Food for thought...

One of my students from last semester posted something interesting on Facebook:

"If a jet is shot down, then how can they consider it a plane crash?"

Good question.  The answer is both simple, and complex.

The simple answer: language shapes perception.  If they keep calling it a crash on the news channels and evening news, then people will eventually forget that a jet carrying passengers--including American civilians--on the way to an AIDS conference was purposely shot down by a ground-to-air missile.

The complex answer is to the unstated, but assumed, question of why are they doing this?

Why, indeed. 

Language does control perception.  "Plane crash" is much less threatening than "jet shot down."  Plane crashes happen all the time: it's an accident.  A tragedy.  Pilot error, or mechanical stress.  A missile hitting a passenger jet, on the other hand, is a deliberate act of war. 

And it's a war we're not capable of starting, much less fighting and winning. 

Part of that is because of the way spending has tipped.  Since Vietnam and Johnson's tenure as POTUS, national spending has gone from being majority what was listed in the U.S. Constitution as federal responsibilities (infrastructure and defense) to more than half being spent on welfare programs, both corporate and individual.  Without a major shift in mentality from "gimme, gimme, gimme" to "Oh shit, we all gonna die," we will not be able to free up the funding to pay for what's needed to stomp those fuckers flat. 

So, our illustrious leaders tell the media to shift perceptions.  "Plane crash," indeed.

The other issue is with the "stomp the fuckers flat." 

We haven't done that since August of 1945.  There has not been a single use of overwhelming force going in and making the other side concede that they have been decisively defeated since we fucked Japan with a sandpaper condom without lube.  There is no political will to win, and honestly hasn't been since then.

Not even after 9/11/01.  Otherwise, we would have gone in with overwhelming force and destroyed any semblance of culture and/or government everywhere in every Islamofascist-controlled country, and taken over for the next ten generations.  Since we didn't do that, we have lost.  And they're forcing us to bleed ourselves to death.

We are overextended.  Thanks to the policies put in place by Truman (full credit, here: I understand why he didn't want to push too hard, and have to use nukes again) that prevented full victory in Korea.  That set the precedent for the flat-out loss in Vietnam.  And for what's going on in the Middle East, now that the POTUS has decided that the job there is done (it isn't, and won't be, until every Muslim over the age of two is dead). 

With the lack of funding for the military (which is mandated by the U.S. Constitution) because of the welfare funding for everything else (which is forbidden by the U.S. Constitution), we cannot simply field more units.  Without the political will to win, we can't stomp the old fuckers flat before we move on to stomp these new fuckers flat. 

And so...we have the media working their asses off to slant our perceptions, and cover the asses of their political masters. 

Maybe not the final step, but getting close.

The KGB--er, FSB--has regained its former power, thanks to Putin's puppet.

I'm sure Dear Leader is watching and taking notes.

This could be nothing.

It could also be definite cause for the response it garnered.

Russia's fucking retarded.

I know they want to cripple us and distract us from whatever it is they're trying to do. I understand that. I understand that they're currently waging war against us--again--by proxy, especially in the Middle East.

That's fine. I get that. But I think they're being incredibly short-sighted in the way they're going about it.

What they don't seem to understand is that, once they've armed the Islamofacists in Iran and Syria with nuclear weapons, we may be target number one, but they're target number two.

Nice diversionary tactic.

Dimitri Medvedev, after following in his puppet master's footsteps in praising Stalin and his USSR for the past two years, has said something new:

"The Soviet Union was a very complicated state and if we speak honestly the regime that was built in the Soviet Union... cannot be called anything other than totalitarian. ...Unfortunately, this was a regime where elementary rights and freedoms were suppressed."

I'd give him a lot more credit, were it not that under his and his puppet master's leadership, Russia was heading directly down the same path. As it is, I suspect it's far more likely that Russia's current totalitarian leaders are trying to direct the world's attention away from what they're doing now.

Self-preservation

The Ukraine has reversed itself on what it claims to believe about the Soviet Union: no longer do they (quite correctly) claim that the Communist leadership deliberately starved their people to thin difficult to control populations.

