Mood:  irritated

In a WorldNetDaily article, 

http://wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=76758

Aaron Klein revealed the level to which the sixties-seventies Left and more recent radicals support Obama, and the connections between them.

"The names of four former top leaders of the Weathermen terrorist organization are listed as signatories on an online petition calling for an "independent grassroots effort" to help strengthen Sen. Barack Obama's campaign.

The petition was initiated by Progressives for Obama, an independent organization acting to ensure the Illinois senator's election.

Progressives includes among its ranks many former members of the 1960s radical organization Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, from which the Weathermen splintered, as well as current and former members of other radical organizations, such as the Communist Party USA and the Black Radical Congress.

"We agree that Barack Obama is our best option for president in 2008, and that an independent grassroots effort can help strengthen his campaign," states the online petition. "It can also strengthen the mandate for his programs for stopping war, promoting global justice and securing our rights, liberties, and economic well-being.

Among the names signed onto the petition are former Weathermen leaders Howard Machtinger, Jeff Jones, Steve Tappis and Mark Rudd.

Machtinger was a Weathermen founder and was co-author of the terror group's original mission statement, which called for "revolutionaries within the United States to wage a 'people's war' and attack from within. The government would fall and 'world communism' eventually would be instituted."

Jones, according to his own website, was "elected, along with (Weathermen terrorist) Bill Ayers and Mark Rudd, to the SDS national office. Then, in the spring of 1970, he disappeared. As a leader of the Weather Underground, Jeff evaded an intense FBI manhunt for more than a decade. In 1981, they finally got him. Twenty special agents battered down the door of the Bronx apartment where he was living with his wife and four-year-old son."

Jones' site says he traveled to Cambodia in 1966 to meet with high-level leaders of the anti-American National Liberation Front. In 1967 and 1968 he served as an SDS regional organizer for New York City.

Contacted by WND, Jones said he is not involved in any Obama advocacy.

Tappis was one of 11 people who signed the original Weathermen statement, which was infamously titled, "You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows."

Rudd, a petition supporter as well as a main signatory to the Progressives for Obama group, was one of the main founders of the Weathermen terrorist organization. A biography published on his website explains Rudd worked to form the Weathermen as a radical alternative to the SDS and for white Americans to eject their "white skin privilege" and begin "armed struggle" against the U.S. government.

Rudd went underground in 1970, when a bomb exploded in a townhouse in Greenwich Village in New York City, killing three of his comrades. He lived for seven and a half years in hiding as a fugitive, finally surrendering in 1977, facing only low-level state charges after federal charges against Weathermen leaders had been dropped. He resurfaced as a teacher in New Mexico...

...All former Weathermen leaders who signed the pro-Obama petition worked closely for years with Weathermen terrorist William Ayers, whose association with Obama has generated controversy for the presidential candidate.

The Weathermen took responsibility for bombing U.S. governmental buildings in the 1970s."

But Obama's grassroots support doesn't end with four old terrorists from the '60s and '70s.  No, these guys are linked to a long list of "Progressives" (PC-speak for "extreme radical leftists"), and (predictably) a group called "Progressives for Obama" now exists.

Again, from Klein's article:

"Trevor Louden of the New Zeal blog commented, "Clearly Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, are not the only former Weathermen backing Obama. Add their old comrades Jeff Jones, Howie Machtinger, Mark Rudd and even Steve Tappis to the mix and you are starting to get beyond coincidence. That former terrorists are working with Marxist groups to elect Barack Obama is beyond doubt."

Progressives for Obama, which initiated the online petition, first published its creed in March in the Nation magazine, explaining the organization descended from the "proud tradition of independent social movements that have made America a more just and democratic country."

Progressives for Obama stated it can help the Illinois senator's ascent to highest office by contributing funds, using the Internet to reach "millions of swing voters;" defending Obama against negative attacks and making its agenda known at the Democratic National Convention.

"Progressives can make a difference in close primary races like Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Oregon and Puerto Rico, and in the November general election," the founders state.

The founders stress it is crucial to form a grassroots leftist movement to ensure Obama does not stray too far to the center, claiming other grassroots liberal movements have successfully pressured U.S. presidents into creating new policy:

"It was the industrial strikes and radical organizers in the 1930s who pushed Roosevelt to support the New Deal. It was the civil rights and student movements that brought about voting rights legislation under Lyndon Johnson and propelled Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy's antiwar campaigns. It was the original Earth Day that led Richard Nixon to sign environmental laws.

And it will be the Obama movement that will make it necessary and possible to end the war in Iraq, renew our economy with a populist emphasis, and confront the challenge of global warming. We should not only keep the pressure on [Obama] but also connect the issues that Obama has made central to his campaign into an overarching progressive vision."

The group was founded by four individuals with ties to extremist groups:

• Tom Hayden, a former state senator who was a founder and principal organizer of the SDS.  Discover the Networks notes Hayden, previously married to actress Jane Fonda, traveled many times to North Vietnam, Czechoslovakia and Paris to strategize with communist North Vietnamese and Viet Cong leaders on how to defeat America's anti-communist efforts.
  
  
• Bill Fletcher, a former Maoist and current leader of Democratic Socialists of America or DSA. The New Zeal blog notes Fletcher was also a founder of the Black Radical Congress, closely linked to the Communist Party USA, which advocated for "progressive social justice, racial equality and economic justice goals within the U.S.
  
  
• Barbara Ehenreich, an honorary chairman of DSA who was formerly active in antiwar movements in which some notorious radicals took part.
  
