I am considering instituting a new award, the name of which came to me last night. I will call it the JACOBIN AWARD. I will present it on this blog for those who have done the most to further the agenda of the Jacobin Club, being a vision of collective rights, rather than the rights of each individual.
I will be accepting nominations for this most coveted prize. Those who wish to place a name in nomination need to send me an email the address in my profile. Of course a short dissertation is required as to why you feel this person is worthy. Unfortunately the person must be alive. (Robespierre and Marat already have their rewards)
I hope to present this award on my blog about the 16th of February, 2009, the anniversary of George Washington's birthday.
de Brantigny
A poll will be placed on my other blog next week.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Friday, January 16, 2009
From a Marine In Afganistan
Reconnaissance Marine in Afghanistan
By James H. Lilley
It's freezing here. I'm sitting on hard, cold dirt between rocks and shrubs at the base of the Hindu Kush Mountains along the Dar 'yoi Pomir River watching a hole that leads to a tunnel that leads to a cave. Stake out, my friend, and no pizza delivery for thousands of miles.
I also glance at the area around my ass every ten to fifteen seconds to avoid another scorpion sting. I've actually g iven up battling the chiggers and sand fleas, but them scorpions give a jolt like a cattle prod. Hurts like a bastard. The antidote tastes like transmission fluid but God bless the Marine Corps for the five vials of it in my pack.
The one truth the Taliban cannot escape is that, believe it or not, they are human beings, which means they have to eat food and drink water. That requires couriers and that's where an old bounty hunter like me comes in handy. I track the couriers, locate the tunnel entrances and storage facilities, type the info into the handheld, shoot the coordinates up to the satellite link that tells the air commanders where to drop the hardware, we bash some heads for a while, then I track and record the new movement.
It's all about intelligence. We haven't even brought in the snipers yet. These scurrying rats have no idea what they're in for. We are but days away from cutting off supply lines and allowing the eradication to begin.I dream of bin Laden waking up to find me standing over him with my boot on his throat as I spit a bloody ear into his face and plunge my nickel plated Bowie knife through his frontal lobe. But you know me. I'm a romantic. I've said it before and I'll say it again: This country blows, man. It's not even a country. There are no roads, there's no infrastructure, there's no government. This is an inhospitable, rock pit shit hole ruled by eleventh century warring tribes. There are no jobs here like we know jobs.
Afghanistan offers two ways for a man to support his family: join the opium trade or join the army. That's it. Those are your options. Oh, I forgot, you can also live in a refugee camp and eat plum-sweetened, crushed beetle paste and squirt mud like a goose with stomach flu if that's your idea of a party. But the smell alone of those 'tent cities of the walking dead' is enough to hurl you into the poppy fields to cheerfully scrape bulbs for eighteen hours a day.
I've been living with these Tajiks and Uzbeks and Turkmen and even a couple of Pushtins for over a month and a half now and this much I can say for sure: These guys, all of 'em, are Huns. Actual, living Huns. They LIVE to fight. It's what they do. It's ALL they do.They have no respect for anything, not for their families or for each other or for themselves. They claw at one another as a way of life. They play polo with dead calves and force their five-year-old sons into human cockfights to defend the family honor. Huns, roaming packs of savage, heartless beasts who feed on each others barbarism. Cavemen with AK47's. Then again, maybe I'm just cranky.
I'm freezing my ass off on this stupid hill because my lap warmer is running out of juice and I can't recharge it until the sun comes up in a few hours.Oh yeah! You like to write letters, right?
Do me a favor, Bizarre. Write a letter to CNN and tell Wolf and Anderson and that awful,20sneering, pompous Aaron Brown to stop calling the Taliban 'smart.' They are not smart. I suggest CNN invest in a dictionary because the word they are looking for is 'cunning.' The Taliban are cunning, like jackals and hyenas and wolverines. They are sneaky and ruthless and, when confronted, cowardly. They are hateful, malevolent parasites who create nothing and destroy everything else. Smart. Pfft. Yeah, they're real smart.They've spent their entire lives reading only one book (and not a very good one, as books go) and consider hygiene and indoor plumbing to be products of the devil. They're still figuring out how to work a Bic lighter. Talking to a Taliban warrior about improving his quality of life is like trying to teach an ape how to hold a pen; eventually he just gets frustrated and sticks you in the eye with it.