After we hung them out to dry when Dear Leader became the democratically elected of the People's Democratic Republic of the United States of America, that may well have been the best call they could have made for self-preservation. Especially after what happened to Poland. And after the USSR--sorry, Russia, gave the KGB--er, the FSB--back its old powers.

See? It's more than just me thinking that Russia was responsible.

A Polish Member of Parliament (MP) thinks so, too. And this guy's take makes the crash just that little bit more suspicious.

Suspicious.

Most of the Polish leadership has been killed in a plane crash. On Russian soil. It's been blamed on fog and pilot error.

The timing and placement of this is quite suspicious, in my opinion. First of all, the trip was in commemoration of the slaughter of Poles by the Russians in WWII. It was on Russian soil. They've put Vladimir Putin in charge of investigating the causes of the crash.

This is the nation that poisoned a defector with a difficult-to-extract radioactive isotope, thallium. You know, something obvious. Designed to send a message.

This is the nation that poisoned a man running for president of one of its former satellite countries, for fear that he would try to remove his country from their oppressive sphere of influence by joining NATO. Which he tried. And failed.

The description of the crash is that the pilot was warned off, continued to try to land, suddenly accelerated, and somehow lost contact with the tower. There were no survivors.

Something is very rotten in Denmark.

We're gonna get nuked.

Sarah Palin is entirely correct. After Dear Leader unilaterally decided to cut our nuclear armament and declared nuclear retaliation off the table, Iran came out and said that they'll retaliate if we threaten them. And that includes sanctions.

And Dear Leader said that Palin was inexperienced with nuclear strategy. I cannot believe Dear Leader thought that his stated policies would help preserve our national safety. That takes a level of naivete that's frightening in the office he holds.

Really? Does that mean I can put him in jail for something I find offensive?

Sean Penn is not a bad actor. He is, however, an idiot that obviously has not read the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, or the Bill of Rights. Nor does he use what little fluff he's got between his ears to reason out that, should the First Amendment not apply to everybody, it doesn't apply to anybody, and that he could just as easily find himself jailed for offending conservatives under a conservative president.

Thanks be to God for our Founding Fathers' foresight in forbidding our federal government from abridging our right to voice our opinions (and state facts) in the political arena.

Chavez is, in fact, a dictator. What's more, he's a Communist dictator in Russia's back pocket.

I want some of what they're smoking.

According to the New York Times, there's a debate raging between the sane scientists who actually follow the scientific method without falsifying data, and those who are screaming that the world's gonna keep heating up until it catches fire, and that the current winter weather is only indicative of global warming.

Really?

Last summer did have a good, hot spell (but it wasn't as hot as the previous summer's, and didn't last as long); however, last summer was shorter and cooler than the summer before.

And there are record breaking amounts of snow in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; in Baltimore, Maryland; in Washington, D.C.; in Chicago, Ohio; and Dallas, Texas will be seeing snow tonight. The Cheyenne River Indian Reservation has been snowed under so heavily that it's been effectively cut off, and will likely see more deaths as a percentage of population than the other areas combined (the initial press release is dated Feb 1, and is currently about a third of the way down the page).

Human-caused global warming my ass. The earth goes through approximately sixty-year cycles, thirty years warm, thirty years cold. We were in one of the warming cycles for most of my life, and there was nothing anybody could do to change it. We're heading into the cold half of the cycle, and there's nothing anybody can do to change it.

Shut up. Just...shut up. Don't dump a crap load of taxes on us designed to force us into "green" behavior. We're already doing everything a reasonable nation can expect to do. Any more and we'll be crippled.

Unless, like a character in a book once implied, that there is no difference between our modern "greens" and the former Russian Reds.

In which case, that's precisely what they want.

Wrong way to go about it.

Iran has "test-fired" an upgraded version of its most advanced missile. It's got a range that would let it reach Israel, and parts of Europe,* and the "test" is supposed to frighten the civilized world out of sanctions and/or attacks to prevent Iran from going nuclear.

What I suspect this "test" will accomplish is to provoke Israel into going in and taking out Iran's newly-acquired nuclear power plants,** as well as any technology that might permit them to rebuild them, or any military technology that might allow them to strike Israel. In other words, their attempt at deterrence from attacking is likely to turn into more of a motivator to attack.