  
• Actor Danny Glover, a member of the Black Students Union, who has visited Venezuela, making guest appearances on President Hugo Chavez's television and radio talk show. He reportedly has accepted loans of about $20 million from the Venezuelan government to make a movie about a Haitian revolutionary leader.

The Progressives for Obama webmaster is Carl Davidson, a former vice president of the Students for a Democratic Society, who has traveled to Cuba to meet with Fidel Castro.

The signatories and endorsers of the Obama activist group, listed on the Progressives website, include scores of well known communist, socialist and anarchist activists and former SDS members."

Any questions?

I have a few questions, mainly for the press:

- You guys have the resources to hunt down stories about the time Sarah Palin's daughter cut History class when they were explaining that slavery is a bad thing.  Why don't you have the resources to look into Obama's wide web of support among left-wing extremists?

- When, exactly, are the links between Hugo Chavez, the leftist dictator of Venezuela, whose anti-American rhetoric escalates with the number of guns, fighters and warships he buys from Russia with that Citgo gas money, and Obama's "progressive" supporters going to be "news"?

- And when are the outrageous statements and actions of the pro-Obama left going to see the light of day?

- When are you people going to publicize Obama's legal (and illegal) attempts to silence the NRA and intimidate TV and radio stations who carry NRA's anti-Obama advertisements? 

- Does anyone else see the irony of the press using their freedom of speech to misrepresent and hide the facts to help elect a President who got into office by using thuggish and coercive legal assaults on the press when they dared be critical of him?

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 9:23 PM MDT

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Mood:  incredulous

The last time so many people who tyrannize their people endorsed a candidate for the Presidency of the United States, it was 1976.

The American press were competing to see who could throw the slowest grounders to Jimmy Carter to make him look as though he hadn't just come out of a prefrontal lobotomy.  And their anointed one got elected despite being a sanctimonious idiot.

If the past is any indication and he's elected, Barack Obama will be Jimmy Carter warmed over — it will seem like we’ve time travelled back to the four years during which American influence and national morale plummeted to an unprecedented low.

So how is Barack Hussein Obama doing with the thugs of the world?   Is he everything these buggers hoped he would be?

Fidel Castro, in a column for Cuba’s Granma newspaper, wrote that Obama is “the most progressive candidate to the U.S. presidency.”  (Nothing gets past Fidel...  )

In mid-April, Hamas adviser Ahmed Yousef told WorldNetDaily “We like Mr. Obama, and we hope that he will win the elections."

Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejihad told Spain’s El Pais newspaper he didn’t believe Obama would be elected, but that he wouldn’t have a problem meeting with him if he were.  (In the first part of that statement, Mr. Ahmadinejihad showed an unusual contact with reality, for him.) 

On March 25, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez told foreign correspondents that relations with Washington, D.C, would worsen if McCain were elected. So I guess he’s endorsing Obama too.  By the way, Chavez has been giving big abrazos and $20 million of Citgo gasoline profits to actor Danny Glover, who is one of the leaders of Progressives for Obama.   More on those people at the bottom of this post.

Emir Nasrallah, who runs Hezbollah (or, as its allies in the working press call it, "the Lebanese Resistance") is also an Obama man. 

Of course, Obama is on record
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.1308/pub_detail.asp
as saying that Hezbollah (which kidnapped and murdered Israeli soldiers in an unprovoked attack, then bombed civilians in northern Israel with Iranian-built Qassam rockets) and HAMAS (which has sponsored countless acts of terrorism, as has Hezbollah) have "legitimate claims." 

__________

That was just the foreign enemies of the United States of America.  Thanks to Obama's friends in the American Left, a surprising number of whom live in Chicago, we have internal enemies as well as implacable external enemies whose idea the "hundred year war" is.  Anyone who thinks McCain came up with that idea is a moron.

Unsurprisingly, many of these people are also Obama supporters.  After all, the Silver Shirts thought very highly of Hitler. 

In a WorldNetDaily article, 

Aaron Klein showed that William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn weren't the only SDS Weatherman terrorists to endorse Barack Obama (I submit that holding several parties to introduce Obama to all of their friends in Chicago politics is an endorsement and a definite disproof of the defense that Obama and Ayers only knew each other from their membership on the board of the same charitable organization - an organization whose "charitable work" consists almost entirely of left-wing political activity).

"The names of four former top leaders of the Weathermen terrorist organization are listed as signatories on an online petition calling for an "independent grassroots effort" to help strengthen Sen. Barack Obama's campaign.

The petition was initiated by Progressives for Obama, an independent organization acting to ensure the Illinois senator's election.

Progressives includes among its ranks many former members of the 1960s radical organization Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, from which the Weathermen splintered, as well as current and former members of other radical organizations, such as the Communist Party USA and the Black Radical Congress.

"We agree that Barack Obama is our best option for president in 2008, and that an independent grassroots effort can help strengthen his campaign," states the online petition. "It can also strengthen the mandate for his programs for stopping war, promoting global justice and securing our rights, liberties, and economic well-being.

Among the names signed onto the petition are former Weathermen leaders Howard Machtinger, Jeff Jones, Steve Tappis and Mark Rudd.

Machtinger was a Weathermen founder and was co-author of the terror group's original mission statement, which called for "revolutionaries within the United States to wage a 'people's war' and attack from within. The government would fall and 'world communism' eventually would be instituted."

Jones, according to his own website, was "elected, along with (Weathermen terrorist) Bill Ayers and Mark Rudd, to the SDS national office. Then, in the spring of 1970, he disappeared. As a leader of the Weather Underground, Jeff evaded an intense FBI manhunt for more than a decade. In 1981, they finally got him. Twenty special agents battered down the door of the Bronx apartment where he was living with his wife and four-year-old son."

