Mood:  incredulous

In his James Bond novel "Dr. No," Ian Fleming once wrote:

"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. 

Over the past two weeks, undersea Internet and telephone cables have been cut.  Five times in two weeks. 

Why?

What's in the works this time?  You don't go to all the trouble to pull telephone cables off the bottom of the ocean and cut it for no reason.  So whoever's doing this HAS a reason.  It can't be a good one for us. 

Just another news item you don't get from Katie Couric. 

___

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 9:55 AM MST

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Watching a documentary on Pearl Harbor on the History Channel ("The Real Story of Pearl Harbor"), I heard the following words and a chill went up my spine:

"Conspiracy?   Don't believe it.  No truth to it, no fact can be found.  And more importantly, more than enough warning came to the commanders here in the Pacific, for them to be more prepared than they were.

The American people bear some responsibility for knowing that war was on the horizon on both the European and Asian continents to think they could get away with doing nothing.  So everyone is responsible."

- John DeVirgilio, Hawaii Director, Pearl Harbor History Association

What are we thinking now?  

- We've already suffered a sneak attack on our nation's largest city as well as on the capital city of our country that has cost more lives than the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor;

- We're already at war in two countries, trying to prevent them from being used as bases for terrorist attacks against us.  Regardless of the weapons of mass destruction issue, no serious dispute is possible that Al-Qaeda was active in both countries before and after we invaded them (and it is still very much plausible that the Iraqi WMD were sent over the border into Syria before we invaded);

- People who claim to speak for a billion Muslims are declaring that they intend to conquer us and kill us if we do not submit to their will, and soon they will have nuclear weapons at their disposal, if they do not already have them;

- We have the virtual dictator of Russia making unwarranted threats to us and our allies in Europe, as have military officials in North Korea and China;

- Venezuela has become a dictatorship and is using its oil wealth to partner with Cuba to foment revolution throughout Latin America;

and yet we are not behaving like a country at war.   

I have lost a son in combat, one of about 4,000 troops who have died in the War on Terror, and yet we are not making even remotely adequate preparations in case the world situation degenerates further and we must engage one or more of the dictatorships which threaten us daily:

- no resumption of the military draft;

- we have yet to replace our fleet of forty-year old F-15 fighter planes even though one of them recently broke in half during an abrupt turn (the pilot was able to parachute to safety but it was close),

UPDATE - According to the US Defense Department, two more F-15 fighters were just lost when they crashed into each other for reasons not yet determined (but probably at least in part due to the fact that they are OLD AIRCRAFT); 

- and we have bargained away a large part of our nuclear deterrent force in a treaty with Russia, a country that has yet not to break an arms control treaty that it possibly could have with us.  They swore solemnly not to make biological weapons in the early 1970s - and that's exactly when they began making tons of the worst biological weapons ever made!  They kept doing it for twenty years!  They filled some of their ICBMs with weaponized smallpox and plague and aimed them at us and at our allies in Western Europe (what's really funny, in a sick way, is that Gorbachev - the Nobel Peace Prize winner - ordered that last war crime done).

--- 

We have been foolish. 

In our rush to collect a "peace dividend" in the 1990s, we have become weak enough to invite military attacks that would have been inconceivable just ten years earlier.  

Every single time we have begun to take our military apart, a Hitler, a Tojo, a Stalin, a Khrushchev, a Khomeini, a bin Laden took advantage of it.  

And there is no shortage at all of more people to follow them - people named Ahmadinejhad, Chavez, Kim Jong-Il, Putin....

The sorry truth is that we are woefully underprepared if the current situation should degenerate into another world war.   

We now face a new enemy alliance, the Shanghai Cooperation Conference, which poses a worse potential danger to us than the Axis did in World War II or the Central powers in World War I - in fact, it may be the worst danger the world has ever faced.

Two of the major partners in the Shanghai Conference, Russia and China, have large arsenals of nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons on other delivery systems.  Both countries still have active biological warfare research programs as well - they promised to stop making bioweapons, but we know how that works, from recent history.

The virtual dictator of one of those powers, Vladimir Putin, has yet to pass a month without making either open or veiled threats aimed at us or our allies, while providing the terrorist regime in Iran with nuclear technology that will allow them to threaten us with nuclear weapons as well.

In this year's Presidential election, should we vote for the party that took our military apart after World War II, just in time for the Korean War, and after Vietnam, just in time for Iran to take our embassy staff hostage... and after the end of the Cold War, just in time for Osama bin Laden and the fanatics of Saudi Arabia to send terrorists crashing airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?

As many mistakes as George W. Bush has made, he did not disassemble our military - that was the work of Bill Clinton, partly on the advice of his wife.   Think she'd be a good choice to lead our country into a potential world war?  A manipulative, possibly unstable liar?