*Boy, the former USSR satellites that our Dear Leader screwed over on the missile defense shield system must be pretty pissed at us, right now. So much for being the one to restore our reputation overseas.

**Not so ironically, the reason our Dear Leader screwed over some of our staunchest European allies is because Russia, the very nation that provided Iran with its nuclear technology, protested the missile defense shield being set up in Poland and the Ukraine. Russia claimed to believe that the missile defense shield was being put in place to defend against them attacking and re-taking their former, now independent territories. Given that Iran seems to be becoming a puppet state in the new Cold War, that claim now makes sense.

No wonder Russia didn't like the anti-ballistic missile shield!

Russia's been "simulating" a nuclear attack on Poland.

So much for Obama being our one and only chance to mend relations with allies.

What, do they have an invasion timetable or something?

Because, Obama is an idiot. He has decided to pull out of the missile defense shield without first warning Poland and the Ukraine* (though he denies that Russian belligerence has anything to do with that). He has decided that it's a good idea to further slash our nuclear arsenal, thereby lessening its utility as a deterrence.

And it's still not enough to make Mother Russia happy.

What, does Uncle Sam have to spread his own cheeks for Mother Russia's giant, unlubricated, black rubber strap on?

*I always thought it was rude to pull out without warning the one being screwed that things were about to splatter all over them.

Broken oaths

The elected president of the United States of America is fully unfit for the job the people selected him to do. He has, himself, said that the Constitution--the one he swore to uphold and protect--was a fundamentally flawed document.

Can't argue with him, there. It did permit for the slow takeover of the federal government by enemies of the United States that talked a good line.

He has not done anything to protect us from our enemies, either foreign or domestic. In fact, I'd say he and his cronies are our biggest domestic enemies.

And now, he's decided that it's not in our best interest to set up the missile shield that we'd negotiated to base in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Ukraine. That it is, in fact, best that we not pursue long-range missile defense, and instead focus on short- and mid-range missile defense.

To put the cherry on top of this heinously bad decision (or perhaps to point up why he made it), he announced this on the seventieth anniversary of Russia's invasion of Poland.

He has set us up to be nuked by our sworn enemies in the Middle East, and for Russia to reclaim the sphere of influence that it once had. He has made this country, and every citizen in it, fundamentally less safe.

Vladimir Putin is laughing. So is Mahmoud Ahmadinajad.

Centuries ago, such oathbreaking would have been met with the people evicting the leader from power by any means necessary. That tradition, like many others, was eliminated by the French.

I'd say this was all Biden's fault, if it weren't more than just us having issues.

Russia's stalking us. Guess they didn't like being called an empty threat.

Heh. Medevev should take notice.

The Marx brothers would be better on foreign policy than the clown in the Oval Office.

Not only does he remain silent on North Korea's flying the bird at us on our Independence Day, but he screws up by the numbers with Russia.

First of all, he makes the same mistake Wilson made with the League of Nations: he partnered with a foreign power to create a treaty that will reduce the nuclear armaments held by both the United States and Russia. This is a huge misstep on two fronts. First of all, the stupid idealist forgot that creating and signing treaties is not among his powers as enumerated by the United States Constitution (which he says is a deeply flawed document--guess this shows part of why he thinks that). Second of all, he trusts Russia to hold up their end of a bargain, when they've demonstrated, time and time again, that they are our enemies.

The other FUBAR is on a level with his 57 states gaffe: he referred to Prime Minister Putin as President. Now, granted: Putin does still hold the reigns of power; however, he holds them through his ventriloquist's puppet, Medevev.

Not just a spoiled, petulant child, then, but a spoiled, petulant, idiot child.

Utterly unsurprising.

And I bet that, had Iran's president been toppled by the people, just as Honduras has shed their dictator, Obama would have protested that, too. After all, communists must stick together. Or else each shall hang separately, strung up by their own oppressed.

We're the threat?

Chavez is on crack if he thinks that the United States with it's current pussy CinC is a threat.