OK, enough. Snuffle will be up soon so I have to get back to my hole. Covering my tracks in the snow takes a lot of practice but I'm good at it. Please, I tell you and my fellow Americans to turn off the TV sets and move on with your lives. The story line you are getting from CNN and other news agencies is utter bullshit and designed not to deliver truth but rather to keep you glued to the screen through the commercials. We've got this one under control. The worst thing you guys can do right now is sit around analyzing what we're doing over here because you have no idea what we're doing and, really, you don't want to know. We are your military and we are doing what you sent us here to do.
You wanna help? Buy Bonds America .
Saucy Jack, Reconnaissance Marine in Afghanistan: Semper Fidelis
de Brantigny
By James H. Lilley
It's freezing here. I'm sitting on hard, cold dirt between rocks and shrubs at the base of the Hindu Kush Mountains along the Dar 'yoi Pomir River watching a hole that leads to a tunnel that leads to a cave. Stake out, my friend, and no pizza delivery for thousands of miles.
I also glance at the area around my ass every ten to fifteen seconds to avoid another scorpion sting. I've actually g iven up battling the chiggers and sand fleas, but them scorpions give a jolt like a cattle prod. Hurts like a bastard. The antidote tastes like transmission fluid but God bless the Marine Corps for the five vials of it in my pack.
The one truth the Taliban cannot escape is that, believe it or not, they are human beings, which means they have to eat food and drink water. That requires couriers and that's where an old bounty hunter like me comes in handy. I track the couriers, locate the tunnel entrances and storage facilities, type the info into the handheld, shoot the coordinates up to the satellite link that tells the air commanders where to drop the hardware, we bash some heads for a while, then I track and record the new movement.
It's all about intelligence. We haven't even brought in the snipers yet. These scurrying rats have no idea what they're in for. We are but days away from cutting off supply lines and allowing the eradication to begin.I dream of bin Laden waking up to find me standing over him with my boot on his throat as I spit a bloody ear into his face and plunge my nickel plated Bowie knife through his frontal lobe. But you know me. I'm a romantic. I've said it before and I'll say it again: This country blows, man. It's not even a country. There are no roads, there's no infrastructure, there's no government. This is an inhospitable, rock pit shit hole ruled by eleventh century warring tribes. There are no jobs here like we know jobs.
Afghanistan offers two ways for a man to support his family: join the opium trade or join the army. That's it. Those are your options. Oh, I forgot, you can also live in a refugee camp and eat plum-sweetened, crushed beetle paste and squirt mud like a goose with stomach flu if that's your idea of a party. But the smell alone of those 'tent cities of the walking dead' is enough to hurl you into the poppy fields to cheerfully scrape bulbs for eighteen hours a day.
I've been living with these Tajiks and Uzbeks and Turkmen and even a couple of Pushtins for over a month and a half now and this much I can say for sure: These guys, all of 'em, are Huns. Actual, living Huns. They LIVE to fight. It's what they do. It's ALL they do.They have no respect for anything, not for their families or for each other or for themselves. They claw at one another as a way of life. They play polo with dead calves and force their five-year-old sons into human cockfights to defend the family honor. Huns, roaming packs of savage, heartless beasts who feed on each others barbarism. Cavemen with AK47's. Then again, maybe I'm just cranky.
I'm freezing my ass off on this stupid hill because my lap warmer is running out of juice and I can't recharge it until the sun comes up in a few hours.Oh yeah! You like to write letters, right?
Do me a favor, Bizarre. Write a letter to CNN and tell Wolf and Anderson and that awful,20sneering, pompous Aaron Brown to stop calling the Taliban 'smart.' They are not smart. I suggest CNN invest in a dictionary because the word they are looking for is 'cunning.' The Taliban are cunning, like jackals and hyenas and wolverines. They are sneaky and ruthless and, when confronted, cowardly. They are hateful, malevolent parasites who create nothing and destroy everything else. Smart. Pfft. Yeah, they're real smart.They've spent their entire lives reading only one book (and not a very good one, as books go) and consider hygiene and indoor plumbing to be products of the devil. They're still figuring out how to work a Bic lighter. Talking to a Taliban warrior about improving his quality of life is like trying to teach an ape how to hold a pen; eventually he just gets frustrated and sticks you in the eye with it.
