Category: War on Terror

What the Hamas terror group did is horrific.  I use the present tense because they are still holding/torturing hostages, American citizens included.  No matter your political or religious beliefs cutting people’s heads off, killing babies, and torturing people is wrong. 

As a sidebar, I do not agree with Israel cutting off the water and power supply to Gaza.  As I will explain later, this helps create a narrative that Israel is committing war crimes as well.

The dirty little secret in that part of the world (Middle East), I trust nothing that comes out of there as far as news goes.  Pretty much every country over there double deals and values their own interests/religion over anyone else’s.  Israel is our only true ally in that space. I say that in a literal sense because Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, and Bahrain typically have been found to be pretty weak allies of ours depending on the enemy.  Sure, we have a large air base in Qatar, I’m sure we likely pay a heavy price in dollars to have it there.  Yes, Egypt and Jordan seem to come down on our side when it comes to Israel and not letting Gaza refugees cross their borders. Oh, Egypt is allowing us to use the Suez Canal; at least for now, but again at what cost?  Don’t believe me?  Check out the foreign aid sent to these countries each year! 

In addition, many countries in that region are aligned with China, Russia, and North Korea, three countries who either legit hate us (Russia and North Korea) or have no real use for us in this conflict (China).  They love nothing more than to see our military spread even further.  Think about it, Russia knows we would prefer to supply Israel than Ukraine, so they win on that front.  China wants Taiwan, and us moving our carrier strike groups that way lessens our ability to help Taiwan.  North Korea?  Well, they get to taunt us even more.  Add Iran, Yemen, Lebanon, and Afghanistan to that list as well, who are actively supporting the Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthi terror groups in that area.  Groups who hate Israel. The Mid-east is a web of competing interests that are being united in their opposition to Israel and the United States.

Add a wild card, Turkey.  Turkey is the 2^nd biggest army in NATO (ally of ours) in the region.  They have been very vocal about us sending all those aircraft carriers, destroyers, and cruisers to the area. 

Turkey is correct about wondering aloud why we are sending all those ships.  It does from afar look like a provocation.  While I do not agree with Turkey’s president about us/Israel committing genocide, and completely disagree with him saying Hamas is a liberation group, I do think he misspoke.  One thing about Turkey they have the ears/eyes of both sides all over this region.  They have open dialogues with Russia, while supplying Ukraine with drones.  They are also in talks with Israel, while being able to speak to Hamas.  I know he cancelled his trip to Israel this week, but he wants to negotiate a peace deal.  I believe him.

Back to the war.

Israel needed to strike back at Hamas, they always do.  Most of the time they strike back 3-4x harder.  However, this time it’s different.  The killing of innocent people at a concert, beheading babies, old people, taking hostages, torture is a horse of a different color.  Israel is going to militarily attack the Gaza strip.  They want to wipe Hamas off the globe.  They have had enough. 

What is happening now is the cause of dividing the world in that region.  Jordan and Egypt say no refugees are welcome from Gaza.  This is because they don’t want the terrorists firing from their countries because this pisses off the USA and next thing you know Israel is lobbing rockets into their countries.  Turkey is warning us to back off the ships we sent into that area.  Iran backed terror groups are firing missiles/drones at our bases in Syria and Iraq, so far, we know 21 military folks have been injured.  Iran, Yemen, and North Korea are going to supply Israel’s adversaries with all they need for this war. 

The heart of the problem here is that Israel has no allies in the area.  Egypt and Jordan merely tolerate them.  All the Muslim countries basically hate them, they are in affect isolated. 

Enter Lindsey Graham, Joe Biden, and the globalists. 

So, we started sending our military might to this area.  The ships are already there.  Our bases in Syria (I do not understand this at all) and Iraq are getting more troops.  We supposedly activated 2,000 troops; I believe this is closer to 20,000, but I digress.  Our meager involvement thus far has evoked a response of laughter from the world.  Israel basically told us F-off.  Iran, North Korea, and Russia are daring us to do something stupid.  The terror groups love this.  Turkey is now likely questioning its role in NATO and all for what?  No one respects us anymore because we are not a superpower.  Our military cares more about pronouns and vaccines than training.  It’s sad.

My solution?

Hard to say.  Israel seems hell bent on going in with tanks and troops and “cleansing Hamas off the earth.”  If they want to do it, I say go for it, but with caution.  There is a reason I think Turkey has ratcheted up the rhetoric.  The area is unstable and is likely going to turn into a powder keg if the tanks move into the Gaza strip.  Put simply, if Israel moves in, I think Iran and their terror friends turn Israel into a microwave.  It will get really ugly, really quick.  Knowing the USA, we will somehow get ourselves right in the middle and WW3 will break out.  We will find out who our friends are, and I think more people dislike Israel than like us. 

