On or about 13:33 hours Feb 13th 2010, a Chinese SU-27 fighter and a Taiwanese F-16 collide over the Taiwan Strait.
The incident spirals out of control when the Chinese do what they always do in a crisis: blame the other guy. Demonstrations erupt in Beijing. Protesters demand that the Communist Party confront Taiwan and Great Satan. "When will China finally stand up?" read the signs.
Washington scrambles as Beijing readies for war.
Sound scary? Hold up - as the daemoneoconically "America's Interests first and foremost" guy Ambassador Bolton reminds us - the last few years for China has been a wild trip!
"Look at China's previous century: the collapse of the last imperial dynasty, the rise and repeated fall of the Republic of China, internal chaos among belligerent warlords, invasion and subjugation by Japan, civil war between Communists and Nationalists, Mao's dictatorship – which brought two of world history's greatest tragedies, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution – and then the 1989 repression at Tiananmen Square, just for starters."
Essentially - China is really, really fragile: Carnegie's Dr Susan Shirk let's out all the hot! wicked gossip and juicy details:
"Party leadership is hemmed in by threats to its stability: a rapidly aging population, the rise of the Internet, privatization of the economy, a widening gap between urban rich and rural poor, a restive population fed up with corruption, pollution that not only sickens but kills, mounting unemployment in an economy that needs to grow 7 percent annually just to provide jobs for 25 million new people entering the workforce.
"All around them," Shirk contends, "the leaders see new social forces unleashed by economic reforms that could subvert the regime." Moreover, Shirk describes a regime -- half Mafia, half corporate board -- so obsessed with staying in power that it is ill-equipped to deal with these challenges.
In a country where communist ideology is dead and a dog-eat-dog form of capitalism is ascendant, you'd think economic interests would be supreme. That's not the case, Shirk argues.
After the crackdown on student-led protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the military and security services gained even more power than they already had in a society built on Chairman Mao's maxim that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."
Force-fed to China's people through programs such as the "Patriotic Education Campaign" (for all college students), nationalism nurtures "popular resentments against Japan and America and an expectation that Taiwan would soon be reunified," Shirk writes.
Look at China's reaction to the food, toy and toothpaste scandals created by shoddy products: Instead of acknowledging the concerns of Western consumers, the Chinese Communist Party's propaganda organs have gone into attack mode, branding these worries as a campaign to isolate and weaken China.
The problem, Shirk says, is that this form of nationalism has "boxed the CCP and its leaders into a corner." With reactions like these, she asks, "how can they stabilize relations with these important countries on which China's economic growth, and its political stability, depend?"
Pic - "Peoples Liberation Air Force is ever vigilant against capitalistic, hegemonic designs and chicanery"
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Fragile!
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Veteran's Day!
Conscripting an army of free men, America deployed 2 million troops to save Europe from a Prussian military machine that was the world's best - until they hooked up with the Great Satan in combat. Places like Chateau-Thierry and Bellau Wood decisively crushed Teutonicism. Deutschland screamed "GOD! PLEASE! STOP!"
An extensive remixed v2.0 released 27 years later as Veteran's Day.
Americans should go down on their knees and thank God Almighty for raising up this laughing race of freemen.
Americans energetically pursue commerce, science, medicine, technology and the arts. When these designs are halted by conflict, they energetically pursue absolute, decisive, and ruthless destruction of their enemies. After visiting violence and securing victory they energetically return to the pursuit of commerce, science, medicine, technology and the arts.
An excellent example of the concept of service to something larger than self became a personal epiphany 2 years ago, at an especial place and a chance meeting with an ancient Iwo Jima survivor.
17 yo, still on the farm when the horrible news came that the neighbor boy had just been killed in Italy. Staring sacrifice in the face, this living embodiment of American Exceptionalism had to take his homie's "... place in the line..." Ma and Pa agreed and the preacher drove him to Nashville to enlist. Less than a year later, this Marine fought in place in the line at the hallowed bloodsoaked Iwo Jima.
His name is legion, for there are thousands like him. From Bunker Hill to Chickamauga, from Midway to Fallujah.
America's veterans put their lives on hold, deploy overseas, incinerate our enemies, return home and continue to build this awesome place.
America and the world can never thank ya'll enough.
Pic - "Thank You All" by ScOtT dUnGaN
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Teuffel Hunden BDay!
Celebrating a 234 year old birthday, the United States Marine Corps is an American treasure. "Semper Fidelis" (Always Faithful)) is especially sweet since her 1st foreign debut centuries ago. In a remakable twist of deja vu, a very young America was faced with a desperate choice - pay ransom cash to an 8th century caliphate or undertake to launch a war thousands of miles away on the shores of North Africa.