OK, enough. Snuffle will be up soon so I have to get back to my hole. Covering my tracks in the snow takes a lot of practice but I'm good at it. Please, I tell you and my fellow Americans to turn off the TV sets and move on with your lives. The story line you are getting from CNN and other news agencies is utter bullshit and designed not to deliver truth but rather to keep you glued to the screen through the commercials. We've got this one under control. The worst thing you guys can do right now is sit around analyzing what we're doing over here because you have no idea what we're doing and, really, you don't want to know. We are your military and we are doing what you sent us here to do.
You wanna help? Buy Bonds America .
Saucy Jack, Reconnaissance Marine in Afghanistan: Semper Fidelis
de Brantigny
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Dealing with punks
David Warren
In Toronto, on Thursday, I witnessed a little incident of some value to the interpretation of world affairs. It happened on a crowded westbound King Street trolley, trapped at Yonge Street by the early rush hour crowds. (Ottawans may envy any kind of functioning transit service.)
Three young men, whom one might characterize as voluntary members of the underclass from the way they were dressed (expensive ghetto gear), jumped the back door of the trolley, in order to avoid paying fares. It is the sort of thing people just get used to in a decaying society. The drivers have their hands full processing paying customers through the front entrance, and can hardly be expected to guard the rear.
But in this case, the driver more than noticed what was happening, apparently through his rear-view mirror. He shut the front doors, stalled the car, and elbowed his way through the standing passengers to confront his unpaid guests. "I've got bad news for you punks," he declared, loudly. "I am not a liberal." Upon being told this, they left the car peacefully. Though I should add that, this being Toronto, the passengers looked more astounded by the driver's declaration than by the punks' behaviour.
In my humble opinion -- shared with all those with some elementary understanding of the art of policing -- the leading cause of anti-social behaviour is permission. People, and young punks especially, will do things that even they know are malicious because no one will stop them.
The worst possible conditions exist, as today, when the surrounding society is befogged with idiotic, decadent notions, such as the idea that the punks are themselves "victims" of some material deprivation, when what they have in fact been deprived of is the iron fist of the law.
We see this phenomenon writ large in Gaza, where the punks are organized into a terrorist militia called Hamas. It is unnecessary to consider their Islamist ideological credentials, only to witness their deeds. These are people who were under the impression that "society" -- by analogy "the world community," and the diplomatic draughtsmen of innumerable "roadmaps to peace" -- had granted them permission to wing thousands of rockets gratuitously into Israel.
And that world community is now the more astounded when Israel replies, in effect, "I am not a liberal," than it ever was by the incessant pounding of the Qassams. We have the spectacle of the suits at the United Nations running about declaring truces that both Hamas and Israel will ignore. Hamas is still winging rockets; Israel has declared no intention of stopping until the rockets stop.
As Claudia Rosett, the leading journalistic investigator of UN perfidy, has been documenting for some years now (in her weekly Forbes.com column and elsewhere), the punks of Palestine have benefited from a level of permission that amounts to direct encouragement.
Since the complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 (that was supposed to bring an enduring peace), Hamas has been able to consolidate its political power over the enclave, while consolidating Gaza's economy around just two industries: terrorism and foreign aid. There is no other economy in Gaza, and there has been no credible attempt to build one.
The UN Relief and Works Agency has acted as the great enabler. Set up in 1949 as a temporary agency to house, feed and resettle fewer than one million Arab refugees (Israel received an approximately equal number of Jewish refugees from around the Arab world), UNRWA has grown by bureaucratic persistence into a vast, permanent welfare organization for the 4.6-million descendants of its original "client base" -- and for their descendants, into the indefinite future. It provides for them with a staff and budget several times larger than the combined UN effort on behalf of all the other refugees on the planet.
That UNRWA does not operate in a vacuum, but has instead woven itself into the regional matrix, is evident from the history. The agency's camps, which have grown into permanent settlements, are distributed not only through Gaza and the West Bank, but around Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Arab governments in each of these jurisdictions absolutely refuse to naturalize these permanent residents, almost all of whom were born on their soil, on the claim that they must rightfully be "returned" to the territory Israel now "occupies." Thus UNRWA facilitates the use of these so-called "refugees" as a dagger pointed at Israel's throat.
Moreover, almost all of UNRWA's staff is locally recruited Palestinian, and thus the entire operation is open to subversion to the ends that they decree. For instance, this week, as the Israelis have alleged, the use of a UN school as an arms cache, use of the building as a defensive fortification by Hamas gunmen, use of its inmates as "human shields."
