely needs all the help she can get which the Starmer government distains to offer her … because she comes from a rough family.)

Is that Britain that I remember still there, in any part? Reading the news over the last decade or two, one really has to wonder if there is much left of that Britain. The Britain that my grandparents remembered has faded and morphed into something that they wouldn’t recognize – and I’m not certain that I see anything like what I remember from those visits in the 1970s, especially not when it comes to the cities; London, which was shabby and comfortable, leavened with green parks and narrow streets lined with two-story brick row-houses all with pocket-handkerchief gardens, or the depressing streets of soot-grimed red brick which seemed to cluster particularly closely around major urban train stations. It seems that large tracts of English cities are now indistinguishable from Lagos, Karachi or Islamabad, that the ancient churches – which weren’t all that crowded when we visited in the 70s – are all but empty, save for holiday services or the occasional posh wedding.
Rue, rue Britainnia indeed. So much for never being slaves.

Barbarity For You

30. June 2025 · Comments Off on Barbarity For You · Categories: Fun With Islam, Good God, My Head Hurts

Of all the malignant concepts spawned and promulgated through our so-called higher education institutions – things such as loathsome Corbusier-style concrete box architecture, modern so-called art which depends more on the manifesto accompanying the paint splatter or pile of trash, the managerial transferability of MBA-degree holders between any industry at all – I believe the worst and most damaging of all is the concept of oppressor/oppressed. In every dyad, one party is the oppressor and deserving of every action inflicted on them, and the other is the oppressed, who is totally justified in any action lashing back against the oppressor.

Nothing else matters; decency, a sense of fairness, any consideration of the actual and specific facts of the matter, the inarguable reality of the situation, even the rules of warfare as generally designated by the Geneva Convention. All those considerations fly out the window, when it’s a matter of the designated oppressed getting the drop on the perceived oppressor. The designated oppressor or any single representative of the oppressing class gets deserved vengeance visited on them by any member of the designated oppressed. The rights and wrongs of the specific situation have nothing to do with it. The comparative wealth or connection to privilege, social standing – these disparities are insignificant, once the parties are sorted into oppressed or oppressor. It may be that wealth, privilege and high social position is held by the party designated as oppressed, and the party of the so-called oppressor is poor, unconnected and working-class. That doesn’t matter; nothing else matters in this construction. The oppressor is always in the wrong, the oppressed is always justified in whatever action they have taken.

Any complaint from an aggrieved victim is dismissed with a contemptuous response of “You deserved it, you despicable, deplorable bullying member of the designated oppressor class; maybe you aren’t personally responsible for perpetuating the oppression, but the people like you are!”

It makes it all simple, when it comes down to deciding the rights and wrongs between individuals and groups. No confusion, no distraction with inconvenient facts, or horrific, brutal deeds. It’s the moral morons’ way out of having to make difficult decisions about right and wrong, given actions by an individual against another, or of one group against another. Just figure out who is the oppressed, or the representative thereof, and who is the oppressor (or representative) and hey, presto – problem sorted. White people bad, black or brown always good, Israelis always bad because they are white (not really, but that’s what the moral morons insist), Palestinians are poor hapless, helpless brown victims justified in committing any savagery, economic migrants and benefits scroungers from Africa are always and forever innocent, it’s just too bad if ethnically white English girls have been gang-raped and sex-trafficked for decades by Pakistani men, and black American hood rats can shoot, rob and burn their way across the urban American landscape, but Trump voters are guilty and never a chance of proven innocent.

I’d uncork a few more words about the disgusting display of raw Jew-hate displayed by performers and the audience at the Glastonbury music festival – broadcast live by the Muslim-lovers at the BBC, but I think Melanie Phillips said it best in describing it as Nuremburg at Glastonbury.
Comment as you wish.

The Long Awaited Fix

20. June 2025 · Comments Off on The Long Awaited Fix · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun With Islam

At long last, like a decades-long grumbling appendix, the radical Islamic mullahcracy which has ruled and ruined Iran for slightly longer than my daughter has been alive, is being suitably and righteously dealt with.

By the Israeli’s, and not the US, but I’ll take what satisfaction I can get and be grateful. Business is being settled at long last and after more than 40 years. The running sore of the middle east, the funder, inspiration and director for so much terrorism against the non-Islamic world is being debrided and sanitized. I honestly wonder why that has taken so long, knowing full well of the specific animus that the mullahs of Iran had against both Israel and the US. I guess that we all had other fish to fry, metaphorically speaking, over the last four decades; settling the hash of the ayatollahs just wasn’t at the top of our ‘to-do’ list. As a member of the military and most often stationed overseas, I had plenty of reason for Iran-sponsored/funded terrorism to be on my mind, after the violent takeover of the us embassy in Teheran, and the holding hostage of embassy staff, as well as Americans who just happened to be in the wrong place on that day.

Invading a country’s embassy is on the same level as invading the country itself, and technically, we would have been well within our rights if we declared war right then and there. But of course, Jimmy Carter – on whose thick, sanctimonious, Jew-hating head responsibility for the hostage debacle landed – hemmed and hawed, whimped and simped his way through the remainder of his term as president. It has since been considered likely that Carter bears a large portion of the blame for the shah’s overthrow.

Some time ago, there was a discussion on the blogger Diplomad’s place, where a number of long-time Department of State veterans were reminiscing on this topic. One who had been around in the late 1970s recollected that the sudden official animus against the shah’s works and all his ways came up out of nowhere. This was much to the commenter’s surprise, and when he asked ‘why’ was told that it came from the very top. The general consensus among State Department veterans on that particular thread was that Carter pulled the rug out from under the shah at the bidding of Saudi Arabia; Carter’s good buddies with a vested interest in hamstringing a regional rival, especially a relatively tolerant and secular one. (Personal note – I was doing basic training at Lackland AFB during the time when the Air Force was also training Saudi and Iranian personnel, and I carried on a brief and very chaste flirtation with an Iranian tech school student. He was sweet and gentlemanly and poetical, and told me several times that the Iranian students looked down on the Saudis as being ignorant and uncouth country bumpkins. Hardly civilized at all, compared to proud and worldly Persians. Having had a couple of less than pleasant encounters with the Saudi students, my fellow female trainees and I agreed.)

The supposition of the Diplomad’s fellow diplomatic veterans seemed pretty logical and I have the impression that “Blame Carter!” has percolated around the conservative side of the blogosphere for a while. If we had a national news media worthy of any respect, or even just academic historians of contemporary international relations who are not ashamed to cast shade on a prominent Democrat Party figure, they might have investigated the possibility and brought the hard evidence out then or since.

Oh, perhaps all the woes of the Middle East since the overthrow of the Shah can’t be blamed on Carter’s fat and sanctimonious head. Native progressives and communists did their part, as did the religious autocrats themselves, each party thinking to use the other towards their own ends. It just turned out that the Islam-addled mullahs were more organized, and had a wide, if not particularly deep pool of popularity among the rural elements. Or so I had read at the time. One does read reports lately that the Iranian mullahcracy has become increasingly corrupt, incompetent and resoundingly hated; that Iranian women are unhappy and protesting having to live under the restrictions of an Islamic version of The Handmaid’s Tale, that Iranians generally are rebelling against Islam various social cruelties and reverting to pre-Islamic Zoroastrianism, or even Christianity. I watched a recent video purporting to be of a currently popular outdoor sport in Iran – that of running up behind Islamic clerics and knocking off their turbans. The overthrow of the mullahcracy has been confidently predicted with increasing frequency – but has never managed to happen. With the surgical amputation of the whip hand by Israel (and perhaps quiet assistance from us) though – chances are better for an Iranian revolt against the power of the mullahs.

The main thing to keep in mind now, is that when the bombs and missiles stop falling and the drones return to their base, Iran’s future will – rightfully – be in the hands of the Iranians; both those in-country and those of the Iranian exile diaspora. Their problems are theirs to fix. Comment as you wish.

The Vanished World

01. May 2025 · Comments Off on The Vanished World · Categories: Ain't That America?, Air Force, Fun With Islam, Memoir, Military

I read the various news stories about the latest Islamic-inspired mass murder in India with a mixture of odd emotions. One of them being ‘Oh dear, radical Muslims again, behaving in that manner which we have come to expect,’ the second being a degree of sadness for a place and a time that I have never been a part of, but am sort-of-acquainted with, and the third being straight-out nostalgia for a vanished world. Or several vanishing worlds. I was moved take down and re-read a murder mystery from the collection in the hallway segment of the home library – M.M. Kaye’s Death in Kashmir.*

The mystery is set in the mountains in the first chapters, and then in a garrison town on the plains, and finally on Kashmir’s Lake Dal, all described most lovingly by a writer who knew them well, eight or nine decades ago. It takes place in 1947, as the British were packing up to leave India for good and all. M. M. “Mollie” Kaye’s family had served the so-called ‘Raj’ for generations; father to son, to son, to mother, to daughter, serving ad doing their bit, spending their lives there, in various capacities. Military, missionary, civil service, the railway network, overseas banking, industry, trade – generations and decades spent in the Far East in various capacities.

But by 1947, the ‘Raj’ was simply closing up shop; grievously wounded by the late war and the horrible post-atomic world, the establishment was packing up and going home, leaving India and the soon-to-be-separate Pakistan to their own devices, for which the best of the British hoped well, but weren’t holding their breath on it. The various garrisons, clubs, schools, amusements and institutions which catered to or supported the British establishment in India faced an uncertain future, if they weren’t closing down entirely. The novel touches on this soon-to-be-vanished world, which once seemed monolithic and unchanging, but which turned out to be ephemeral. In almost no time at all, the largest part left was either in the history books or living in the memories of those diminishing few who had lived in it.