How about Obama?  As impressive as he seems to be - he seems to be a good guy, well read -  how well do you think he'd hold up if things really got bad?

John McCain has weaknesses, but also many crucial strengths.  One of them is that he has served and bled for his country in Vietnam.  Senator McCain is by far the best choice we have from the available alternatives to be the next President of the United States of America.  He has personal integrity and the other leaders of the world know better than to provoke him unnecessarily.  He also has shown undeniable leadership in the United States Senate for years.

John McCain should be our next President.  Any other choice would be disastrous. 

We're heading into a large war in the coming years and we need to be serious about preparing for it - we can't wish it away.  It's time for hard choices. 

It may be too late to stop the death of our country - but we can at least die on our feet.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 11:20 AM MST

Updated: Friday, 22 February 2008 12:27 AM MST

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Mood:  incredulous

The man on the right of the picture (courtesy of the Weekly Standard) is Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. 

Mr. Chavez doesn't like America or Americans.  He has boasted that his control over the oil under Venezuela gives him power over us.  Indeed, if you buy your gasoline from a Citgo filling station, the deal is ultimately with Chavez. 

Chavez is also tight with Fidel Castro and the leader of Iran, the one who has talked about "sharing" nuclear technology with Chavez.

Mr. Chavez has also been spending immense amounts of his country's oil money supporting violent guerilla fighters in Latin America and buying weapons from Iran and Russia.  Under his leadership, Venezuela has begun the process of joining a military and political alliance with China, Russia, some of the former Soviet states around the Caspian Sea and Iran.  The common motive of this alliance is anti-Americanism.

__

The other guy in the picture is Larry Glover.  While he's done movies on his own, he is mainly famous as Mel Gibson's sidekick in the "Lethal Weapon" movies, and more recently, the "Saw" series of movies.  To be fair, he did put in a decent job of acting in "Flight of the Intruder," but that's about it.

Mr. Chavez has given Mr. Glover twenty million dollars to make some movies.   One will be about famous South American revolutionist Simon Bolivar, arguably a great man; the other will be about Haitian rebel Toussaint L'Overture, arguably a butcher and a the man who cost Haiti a chance to be a reasonably prosperous, reasonably well-governed nation. 

Given Chavez's own willingness to spill the blood of those incautious enough to disagree with him in public and to buy the votes of his countrymen with other people's money taken at gunpoint, it's a good bet that Glover's film about Toussaint L'Overture will give us a side of that man that has not only not been seen before but may never have existed at all.

Glover has telegraphed his leftist sympathies in the past by political messages left in the kitchen fridge of his character Murtagh's house in the Lethal Weapon movies, and voiced them more explicitly among friends in the Hollywood left.

Since Danny Glover has a job as a propagandist for a declared enemy of the United States, he doesn't need our business any longer. 

Those of you who are not looking forward to losing relatives, sons, daughters and spouses in the war that Mr. Chavez has announced he will someday welcome with our country should think very, very hard about whether Glover needs any more of OUR money, now that he has so much from the dictator of Venezuela.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 3:25 AM MST

Updated: Monday, 11 February 2008 8:19 AM MST

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There's a minority group out there which really needs us to reach out to them and give them every sort of help we can! 

We need to show more sympathy for these people. 
* They travel miles in the heat. 
* They risk their lives crossing a border. 
* They don't get paid enough by a long shot. 
* They do jobs that others won't do or are afraid to do. 
* They live in crowded conditions among a people who speak a different language. 
* They rarely see their families, and they face adversity all day, every day. 

I'm not talking about illegal immigrants; 
I'm talking about our troops in combat zones all over the world! 

Strange, isn't it, that so many Congressmen and Senators from both major parties AND our President are willing to lavish all kinds of social benefits on illegals, but don't support our troops - and what's more, the leaders of Congress in both houses are now threatening to defund them?

 
Could this just maybe have something to do with the millions of dollars being spread around Capitol Hill by 1,700 members of CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations)? 

So much money spent by so few people... where's it all coming from?   Are the people gouging us for oil using the money they take from us at the gas pump to control our political process?

____________________________
 

This November we need to remember this problem - and FIX IT by pulling the right levers in the voting booth.  We need to be honest enough to admit we screwed up in 2006 and undo the damage - send the slick-talking politicians who take oil money to destroy our country back where they came from and elect people who care about our country!   We have a war to win and a country to save - let's get on the stick!!!

 
Please pass this on; this is worth more than the short time it takes to read it

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 11:39 AM MST

Updated: Tuesday, 15 January 2008 10:39 PM MST

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I just read an essay by Dennis Prager which comes very close to saying what I have thought for a long, long time. 