Jones' site says he traveled to Cambodia in 1966 to meet with high-level leaders of the anti-American National Liberation Front. In 1967 and 1968 he served as an SDS regional organizer for New York City.

Contacted by WND, Jones said he is not involved in any Obama advocacy.

Tappis was one of 11 people who signed the original Weathermen statement, which was infamously titled, "You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows."

Rudd, a petition supporter as well as a main signatory to the Progressives for Obama group, was one of the main founders of the Weathermen terrorist organization. A biography published on his website explains Rudd worked to form the Weathermen as a radical alternative to the SDS and for white Americans to eject their "white skin privilege" and begin "armed struggle" against the U.S. government.

Rudd went underground in 1970, when a bomb exploded in a townhouse in Greenwich Village in New York City, killing three of his comrades. He lived for seven and a half years in hiding as a fugitive, finally surrendering in 1977, facing only low-level state charges after federal charges against Weathermen leaders had been dropped. He resurfaced as a teacher in New Mexico...

...All former Weathermen leaders who signed the pro-Obama petition worked closely for years with Weathermen terrorist William Ayers, whose association with Obama has generated controversy for the presidential candidate.

The Weathermen took responsibility for bombing U.S. governmental buildings in the 1970s."

Not all of Obama's more interesting endorsements, I admit, but food for thought.  Would you take these guys' advice on who should be President of the United States?   Me neither.

Obama's leftist radical support isn't just one old 'Seventies bomber anymore.  When you move the fridge, the cockroaches just seem to come from nowhere.  Stay tuned, there's more.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 8:57 PM MDT

Updated: Monday, 6 October 2008 12:25 AM MDT

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Mood:  irritated

Barack Obama and his campaign have tried to re-invent Obama as someone who's always been the kind of guy you'd invite over to the house to burn brats and drink beer in the back yard. 

Specifically, the literal "party line" is that Barack Obama and SDS Weatherman terrorist William Ayers' relationship consisted solely of belonging to the same charity board. 

"Many of its (the SDS's) members became prominent professionals in US public life.

Bernardine Dohrn, the author of the Declaration of War, is now a law lecturer. Her husband, Bill Ayers, lectures in education. Both were implicated in the group's most serious attacks, but were never convicted.

During the late 1990s, Mr Obama served on the same charity board as Mr Ayers.

Such was the threat engendered by the group that a tenuous association with a former member can still cause ripples in a presidential race three decades later."

But the BBC (and most of the rest of the press) soft-pedaled the link between SDS Weatherman bomber Ayers and Obama.  The BBC might also have drawn some parallels between the IRA and the SDS, but didn't.  Apparently terrorist bombings are ginger-peachy on this side of the Atlantic.

Finally, the BBC committed the unforgivable journalistic sin of misrepresenting the facts.  Ayers admitted he was guilty of the bombings in which he was implicated, after his trial.  He was released on the basis of a procedural error in his trial, after a criminal defense paid for by a wealthy father.

From "Intellectuals: Who Needs Them?", A public gathering sponsored by The Center for Public Intellectuals and the University of Illinois-Chicago, we see that Obama and Ayers and Dohrn weren't strangers who just happened to be on the same charity board - they were colleagues with many common interests and appeared together on at least one discussion panel which appears to have justified leftist violence - using Ayers as an exemplar of how to do it:

"2:15-3:45 p.m.
IV. Intellectuals in Times of Crisis
Experiences and applications of intellectual work in urgent situations.

William Ayers, UIC, College of Education; author of Fugitive Days
Douglass Cassel, Northwestern University, Center for International Human Rights
Cathy Cohen, University of Chicago, Political Science
Salim Muwakkil, Chicago Tribune; In These Times
Barack Obama, Illinois State Senator
Barbara Ransby, UIC, African-American Studies (moderator)"

I discovered this link this afternoon Googling around (if you're interested, the search terms were ["William Ayers" Obama]).

Using a slightly different set of search terms [(William Ayers OR Bill Ayers) AND Obama], Google turned these results up:

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2169

"Discover the Networks.org  A Guide to the Political Left - Bill Ayers"

"In the mid-1990s, Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn hosted meetings at their Chicago home to introduce Barack Obama to their neighbors during his first run for the Illinois Senate.

In 1995 Ayers -- whose stated educational objective is to “teach against oppression” as embodied in “America’s history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation” -- founded a “school reform organization” called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC). He appointed Obama as the group's first chairman.

When National Review Online writer Stanley Kurtz in 2008 reviewed the CAC archives at the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois, he found that Ayers had been one of five members of a working group that assembled the initial CAC board which hired Obama.

“Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit,” Kurtz wrote. “No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.” According to Kurtz, the CAC archives show that Obama and Ayers worked as a team to advance the foundation's agenda -- with Obama responsible for fiscal matters while Ayers focused on shaping educational policy. The archived documents further reveal that Ayers served as an ex-officio member of the board that Obama chaired through CAC's first year; that Ayers served with Obama on the CAC governance committee; and that Ayers worked with Obama to write CAC’s bylaws.

A September 2008 WorldNetDaily report offers still more details: “Ayers made presentations to board meetings chaired by Obama. Ayers also spoke for the Chicago School Reform Collaborative before Obama's board, while Obama periodically spoke for the board at meetings of the collaborative … According to the documents, the CAC granted money to far-leftist causes, such as the radical Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, which …has done work on behalf of Obama’s presidential campaign.”