I can only think that one of the reasons that I felt such a strong sense of affinity was that I also was a resident in an ephemeral world – the network of overseas American bases where I lived and worked in the 1980s and early 90s. Sondrestrom AB closed; the concrete barracks building that I lived in is now a B&B, hosting those with a taste for remote adventuring. Hellenikon AB closed, and the base buildings demolished to create the main venue for the 2004 Summer Olympics … but the facilities were abandoned and looted of useful materials before another decade passed. The American side of Zaragoza AB reverted entirely to the Spanish Air Force, as did Torrejon AB, near to Madrid. The bases are still there – but the American units are all but gone. The base at Adana/Incirlik in Turkey, hugely favored in my day as a wonderful shopping venue and a great place to serve an accompanied tour with your family, is presently anything but a safe tour. Now it’s an unaccompanied tour, and if I read the military media correctly, only absolutely essential functions are present there now. No more shopping excursions organized by the spouses’ clubs to purchase rugs, brass, art, jewelry and oriental antiques. Just about every one of the American bases in Germany closed up or downsized radically. The American military presence in Europe slowly began contracting after the fall of the Berlin Wall – which makes sense, really, but for military members who spent much of their adult lives there (or child dependents who went to US schools overseas) there is a sense of loss, knowing that those establishments are no longer there.

Only the memories remain, photographs, and souvenir mementos. The matter of memory, though, brings me around to M.M. Kaye; she had a good relationship with her parents, who seem to have been interesting and talented people, who had fascinating careers, and shared their memories of the prime of their lives at Britain’s peak on the late 19th century. In turn, she put the incidents of their lives into a memoir – so the memories are not entirely lost. This reminds me again of a conversation with another writer of historical fiction: suppose, we reasoned (we were about the same age, with parents born around 1930) that one of our parents at the age of ten or twelve, spoke to the oldest person that they knew then, who told them stories of their lives. So that person would have been born between 1850-1860, with memories of the American Civil War, and the aftermath, the Lincoln assassination, the wild post-war west, of wagon trains, Indian wars and Jesse James. Now, we speculated – suppose that person, born in 1850 0r 1860 – at the age of ten or twelve, spoke to and listened to stories told by the oldest person that they knew – say around 1865. That senior citizen would have been born perhaps in 1775, and might have had childhood recollections of the Revolution, of seeing General Washington and his rebel army marching past, heard tales of the original Boston Tea Party, heard the bells announcing the Declaration of Independence.
It was an interesting thought – that even as we might seem distant from historical events of the recent past, perhaps we are really only three or four lives removed from distant history.
Comment as you wish.

*The mystery itself is fair enough – the eventual reveal of the murderer as a deep-cover Soviet agent is quite startling, because that well-drawn character has been near-front and center for most of the book. From a plotting standpoint, I would have liked to have seen a few more scattered hints of Communist sympathies on that character’s part. As another character commented, “The life of the party … but no one ever suspected which Party!”

Don’t Fear the Beeper

26. September 2024 · Comments Off on Don’t Fear the Beeper · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, Fun With Islam, Media Matters Not, Military, Smells Like Cedar, War

I have to admit that I am snickering still over the Mossad’s targeted beeper offensive against Hezbollah … who ought now to go by the nic of “Hezball-less” – snickering in those intervals between genuflecting in respectful admiration to a national intelligence organization who can actually undertake an operation of such … intelligence. And sneaky, original creativity. And command of technological aspects. And complicated operation conducted by a sub-rosa organization over a long period of time, without a single desk jockey blabbing to a fool like Seymour Hersh. And pulling the detonating cord at a time calculated to inflict the most damage on an enemy chain of command.

From the liver to the knee, indeed.

A commenter at Bayou Renaissance Man’s post about Operation Grim Beeper huffed and puffed indignantly – War crime! Horrible! Unprecedented! What about the Children! and calling the rest of us all kinds of unflattering names as we are markedly unsympathetic to the plight of the Hezball-less command echelon and those few innocent unfortunates caught in the immediate vicinity. The commenter went by the nic of Anonymous for the purpose of that comment thread, and likely for good reasons – cowardly reasons, but there you go. So brave to stand up thus anonymously on a conservative blog-thread! So … whatever. Sabotaging pagers, cellphones and walkie-talkies specifically ordered for the use of and put into the hands of a terror org’s operatives is a heck of a lot more targeted and focused than say … dropping thousands of tons of bombs on Germany and Japan in WWII, firing rockets at random into Northern Israel or sending hijacked airliners into a couple of tall office buildings in New York.

Frankly, I applaud the specificity of Operation Grim Beeper – it delivered in a very satisfactory way to people who had richly deserved such retribution and had deserved it for decades. I have not forgotten the Hezbollah truck bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, or the hideous torture and murder of kidnapped Americans in Lebanon at around the same time. The Israelis took out the trash in a way that it seemed that our own administrations since then were unable and then unwilling to do. Thanks, Mossad; you might not get anything but backbiting and quiet sabotage from the Biden administration and our State Department generally, but you have my personal gratitude as a military veteran.

Besides defanging Hezbollah/Hezball-less, in decapitating their chain of command by killing or incapacitating everyone sufficiently high-ranking enough to be issued a pager, Grim Beeper has some other interesting side effects; first, in lumbering the organization for immediate and ongoing medical care of their wounded. The dead burden an organization to a certain degree, but care of the wounded and permanently crippled ties up considerably more in resources. And secondly – having essential bits of male anatomy atomized by an exploding beeper – that’s just cruelly comic. Heartless – but funny. Becoming a laughingstock across the Middle East just has to sting. I’ve also seen speculation that Hezbollah/Hezball-less might also have lost whatever remains of toleration for their activities within Lebanon itself, although there may not be enough normal folk left there to return Beirut to being the Paris of the eastern Med again. As for notable Hamas-Hezbollah fan Rashida Talib getting all indignant and bent out of shape over a cartoon … well, she IS a fan of both … and pointing it out humorously by referencing an exploding pager on her desk is something we still can do. Honestly, you’d think that someone elected to a seat in our national legislature would have developed a thicker skin.
Your thoughts and insights?

Slow But Exceedingly Fine

31. July 2024 · Comments Off on Slow But Exceedingly Fine · Categories: Devil Dogs, European Disunion, Fun With Islam, History, Memoir, Military, War

I see from various sources that the Israelis have finally done in one of Hezbollah’s senior-ranking terrorists, one Fouad Shakar, who had a multi-million-dollar bounty on his head for involvement in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. The mills of justice may grind very slowly, but they eventually grind very fine. Well, he got to live more than forty years longer than the 241 Marines blown up in 1983, and I hope without much conviction that he spent every one of those years looking nervously over his shoulder. The Hezbollah organization was also behind the kidnapping, gruesome torture and murder of Americans in Lebanon in the 1980s, and the protracted hijacking of TWA 847 in the summer of 1985.

I had to take an intense interest in all this at the time, because I was stationed in Athens, as part of the staff for the military radio station at Hellenikon Air Base. It was a particularly fraught time for Americans stationed in Europe generally, because of ongoing terrorism. Yes, there was terrorism aimed at Americans before 9-11, but the brunt of it fell on military, diplomatic staff and those generally alleged to be CIA operatives who stationed in Europe. The rest of the US might not have paid much attention at the time; we did, and almost obsessively, because it was a matter of life and very real death.
I was working the overnight shift in the days after the Marine barracks bombing and remember when the list of casualties came over the teletype – yard after yard of yellow paper, with triple-spaced names. The Marines are the smallest service, and the mesh in webs of relationships are probably closer and tighter than most other services. It’s not six degrees of separation, it’s more like two or three. Three or four years later, I worked with another military broadcaster who had made a cross-service jump from the Marines to the Air Force. He had been assigned to the Beirut force and had rotated out a month or so before the bombing, so of course, knew many of the dead and injured Marines – including the young Marine troop who had been on the cover of a Time magazine issue.

The hijacking of TWA 847 was even more horrifying for those of us stationed in Athens for a reason that didn’t get much mention then. It was the regular flight rotating between the US and the Mediterranean – and military personnel and families rotating in and out of Athens, and Crete usually came and went by that flight. The military travel office just purchased seats on civilian airliners going back and forth from CONUS (continental US) rather than erratically-scheduled and usually very uncomfortable Air Force transports. And I was on duty again, when news of the high-jacking came over the teletype, just before lunchtime.
Oh, my god – a flight out of Athens! I looked at the flight number and absolutely froze with horror. TWA 847. I went running through the building to where there was a little balcony with an emergency fire exit staircase over our parking lot and called down to the station manager and program director, were about to get into their cars to go someplace for lunch. “They’ve hijacked the TWA flight! The one that everyone rotates out on!”

They were also horrified, of course. We hung over the teletype for the rest of that day, the whole staff wracking our collective brains, trying to remember who we knew who had orders and was due to leave Hellenikon on leave, permanent-change-of-station or temporary duty, who might have had seats on that flight … and who would be traveling with their wives and children.
There might very well have been – but for the grace of G*d and good fortune, there weren’t any military families on that flight. There was a small party of Navy divers returning from a TDY to Iraklion, and I think some Army reservists. The reservists had the wit and foresight to hide their military ID and escape much abuse from the hijackers, if I am recalling correctly, but the Navy divers were traveling on orders and their ID cards, and so were readily singled out. Robert Stethem was beaten and murdered as a means of getting a demand for jet fuel met.

In the months after that, we had our eyes in swivel-stalks, whenever we traveled on by civilian means. We wore civilian clothes, ditched anything superficial what might indicate we were military, avoided known American hangouts, got civilian passports – and were told that if there were anything like the TWA 847 going down again, to conceal or ditch our military ID. For years afterwards, when anyone I encountered casually asked if I were American … I had this instant, paranoid hesitation in answering. Why do you want to know?