Diplomacy was the first choice and Great Satan's Thomas Jefferson himself met with a duly commissioned rep of the 'Barbary Coast'. His report to Congress is totally familiar to Americans in the New Millenium:
"The ambassador answered us that the right was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mohammedist who should be slain in battle was sure to go to paradise."
Jefferson used the Marine Corps to grant them their very wish. A task force led by the USS Enterprise stormed into the 8th century and defeated the Mohammedists in Great Satan's very first regime change.
Great Satan's enemies have learned the hard way that the Marine Corps is very often the piercing tip of the American spear. Like Kaiser Wilhelm's vaunted Prussian elites who admiringly christened the Americans at Bellau Wood - das Teuffel Hunden - 'Devil Dogs'.
Sweet irony that Deutschland surrendered on the day after the Marines 143rd birthday
10 November 1775 to 10 November 2009. Always Faithful indeed. Happy Birthday USMC.
The Marine Anchor, Eagle and Globe is a wonderful reminder to America's friends and enemies that Great Satan built the modern world.
And she knows her way around.
Art "Teufel Hunden" by Dean Forward
Palestinian Sympathy Fatigue II
Well, well -- wail! News that the so nice - he be nom d'guerr'd twice! Abu Mazen/M'Moud Abbas -- the President of the West Bank and the rocket rich Strip turf (collectively called Palestine) is ready to jettison the escape pod and high tail it for his super swanky beach front villa in Q'Tar.
Saw that one a mile away. Just like the happy happy fact that HAMAS couldn't get re elected as grave diggers in the Strip now.
Both Satans' seem to look at the fast creation of a magical Nakbah free nation state of Palestine regardless of the Palestinians’ unwillingness to accept Little Satan's right to exist as the primary aim of their Palestinian policies.
Hip and haunch with calls for the establishment of a Palestinian state seem to actually increase in direct proportion to the radicalization of Palestinian society:
The more radical Palestinian society becomes, the hotter the hot wicked desire to grant it sovereign statehood.
Sovereign statehood and Palestinians have never really seemed to hook up. Like their Arab brethern, Palestinians have consistently sour mouthed that Little Satan's property posse that 'occupied' precious Palestinian turf with an amazing immodestly, lack of restraint and blitzkrieg tactics is the main problem.
Yet - predictably enough -- Palestinian Sympathy Fatigue may be the new (same as the old) thang:
"There is no romance, no sex, no excitement, no urgency — not even a sense of importance anymore."
Essentially because -- there is precious little in it for Great Satan. Would creating the world's 58th and 59th mohammedist or Arab League's 23rd and 24th nation state sweetly usher in a new error free era of peace, tolerance and get with it ness?
Would Little Satan be able to host Great Satan's Air Force or Teufel Hunden at state of the art bases, kassernes or cantonments? Would Palestine? And what would a future Palestine look like anyway? Yet another tribalistic kleptocracy or a really cool version of an Arabic Little Satan - complete with real elections, free press, consenual gov, indy judiciaries and egalitarian concerns?
"The way for the Palestinians to get a state is to go ahead and build it. If and when the institutions are there and functioning, from police and courts to a parliament, negotiations will reflect that fact.
"The argument that settling the borders and removing Little Satan's troops must come first is a path to failure. For one thing, Little Satan will not and should not leave until it is clear that the West Bank can be policed by Palestinians and that the region will not be a source of terrorism, as Gaza and South Lebanon became when Little Satan left there.
"No conference and no treaty can provide such a guarantee; only functioning Palestinian police forces that are already fighting and defeating terror can do so.
"It would press the Arab states to help real live Palestinians in the West Bank, rather than the imaginary Palestinians--all either bold jihadists or desperate widows and orphans--whom they see on Al Jazeera.
"In fact, except for occasional visits by Jordanians and Egyptians (who have peace treaties with Little Satan already), top Arab officials haven't a clue what's going on in the West Bank, for they've never been there. Not one head of state or government or foreign minister, not once.
"Organize a tour; take a few princes and foreign ministers to Ramallah, Jenin and Jericho where they would find that they are neither in Somalia nor some heroic battle scene against Zionist oppressors.
As Palestine's dual d'nom'd daddy says: "In West Bank we have a good reality… the people are living a normal life.”
Despite Goldstone Report, Willie P or rowdy rocketeers -- nearly everyone in free societies (except for maybe the MOST depraved Realist on the planet) is suffering from Palestinian Sympathy Fatigue.
Sweet!