WorldNetDaily reports further that “while Obama chaired the board of the CAC, more than $600,000 was granted to an organization founded by Ayers and run by Mike Klonsky, a former top communist activist. Klonsky was leader of the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party, which was effectively recognized by China as the all-but-official U.S. Maoist party."”

The Obama campaign should own up to all of this.  It's a matter of public record - Barack Obama's history (or to use the current PC term, his "narrative") is inextricably tied to that of the radical left  - particularly the Maoists and other Communist activists of Chicago - who were also central to leftism in America.. 

Obama didn't just belong to the "same charity board" as Ayers, he and Ayers and Ayers's wife Bernardine Dohrn worked together.  Ayers and Dohrn had Obama to their house on several occasions to introduce Obama to leftist activists in the Chicago area.  Ayers and Dohrn were central to Barack Obama's political life.

Better to admit all this and go on as best you can (430 million dollars, most of it from big business, should help) than try to pass off the preponderance of evidence linking Barack Obama to former terrorists and other radical leftists as a "smear."

The people accused of perpetrating a "smear" are telling the truth, and Obama and his people are lying.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 6:08 PM MDT

Updated: Monday, 6 October 2008 12:22 AM MDT

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"hegemony [hig-em-on-ee]

Notes on the potential for a war in and around Taiwan, China and the rest of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, with speculations on how this new totalitarian axis around Shanghai might grow (especially if Barack Obama is elected President and takes no action to slow its growth).

 _______________________________________

The Communist People's Republic of China (PRC) is increasing the percentage of its national economic output and the absolute amount of money they spend to prepare for a military resolution of the Taiwan issue to their satisfaction.

Over the past decade, the non-Communist Republic of China (ROC) on the island of Taiwan has allowed real spending on their national defense to decline.   This has created a challenge to the Taiwanese capacity to remain independent.

The Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 commits the United States to help Taiwanese maintain peace, security and stability through arms sales, indirect support and direct power projection into the area.  If we don't live up to that treaty, our other allies throughout the world will decide that it would be better for them to be allied with some other country.  China or Russia, perhaps. 

Then, our current troubles getting oil into the country will be remembered as "the good old days," just as we now reminisce about how calmer the world was when we just had to worry about one alliance dedicated to our destruction.  (We now have at least two - the Islamist jihad as interpreted to mean that we and all other non-Wahhabi Muslims must be subjugated or murdered; and the new one, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.)

The 2007 Taiwan government's defense budget was US $8.9 billion.  (Compare that to the PRC defense budget (estimated) of between US $97 billion and US $139 billion.)  With that money, in 2007 Taiwan bought 12 P-3C maritime patrol aircraft for locating and dropping torpedoes on Communist Chinese attack and missile submarines, six upgrades for their Patriot system, 3 TP-3A airframes (spare parts), 144 SM-2 naval Surface to Air Missiles, and a feasibility study for 8 diesel-electric submarines.

Over next three years (2007-2010) Taiwan is buying 218 AMRAAM Air to Air missiles, 235 Maverick Air to Ground Missiles, and 60 Harpoon Block II Air to Surface Cruise Missiles. 

Taiwan's 2008 defense budget is US$10.5 billion - a 12% increase over 2007.  This is puny compared to business as usual across the Formosa Straits in Red China.  Fortunately, Taiwan has natural defensive advantages that help offset mainland China's higher levels of spending on military hardware - mountains and caves which lend themselves to conversion into fortifications.  If it weren't for those, China might have already invaded Taiwan.

 ------

From the US Department of Defense "China Military Report 2008":

"The circumstances in which the mainland has historically warned it would use force against the island are not fixed and have evolved over time in response to Taiwan’s declarations and actions relating to its political status, changes in PLA capabilities, and Beijing’s view of other countries’ relations with Taiwan.

These circumstances, or “red lines,” have included: a formal declaration of Taiwan independence; undefined moves “toward independence”; foreign intervention in Taiwan’s internal affairs; indefinite delays in the resumption of cross-Strait dialogue on unification; Taiwan’s acquisition of nuclear weapons; and, internal unrest on Taiwan.

 Article 8 of Communist China's March 2005 “Anti-Secession Law” states that Beijing would resort to “non-peaceful means” if:

-“secessionist forces . . . cause the fact of Taiwan’s secession from China”;

- if “major incidents entailing Taiwan’s secession” occur;

-or if “possibilities for peaceful reunification” are exhausted.

The ambiguity of these “red-lines” appears deliberate, allowing Beijing the flexibility to determine the nature, timing, and form of its response.  Added to this atmosphere of ambiguity are political factors internal to the regime in Beijing that might affect its decision-making but are opaque to outsiders."

_____________

Deterrence Factors (from the DoD's "China Military Report")

"China is deterred on multiple levels from taking military action against Taiwan.  First, China does not yet possess the military capability to accomplish with confidence its political objectives on the island, particularly when confronted with the prospect of U.S. intervention.

Moreover, an insurgency directed against the PRC presence could tie up PLA forces for years. A military conflict in the Taiwan Strait would also affect the interests of Japan and other nations in the region in ensuring a peaceful resolution of the cross-Strait dispute.

Beijing’s calculus would also have to factor in the potential political and economic repercussions of military conflict with Taiwan. China’s leaders recognize that a war could severely retard economic development.  Taiwan is China’s single largest source of foreign direct investment, and an extended campaign would wreck Taiwan’s economic infrastructure, leading to high reconstruction costs. International sanctions could further damage Beijing’s economic development.

A conflict would also severely damage the image that Beijing has sought to project in the post-Tiananmen years and would taint Beijing’s hosting of the 2008 Olympics. A conflict could also trigger domestic unrest on the mainland, a contingency that Beijing appears to have factored into its planning.