Finishing School

03. May 2024 · Comments Off on Finishing School · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, Fun With Islam, Local

So, the recent fiery yet “mostly peaceful” pro-Hamas demonstrations of support on various university campuses making the fiery and “mostly peaceful” headlines over the last couple of weeks may yet have unfortunate results for the affected schools. This would be a consummation devoutly desired by those of us on the sort-of-conservative side of the political spectrum, who have viewed the increasing academic lunacy and dysfunction with concern and mistrust. Honestly, it’s long been obvious that there is a massive stench emanating from those ivy-hung quadrangles of higher learning. The tuition to attend them has been increasing at a breakneck rate for two or three decades, even above the rate of inflation, while the graduates of those institutions appear dumber and dumber and the ratio of administrative staff to student body approaches 1:1. Of late, even those graduates boasting diplomas from formerly respected colleges appear barely scathed by literacy, or any kind of practical, useful to-the-working-world knowledge and skills at all. No wonder that an increasing number of 18 year olds are coldly, rationally considering the cost-to-benefit ratio and opting for a trade school or an apprenticeship.

Adding insult to this injury, just about every malignantly bad idea infecting our society and body politic today originated in academia; diversity-equity-inclusion or ‘white people bad!’/POC can do no evil, the viability of gender-swapping and forcing women to share intimate spaces and sports teams with men LARPing as Audrey Hepburn, and those designated as disadvantaged minorities are entitled to whatever retaliation they want to take against those they hold responsible for their condition. I’m certain that dozens of other bad ideas can be laid at the feet of the ivory-tower academics. They’ve long been enamored of communism and that slightly less poisonous junior partner, socialism, because it sounds so logical and sensible in theory. Never mind that extolling Marxism in practice means glossing over mass murder, famine, gulag slave labor, political corruption, and a stagnated manufacturing sector. If academia can overlook all that … well, what’s the murder, kidnapping, mass rape and torture of 1200 Israelis in comparison? Going all I-Heart-Hamas is sooooo daring, rebellious, romantic, and the logical extension of those other bad ideas, in addition to wholly unwarranted ‘60s protest nostalgia. Why not turn out and protest for the Cause, whatever the cause is, this week?

However, I am not entirely certain that fondness for Hamas and the Poor Pitiful Pathetic Palestinians runs all that deep at American universities, even the ivy-shrouded bastions of privilege favored by the otherwise useless spawn of the elite class. Oh, sure – a lot of the proggie professorate are keen, with visions of ’68 dancing in their relatively vacant heads, or administrations keen on all that full-fare tuition from foreign students of a Middle Eastern origin and naturally anti-Semitic leanings. News stories like this one, about the high proportion of professional activists among the detained, the pre-positioned buckets of concrete chunks, the uniformly expensive pop-up tents all of a color and make, professionally pre-printed protest signs … all scream ‘astroturf’.

It’s an ‘astroturf’ protest movement enabled by spaghetti-spined administration and chancellors, at the expense of students there who actually – get this – still expect an education out of it all, while enjoying something of traditional fun and non-activist college experience. I also suspect that in the long run, indulging the I-Heart-Hamas student activists and the professional protest organizing cadre will not work out well for places where the most destructive, disruptive protests have taken place, and which retain the most anti-Semitic faculty. When the brightest and most focused students decide they can be better served by taking their interests and their tuition dollars elsewhere, formerly respected academic establishments will just become an expensive finishing school for privileged foreigners, and the offspring of our own elite class who can’t hack more demanding school programs.
Comment as you wish.

Depth of Disgust

12. December 2023 · Comments Off on Depth of Disgust · Categories: Fun With Islam, General, History, Media Matters Not, My Head Hurts, Rant

You know, I would be completely, totally, utterly disgusted and disillusioned with the non-reaction of international , professional and academic ‘capital F’ Feminism, in the wake of Hamas’ rape, pillage and kidnapping spree of last October … except that I sussed several decades ago that the same international, ‘capital F’ professional and academic feminists didn’t really give a waffle-fried damn about the lives, ambitions, challenges and condition of ordinary women. I had no illusions to lose about the big-name capital F feminists, not after I came to a certain realization sometime around 1985 or so.

Until then, I had thought of myself as a mild sort of feminist – really wanting nothing more than equal access to education, employment, and consideration by society in general, given meeting the same standards/qualifications. While the situation for women in the early latter half of the 20th century weren’t quite as limited as they had been a hundred or two hundred years earlier – there were restrictions, a few of them legal (such as military women not permitted to marry or have children and continue to serve) but most were societal expectations affecting middle and upper-class women. (Working class women, married and unmarried, almost always had to have jobs. Even in the 19th century.) Feminism in the 1970s meant to me personally that there were choices that individual women could make about choosing and balancing a career, a family and the domestic obligations involved, rather than having them made for us. (That many women have since been free to make unwise choices is a separate issue.)

What I came to realize after about a decade of subscription to MS Magazine (Yes, I had a subscription – to that and about half a dozen other progressive/liberal publications, in the pre-internet days) was that there was a definite bias therein when it came to defining a feminist. The message that I got from the MSlings and the rest was that it might all very nice to be a woman employed in a fairly non-traditional profession, but you really weren’t a ‘real’ feminist and down with the cause unless you worked at some academic establishment or in the creative or publishing fiends, earning an upper-middle-class salary, were a single parent, man-hating vegetarian, lesbian or at least bi, who celebrated ones’ abortion/s and reliably voted progressive. There was, briefly, a ‘feminists for life’ action group, which, predictably, got read out of meeting when the Mainstream Capital F feminists decided to go all in on abortion access.

Increasingly, it was obvious that mainstream professional feminism had practically nothing to say to me – I was only one of those things (single parent through an unfortunate choice of potential life partner). I gathered that being working class was beneath consideration, and military was just too infra dig for the MSlings and the professional feminists: Kate Millett, Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan, Andrea Dworkin, Shulamith Firestone, and other influential voices. They were all notable professional capital ‘F’ feminists of the ‘Second Wave’ as writers, theoreticians, campaigners. They weren’t quite as far out on the man-hating whack-job fringe as Valerie Solanas, who tried to murder Andy Warhol in 1968. But over time it eventually became clear that they were desperately unhappy women; they hated men, despised family life, had no affection at all for children – and eventually didn’t have much to say to me. I liked men as friends and romantic partners, treasured a family life and held children to be precious. I did rather agree with Naomi Wolf, who briefly wandered off the mainline feminist plantation with publication of her 1993 book, Fire with Fire. She argued that mainstream feminism had to basically grow up, make common cause with women across the political spectrum, stop glorying in victimhood, and stop wasting time and energy in man-hating and abortion; work to benefit all women, not just the doctrinaire hard-core Feminists. I rather think she was chased back onto the plantation after that – she only totally rebelled recently.

My second disillusion regarding the Feminist Establishment came about two decades after the first, watching an able politician like Sarah Palin monstered and denigrated by the mainstream establishment Feminist voices in the media, mostly, but also in academia and among the surviving intellectual Feminists. It was an absolutely disgusting display of snobbery. Here was an able, attractive, and intelligent state-level politician, happily married with mostly well-adjusted children until the glare of the establishment media put them under the unbearably white-hot spotlight. She was neither spawn or spouse of an established male politician, who made a career in politics entirely on her own merits, previously well-respected as a state governor … and she got treated like something nasty, tracked in on someone’s shoe after the 2008 election. There was an awful kind of bitchiness about the aftermath of that campaign – as if a hundred thousand doctrinaire Feminist mean girl snobs piled on to the chosen victim.

These observations all left me less than impressed with the current crop of ostentatious feminists, out there protesting, cosplaying the cast of The Handmaid’s Tale or wearing pink knitted hats and bleating about microaggressions and the patriarchy or the male gaze, or because their feelings were hurt because someone somewhere wore a shirt they didn’t like or said something they found offensive. Meanwhile women in certain African cultures are mutilated genitally, South American women are sex-trafficked … and Israeli women were gang-raped, mutilated, murdered or kidnapped by Hamas terrorists. The professional capital F feminists are mostly silent, especially about this last. I’d like to think it’s an embarrassed silence, but I know better. The professional feminists are first and foremost progressives – and they really don’t care for the lives and fortunes of women not in their own little circle.
Comment as you wish.

(PS – the latest historical novel is released into the wild, and is now available in print and as a Kindle version, here on Amazon!)

Close to the Edge

29. November 2023 · Comments Off on Close to the Edge · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun With Islam, Media Matters Not, Politics, Tea Time, World

I’ve felt over the last couple of years, that there is a steep precipice in our path, up to which our current Ruling Class is staggering blindly. Not just our American path, but in the developed world generally, and in that of western Europe. Things just can’t continue as they are. There is a breaking point coming. Really, no one might accurately predict exactly what small spark will kick off the explosion or the fall from a great height, or exactly where it might occur. The precipitating powers move in the shadows, veiled by a news media which deliberately veils them anyway. Too many national and international elites are pursuing policies which benefit them, rather than the countries they are supposed to govern. Too many of the transnational ruling class, indeed, seem to be in competition to pour contempt and derision on their less-fortunate, relatively powerless fellow citizens … and that’s a situation which can’t continue indefinitely. People are too stressed, made angry by things which they can’t control. Road rage incidents, riots that flame up like a prairie fire, unprovoked beatings, mass brawls in fast food restaurants and on commercial airliners; people are snapping over the slightest provocation, a misheard word, a momentary inconvenience…

There are just too many small indicia of trouble – small things, taken individually which wouldn’t mean much. But all the big things pile up like firewood, only wanting the tinder – which I fear that the small things will provide, to our cost. Big things like the Covidiocy, locking people into their houses and out of a social life, and then the vax mandate which cost them jobs, BLM/Antifa riots and protests which wrecked downtowns across red states, and inspired city governments to turn a blind eye towards property crime and the organized looting of retail outlets. The erasure of national borders is another one of those big things, stressing on a local level, when mobs of strangers suddenly show up and are favored with shelter, food and considerations not given to local citizens, deserving or not.