Pic - "Don't wanna be accursed! Won't the last girl or the 1st to tell me i should go str8 2 Hale"
Monday, November 9, 2009
Relic
Measuring 1,300 meters on Mühlen street, between the Oberbaum bridge and the Ostbanhof station you'll find the longest section still standing of the Berlin Wall, also known as East Side Gallery in the Friedrichshain district.
The Wall was erected in 1961 because more than 2.6 million Ost Deutschers escaped to West Berlin or West Germany from 1949 to 1961 (total population of East Germany was about 17 million!).
Great Satan's 41 was on hand to reassure allies ("I like Germany so much I think there should be two of them!" France's Mitterand) and stare down Soviets who really didn't have a choice in the matter - at least without igniting a Götterdämmerung that would leave Europa as barren and desolate as the surface of the moon.
41 reflects on Wall and the relics:
"The international scene has changed enormously in the last two decades, in large measure because there is no more superpower confrontation. That is the enduring historical legacy of the Fall of the Wall: it set in motion those events that would lead to the reunification of Germany less than one year later – a day that marks, in my mind, the day the Cold War ended.
"The events of 1989 began a new era in the history of Germany, Europe, the Atlantic Alliance, and indeed, the entire world. To be sure, new challenges and responsibilities have emerged.
"It is a world that is all the more hopeful because over the last two decades, a united Germany has taken its place as a force for peace and stability in world affairs, NATO has renewed its purpose, and the members of the Atlantic Alliance have become even more vital partners in leadership.
"As we celebrate this year’s historic anniversaries and look forward to a shared future of hope and promise, may God continue to bless the people of Germany and the entire Transatlantic Community.
“That stark and searing symbol of conflict and cold war was proof that no wall is ever strong enough to strangle the human spirit, that no wall can ever crush a nation's soul.”
Pic "Checkpoint Charlie"
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Re Unification Day
"The greatest credit for liberation of Eastern Europe lies with common people whose thirst for freedom survived decades of repression under Soviet rule – ordinary warriors like Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose Nobel Prize-winning writings documented the horrors of Soviet labor camps.
"They are the ones who led the mass exodus from East Germany to West, who tuned in to the broadcasts of Radio Free Europe against the objections of their government, who shed the shackles of oppression in pursuit of the ideals of liberty and prosperity offered by a free society.
"The brave actions of these impatient patriots – matched by the bold transformative visions of Western policymakers – ensured that freedom would triumph over tyranny.
"Today, a new kind of ideological struggle emerges, one that finds freedom’s enemies in the form of dictators who persecute religious and ethnic minorities, in the form of tyrants who cling to artificial symbols of legitimacy, in the form of terrorists who seek to slaughter innocent civilians and seek to destroy civilized ways of life.
"We must marshal the institutions of the Cold War era, like the NATO alliance, to help meet these 21st-century threats.
"And, perhaps most importantly, we must never surrender the bold vision that advances the goals of freedom and democracy around the world.
Dr Condoleezza Rice
Pic "Holidays In The Sun"
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Coup d'état le Militare: How to Stage a Military Coup
While there may not really be a Coup School (as far as we know! ) there is a how to book.
The coup remains the single most common form of regime change throughout the world. 14 alone attempted in 2004! The gov targeted by a coup attempt could be democratically elected, a long-standing dictatorship, or nothing more than a junta putsch put in place by the previous month's coup.
The motivation will always be lust for power, patriotism, greed or exploitation. It is usually a combination of power, greed, exploitation and patriotism.
"How To Stage A Military Coup: From Planning To Execution" by David Hebditch and Ken Connor is a sexyful interesting and thought-provoking exploration of the military empowerment of obtaining command and control through the exercise of military force or the threat of such force.
Intro'ing a detailed and in-depth understanding (which Connor has 1st hand experience) of the act known as a military coup or coup d'etat, this worldy tome is an outstanding and unique study of what may be frequently and sweetly used against various unstable regimes throughout the world.
Highly recommended to military cats, students of politics, internat'l studies, and the utilization of military power with a role in establishing and/or overthrowing regimes.
Ultimately the book is a work of military history and illuminates this rarely talked about unsavoury element of the military experience that is fortunately outside the modern history of Western democracies.
Vital, because it's referring to the human experience of these coups, not high-blown non profit academic brainiac jawflapping full of theories or wishful interpretation, and still retains a certain dark humor.
With tons of soldiers serving overseas from legit democratic govs, understanding military coups is vital not only to protect our own force but also to promote respect for legitimate gov in our allied forces.
This Coup How To should be read by military cats to prep for the challenges of operating overseas and for some good entertainment.
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