Finally, China’s leaders recognize that a conflict over Taiwan involving the United States would give rise to a long-term hostile relationship between the two nations – a result that would not be in China’s interests."

 _______

Most of the 70 billion dollars a year Beijing clears from its trade with the United States would evaporate in the event of a war between the PRC and Taiwan. 

(Unless a Democratic Party president is influenced by the Chinese - perhaps by old friends who are also Maoists, or perhaps by cash, as the Clintons were - to smooth over little bumps in the road like Chinese espionage in our nuclear weapons program or their slaughter of their own people and helps the Communist tyranny in Beijing overcome their own blunders.) 

The Chinese hard currency balance could dwindle to nothing overnight - given a collapse in the Chinese banking industry like our own recent troubles - they have a similar bad loan problem to ours which enriches the favored few of the Chinese government and their cronies in big business - and their dependence on imported oil for any transportation not fueled directly or indirectly by coal.  In China, if it doesn't travel by rail, transport depends on oil that must be purchased from Russia or the Middle East. 

It's possible that the PRC economy might not survive a protracted shooting war, or even economic sanctions involving the US and one or more other Western nations that go on for any length of time.   Sanctions might cause the Chinese to default on contracts,  and causing worse economic damage to the mainland in a cascading pattern. 

In short, if we stop buying their crap, er, merchandise, the Communist Chinese could go broke in relatively little time.

Whether this would destroy or cement the Chinese Communist Party's hold on the people of the mainland is unclear; it's highly doubtful that following their "24-character strategy," any Chinese government would invade Taiwan or pursue similar aggressive actions without having cast itself as the injured party to the Chinese people.  Any economic damage to the Chinese might then be usable as justification for hardening of the government's stance toward both Taiwan and any of her supporters.

Much would depend on the degree of credibility the Beijing regime enjoys with its people going into such an adventure - and the resolve of the United States to punish Red China for attacking its neighbors. 

If elected President, Barack Obama would send a letter to the United Nations (over whose military actions China enjoys a veto in the Security Council, thanks to his predecessor Jimmy Carter) if the Chinese invaded Taiwan.  That would not even slow the Chinese down, any more than Obama's tut-tutting or George Bush's impotent bleating slowed Russia down in Georgia.

More problems with Tibet or the Uighurs could cost Beijing hard-won public relations capital and weaken support for action against Taiwan; conversely, an adventure against Taiwan might be used precisely to distract popular attention from economic or political misadventure at home, as well as to justify repressive measures against dissident elements at home.

As the DoD "China Military Report" shows, Beijing understates its defense expenditures officially (as opposed to estimated actual expenditures) by from fifty to two hundred percent.  It would be unreasonable in the regional context to assume that Taiwan was transparent in all of its defense expenditures. 

Rumors persist about at least an embryonic Taiwanese nuclear weapons program from which it was dissuaded by the US, and which might have provoked an invasion from the mainland if pursued publicly.  A previous administration probably explained the facts of life to the Taiwanese - the US could not be held to the terms of the Taiwan Relations Act if Taiwan did anything as provocative as acquiring nuclear weapons (even though the mainland Chinese had over 700 nuclear-armed missiles aimed at Taiwan a few years ago - the total's probably over 1,000 now).

Taiwan , numerically inferior in troop strength and faced with several thousand intermediate-range ballistic missiles aimed at it by the mainland, and outspent between ten and fifteen to one on defense by the PRC, could be expected to have developed a covert nuclear weapons program. 

Taiwan could afford nuclear weapons; if the Taiwanese want to remain politically independent rather than negotiating a largely meaningless Hong Kong-like quasi-autonomy from the mainland, they would have to hold Beijing at risk in order to deter either an invasion or a bombardment.  Nuclear weapons would seem to be the only deterrent worth considering in this context (unless other weapons of mass destruction such as biologicals are in their arsenal).  

An unusually clever (and effective) approach to a nuclear defense might be for Taiwan to hide a nuclear device somewhere in the maze of tunnels under Beijing, close enough to actually endanger the PRC's national command center if its location were known to the Taiwanese.  This tactic has drawbacks - a working nuclear weapon emits neutrons constantly, and relatively cheap handheld neutron detectors about the size of a large flashlight are available.  China has plenty of policemen and soldiers who could sweep the capital on a regular basis with these detectors.

Of course, the opposite is true as well - it might make sense to the Communists to simply cut their Gordian knot and take the obloquy of having slaughtered several million people as the price for consolidating their "first island chain" defensive perimeter and becoming the hegemon of Asia in fact as well as geography. 

Since the Chinese already support the dictator Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe in exchange for a new colonialism in which most Zimbabweans are oppressed in a terroristic regime supported by armed Chinese in uniform, it's hard to believe the Chinese worry about how the nuclear devastation of Taiwan might look on CNN. 

Given CNN's propensity to manage the news to make Barack Obama look good right now, it's entirely possible they'd bury any bad news coming out of the Formosa Straits - with or without "suggestions" from an Obama White House.   CNN is certainly covering-up Obama's deep and abiding debt to the radical left.

Whether the rape of Taiwan would be worth the isolation the West would impose on China as a result depends partly on whether the Shanghai Cooperation Organization could replace the revenue which Beijing would lose after committing mass murder in order to settle the Taiwan matter - and whether the West did much of anything.

It wouldn't be the first time a Chinese government in Beijing has chosen to murder millions of innocent people rather than risk losing its control over the rest of the country.

 ___________________________

There is a very real chance, given the current make-up of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and its candidate nations, that the foundation for a forcible hegemony including the entire Western Pacific may be in the making.