A recent incident which caught my attention and hinted to me that we are very close to the disastrous edge was the unprovoked knife attack at a school in Dublin – an attack which severely injured a woman and three children. (Link goes to Neo Neocon, and an interesting and informative discussion in the comment thread.)Initially, the local police were coy about describing the assailant, although he was captured almost at once. In the US, we have learned what to assume – with a high degree of accuracy – when a Person of No Description is apprehended after committing violence. Apparently, the Irish have learned that lesson as well. Having been fed to the back teeth with assorted petty and major crimes committed by an alien element – third-world migrants forced upon their communities by a governing class who appeared to be much more interested in currying favor with their international ruling class elsewhere in Europe, the locals chose to make their unhappiness in a language which the ruling class can’t ignore.
“… Some in Ireland believe too many people have arrived, too quickly, and that we need a ‘mature debate’ about it. But whenever they say something, they’re branded bigots and scum.”
Firey riots appear to be an acceptable means of protesting when it comes to an urban underclass, but only of the aggrieved are the right sort, dontchaknow. In any case, the national stereotype is of the Irish generally being truculent and ready to fight on any ground; after all, they fought being colonized by the British for a good few centuries; who would have expected them to lie down and be colonized by anyone else.

The observation in the above-linked article does ring very true to me; the ruling class willfully closing their ears to the voices of the ruled class by branding them bigots and scum. And deplorable, racists, stupid … Our own ruling elite did the same with the Tea Party. As courteous, reasonable, responsible and thoughtful a body of citizens as ever was in the United States political life, and for all that, called names and abused by the media, entertainment and political class.
Discuss as you will, while we still can.

Rage

17. November 2023 · Comments Off on Rage · Categories: Fun With Islam, Good God, History

So a month and a bit after the Oct.7th pogrom in Israel, the streets of American and European cities, and university/college campuses are filled with rage, and a disgusting display of Jew-hate. It’s as if none of them ever read Shirer’s “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” or had the slightest clue about what happens when the survivors of a genocide have the chance to pay back the perpetrators of mass murder – the wholesale murder of kin, friends, and coreligionists – with appropriate coin. But mostly … rage. By coincidence, the hand-scribbled ravings of the Covenant School transexual murderer were leaked to a media outlet – it looks like some local police officers are believed to have been the conduit for the leakage. Because what comes clear about the girl who wanted to be a boy was the pure, white-hot insane and murderous rage, which somehow became focused for whatever reason on the kids, kids who were of a privileged enough background that their parents could send them to a religious-sponsored private school. I wonder if the rage grew out of frustration. The kids had something that Audrey Hale felt that she lacked – a secure sense of self in the world, comfort within their own skin, innocence and trust, parental approval – whatever. They had all that or some other quality – and she didn’t and it wasn’t fair – and so she was consumed with rage, a rage which could only be assuaged by lashing out.

Sometime around the start of Gulf War 1, I read Bernard Lewis’ article in The Atlantic Magazine – The Roots of Muslim Rage – and I was so struck by his insight and explanation that I really made a pest of myself, showing the article to a number of my fellow NCOs and airmen – “See! That’s why they hate us! They really, really hate us! And this is WHY!” (Well, not all Muslims, actually – but a far number of those who were lashing out back then, even before 9-11.) Here you had a body of people who had been promised everything by their Prophet – wealth, domination, all the goodies that this mortal life has to offer as well as unending orgies in the heavenly knocking-shop – and yet, they looked around at the rest of the world and saw that they lived in poverty-ridden, unsanitary, dysfunctional dumps, while the supposedly unworthy infidels had riches, health, power, scantily-clad women … well, you’d be pissed. Consumed with rage, and envy, and the conviction that it just wasn’t fair!

So what comes out when I look at what I can bear to look at in the videos of the October 7th pogrom Palestinian pogrom and read in the various news reports is the motivation of sheer rage. All-consuming, envious rage, never to be assuaged by all the progressive sympathy in the world, all the donations by the UN for the poor, suffering Palestinians over eighty years (as if they were the only folk in the world who lost a war that they initiated and perpetuated). They squatted in an enviable bit of Mediterranean shoreline that could have been a tourist and garden mecca and marinated in rage. A rage made even more white-hot at how Jews made a prosperous, tidy, advanced little nation out of a desert. The Hamasniks looked over the border into Israel at the pretty homes and prosperous farms and businesses … and went insane with unreasoning rage at what they didn’t have … everything that they wanted and deserved. All the goodies that those cheating, unbelieving Jews had, and it just wasn’t fair.

And so, they went mad with rage. And there we are. Comment as you wish,

Consequences

27. October 2023 · 1 comment · Categories: Fun With Islam, Good God, Israel & Palestine

So, looking at the actions of pro-Hamas demonstrators on university campuses and in the streets of major blue-tinged cities over the last few weeks, we really don’t have to ask as Dorothy Thomson did, in mid-1941 – who goes Nazi? College students suckled on the sour teat of DIE-addled academicians with delusions of intellectual grandeur, for a certainty, and recent immigrants who have brought their unfortunate old habits of hate with them. Still, when it comes to that first group, it has been amazing and disheartening to observe that sheltered twentysomethings driven to hair-trigger meltdown by the alleged presence of misogyny, the faintest hint of racism, and microaggressions so tiny as to be invisible to the naked eye have enthusiastically aligned themselves with genocidal Jew haters from Gaza. Students and academics didn’t even pause for a split second, before cheering on indiscriminate random slaughter, torture, repeated rape so violent that it left pelvic bones broken, burning families alive in their own homes, looting and hostage-taking.

While those educated in the most prestigious universities and colleges in our fair nation may not grasp the obvious double standard, a fair number of the rest of us see it all very plainly. Indiscriminate and brutal slaughter of civilians by armed bullies is bad, m’kay? The Geneva Convention, that much-violated set of rules governing the conduct of war operations frowns on it, for all that only a few nations conducting warfare lately have ever observed them. I am also certain that I am not the only one of the post-WWII generation who had those few brave individuals who sheltered European Jews, or helped them escape from the Nazi’s “Final Solution” held up to me as the epitome of moral courage in a dark time.

So, it emerges that has been considerable blow-back to the poisonous Jew-hate on display after the October 7th Pogrom – students and individual bigots being doxed, fired, or having offers of post-graduate employment rescinded, counter-protests in front of their houses, anonymous death threats (so alleged), and the threat of an internet mob harassing them. My heart bleeds for them… well, no, it doesn’t. Not a bit of it – all this has been established as the accepted treatment for conservatives, or the unwary innocent caught by the progressive cancel culture mob. Let it all unfold in the manner established by the progressive mob.

Discuss as you will, and while we can.

The New Pogrom

11. October 2023 · Comments Off on The New Pogrom · Categories: Fun With Islam, Iran, War

I think the reason that last Saturday’s massacre in Israel hits so close to the nerve of Americans like my daughter and I, is because we can look at the pictures and video of the victims and the aftermath and see ourselves. My daughter and I look at pictures of the blood-spattered crib and the baby carrier and see Wee Jamie. Hear him crying in pain and bewilderment. We see pictures of the pleasant little houses, the tree-planted neighborhoods targeted by the Hamas savages, and see our own neighborhood, as a bullet-riddled, blood-spattered smoking ruin. I look at pictures of the audience at the all-night music rave, and see my daughter among them, dancing with her friends and having fun, the next minute dragged away dead, or for treatment that used to be described as worse than death. My daughter can look at me or consider her memories of her bed-ridden invalid grandmother, and readily imagine either or both of us cut down mercilessly … and the murderers recording the whole bloody cruelty for posting to social media for the approval and cheers of their friends.

This is an organized and sponsored pogrom the cruelty and viciousness of which hasn’t been seen since medieval times, although the Nazis and Imperial Japanese certainly did their best in Europe and China within the living memory of elderly people still alive today.

Eventually whoever was responsible in the Israeli intelligence and defense organizations for last weekend’s failure will be identified and chastened. The Gaza strip will be a sea of bouncing, smoking rubble, regardless. Whichever state actor – looking at you, Iran – aided and abetted will likewise have some kind of retaliation meted out to them. I am also pretty certain that those Hamas operatives who were braggart and foolish enough to be videotaped or photographed on social media with recognizable faces will also be identified, as has various Antifa dirtbags here in the US were identified by the weaponized autistics of 4-Chan. I am certain that in coming days we will be treated to a succession of adorable dirty-faced moppets rescued from bombed buildings, and poor abaya-clad women of certain age wailing about their ruined home. I am also certain that members of the Greatest Generation vaguely regretted the necessities of war which meant scenes of adorable dirty-faced Japanese moppets rescued from the ruins of their homes, or the good German frauen lamenting the ruins of their cottage or apartment in Berlin or Hamburg. But we couldn’t then allow Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan to continue as they were. Neither can Israel continue living with the proven threat posed by Hamas in Gaza. (Or anywhere else.)

The Gaza strip will be a sea of bouncing rubble. Any country, not just Israel can’t endure the cruelty of what happened last Saturday morning. A long time ago, I would have felt sorry for the residents of Gaza. They wasted every chance, every opportunity to be a combination of Singapore, the Maldives, and the Marbella of that corner of the Mediterranean. Yes, they lost a war in 1947, a war they didn’t expect to lose, but hey … ask Japan, Germany, Argentina, the southern US or Mexico how it feels to lose a war that they all thought was in the bag. A lovely stretch of coast, with marvelous beaches, which could have drawn free-spending tourists and vacationers all across Europe, even day-trippers from Israel and Egypt itself. Such wasted potential, potential sabotaged by poisonous rage and resentment. Bernard Lewis wrote years ago, an explanation for Muslim rage and envy. Everything that Allah promised good observant Muslims seemed to have been withheld from them – and lavished upon the unbelievers. Riches, power, happy successful societies, military might, beautiful women dancing the night away at an outdoor concert … all of that. Muslims must look around, and see that almost without exception, strictly Muslim-ruled countries were pits of dysfunctional, wretched despair and poverty. And so, they raged and went rabid-mad.
Since last weekend, there have been a number of organizations and individuals pledging their true allyship and support of Hamas and the Palestinians – looking at you, BLM. I can only assume that these people and groups are perfectly OK with mass murder of defenseless audiences at an outdoor concert, slaughtering families wholesale, decapitating babies and gang-raping women until they hemorrhage. Good of you to let us all know where you stand, and what you stand for. Noted.
(Although a number of individuals have walked back from such statements of support for Hamas. I’d like to think that they realized how awful it made them look, personally, but suspect such regrets may have more to do with employers declining current or future employment.)
Discuss as you wish, and have the heart.

