Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Stories below the fold

War? What war?
Special ops in Libya

Syria: Not all rebels are ISIL...a report on the Kurdish rebels in Syria but Assad has Iranian troops and "volunteers". ISIL is hurting because the Russians don't follow the "rules of engagement" that Obama's lawyers insisted on, and now the US has followed suit, so they no longer can stay safe by keeping civilian hostages with them.

And note Turkey is more worried about Free Kurdistan guys than Iran with nukes or ISIL. Since much of this goes back to the Versailles treaty, that denied the Kurds their own country, blame Wilson for the mess.

Mainly for later reading.

Ironically, a good summary on why Assad was a bad guy but better than the alternative, i.e. a gov't run by Islamic terrorist, can be found HERE, at 10 minutes in, when the CIA briefs Mrs. Pollifax on the back ground for her job in Syria. (published 2000).

Too bad President Obama didnt read Mrs. Pollifax...

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So Trump is now into conspiracy theories, bringing up Vince Foster's suicide. Wikipedia articl on the Vast Right Wing conspiracy that questioned all those official reports here.



Younger voters probably are not aware of the many questions the case brought up, but after 15 years of CSI on TV, they might question the failure to investigate the crime scene.

However, I suspect the failure to investigate might not have been Hillary's fault: It might have been to try to protect his family because of where the suicde happened. (The obscure park where he was found was famous for being a meeting place for gays , which might explain the initial failure to investigate what the first responders saw as another gay suicide, nothing here to see, folks, in the days when homophobia was real).

But why bring it up at all? Because Foster was involved in the Rose Law firm, the firm that was rumored to be the inspiration for the best selling book and hit movie about a law firm in a hick state.

When this happened, unless you read Alamogirl, you probably couldn't get all the gossip and hard news and try to connect the dos...it wasn't pure paranoia that made some question that a coverup was going on...

but now, unlike 1996, youngsters can pull up stuff from google, like this easily found article from 1994 NYT about the shredding of documents in Foster's files by that firm.

The reason I remember this is because Rush had a hilarious commercial promoting a product called the "heavy duty Rose Law firm paper shredder".

The problem is not his suicide per se, but why all the cover up?

And Trump knows that it points to a long connection between the Clintons and monetary shenanigans (as if Trump didn't do his share of sleazy business, but never mind...his was openly known).

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Duterte is quoted criticizing the Catholic bishops and promoting birth control and a "three child" rule.

That should reassure the population control folks controlling the strings for developmental aid, and make the Obama administration happy, since it is more worried about pushing abortion, divorce and gay rights than worrying that China has slowly been taking over the West Philippine sea (and the sea lanes to Japan and Korea) in plain sight.

Which is good, since Duterte will probably make nice with China (which may be why VietNam will now be provided with weapons to fight China as the US proxy...unlike the Philippines, which was part of the calphate not China, they were once part of China, and know they are on the list for takeover, as China takes over everywhere they used to own over the last 3000 years).

FYI: it's not just the oil/natural gas under the reefs: it's the sea lanes that matter:


why sea laes are important


As for Duterte's proposal of passing a three child limit: Uh, he shoots off from the mouth all the time, but we are still a democracy, and such things could get you impeached if you try to do it by fiat like Obama is doing with his bureaucratic fiats to push birth control on Catholic nuns.

However, in the corrupt Philippines, where 20 percent of deliveries are with hilots outside the medical system, one suspects this will not happen... heck, even in India, Mrs. Gandhi's attempt to do this (by coercing sterilizations) resulted in her losing the next election. And I should point out that the "fertility rate" in the Philippines is now 3.1, meaning his goal has already been reached.

He has an ongoing problem with the bishops, because his Dirty Harry style of justice is viewed as wrong by the bishops, as the old leftie retired Archbishop Cruz point out.


But his election has caused a small ripple of hope for the poor in other Asian countries, as this analysis points out.


“The people, especially the grassroots, want real change that would trickle down to the lowest human beings whose homes are the cold pavement of cities’ street,” argues Evelyn Agato, former station manager of Radyo Pilipinas and now a mass communications lecturer. “They expect that a strong leader will usher them to at least a peaceful night sleep. Thus, Duterte’s phenomenal victory was brought about by votes of disappointment and dissatisfaction.” Agato told INPS that the political culture in the Philippines could change with the election of a president from Mindanao which has faced decades of civil war between the community and the NPA, as well as Islamic groups such as the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and Abu Sayyap.
“Manila-based political culture, as I see it, will now be learning to adjust to the political culture of the south, especially the style of governance by the new president,” she notes. “He is the man of the people. The way he dresses, the way he talks, and I think the way he thinks, are real for the common man. He is the man who does what he says and performs with sincerity.”

and like Trump, if that doesn't make you think of Adolf it should.

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Are the white farmers thrown out by Mugabe now behind Zambia's ability to export grain and feed the starving in Zimbabwe?

No. 

Most of the grain in Zambia is grown by small farmers, who are supported by gov't programs giving them fertilzer... the similar program in Zimbabwe didn't work due to corruption....

 but the large farmers grow a lot of tobacco, which helps with foreign exchange.

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My cousin, whose ship had been kamikazi'd, figured he would be killed in the battle to invade Japan. So he got drunk, fell out a second story window that he thought was a door, broke his leg, and managed to miss the invasion... which of course never happened because Truman bombed Hiroshima.

The story that is often ignored:

The Joint Chiefs of Staff estimated as many as 134,556 dead and missing Americans. A study for the office of War Secretary Henry Stimson put the figure at 400,000 to 800,000 dead GIs, with Japanese fatalities reckoned between five and 10 million military personnel and civilians. In addition to combat casualties, the more than 27,000 American POWs held by Japan were subject to immediate execution should the United States invade.
(I should add a little known fact: a lot of US POW's had been shipped to Korea or Japan via "hell ships" to work in Japanese factories, so were not liberated with the Philippines).

The same pacifists who lament Hiroshima ignore the casulaties in the "rape of Manila", or the dirty little secret that civilians in Saipan had been pressured into fighting with sticks or committing suicide...actions that suggested a similar high casualty rate if Japan had been invaded.

The pacifists cherry pick their facts, to condemn the west in the same way they ignore the genocides of atheism to condemn Christianity.

or as Instapundit remarks:

These facts are indisputably true, but the fact is that hand-wringing over Hiroshima is just so much virtue-signaling by people who probably never said a bad word about Stalin or Mao’s mass murders. 

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so Zika is the problem. Send money.
MSM MEME: Evil Republicans won't increase the money.
Reality: funds in previous budget that should have been used to fight Zika were diverted for global warming.

Dirty little secret: Dengue probably kills more babies than Zika will damage, but hey, Zika will be used to push legalized late term abortion in poor Catholic countries of South America, so you will see lots of stories about poor women forced to carry their late term Zika pregnancy, not stories on how money to kill mosquitos is diverted to the pockets of politicians instead of cleaning up the environment, or how Green NGO's oppose pesticide spraying.

And as I noted in a previous post if you don't kill the mosquitoes, you may face a resurgence of yellow fever... Angola to China to the Philippines...

China has already started "vector control" where cases are reported, and in the US, mosquito control will just be pushed and will stop the epidemics, in the old fashioned way used to clean up the Panama canal yellow fever epidemic: Clean up the environment to get rid of standing stagnant water, and spray spray spray:


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