Decisive amputation of the Taiwanese leadership would signal resolve in a way that might destroy or cripple the Western Pacific and South Asian democracies and re-align the transCaucasus away from reformism and democracy and toward an curving Eastern axis reaching through Beijing from Moscow down to Karachi.   

This, of course, would be only the beginning of a course culminating in threats to India, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Phillipines, and Sri Lanka - each of which is now experiencing instability that poses a real threat to its national existence.  The candidacy of Pakistan, North Korea and Iran for membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is an ominous development because these three countries stand to benefit directly from instability in the states outside the Shanghai axis.

In Pakistan and China's case, territorial claims which have stood for centuries might be settled in a swift strike at India.  Kashmir and the Indian borderland with China in the Himalayas could be ripped away from India in a series of strokes along the entire Shanghai Cooperation Organization axis. 

A resurgent Pakistan might allow the Taliban to operate even more freely from its sanctuaries than it now does, taking Qandahar from the east of Afghanistan, while Iran creates mischief and perhaps even grabs some land from Afghanistan's western borders.

Russia and China would scarcely have to act in this case, except to make adventitious additions to their own borders in the Caucausus and Central Asia; the cozy relations between Russia and Iran may finally give the Russians the warm water port they have coveted, replacing the access they lost when the Ukraine seceded

(Even if the unrest that Putin and his Communist retreads are fomenting causes the Ukraine to fission, their supporters probably could not recover access to the Black Sea for Russia from Ukrainian soil, because the reunionists live over to the East and North.  The Russians' bid to kill Kuznetsov and abort the Orange Revolution aborning has failed, so far).

Russian activity in Georgia, meanwhile, continues.  There has been no real justification for their invasion or continued presence in Georgia beyond the borders of Abkhazia or Ossetia; none that doesn't involve laying the foundations for an eventual Russian takeover of all of Georgia, gaining the Russians a foothold on the Black Sea to replace the one they'll eventually lose when the Ukrainians boot them out of their naval base there.

 ___________________________

We're looking at an axis extending from Shanghai to Moscow, with ambitions to expand all along that line into other people's territory.  

Look at it.  Look at the size of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a military alliance which exists... why does it exist?

Consider when World War II started in 1939, it was begun by Germany, Italy and Japan, with the Soviet Union promising to stay out of Germany's way as they conquered Europe - until they themselves were invaded by Germany in 1941. Three relatively small countries could only be defeated an alliance of nearly the entire rest of the world which had not already been conquered.  

Russia and Germany split Poland between them in the years between the beginning of World War II and the invasion of the Soviet Union.  And, as we've seen in Georgia, Russia has their walking shoes on nowadays.  They might elect to either stand aside and split Chinese conquests on their border with the Chinese - or strike out on a campaign of conquest of their own.  History supports either outcome.

Barack Obama doesn't think we need to maintain or expand our military.  He has pledged to draw it down.  Apparently they don't teach map skills in Harvard - or European history, a subject that seems to bore Obama, since he failed to show up for even one meeting of the subcommittee he chairs on European Affairs in the Senate.

History shows us that in 1939 plenty of people who went to Harvard didn't think Hitler and Tojo were a threat, either.  Then as now, people here in the United States screamed about how the axis threatening the world just wanted peace, and how we were provoking them by daring to defend ourselves. 

FDR had to weave a tortuous path between isolationists in both political wings and Stalin's "community organizers" simply to rebuild the United States' military and supply Great Britain with what she needed to resist a German invasion.

We never really recovered from Clinton's destruction of the US military - and Obama wants to throw away even that degree of recovery.  He's promised to do exactly that.  We'll be many years and spend trillions rebuilding our military if Obama wins this election - and WE WILL NEED A MILITARY. 

Obama has an incredible set of endorsements - every dictator and would-be dictator on Earth hopes Barack Obama will be elected President of the United States.  Professional courtesy, I guess.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 8:34 AM MDT

Updated: Wednesday, 30 September 2009 3:07 PM MDT

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This video clip

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 3:27 PM MDT

Updated: Sunday, 5 October 2008 3:02 PM MDT

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Quoted from Newsmax.com

 Obama Wants NRA Ads Banned -

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 8:46 AM MDT

Updated: Monday, 29 September 2008 9:07 AM MDT

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Commentary magazine recently printed a column, "Why Iraq Was Inevitable," by George Mason University historian Arthur Herman dealing with the current fad of condemning George Bush for getting us into the war with Iraq.  As they point out, it's hard to remember that he had plenty of company in wanting to neutralize Iraq's potential as a home base for terror and a nexus for attacks on neighboring countries: 

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/why-iraq-was-inevitable-11456

"In this light—that is, in light of what was actually known at the time about Saddam Hussein’s actions and intentions, and in light of what was added to our knowledge through his post-capture interrogations by the FBI—the decision to go to war takes on a very different character. The story that emerges is of a choice not only carefully weighed and deliberately arrived at but, in the circumstances, the one moral choice that any American President could make.

Had, moreover, Bush failed to act when he did, the consequences could have been truly disastrous. The next American President would surely have faced the need, in decidedly less favorable circumstances, to pick up the challenge Bush had neglected. And since Bush’s unwillingness to do the necessary thing might rightly have cost him his second term, that next President would probably have been one of the many Democrats who, until March 2003, actually saw the same threat George Bush did.