Perhaps it doesn't go far enough - Barack Obama by no means has a monopoly on the sort of mealy-mouthed arrogance that allows him to assume that we should naturally unite behind HIM.   Pat Robertson had an even larger dose of "I love Me-ism" during HIS Presidential campaign, and Huckabee's self-love is both strong and apparently sincere, as is John McCain's, Al Gore's, Rudy Giuliani's and (of course) Hillary Clinton's. 

It's been said half jokingly before, but I am strongly of the opinion that the only person fit to be President of the United States is someone who has to be dragged kicking and screaming into the office, and who will demand as part of the deal that he gets to only serve one term for good behavior. 

When you consider the crap that someone has to go through to be elected President of the United States of America, the natural assumption is that anyone who WILLINGLY goes through enough of it to actually be elected is either a crook or one of those unfortunates who pays women lots of money to tie him up and beat him with whips during his off time.

But the scary, scary thing is that the process of running for President is such a nail-pulling pain that the winner of a Presidential election logically must be a control freak of such immense and frightening proportions that he or she NEEDS to have the country all thinking his or her thoughts, surrendering their will to him or her, abdicating what is supposed to be the sovereign status of the American citizen to their newly elected Chief Executive.  

It actually makes sense that after a full Presidential campaign, the winner of the election becomes the kind of self-infatuated psycho which Martin Sheen played so adroitly for two "terms" of the TV series "The West Wing."  After all the talking out of both sides of one's mouth, the surrender of one's integrity to the siren call of the smoky back room, the immolation of one's family life on the altar of political primacy, perhaps Presidents feel as though we should all line up and smooch their fat behinds.

And nothing convinces me more that perhaps it's time we ditched our two-party, directly-elected Presidential system in favor of Parliamentary rule as Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand know it.  They're not perfect by any means, either, but the illusion that one party has all the answers and it makes sense to directly elect a leader based on the amount of crap he or she can throw against the wall and make stick under which we presently suffer is just no good. 

No one man or woman has a vision that is valid for three hundred-plus million people.  It's time we tried to create a system in which the leader rises to the top from LISTENING to the voters, not by TALKING to them incessantly - and often saying contradictory things from one day to the next.  In Britain, no one party has a firm enough lock on power to be able to effectively ignore the voters, the way both major parties are able to here in America (as long as they keep the extremist party faithful happy at convention time).

But let's read what Prager has to say: 

________________________________________ 

"Obama's calls for unity are not what they seem

Dennis Prager

We are repeatedly told by the news media that there is a deep, almost
palpable, yearning among Americans for unity. And Sen. Barack Obama's
repeated and eloquent claims to being able to unite Americans are a major
reason for his present, and very possibly eventual, success in his quest for
his party's nomination for president of the United States.
I do not doubt Mr. Obama's sincerity. The wish that all people be united is
an elemental human desire. But there are two major problems with it. First,
it is not truly honest. Second, it is childish.

First is its dishonesty. Virtually all calls for unity - whether national,
international or religious (as in calls for Christian unity) - do not tell
the whole truth.

If those who call for unity told the whole truth, this is what they would
say: "I want everyone to unite - behind my values. I want everyone who
disagrees with me to change the way they think so that we can all be united.

I myself have no plans to change my positions on any important issues in
order to achieve this unity. So in order to achieve it, I assume that all of
you who differ with me will change your views and values and embrace mine."

Take any important issue that divides Americans and explain exactly how
unity can be achieved without one of the two sides giving up its values and
embracing the other side's values.

Barack Obama wants American troops out of Iraq now. About half of America believes that American troops abandoning Iraq will lead to making that country the world's center of terror and to the greatest victory thus far
for the greatest organized evil in the world today. How, then, will Mr.
Obama achieve unity on Iraq?

Mr. Obama believes in repealing the tax cuts enacted by the Bush
administration. How will he achieve unity on that? Many of us believe that
re-raising taxes will bring on a recession.

And what is the "unity" position on same-sex marriage? Either one supports it or one supports keeping marriage defined as the legal union of a man and a woman. The only way to unite Americans on this issue - and I don't know what is more seminal to civilization than its definition of marriage - is to convince all, or at least most, Americans to embrace one of the two positions.

It is fascinating how little introspection Sen. Obama's "unity" supporters
engage in - they are usually the very people who most forcefully advocate
multiculturalism, who scoff at the idea of an American melting pot and who
oppose something as basic to American unity as declaring English the
country's national language.

Their advocacy of multiculturalism and opposition to declaring English the
national language are proof that the calls of the left-wing supporters of
Barack Obama for American unity are one or more of three things: 1. A call
for all Americans to agree with them and become fellow leftists. 2. A
nice-sounding cover for their left-wing policies. 3. A way to further their
demonizing of the Bush administration as "divisive."