Foreign and Domestic

15. September 2023 · Comments Off on Foreign and Domestic · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun With Islam, Media Matters Not, Military, Politics, Rant, Veteran's Affairs

I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic… From the Oath of Enlistment

It honestly kind of slipped my mind at first, that Monday morning was the anniversary of the 9-11 terrorist attack on the United States. It’s been 22 years since that horrible day. I had other stuff – purely personal concerns on my mind.
For one, every single thing that I had to say about 9-11, I said, wrote and posted ages ago … and why re-run, one more time? There’s just nothing more to say, any more than there would be anything more to say about the shock of Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 – one more tedious rerun of a recollection of where I was, what I was doing. It’s been a lifetime, in a way – and for high-school and college graduates this year, it’s been all their lifetimes.
The other thing – a more recent tragic anniversary which looms closer in time is the disastrous and humiliating withdrawal from Kabul, Afghanistan, and the Abbey Gate suicide bombing there which killed more than a hundred civilians and thirteen American service personnel. Those deaths meant so little to President Biden that he kept looking at his watch during the ceremony at Andrews AFB when their coffins were unloaded. Those thirteen were the merely last American military lives frittered away in almost two decades of seemingly endless and pointless deployments to Afghanistan, culminated in a departure so botched that I’m still shocked that only a single commissioned officer resigned in protest. Sec Def Austin and General “Thoroughly Modern Milley apparently feel no shame over bungling their responsibility to the nation so horribly.

And this – a demoralized, gutted military – isn’t something that happened at the hands of foreign enemies. Our so-called leadership of the so-called elite gives every indication of hating at least half the American citizenry; it’s as if there is a secret contest on for who can come up with a notion to make our lives even more miserable, by banning gas stoves, gas-powered gardening tools and automobiles, limit air conditioning, efficient toilets, appliances and heaters, and living in detached suburban houses with a generous garden attached. Those same political and social elites appear to cheer on a new race war, all this with the full and enthusiastic cooperation of academia and the national news and entertainment media … those who have taken some time away from cheering on the sexualization of elementary-school-aged children.

Those of us paying attention suspect, with considerable reason for it, that our political leadership (mostly on the Donk side, but a few of the Heffalump persuasion when campaigning for reelection) have been bought and paid for by international and/or corporate interests – to the detriment of the interests of voters and American industries alike. Our national borders seem to have been erased in the interests of importing a more compliant population … and political opposition to all of this and the above has been criminalized. We even have our own gulag and collection of political prisoners. In the meantime, the national news-reporting media have degenerated into a partisan collection of bootlickers, toeing the party line and exclaiming rapturously over how much the love-love-love the luscious taste of authoritarian boot-polish.

The horror of 9-11, and what enemies foreign did to us, more than two decades ago? That was bad enough … but not nearly as damaging as what our ruling elite have done to us since.
Discuss as you wish, and while we still can.

The Twilight Zone

05. January 2021 · Comments Off on The Twilight Zone · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun With Islam, History, Iran, Media Matters Not, Politics, Rant

Well, it appears that the mullahcracy in Iran is still steamed over the death of their military mastermind Quassam Soleimani, the chief of so-called Quds Force – sort of the Iranian SS, I have always thought. On the one-year anniversary of that momentous drone-zap (a consummation quite overdue in my opinion) the president of Iran directly threatened the life of President Trump. Talk is cheap, and Iranian threats of dire revenge are the equivalent of those teeny and nearly worthless Spanish 1-peseta coins, which were struck from aluminum in the early 1990s, about the size of a child’s fingernail and looked like nothing so much as doll money. But still … the militant Muslims of Iran are certainly dedicated and determined sufficiently to have racked up any number of lesser-known and less-protected hits, so I wouldn’t be surprised at all if this was something more than just tough talk for the benefit of their domestic audience and fans of Islamic mayhem in other countries.

More »

When Doom Comes a’ Calling

10. January 2020 · Comments Off on When Doom Comes a’ Calling · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun With Islam, History, Iran, Iraq, Media Matters Not, Military

(I started this post last weekend – but real life and a new book project intervened. Consider this a footnote to Trent T.’s post, here.)

Well, it certainly came a’calling for Iran’s General Qasem Soleimani last week, Middle Eastern time. Nothing left but bits of scrap metal and meat, and a bruised hand with a large ring on it. Kind of fitting for the guy who perfected the fine art of IEDs, and brought so much business to the developers of artificial limbs for those survivors of that deadly art. As the satirist Tom Leher noted, so many decades ago, and in a slightly different context,

“Some have harsh words for this man of renown, But some think our attitude Should be one of gratitude, Like the widows and cripples in old London town Who owe their large pensions to Werner von Braun.”

So it seems that the late General Soleimani will not be missed … not missed much by an assortment of parties in Iran, the Middle East, Israel, and US State Department employees across the world, some of whom posted their congratulations in the first blog reports that I saw first thing. The Daughter Unit reports that most of the veteran social media participants were absolutely fizzing with glee, as were apparently Iranian anti-mullacracy exile communities across the world. Considering that the late General S. had a hand in nearly four decades of Islamic violence (violence which racked up casualties in the thousands, and which did include American troops), across the Middle East and was about to take a hand in fomenting some more in Iraq last week, he will definitely not be missed.

The remote pilot of the drone which dropped our final farewell gift upon him didn’t miss, either, although to read the Twitter caterwauling laments of Hollywood idiots like Rose McWhatserface is nearly enough to make one upchuck. The trauma of being sexually molested by a creep like Harvey Weinstein obviously blotted from what remains of her tiny mind the reality of things like … umm, Iran’s forty-year jihad against the US, beginning with overrunning our embassy in Teheran and keeping staff, employees and casual American visitors to said embassy captive for more than a year? In the old days, an attack on a foreign embassy counted as declaring war. It fries me no end that the Teheran embassy thing happened so long ago that I was in my first Air Force enlistment, and my daughter was born a couple of months later. That’s how long we’ve been waiting for anything like an appropriate response.

And Jimmy Carter was such a clueless, limp-dcked, Saudi-loving, anti-Semitic wimp that he couldn’t even countenance the appropriate response, which should rightfully have been along the lines of – “Release our people and vacate our embassy (and clean up the mess as you go) or various essential real estate of yours will become slightly radioactive glass. Counting down… three … two…” THAT response would have spared us all – especially in the Middle East – decades of trouble, but morons like failed novelist Ben Rhodes certainly wouldn’t grasp that point, being twenty something, or perhaps older now, and still dealing with equally educated idiots. And as for ostensibly American news media painting, certain celebs and politicians painting the late General in romantic shades of “able soldier, handsome charismatic leader, an inspiration to his troops, austere poet, snappy dresser and all-around-good-fellow…” People, do you have any comprehension of how that makes you appear to the rest of us? It’s as of you are lamenting and condemning the death of Reinhold Heydrich, who was also cultured, handsome, a charismatic leader, et cetera, et cetera – and every but as much a murderous a*hole as Qasem Soleimani. Is this truly what you wish to embrace, and to appear to the rest of us as a sympathizer of? Discuss as you wish, and add any insights.

Who’s Your Baghdaddy?

30. October 2019 · 2 comments · Categories: AARRRMY TRAINING SIR!!!, Fun With Islam, GWOT, Iraq, Military, sarcasm, War

It is deeply, solidly ironic that at almost the very hour that US forces were bagging Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, fearless leader of the ISIL/ISIS-established caliphate in the Middle East, that the catastrophically-unfunny cast of Saturday Night Live had just finished ragging on President Trump for supposedly coddling ISIS by pulling out of Syria. There hasn’t been a case of timing this bad since 70ies Weatherman terrorist-turned-educator Bill Ayres launched his memoir of bomb-building and social mayhem the very week that Osama Bin Laden’s merry crew of jihadis murdered nearly 3,000 Americans and others in a single day, on September 11th, 2001.

Well, who would have thought that our intelligence services were actually performing the hard graft of tracking down dangerous international enemies, instead of attempting to reverse the results of an election, and harass domestic political opponents? Seeing that our military leadership was dead-as-a-doornail serious about taking care of business, in facilitating Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi date with his seventy-two cranky virgins or white grapes, or whatever – was grimly satisfactory. This is the jolly lad whose ISIS/ISIL hardliners set a standard for psychopathic cruelty to captives which might have 19th century Comanche and Apache warriors saying, “Oh, hey, guys – don’t you think that’s going a little too far?” (Or maybe not – those fellows had some stomach-churningly inventive notions about killing slowly.)

It is additionally rather delicious that al-Baghdadi was chased by a military working dog into his last hide-out, and that it was a female working dog at that. And there, the wretched man chose to blow himself up, with three of his kids, although Jamie Lee Curtis expressed some indignation and sorrow on his behalf. Did she or anyone else among the Hollywood Trump-haters express any such tender feelings about those captives of al-Baghdadi who were burned alive, drowned in metal cages, executed with det-cord around their necks, and beheaded in job-lots? Anything about the Yazidi women and girls sold into sex-slavery? So help me, I can’t recall, but then we have come to expect this kind of one-sided concern from the denizens of the celebrity world.