_____________

It is too often forgotten, not least by historians, that George W. Bush did not invent the idea of deposing the Iraqi tyrant. For years before he came on the scene, removing Saddam Hussein had been a priority embraced by the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton and by Clinton’s most vocal supporters in the Senate:

Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas, or biological weapons. . . . Other countries possess weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. With Saddam, there is one big difference: he has used them. Not once, but repeatedly. . . . I have no doubt today that, left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will use these terrible weapons again.

These were the words of President Clinton on the night of December 16, 1998 as he announced a four-day bombing campaign over Iraq. Only six weeks earlier, Clinton had signed the Iraq Liberation Act authorizing Saddam’s overthrow—an initiative supported unanimously in the Senate and by a margin of 360 to 38 in the House. “Iraqis deserve and desire freedom,” Clinton had declared. On the evening the bombs began to drop, Vice President Al Gore told CNN’s Larry King:

You allow someone like Saddam Hussein to get nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, chemical weapons, biological weapons. How many people is he going to kill with such weapons? . . . We are not going to allow him to succeed. [emphasis added]

What these and other such statements remind us is that, by the time George Bush entered the White House in January 2001, the United States was already at war with Iraq, and in fact had been at war for a decade, ever since the first Gulf war in the early 1990’s. (This was literally the case, the end of hostilities in 1991 being merely a cease-fire and not a formal surrender followed by a peace treaty.) Not only that, but the diplomatic and military framework Bush inherited for neutralizing the Middle East’s most fearsome dictator had been approved by the United Nations. It consisted of (a) regular UN inspections to track and dispose of weapons of mass destruction (WMD’s) remaining in Saddam’s arsenal since the first Gulf war; (b) UN-monitored sanctions to prevent Saddam from acquiring the means to make more WMD’s; and (c) the creation of so-called “no-fly zones” over large sections of southern and northern Iraq to deter Saddam from sending the remnants of his air force against resisting Kurds and Shiite Muslims.

The problem, as Bill Clinton discovered at the start of his second term, was that this “containment regime” was collapsing. By this point Saddam was not just the brutal dictator who had killed as many as two million of his own people and used chemical weapons in battle against Iran (and in 1988 against Iraqis themselves). Nor was he just the regional aggressor who had to be driven out of Kuwait in 1991 by an international coalition of armed forces in Operation Desert Storm. As Clinton recognized, Saddam’s WMD programs, in combination with his ties to international terrorists, posed a direct challenge to the United States.

In a February 17, 1998 speech at the Pentagon, Clinton focused on what in his State of the Union address a few weeks earlier he had called an “unholy axis” of rogue states and predatory powers threatening the world’s security. “There is no more clear example of this threat,” he asserted, “than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq,” and he added that the danger would grow many times worse if Saddam were able to realize his thoroughly documented ambition, going back decades and at one point close to accomplishment, of acquiring an arsenal of nuclear as well as chemical and biological weapons. The United States, Clinton said, “simply cannot allow this to happen.”

So if William Jefferson Clinton had lived up to the lofty rhetoric in his speeches, we would have been in Iraq before the end of his administration - perhaps if Clinton's compulsive womanizing had left any intellectual energy in the Capitol for anything but impeachment hearings and abortive air raids such as Operation Desert Fox which did nothing to discover what was really on the ground in Iraq.

If George W. Bush hadn't sent the Armed Forces in to invade Iraq, hadn't pressured Saddam to hide (perhaps export) his weapons of mass destruction, such as the sarin nerve agent used on American troops after the war by insurgents, or the 450 tons of yellowcake uranium which was not in Iraq for glazing pottery, the impetus for the next President might have been a series of attacks on the American homeland with weapons from the Iraqi arsenal solicitously provided by the Iraqi hosts of Al-Qaeda and Ansar Al-Islam, both present in Iraq before the invasion.

But there's an election to steal, so the Democrats and their allies in the press are going to forget that the leaders of the Democratic Party were for the war up to, and after, the point at which it happened.

The reason we don't respond to this hypocrisy as such is that it's not remarkable coming from the Democratic Party.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 12:03 PM MDT

Updated: Sunday, 24 August 2008 12:12 PM MDT

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Mood:  mischievious

The press has been repeating a memo mailed to them by the Eleison Group, an ad agency which specializes in getting religious people to vote for the Democratic party and "progressive" causes, that the McCain campaign has created a powerful Web ad/video, "the One," which supposedly uses imagery from the "Left Behind" books to make people believe Barack Obama is the Antichrist.

No, really.  The Antichrist.  The Father of Lies. 

Anyway, I watched the video many times, because it's pretty funny, and no urge to scour the Mark of the Beast from my skin overcame me, nor had I a feeling that Barack Obama was heading my way with four guys on horses behind him.

So I decided to take a poll to see whether anyone else felt that way after seeing this particular Web ad.

Please watch "the One," then take the poll.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 10:46 PM MDT

Updated: Saturday, 16 August 2008 4:21 PM MDT

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We could be as little as five years away from clean, cheap fusion power.

Fusion, if you need a refresher, is one of two nuclear reactions that can give us energy.

Nuclear fission, the reaction we now use in nuclear power plants, splits the center (or "nucleus") of a heavy atom like uranium, thorium or plutonium into smaller atoms to release energy in the form of heat and radiation.  We also use fission in nuclear weapons.

Nuclear fusion is a reaction in which light atoms like hydrogen, lithium, boron or helium are fused together into larger atoms, which also releases energy and radiation.  Nuclear fusion is used along with fission in some nuclear weapons (usually the ones called "hydrogen bombs").

Nuclear fusion is harder to make happen outside of a hydrogen bomb.  So far, fusion reactors are great, huge things that consume more power than they make.  By contrast, the very first nuclear reactor (under the west stands at Amos Alonzo Stagg Field in The University of Chicago in 1942) made more energy than it consumed (essentially none) from the beginning.