Simply put, we shouldn’t be operating in that region.  Haven’t we lost enough young people already?  Also, at what stage do we have to worry about our own stockpiles?  We have given a ton to Ukraine and Israel.  Let Turkey decide on a solution in that area.  They do not want missiles flying over their country.  Dirty little secret is the other oil producing states don’t want that either. 

The Chief

Editor’s Note: it is my fault this post was delayed, the Chief did his part.

Today, 3/20/2023 is a day of reflection, as it marks the 20-year anniversary of the US invading Iraq.  When looking back, I was a high school sophomore at the time.  Our nation had gotten attacked on 9/11, our mission was to find those in charge, and eliminate them from earth.  In hindsight, what happened on this date set the US back as a world superpower.

I was all for the invasion, you do not dare invade the US and live to tell the tale.  We as a people, myself included, were gassed up by George W Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld saying we had intelligence on who did this.  First it was radical Muslims, then jihadists, etc.  John Bolton was another one of the cheerleaders for invading Iraq.   But the worst was Colin Powell, yep, the “decorated” general who aspired to be President.  He went in front of United Nations and gave a speech citing an intelligence document that Iraq had nuclear weapons and was hiding them.  We had to move now.

Move we did.  Even though Britain and Germany questioned the validity of this document, it didn’t matter.  We invoked the article of NATO and had the backing of the largest alliance with us.  We invaded Iraq.  I was fully in support, at least for a while.

Then it turned out there were no weapons.  None.  Powell lied.  Even though we rolled through Iraq and killed Saddam Hussein the worst was yet to come.  Bush termed out of office and new President Barack Obama was sworn in, Colin Powell ditched the GOP for the Dems and basically kept the same job in the White House.  Some liars get promoted or ignored, I still remember the democrats saying Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld were war criminals, somehow Powell escaped that title.  Just keep in mind the vote to go to war was 268-161 or something like that.  Those in favor included John Kerry, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton mind you.

Iraq quickly became a quagmire, who would have thought right?  We lost over 5,000 servicemen, and likely thousands of civilian contractors.  Untold are the stories of our young people who came back stateside scarred for life from what they saw.  Terrorists and those with nothing to lose do not fight fair.  Roadside bombs, IED’s, and knife attacks leave a lasting horror story. 

We did not free the Iraqi people, we just put different groups in charge of different zones.  In essence it is a lawless nation now.  Any mission we claim to have won, was pointless.  Sure, we rid the world of a horrible man (that we kept in power for many years before turning on him), but is the situation any better?  Bottom line is many in Iraq hate the US and all it stands for.  We showed our collective rear end to the world.  We feel we can just bomb any nation and rebuild it to look like ours.  It will never work in this part of the globe.  How many lives need to be lost and dollars squandered just to win a pyrrhic victory?

This reminds me so much of the situation of Russia invading Ukraine, even if Russia ultimately succeeds, Ukraine does not want to be occupied by Russia so violence and fighting will always be a thing.  Never underestimate a country’s people who do not want to be under another country’s rule.  It is for that reason I oppose our “helping” of Ukraine. 

The Chief

No Really. It just wasn’t covered by the big city media because it happened in the “fly-over” part of California. At least three California government facilities received multiple letters postmarked from a country in the former Soviet Union containing white powder. At least one tested positive for Ricin.

I did an Internet search and found little on the attack. Just a few scattered echoes of the same press release reproduced in news outlets on both sides of the Oregon/California border. This is a typical report.

On July 23rd envelopes arrived at Pelican Bay State Prison that, after a screening process, were found to contain a suspicious substance.
The area where the envelopes were opened was quarantined and “a coordinated investigation with local, state and federal law enforcement as well as public health officials was initiated.”

The substance was sent to a lab and was determined to be ricin.

Three people who came into contact with the envelopes were taken to the hospital for medical evaluation and then later released.

Envelopes containing Ricin arrive at Pelican Bay State Prison

Oh, Pelican Bay State Prison in on the north coast of California off highway 101 near Crescent City. Centinela State Prison is just north of the Mexican border in the very southern part of California. I saw no media reports from any southern California media outlets on this incident.

However, the incident did make it into the Wikipedia article on Ricin which can be found here.

Concerning Ricin

Ricinus communis, is a highly potent toxin. A dose of purified ricin powder the size of a few grains of table salt can kill an adult human. The median lethal dose (LD50) of ricin is around 22 micrograms per kilogram of body weight if the exposure is from injection or inhalation (2 milligrams for an average adult).