Finally – that the whole operation was kept from the Dem leadership on grounds of operational security? Ah yes; I won’t go as far as to say that Nancy Pelosi would have picked up the phone and called a contact at the Washington Post, saying, “You’ll never guess what is going down – the Special Forces are going after al Baghdadi – but don’t tell anyone, it’s Top Secret!” but at the rate that stuff keeps getting leaked from Dem offices into the media … good call. Yes, someone on a senior Dem leadership staff would have spilled to a media contact, likely out of sheer ignorance and malice toward Trump. The kind of mindset what sees the lower serving military ranks as disposable pawns, only useful for holding umbrellas, or as background for a nice photo op … or if their deaths can be used for a purpose. Yes, I’m that cynical. Discuss as you wish.

Why I Do Not Care for Ilhan Omar

27. July 2019 · 2 comments · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun With Islam, Politics, Rant

Oh, let me count the ways – first, a purely visceral and visual reaction: she’s a snake in a trendy head-scarf. Reminds me of the internet meme of Momo, actually. And the fact that she is a particularly nasty bigot and vocal anti-Ordinary American, and Jew-hater, and might very well have both perpetuated and benefited from immigration fraud.
And … Somali.

I am certain there are some Somali immigrants/refugees who are adornments of wherever they have settled outside of Somalia and taken the trouble to adapt to their new communities. The fashion modal Iman. And Ayaan Hirsi Ali … Seriously, that just about does it for me as far as favorable impressions of the Somali immigrant community goes. I have been given to understand through various local specialty bloggers, that there is a large and indigestible collection of Somalis in Minnesota; indigestible as much of what passes for news regarding that community which appears now and again in media as well as blogs … does not reflect well on Somalis. Systemic welfare fraud. Somali taxi drivers refusing rides to passengers with service dogs and duty-free alcohol. Support and volunteers for the brutal régime of ISIS in Syria. The unprovoked shooting of an unarmed woman by a Somali police officer who never should have given a badge and a gun. There are reports that Ms Omar’s father was a higher-up in a Marxist régime which brutally ruled the place until overthrown, whereupon Somalia devolved into a more or less permanent state of cutthroat tribal war, famine and piracy … and don’t think that I have forgotten about how the US and the UN together got suckered into trying to administer famine relief in the face of a local warlord weaponizing the distribution of food. Taking pity on all those poor, poor, big-eyed starving children with swollen bellies finished up with the bodies of dead Americans being dragged through the slums of Mogadishu and displayed like trophies for the news media. No good deed goes unpunished, in that part of the world, it appears.

You’d think that refugees from all that would be disinclined to create that situation all over again, upon escaping from it, as well as perhaps displaying a modicum of gratitude for a safe refuge. That doesn’t seem to be the case, most notably with Ms Omar, who apparently expected America to be all roses, rainbows and unicorns like a 1950ies sitcom and was most bitterly disappointed when it wasn’t.

Somali refugees were settled there through the good offices of religious agencies over the last three decades, which once had much better results in assisting refugees. I was active in college in a local Lutheran-sponsored local resettlement effort focusing on Vietnamese refugees. This was a very personal, tightly-focused effort by a working-class community in doing our best for a body of people for which we felt an inchoate degree of sympathy, in that most of the refugees that we turned out all effort for were also working and middle-class – whom, moreover – worked very hard to establish themselves in a new country. Those sponsored families and individuals rewarded our homes and efforts; they all became Americans, melting seamlessly into speaking English, educating their children, sending them out into military service, to useful occupations, to whole-heartedly embracing all that America had to offer – while still keeping intact an affection for certain traditions. That is the way that immigrants in previous decades did it, no matter what their national origin – but if Ms Omar is the best the Somali-American community has, I don’t hold out much hope for that community ever adjusting. Discuss as you wish.

The New Party Line

14. March 2019 · 3 comments · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun With Islam, Media Matters Not, My Head Hurts

So, as of this last week, as per the sparkly new members of the House, the Democrat Party line is now one of unapologetic and hard-line anti-Semitism. Not that this should surprise anyone with a grounding in history: in the 19th century, the Democrat Party was the party of slavery and secession, in the 20th, the party of segregation and Jim Crow. And now, in this faintly-tarnished 21st, they appear to have become the party of socialism, anti-Semitism, and the fanatical belief that OMG-The-Planet-Earth-Is-Gonna-Fry!
The Horrendous Climate Change thing is bad enough on its’ own. Look, I have been paying attention long enough to remember when Massive Global Cooling was all the Panic du jour, then followed by the Massive Global Warming – all this human and/or industrial caused. I am so not falling for the scam of the successor to this panic – that of Massive Global Climate Change!!Eleventy!! It was warm enough in Roman times to grow wine grapes in England, warm enough in Medieval times for subsistence farming in Greenland, cold enough in the 17th centuries that the Thames froze over at London, enabling midwinter jollities to be held on the ice. The monumental Cliff Dweller settlements in the American Southwest flowered and flourished until the thirteenth century, when widespread drought and subsequent unrest drove the Anazazi from their aeries among the cliffs. The volcanic explosion of Mt. Tambora in 1815 in the East Indies brought about the following “year with no summer” in the northern European continent and the eastern US – all this when industry was in infancy and automobiles a dream in the mind of whatever madman was doing science fiction at the time… so, not buying anthropomorphic global warming or the Green New Deal for a hot second.

But that kerfuffle is a small thing, next to the revival of anti-Semitism, now apparently a key Dem party feature, with the new kids on the block – Ilhan Omar, Cory Booker, AOC and others apparently having no problem with publicly, unapologetically expressing sentiments regarding Jews that wouldn’t have been out of place in a publication like Der Stűrmer. Anti-Semitism in the United States was, I always thought, not nearly as virulent a feature in the social landscape as in, say, Imperial Russia (with frequent vicious pogroms and generation of the ever-green Protocols of the Elders of Zion forgery) or in Belle Epoque France, with the Dryfus affair. Certainly, anti-Semitism existed in the US, but in a paler, social-snobbery kind of way. One has the impression, in surveying a wide selection of contemporary 19th century American readings, that generally American intellectuals and thought leaders knew of anti-Semitism, but didn’t really feel anything about it, one way or the other. Growing up in Southern California in the 1950s and 60ies, anti-Semitism was even farther off the table: it was tacky, ignorant and completely unacceptable. Besides, our family had friends – some of them very dear friends – whose’ lives had been impacted by the Holocaust. It was an uncomplicated path between Jew-hate and loading your fellow-citizens into box-cars for that one-way trip; this, everyone seemed to know and understand … then.
But not now, apparently. The same old Jew-hate staggers back to horrid zombie-life among people who ought to know better, but don’t. And why? The necessity for having a scapegoat for personal and societal failure, I assume. Catastrophic failure in socialist regimes (see Venezuela, the latest example), the sink-hole of dysfunction in the inner-city urban black community, and the slow-rolling disasters that are countries ruled by strict Islamic principles (Pakistan and Somalia immediately come to mind) simply must be the fault of other forces or agencies. Someone or something else must be to blame when it all comes crashing down, as socialists have only the best intentions, the urban black communities are wholly innocent, and Islam is perfect. So the ancient hatred of the successful by the un- shambles forth, once again. Your thoughts?

Done With Feminism

30. September 2018 · Comments Off on Done With Feminism · Categories: Fun With Islam, Good God, Local, Media Matters Not, Rant

I am done with officially-sanctioned, automatically-expected-full-throated solidarity with other women no matter what the issue or complaint. I am done with the whole reproductive-health-motte-and-bailey-abortion-sacrament. I am more than done with women who think that the crusade for political, legal, and educational equality is merely an excuse to be viciously-manipulative bitches to those men unfortunate enough to be involved with them personally. I am also so done with women who are of an inter-connected social class sufficiently well-to-do to have had damn-near everything handed to them on a silver platter, complaining at an ear-splitting level about being downtrodden and oppressed; this when women in the Middle East must wear burkas out in public, have to be escorted when out in public by a male relative … and oh, yes – sold as sex slaves in Daesh/ISIL markets, or routinely have their clitorises excised. I am also done, by the way, with female protesters done up in cheap red-cloak and white bonnet costumes drawn from a bad dystrophic novel by a Canadian who knows f**k-all about the American Protestant tradition. (I’d respect Margaret Atwood ever so much more if she had done her Handmaids’ Tale schtick in an Islamic setting, but I guess she isn’t all that brave about having a fatwah declared on her. Pity.) I am extra-so-done with Hollywood personalities screaming about the century-old existence of the casting couch, when I am certain that for most of them, the experience thereof was a carefully-considered quid-pro-quo career move – and they had their benefit delivered from the bargain. I am also done with Triggly-puffesque screamers having spectacular conniption fits at any suggestion that men and women have different yet complementary strengths, talents and values. Finally, I am done with certain so-called feminist mean girls of the academic ilk patrolling the thinking of others with all the sadistic enthusiasm of concentration camp guards pouncing on the slightest gesture of defiance from prisoners. Consider this my final kiss-off to current establishment feminism; nice to have known ya and believe me when I say that a female-ruled society would pure bloody hell, if it ever was or would be enabled. It would be somewhat akin to the hell of last week’s hearing for a new Supreme Court nominee – which for me was the very last straw.