But there are different ways to make this reaction happen that haven't really been explored with the money and energy that have gone into the big-iron thermonuclear reactors built so far, and the monstrous ITER reactor under construction in France (with American help in funding and design).  Possibly the most promising one - one which its developers say could be producing power in as little as three to five years - is the Bussard Polywell fusion reactor.

Dr. Robert Bussard, a nuclear physicist from the fun old days who designed a nuclear-powered cruise missile for the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s, also the father of the concept of the "interstellar ramscoop," was one of the major exponents of the inertial confinement fusion (ICF) concept.

Not many years ago, Dr. Bussard presented a talk at Google entitled "Should Google go Nuclear?" (amid rumors that Sergei Brin and some of the other investors in Google were thinking about funding him):

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846673788606

For those who, like me, like written presentations of technical data better, there's a written transcript:

http://askmar.com/ConferenceNotes/Should%20Google%20Go%20Nuclear.pdf

and a Web page on the progress made by Dr. Bussard's group:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/01/bussards-inertial-electrostatic.html

ICF doesn't have to emit or use neutrons - the boron-11 (80% of natural boron is boron-11) + proton (ionized hydrogen) inertial confinement reaction emits no neutrons and it emits charged particles that can be captured in the magnetically-active inertial confinement grid to produce electrical current directly. 

Boron-11 + proton  -->  Helium-4 + Helium-4 + energy

Producing electrical current in the reactor is something no other reactor design, fusion or fission, does.  It's brilliant - it has far fewer systems and parts than other reactor designs.  Instead of a huge concrete reactor dome next to a large concrete building holding the generators and water pumps and auxiliary diesel generators, a Bussard Polywell fusion power reactor would sit in a single building, about a story or two tall.   The transformers would be the same, because electrical power is electrical power.

What's better is that the power wasted when a nuclear reactor or an oil or coal furnace heats water into steam to spin electrical generators, then pumps the water from the cooled steam back into the reactor is not wasted in this design.  Much, much more of the energy made by the Bussard Polywell design goes out of the reactor as electricity.

Finally, and best of all - no meltdowns.  When a Polywell fusion reactor breaks, it just stops.  No explosions, no radioactivity, no muss, and no fuss.

Calculations indicate that a full-scale Polywell IEC reactor could produce as much as 128 gigawatts of power.  Normal fission reactors and oil and coal power plants top out at 1 - 2 gigawatts.  And Polywell fusion reactors are much, much cheaper to build per unit of energy generated than current nuclear reactors.

The projected cost to build the first power-generating Polywell IEC reactor is about $200 million, with a generating capacity of a gigawatt.  The reactor would be 4 meters (about 4.3 yards or 13 feet) across and weigh 14 tons.  You could install one inside a medium-sized freighter.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/01/bussards-inertial-electrostatic.html

By comparison, it costs between $2,000 million ($2 billion) and $3,800 million ($3.8 billion) dollars to build modern fission power plants for a generating capacity of 1.05 and 1.15 gigawatts.

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2007/01/17/18348080.php

So electricity made by Polywell fission plants could cost up to nineteen times less than electricity generated by existing nuclear plants.  And if the boron-11 + proton reaction can be made to work in large Polywell reactors, this would be CLEAN nuclear power, with no neutrons and very little, perhaps no radioactive waste.

Say that three-fourths of your utility bill is related to power generation costs and fuel, and your power is all made by nuclear power plants (both very conservative assumptions favoring present-day utilities).  If you pay 12 cents/kilowatt-hour for power, 9 cents of that may be traceable to power plant operations and fuel. 

Replace the current power plant with a Polywell fusion power plant, and this part of your electricity rate drops to 0.47 cent.  Your overall power rate becomes 3.47 cents instead of 12 cents.  You get to spend 8.5 cents per kilowatt-hour you use on other things, assuming your power use remains the same.  Your power bill drops by 71 percent.

If you, for the sake of argument, use 2,000 kilowatt-hours of power a month, your power bill is 240 dollars a month if you pay 12 cents per kilowatt-hour.  Drop that rate to 4.8 cents and your bill drops to $69.40.

Interestingly, power output in Polywell reactors varies exponentially with physical size.

Double that hypothetical 4-meter Polywell reactor in size and you get a reactor theoretically capable of generating 128 gigawatts!  (exclamation point mine)

I don't know how much that 8-meter Polywell reactor would cost to build, but even if it cost a billion dollars, the part of your electricity bill traceable to power plant construction and operation would be reduced up to 128 times.

Using that analysis of mine again, this part of your present 12 cents per kilowatt-hour electrical power rate falls to 0.07 cents.  Your rate could drop to 3.07 cents per kilowatt-hour. 

Say again that you use two thousand kilowatt-hours a month.  At 12 cents per kilowatt-hour, now you pay $240 a month for power.  At 3.07 cents per kilowatt-hour, that bill is now $61.40 most of it payroll, debt service, maintenance of the power distribution grid, etc.  The power generation cost (assuming a 128 gigawatt power plant) for 2000 kilowatt-hours would be $1.40.

Since nuclear power right now is twice as cheap as coal power and many times as cheap as oil, even cheaper than natural gas, the cost advantage of fusion power over fossil power is even greater.

We're really talking about knocking the props out from under Russia and OPEC.  If we get this concept to work and sell these plants around the world, Vladimir Putin is going to have to drink generic brand vodka.   Works for me.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 7:01 PM MDT

Updated: Monday, 29 September 2008 10:23 AM MDT

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