However, there is more.

In addition to previously published reports, at least one other facility near Ione, California (50 miles from Sacramento) also received suspicious letters with white powder. The letters have been addressed to both prison staff and particular inmates at the prisons. The Department of Corrections has implemented statewide training and special precautions to people interacting with the mail.

Terror attacks in rural places don’t matter. Because this happened in “flyover country” you never heard about it until now.

OK; actually, Ebola is The Strain meets the Zombie Apocalypse.

The Strain, by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, tells the story of an employee from the Center for Disease Control, fighting against all odds to stop a plague that nobody believes can happen. One of his chief obstacles in preventing the spread of the disease is the director of the CDC—who is personally benefitting from the misery of others—and thus won’t do his job. The director’s political power is more important than doing the right thing.

Lest you think this type of ‘politics over public health’ only happens in the 2009 novel, here is Obama’s CDC Director,

Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said during a telephone press briefing Wednesday that you cannot get Ebola by sitting next to someone on a bus, but that infected or exposed persons should not ride public transportation because they could transmit the disease to someone else.
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/brittany-m-hughes/cdc-you-can-give-can-t-get-ebola-bus

My nephew works in the hospital in Dallas which seems to be ground zero for this disease in the United States. I am not happy with what is going on.

Matt Drudge sums it up well on his website

The second nurse to get Ebola called CDC several times to be sure it was OK to fly on commercial airliner

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that Vinson called the agency several times before flying, saying that she had a fever with a temperature of 99.5 degrees. But because her fever wasn’t 100.4 degrees or higher, she didn’t officially fall into the group of “high risk” and was allowed to fly.

Officials in the U.S. have been trying to calm fears over the Ebola crisis, but time and again events have overtaken their assurances.

In August, before the first U.S. infection, CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden said: “We’re confident that we have the facilities here to isolate patients, not only at the highly advanced ones like the one at Emory, but really at virtually every major hospital in the U.S.”
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ebola-nurse-called-cdc-several-times/

What training? Nurses had none

The statement, which was played in its entirety on CNN on Wednesday morning, also reports that Ebola training at the hospital was “optional,” “nurses have been left to train each other,” and that nurses who interacted with Duncan simply continued treating other patients.

According to the statement, “there was no advanced preparedness on what to do with the patient. There was no protocol, there was no system. The nurses were asked to call the Infectious Disease Department. The Infectious Disease Department did not have clear policies to provide either.”
The union added that “advanced preparation that had been done by the hospital primarily consisted of e-mailing us about one optional lecture or seminar on Ebola.  There was no mandate for nurses to attend training or what nurses had to do in the event of arrival of a patient with Ebola-like symptoms.”  And “there was no hands-on training on the use of personal protective equipment for Ebola, no training on the symptoms to look for, no training on what questions to ask.”
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2014/10/15/Nurses-We-Were-Told-to-Call-Authorities-for-Ebola-Protocol

Yeah, nurses treated the Ebola patient with no protective gear and then treated other patients. Oh, don’t forget that the hospital discharged the guy with Ebola and he returned a few days later when he was re-admitted and later died.

Memo to healthcare workings, treat this as a radiological accident (or dirty bomb attack) and your protective gear will be more in line with what you need to use.

Ok so what happens when ISIS decides to purposely shoot-up some people with this disease and dispatch them to Western countries to hang-out in shopping malls? The economic panic would be about the same as the Zombie Apocalypse. Economic chaos, government collapses, and general lawlessness. It may not result in the world of Mad Max but it could get quite far in that direction.

The end result is less personal freedom and more government control.

Oh, we are still issuing 100 Visas a day to people in the hardest hit African countries so they can travel to the United States. On the plus side, at least Aids is not the only disease with civil rights now.

When I was a kid, this was the face of Isis.

Today, this is the face of ISIS: Jahadi John

Who in this country thinks a few drone strikes will stop these guys?

Isn’t he wearing the same outfit that they want all women to wear?

How will Obama screw up this threat to civilization?

While it sounds like something from a Tom Clancy novel, Malaysia Airlines flight 370, a fully loaded Boeing 777 has been missing for about a week.
It is clear by now that it left the designated flight path.
No ransom claims have been issued.
No debris has been found.
No black boxes or transponders have broadcasted.

So what happened?

I think the passengers and crew are likely dead. But what of the aircraft itself? Is someone weaponizing it? I think the proper identification of the hijackers is crucial to identifying likely targets. What happens next could make 9/11 look like a picnic.

Is my idea a conspiracy or just a caution? I think we will know soon.