I have come to this breaking point after six decades and a little more on this dirtball, urged along by experience and observations made of the world around me, plus a lot of reading of history and other materials. Let there be absolutely no shred of a doubt about this – I like men. Have always liked men; as kin, co-workers, bosses, friends and lovers. Men are strong, considerate, they know how to fix things, many have tool-boxes and all of them have dicks, generally they can wield both with some skill, and they are the other half of the universal sky, the other half of our human race. Admittedly, some of them are a bit crude, a very few are beyond all help. For some, it takes a couple of years past their teenage years to be at their best – but I also know of the male of our species at their best and most noble, and they are glorious to behold. Strong, yet gentle, gallant enough to bring tears to your eyes, courteous, even chivalrous in the old Victorian sense, but still generally accepting and supportive of female input and choices … unless they have been unlucky to victimized by one of those mean-girl drama-queens and in consequence are justifiably bitter. Feminism wasn’t supposed to be all-misandry, all the time. It was supposed to be, I thought – and I was not alone in this – about having a vote, and having the opportunity to make the same choices that men did; to get the same kind of education and have the chance to work at the same jobs, and if you and your significant-other want to split the housework in some non-traditional way, then that was a private matter and none of anyone elses’ business. Not only is the personal not political, it’s mostly a dead bore, even in pretty pictures on Instagram.
As I said before – I like men. I have brothers, friends, have had clients, co-workers, bosses who are men, of whom I think the world, and who honor me in turn with their respect and friendship. That any of them could have been treated as Judge Kavanaugh was over this past week – a full load of calumny, false witness, and pure shrieking harpy vindictiveness – would have sent me into – well, not murderous berserker rage (I don’t do berserker, for one) – but into cold and calculated fury. I’m in the cold and vengeful fury mode anyway, having followed the whole disgusting charade all last week. Here is a perfectly decent man, from all appearances (from my experience a guy who has been a chivalrous and responsible Boy Scout all his adult life, who has treated his female friends, peers, and employees with consideration for decades, and likely all that even as a clumsy teenager) smeared as a rapist in the national news and entertainment media. And even worse, courtesy of USA Today – accused as a potential pedophile, in a perfectly vile editorial which upon mature consideration, the editors walked back … but not until the disgusting accusation had been out there for hours. OK, thanks, USA Today and other mainstream national outlets; your propensity for going all Salem Witch Trials has been noted. Y’all turned so gradually into Der Stürmer that I barely noticed until now.

Strong, independent and able women of the previous century, and the century before that would barely recognize the world which sprouted like ugly weeds in their simple demands for a vote and respectful consideration of their skills and capabilities. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lizzie Johnson Williamson, Madame C.J. Walker, Clara Barton. Nancy Wake, Margaret Bourke White … I can now imagine these able, confident, successful women revolving in their graves like Black & Decker Drills at how the cause of “feminism” has been degraded. They lived their lives, every one of them, as women of talent, ambition, and skill in their chosen professions, and I do not think that the affection and support of men in their lives and careers was in abeyance, for they all did great things, in what is now supposed to have been a man’s world. And they did it without tearing down men or bringing false witness against them.

Racial Meditation

11. March 2018 · 1 comment · Categories: Ain't That America?, Air Force, Fun With Islam, Military, Politics

For me, the very first – although not the most momentous disappointment in the accumulated collection racked up throughout the Obama administration – was the realization that there would be no line drawn under the old bug-bear of racism with regard to those of us – as a friend of mine during my assignment to Greenland in the early 1980s put it – with the year-round dark tan. Yes, said friend was black, Afro-American, a person of color, or whatever the approved term is these days. (You kids, get off my lawn! Oh … I don’t have a lawn.) My friend was a totally middle-class young woman, the daughter of professionals, who like me, had grown up without ever personally observing much in-your-face unmistakable racial antagonism or prejudice. It was merely something that had happened to other people, a fair number of decades ago; at worst howlingly illegal, at best, rude. We were in the habit of walking together every Saturday, around the end of the Sondrestrom AB runway to the Danish side of the base, there to enjoy a cup of tea and a pastry in the SAS air terminal cafeteria.

North of the Arctic Circle, you take your diversions where you can find them; in this case, the air terminal cafeteria was A) away from the base, and B) actually had rather good food, since it was entirely run by Danes; masters of pastry and good solid comfort food. One Saturday, the cafeteria was empty save for a large party at another table, who stared at the pair of us in a manner most disconcerting. It freaked both of us out, as soon as we noticed. Had we each suddenly grown another head? Were we trailing toilet paper stuck to our mukluks? It wasn’t an American uniform – both of us were clad in the customary Sondy winter mufti, of jeans and plaid shirts, with the addition of dull-green issue parkas and mukluks – why were they staring at us? Finally, I ventured – “Is it because you’re black and I’m white, and they’re from South Africa or something, where it’s illegal to sit at the same table?”

She agreed that it must be something like that; it must have been the only explanation, and we returned to enjoying our tea and pastries, marveling at how things had changed so much for the better, from the times of violent civil rights demonstrations twenty years before.
At that point – and especially in the military – systemic racial prejudice appeared to be something from the bad old days. It was so far off the table, it wasn’t even in the same room. No one turned so much as a hair over a commander, supervisor, NCOIC being of another race, and if racial prejudice were a factor in the dating and marriage scene, it was one of the best-kept secrets since the Enigma coding device. So, twenty-some years after that tea-time in the airport terminal, I had some thin and comforting hope that the election of B. Obama to the highest office in the land would at the least put a dagger in the heart of the myth of the USA being Teh Most Racist Nation Evah! – even if he delivered on nothing else of note. And this, even after the “G*d Damn America” sermon stylings of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright came to light among the conservative side of the blogosphere. I’m at heart an optimist … surely the chances of a light-weight Chicago machine pol, with not much going for him other than a mellifluous voice (when reading from a teleprompter) and a slightly unusual personal background couldn’t do all that much damage … could he?

Ten years later, that answer is along the lines of ‘oh, hell, yes!’ Between the crazed indifference to the actual facts of the various ‘police on black thug’ shootings on the part of BLM (and the statistics on crime by black vs white perps generally), the curious rise of the ‘knock-out game’, an anti-Semitic race-mongering sleaze-ball opportunist like Al Sharpton achieving a comfortable sinecure and apparent social respect among Dems as a media commenter, American institutions of higher learning piously condemning ‘whiteness’, an earnest and involved group of citizens like the Tea Party partisans being routinely condemned by the establishment news and entertainment media as racist … all that is bad enough. But now it seems that Nation of Islam honcho, Louis Farrakhan – vicious, anti-Semitic, poisonously-hateful of whites in general, and all-around nut-bar – was on closer acquaintance with our former President than previously thought. Yes, presidents and rising pols need to rub elbows with those from whom a normal private citizen would otherwise run screaming, or at least murmuring polite apologies as they edge towards the door – but what are we to make of this? Trump is expected to apologize endlessly for having attracted the support of David Duke – but the support of a malignant hater like Calypso Louie is just – oh, well, one of those political things?

Sharpton, at least, gives off the vibe of being a particular sort of crass racial opportunist (aside from the anti-Semitic thing). Stoking racial animosity been berry, berry good to him over the years – but Louis Farrakhan? He comes off as a fanatic, and of a dangerous sort. Discuss, if you can bear it.

On the Protests Sweeping Iran…

01. January 2018 · Comments Off on On the Protests Sweeping Iran… · Categories: Fun With Islam, Iran, Media Matters Not

Which, naturally, we are hearing little about from our Dear National News Media. This article explains why.

A Week of Tantrum

15. December 2017 · Comments Off on A Week of Tantrum · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, Fun With Islam, Israel & Palestine, Local, Media Matters Not

Well, this has been a festival of tantrums, has it not? What with ISIS/ISIL/Whatever is now huffing and puffing, threatening to blow our Christmas cottage down, and to execute President Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. Might have some luck with some sub-normally-intelligent specimen of Muslim humanity with delusions of adequacy walking into a public place with a badly-constructed pipe-bomb, but looking on the most recent fearless lone-wolf jihadi warrior, who only managed to semi-eviscerate himself in trying to blow up … which reminds me, have the usual suspects begun winging on about the anti-Muslim backlash which, miraculously, never seems to descend? I’ve been sick as a dog all week with a seasonal cold, so it might have actually happened, and I never noticed. Meanwhile, the Palestinians and their fellow-traveler-symps in the Western world have declared another day of rage with regard to President Trump following through on the ever-so-tentative concept agreed upon by how many previous administrations – that the US embassy in Israel should be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Cue the day of pique, anger, rage, frenzy, furor, indignation, and bluster … any day which ends in ‘y’ will suit for the pathetic Palestinians, exploited by other Arab nations for seventy years. Look, Pallies, this is what happens when you and your badly-chosen Arab allies loose wars repeatedly, persistently and without fail pick the wrong side in a conflict, choose thuggish leaders who take the sweet, sweet internationally-donated lolly and stash it in a Swiss bank account… and then turn around and blame your self-inflicted woes on the nearest handy target. Nope, sorry – the well of sympathy in me towards the Poor Prosecuted Palestinians went dry sometime around 9/11, or possibly when in the depths of one or another of the intifadas – committing, enabling, excusing all sorts of terrorist atrocities – their spokes-feeb took a breath and whined that everyone in the West regarded the Pallies as terrorists. There is that concept concerning cause and effect, ya know. Gaza could have been a garden and beach-leisure spot, cheerfully raking in Israeli tourist dollars over the last seventy years, but no … better to marinate in poisonous resentment. Again – this is what happens when you a) pick bad allies, b) lose wars, and c) blame everyone else but yourselves.

Meanwhile, the Pervnado churns on and on and on, with the latest accused MCP being Russell Simmons. Has any powerful male figure in the national news media, music, the movies, or any other establishment not been a complete pig when it comes to conduct, professional or otherwise with women; women he worked with, interviewed, or who had careers which they hoped he would enable through being nice to him, or at least not slapping him into the next county for demanding sexual services? Boundaries, ladies and gentlemen – are nice things to have, loudly to publicize and faithfully to observe. Note that no one has been snickering at VP Mike Pence lately, for being a woman-hating prude, in never yet being alone with a woman not his wife.