In case the reader should dismiss these observations about calls for unity
as political partisanship, let me make clear that they are equally
applicable to calls for religious unity. For example, one regularly hears
calls by many Christians for Christian unity. But how exactly will this be
achieved? Will Catholics stop believing in their catechism and embrace
Protestant theology, or will Protestants begin to regard the pope Christ's
vicar on earth?

Ironically, one reason America became the freest country in the world was
thanks to its being founded by disunited Christians - all those Protestant
denominations had to figure out a way to live together and make a nation.

Given what Sen. Obama's calls for unity really mean - let's all go left - it
is no wonder he and his calls for unity are enthusiastically embraced by the
liberal media.

For nearly eight years the media and Democrats have labeled President Bush's policies "divisive" simply because they don't agree with them. They are not one whit more divisive than Sen. Obama's positions. A question for
Democrats, the media and other Obama supporters: How exactly are Mr. Obama's left-wing political positions any less "divisive" than President Bush's right-wing positions?

Second, the craving for unity is frequently childish. As we mature we
understand that decent people will differ politically and theologically. The
mature yearn for unity only on a handful of fundamental values, such as: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Beyond such basics, we yearn for civil discourse and tolerance, not unity.

The next time Sen. Obama speaks with his usual passion and eloquence about his desire to unite Americans, someone must ask him two questions: Why are your left-wing positions any less divisive than President Bush's right-wing positions? And if you are so committed to uniting Americans, why did you vote against declaring English our national, i.e., our unifying, language?  Without compelling answers, Sen. Obama's calls for American unity are no more than calls to unite around his politics and him."

__________________

The only point where I disagree with Mr. Prager is, as I said earlier, that Barack Obama isn't the only man in the Presidential race playing this game - they all do to some extent or another.   Huckabee may actually be worse about it than Obama is.  

And if our choice boils down to a self-infatuated left-wing pseudointellectual populist or a self-infatuated right-wing chiliast back room deal cutter who turns dope pushers and rapists loose if they thump their Bibles convincingly enough, that's a dismal choice indeed. 

I first threatened to emigrate to another country if Jimmy Carter were elected, and of course, I didn't put my walking shoes where my mouth was when it came down to hard cases.  But I'm actually practicing ending my sentences with "eh?" now and sampling Molsons (the alcohol-free kind because my liver won't put up with the real thing anymore).  All it'll take is for either of those yo-yo's, or Clinton (please, God, no, not her!) to be elected President.

I guess that I support Fred Dalton Thompson above all the others because he's already demonstrated in the US Senate when he served there between stints in Hollywood that he knows how to listen and how to seek compromises.  If any of the current crop of candidates knows how to listen more than he talks, it's probably Fred Thompson.  He certainly seems to view the office of the Presidency as more of a job and less of a personal entitlement.

Besides, the last time we went with a movie actor as President, it didn't turn out very badly at all.  Won the Cold War, cured the national case of mullygrubs we contracted from Mr. Peanut - yep, going over to the Screen Actors Guild for a President (again) isn't the worst thing we could do by a long shot.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 3:10 AM MST

Updated: Sunday, 10 February 2008 11:30 AM MST

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Mood:  incredulous

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) consists of 1,700 people.  Thanks to the open wallets of terrorist-supporting organizations such as the Holyland Institute, they have over $3,000,000 to spend, and they spend it in the halls of Congress, where since the Democratic victory in the last Congressional elections, they have increasing amounts of influence.

They are also in the business of threatening critics of terrorism and trying to influence advertisers who support journalists who oppose terrorism.

They got to Office Max when talk show host Michael Savage came out against CAIR's sleazy tactics.  Office Max pulled their ads from Savage's show.  I asked them why they did that, on the "contact us" page of their website:

"Why did you withdraw sponsorship from the Michael Savage show at the insistence of radical Muslim organizations?

The Council for American Islamic Relations only has 1,700 members.  Its primary funding appears to be from such terrorist financiers as "the Holyland Foundation" and from terrorist organizations such as HAMAS,

By acceding to demands from CAIR and their front organizations, Office Max is taking the side of terrorism against an independent critic of terrorism.whose only offense was to call attention to this tiny group of terrorist abetters.

Should Office Max be in this particular line of business?  If I had to choose between a firm that supported Michael Savage's right to comment against terror and the people who support terrorism and a firm which withdrew that support, I know I'd have to give my business to people who oppose terror.  

My son died fighting the people who CAIR supports in Iraq when his Bradley drove over a bomb they buried in the side of a road north of Baghdad."

When Office Max gets back to me, I'll pass on their explanation.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 12:34 PM MST

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Iran's Nuclear capable missiles

Posted on Yahoo.com's Open Source Intelligence group by: "Beowulf" Beowulf@thedurendal.com   brucetefft

Thu Dec 13, 2007 5:24 am (PST)

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 10:25 AM MST

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