There are root causes of the current conflict, going, as all agree, right back to the foundation of Israel (by the UN) in the late 1940s. The continued existence of UNRWA is the principal one, creating the conditions for Islamist terrorism to flourish, and it is time that root cause was addressed.
Thanks to Cletus
de Brantigny
In Toronto, on Thursday, I witnessed a little incident of some value to the interpretation of world affairs. It happened on a crowded westbound King Street trolley, trapped at Yonge Street by the early rush hour crowds. (Ottawans may envy any kind of functioning transit service.)
Three young men, whom one might characterize as voluntary members of the underclass from the way they were dressed (expensive ghetto gear), jumped the back door of the trolley, in order to avoid paying fares. It is the sort of thing people just get used to in a decaying society. The drivers have their hands full processing paying customers through the front entrance, and can hardly be expected to guard the rear.
But in this case, the driver more than noticed what was happening, apparently through his rear-view mirror. He shut the front doors, stalled the car, and elbowed his way through the standing passengers to confront his unpaid guests. "I've got bad news for you punks," he declared, loudly. "I am not a liberal." Upon being told this, they left the car peacefully. Though I should add that, this being Toronto, the passengers looked more astounded by the driver's declaration than by the punks' behaviour.
In my humble opinion -- shared with all those with some elementary understanding of the art of policing -- the leading cause of anti-social behaviour is permission. People, and young punks especially, will do things that even they know are malicious because no one will stop them.
The worst possible conditions exist, as today, when the surrounding society is befogged with idiotic, decadent notions, such as the idea that the punks are themselves "victims" of some material deprivation, when what they have in fact been deprived of is the iron fist of the law.
We see this phenomenon writ large in Gaza, where the punks are organized into a terrorist militia called Hamas. It is unnecessary to consider their Islamist ideological credentials, only to witness their deeds. These are people who were under the impression that "society" -- by analogy "the world community," and the diplomatic draughtsmen of innumerable "roadmaps to peace" -- had granted them permission to wing thousands of rockets gratuitously into Israel.
And that world community is now the more astounded when Israel replies, in effect, "I am not a liberal," than it ever was by the incessant pounding of the Qassams. We have the spectacle of the suits at the United Nations running about declaring truces that both Hamas and Israel will ignore. Hamas is still winging rockets; Israel has declared no intention of stopping until the rockets stop.
As Claudia Rosett, the leading journalistic investigator of UN perfidy, has been documenting for some years now (in her weekly Forbes.com column and elsewhere), the punks of Palestine have benefited from a level of permission that amounts to direct encouragement.
Since the complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 (that was supposed to bring an enduring peace), Hamas has been able to consolidate its political power over the enclave, while consolidating Gaza's economy around just two industries: terrorism and foreign aid. There is no other economy in Gaza, and there has been no credible attempt to build one.
The UN Relief and Works Agency has acted as the great enabler. Set up in 1949 as a temporary agency to house, feed and resettle fewer than one million Arab refugees (Israel received an approximately equal number of Jewish refugees from around the Arab world), UNRWA has grown by bureaucratic persistence into a vast, permanent welfare organization for the 4.6-million descendants of its original "client base" -- and for their descendants, into the indefinite future. It provides for them with a staff and budget several times larger than the combined UN effort on behalf of all the other refugees on the planet.
That UNRWA does not operate in a vacuum, but has instead woven itself into the regional matrix, is evident from the history. The agency's camps, which have grown into permanent settlements, are distributed not only through Gaza and the West Bank, but around Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Arab governments in each of these jurisdictions absolutely refuse to naturalize these permanent residents, almost all of whom were born on their soil, on the claim that they must rightfully be "returned" to the territory Israel now "occupies." Thus UNRWA facilitates the use of these so-called "refugees" as a dagger pointed at Israel's throat.
Moreover, almost all of UNRWA's staff is locally recruited Palestinian, and thus the entire operation is open to subversion to the ends that they decree. For instance, this week, as the Israelis have alleged, the use of a UN school as an arms cache, use of the building as a defensive fortification by Hamas gunmen, use of its inmates as "human shields."
There are root causes of the current conflict, going, as all agree, right back to the foundation of Israel (by the UN) in the late 1940s. The continued existence of UNRWA is the principal one, creating the conditions for Islamist terrorism to flourish, and it is time that root cause was addressed.
Thanks to Cletus
de Brantigny
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
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