And finally, kudos to Sarah Huckabee Saunders, she of the thankless job of daily wrangling the White House press corps – a body which for the most part increasingly resembles a class of bitchy middle-school mean girls, with her as their homeroom teacher. Looks like a darned nice pecan pie too. A note to April Ryan, and Rosie O’Donnell, too – a pecan pie is not that hard to make, even if you make the crust from scratch.

(Note: A Fifth of Luna City is now up in both paperback and Kindle ebook. Lone Star Glory is, as of yet, only available in Kindle – the paperback version won’t be up until around the end of the year.)

London Calling

22. March 2017 · Comments Off on London Calling · Categories: Fun With Islam, Good God, Media Matters Not

You know, I’m getting to the point of being numb about this sh*t. Herewith the graphic predicting the angle of news coverage of this and other outrages. (Sorry for the long absence – real life, writing and home reno projects. I’ll be back, I promise.)
exjon_media-narrative-chart_3-22-17

Under Siege

01. August 2016 · Comments Off on Under Siege · Categories: Air Force, Allied Treachery, Fun With Islam, Military, War

The base at Hellenikon was often under siege and sometimes physically so; before, during and after I was stationed there in the early 1980s; regularly once a year when the local national employees went on strike, and blockaded the front gate, and now and again by anti-US and anti-NATO protesters. Although there was a Greek Air Force installation right next to the American base, there was no passage between the two, unlike the base at Zaragoza, where Spanish and American personnel had pretty much free passage between their respective halves of the facility. In the case of striking workers, or hostile protestors at the main – and only entrance – those of us inside the base were stuck there, while those outside were also cut off. Only one year did it become a problem lasting more than a single day – but it was an inconvenience for us all, and particularly frightening for family members.

And I was remembering all of that, this weekend, reading about how Incirlik Air Base – which also used to be called Adana Air Base – was cut off for about a day this weekend, after having commercial power cut off for nearly a week by Turkish civil authorities, in the wake of an attempted coup against a president who strong-armed himself into office by side-stepping the established rules. Because of the deteriorating situation in Turkey, all family members were ordered out at the end of March, 2016; a NEO evacuation, as it used to be and still is termed, for Non-combatant Evacuation Operation. (I used to have to keep current paperwork for an escort for my daughter, in the case of one of these; she would travel with various friends who would deposit her eventually with my parents, while I would stay behind.) Months before, the military quietly stopped facilitating accompanied tours to Incirlik. Currently, according to the bases’ own website, there are about 1,400 American military personnel serving there, with another 400 civilian employees. The dependent schools, teen center, child care center – all are closed; presumably the various employees of same are either evacuated themselves, or enjoying a nice vacation.

Incirlik’s mission and that of the 39th Air Base Wing is, according to the bases’ website, “to help protect U.S. and NATO interests in the Southern Region by providing a responsive staging and operational air base ready to project integrated, forward-based air power.” Part of this mission also includes a store of nuclear weapons. The base website is naturally, non-committal about this aspect of their mission. Even if there aren’t any such weapons in the bomb dump at Incirlik, likely there are all kinds of interesting munitions and weapons. Which is all very good and well – but Turkey’s President Erdogan has been loudly accusing the US – and the former USAF commander of Incirlik – of plotting and assisting with the failed coup. The commander of the Turkish Air Force assets at Incirlik is reported to have asked the US for asylum, which was refused; the man is now under arrest, as part of the purge of Erdogan’s political enemies. I have read here and there that those American military assigned to the base are confined to the base itself; considering Erdogan’s incendiary accusations, probably a wise move.

As for what now – like Will Rogers of blessed memory, all I know is what I read in the newspaper, or on-line at various sites. But the nightmare visioning that woke me up several times this weekend was of a full-on mob attack on Incirlik’s American sector, on the order of the Benghazi consulate writ large, and with even more weapons and determination … and with the tacit encouragement of Erdogan’s government and Islamist allies.
So much for being a NATO ally. And since our State Department did very little in the case of the Benghazi attack, save for blaming it all afterwards on a mysterious video that hardly anyone had heard of … can one count on the DoD being all that proactive in the event of a serious attack on Incirlik AB? Discuss.

Cannon Fodder

10. January 2016 · Comments Off on Cannon Fodder · Categories: European Disunion, Fun With Islam, Rant

An archaic term, in general; according to the wildly variable and sometimes suspect Wikipedia, it is a term taken from an even more archaic term for food for livestock. “Soldiers are the metaphorical food for enemy cannon fire.” Wikipedia defines the expression further as, “…an informal, derogatory term for combatants who are regarded … as expendable in the face of enemy fire … or to distinguish expendable low-grade or inexperienced combatants from supposedly more valuable veterans.”

Expendable is the operative word, and expendable without much regret on the part of the credentialed elite – the political, social or military elite – because the expected goal is considered worth the sacrifice, especially if the sacrifice is borne by others. Reading this week about the sexual violence reported – reluctantly in many cases by German media – as being perpetrated on a grand scale by recent Middle Eastern migrants masquerading as war refugees on women in German cities on this last New Years Eve gave me a sickening new understanding of the concept.

Indeed – here we have a transcendently generous, philanthropic goal; to provide sanctuary for the poor innocent refugee from wars’ alarms and horrors. It is a worthy goal, by the way – when genuine refugees are considered, and those providing sanctuary are quite firmly realistic about the situation and limitations. But authorities in Europe who made a great, enthusiastic show regarding welcoming Middle Eastern refugees all through last year now must accept – and accept they must, however reluctantly – that they have made their own women into sexual cannon fodder. They have enabled molestation, gang rape, robbery and massive harassment in their own streets … all so that the ruling elite might bask in the glow of their own self-righteousness. Well, done, Angela Merkel and the mayor of Cologne, and those media outlets who refused to make mention of the various incidents, which now appear to have been happening for months on a smaller scale.

However, Ms Merkel and the German ruling elite are hardly alone in selling out their citizenry to sexual exploitation for fear of being termed racist. Social workers and police looked the other way for decades in Rotherham, England … and our own very dear establishment media organs in the United States have downplayed criminal offences perpetuated by illegal aliens for years.
Cannon fodder, indeed. Discuss.

Rituals of the Season

06. December 2015 · Comments Off on Rituals of the Season · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Fun With Islam, GWOT, History, Iraq, Media Matters Not, War, World

My daughter was nearly ten years old, in that Christmastime of 1990. I was stationed at Zaragoza AB, in the Ebro River Valley of Spain, which was serving as one of the staging bases in Europe for the build-up to the First Gulf War … the effort to liberate Kuwait, which Saddam Hussein seemed to believe that he had a perfect right to occupy, loot and exterminate those opposing him in that small matter. But this is not about that war, particularly – only as it affected those of us located far along the haft of the military spear towards the sharp and pointy end.

Zaragoza was a long-established US base in Spain by then – sufficiently long enough to have grown up a second generation of children born to American servicemen and their Spanish wives. It was sufficiently well-established to have a fairly modern on-base school, which housed the elementary classes in one wing, and the high school in the other. My daughter started there in kindergarten, the very week that we arrived, in 1985, to the day that we departed, six years later, when she started the sixth grade. It was a safe posting, especially considered after my previous assignment to Athens, Greece, where terrorism aimed at American personnel and at the base generally was accepted grimly as an ongoing part of life, like hurricanes along the southern coasts. One took every careful precaution and internalized certain practices against an irregular and specifically unpredictably-occurring threat. One of my daughter’s earliest memories is of watching me from the front step of the suburban Athens apartment where we lived then … kneeling down to look underneath my car, parked out in the street. I was, of course, looking for something explody-ish with trailing wires, where such a device ought to not be attached to the underside of the bright orange Volvo sedan that I had purchased from a fellow NCO upon arrival in Athens. (The Volvo had the temporary USG or US Forces Greece license plates on it, which branded the vehicle as being owned/driven by a member of the American military, and thus a likely target for anything from crude vandalism to a bomb.  Just one of those things; it was a relief to get to Spain, where the practice was for regular Spanish license plates to be placed on automobiles owned by American service personnel.)

Late in autumn of that year the build-up began. Zaragoza AB went on a war footing, which meant that duties and hours devoted to those duties doubled, or in some cases, tripled for all personnel. Bright new concertina wire went up, all along the base perimeter; one of my memories of that period was how weirdly beautiful it looked under a layer of winter frost  in the early morning – like sunshine brilliantly glittering on matte-finished silver.

Christmas was coming.  After that, New Year’s Day, and then the deadline for Saddam Hussein to give up Kuwait. We knew that, barring a miracle, he wouldn’t. And then War, sometime in those days of the first week. Inevitable. The dark grey storm cloud on the horizon, flickering with flashes of interior lightning, blotting out the horizon and moving inexorably closer. One was made aware of it in dozens of ways, as the minutes, hours, days ticked by – even as the prosaic routines went on. My daughter had school every day, I cooked a family supper every evening, read to her at bed-time, shopped for groceries at the commissary, pressed a fresh blue uniform shirt every morning, mailed out Christmas cards, bought and wrapped presents. Because Christmas. One holds on to as many shreds and shards of normality as one can, when it comes to children.

These last few weeks, I have been feeling the same foreboding that I did, that holiday season more than twenty years ago. My daughter and I have a full schedule of weekend holiday markets and events. When we were setting up for the first of them, on a Friday afternoon, we came home to the news about the Islamic massacre in Paris. This week, as we were getting ready for another, it was the Islamic massacre of local government employees in San Bernardino. Next week … who knows? I am fairly certain that there will be another atrocity perpetrated by Daesh fanatics over the coming holiday season. It will occur in a place and at a time where it will all come as a horrifying surprise to the victims of it, to our national leadership cadre and to our major news outlets. The latter two will, of course, be horribly inconvenienced by having to throw some thin shreds of career-saving rationale or justification excusing such an unexpected event. This I know, as surely as I saw the deadline for military action in the Gulf inch closer and closer.

Merry Christmas, y’all.

 

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