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. 

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.

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.

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 say: good on them.

Apparently, Israel has assassinated a top Hamas official at a hotel in Dubai. Europe is trying to prosecute Israel for killing a terrorist that wasn't on a battlefield, but Europe is being Islamicized, and was anti-Semitic even before that, so their opinions don't count.

Well done, Israel.

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.

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.

Too late now, idiots.

Russia now fears that North Korea will start a nuclear war. Given that the whole North Korea/South Korea thing was a direct offshoot of the First Cold War, and that if not for Russian Communisim and their brothers in China, North Korea wouldn't be an issue right now, it serves them right to have to fear what they have wrought.

Especially since it's very likely that Japan will probably also go nuclear, out of self defense.

No one trusts the new POTUS, with his bowing, scraping, and ass kissing to vicious dictators the world over, and his scramble to re-label everything from terrorism to the conflict in the Middle East. Everyone believes that he'll duck and dodge, verbally bobbing and weaving, and refuse to deal with a nuclear attack.

I don't trust him not to adequately respond to a nuclear attack (i.e., declare war, with nothing but unconditional surrender and regime replacement, if not total annihilation). Not on South Korea. Not on Japan. Not on Israel. Nor even upon us.

Urgent, he says. Idiot.

President Obama has asked for more money. $83.4 billion--that's $83,400,000,000--for military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. He says it's urgent.

Urgent it may be, but he's missing a lot more that's just as urgent. For instance, he ignored North Korea's missile--I mean satellite launch. He threw Poland under the bus with the missile shield, and the USSR--sorry, I mean Russia--is now test-firing ICBMs. Iran is edging ever closer to becoming a nuclear power (even France is worried about that, even though Obama doesn't seem to be), and Obama's bowing and scraping to a foreign king (which implies that we are not soverign, and owe fealty to said Islamofacist ruler).

And he says the military request is urgent. More urgent is getting this asshole's majority revoked so that the reach of his idiocy is limited.

This is where we actually need "more power."

The United States Constitution clearly states that one of the main responsibilities of the United States federal government is maintaining the physical safety of the people. While it's a stretch to read that as the responsibility to impose a sin tax on things that aren't good for us (like cigarettes), it is not a stretch to read that as meaning that the United States federal government has a responsibility to meet and respond to military threats.

However, the federal government is falling down on that job. Seriously falling down on that job.

North Korea is preparing to launch a "satellite." In reality, the world is aware that that launch is a mask for a test of ICBM technology. That "satellite" could reach Hawaii. And our government is doing nothing about it.

Japan is threatening to shoot down the missile--er, satellite. I hope they do it, even though I hate--hate--that we're being forced to depend upon another government to keep us safe.

Remember, there are "rights" and "privileges."

What's the difference? A "right" is something all people have. We have the right to keep breathing, and the right to attempt to earn enough money to buy the things we need to have.

A "privilege" is something that others allow us to have. One very good example is the privilege to buy our choice of automobile (and if you don't think this is a "privilege," look at the way D.C. is yanking the automakers around with CAFE standards).

North Korea argues that they have the right to test-fire missiles. Oh, sorry--launch satellites. Sure they do. And the rest of the world has the right to shoot down whatever they try to launch.

Oh wait, that's a privilege, isn't it?

Russia's further attempts to weaken us

Russia has declared that they're taking a hard line with us. No surprise, there. Our current POTUS is no Regan when it comes to international relations.

They're selling missiles to Iran. No surprise there, given that they've decided to be belligerent with us again. After all, how long did we spend in a proxy war with the USSR? Who's the one in charge over there? Yeah, exactly.

To further weaken us, they're one of the prime movers with the idea of a world currency that isn't the dollar. While I don't blame them--not with current fiscal policies--this is intended, on their part, to be a blow to us.

We are in trouble. We're facing more, and more dangerous in the long term, enemies than we really saw under President Bush. It doesn't matter whether you want to argue that it's just because Bush ignored them or because Obama's looking to be a wimp--either way, we've got a problem.

God, don't we have perfect timing?

Our military decided that it was time to upgrade our nuclear weapons. Then, they discovered that we have a tiny problem. Insignificant, really, in the scheme of things.

The government labs have forgotten how to make critical parts.

That's right. Our government cannot remember how--cannot seem to find any documentation on it, and claim to have simply not kept records on the process--to make components critical to the upgrades.

And what wonderful timing they had, too. Not only is Iran fighting to acquire nuclear weapons, but The People's Democratic Republic of Korea (make note of all the Orwellian Newspeak in that--it's Communist North Korea) is threatening that they'll attack anyone who shoots down their "satellite" that no one is sure will actually be a satellite.

Our timing in discovering that we lack critical information and skills absolutely could not come at a better time.

Can somebody explain the logic behind this?

And it has to be logic, because I don't understand why in the world anyone would want to help their enemies.

Hillary Clinton has scolded Israel for not making sure that humanitarian aid gets to Gaza quick enough.

Gaza's main ambition is to wipe Israel from the map. Even in times of declared truce, they still try. Women and children dance in the streets when the rockets hit anywhere near their targets--or even if the rockets don't hit near their targets, and just kill a bunch of people.

Why expect Israel to help those people? Why do we try to help those who danced in the streets in celebration of the towers falling on September 11?

The Canadian lawyer/human rights activist that commented in my post on the UNCRC on Wednesday called me racist. Probably for the post directly below the one he commented in. He missed the post that explained why my attitude isn't racist--so I'll summarize again, here.

I'm not racist. I don't hate race. I hate actions. I hate ideology.

Gaza's acts, and Gaza's ideology, rather than Gaza's race, is what prompts me to cheer when Israel issues a smackdown, and to wonder why Israel would even consider helping them back up while they're reloading.