[We've] got a tiger by the tail

Remember the old country song by Buckminster Owens, "I've got a tiger by the tail"?

I've got a tiger by the tail, it's plain to see;
I won't be much when you get through' with me
Well, I'm a losing weight and a turnin' mighty pale
Looks like I've got a tiger by the tail

Well, I thought the day I met you, you were meek as a lamb;
Just the kind to fit my dreams and plans
But now, the pace we're livin' takes the wind from my sails
And it looks like I've got a tiger by the tail

I'm thinking Minster Buck saw something the rest of us didn't.  Was he writing about the 21st Century world we would soon be living in?  Was he writing back in 1964 about how we in the West would soon be grabbing hold of a bunch of rag-tag religious fanatics in a part of the world we would be hard pressed to find on a map, only to learn they were a tiger we would have no idea how to let go of without getting mauled?

Here's how we got into this mess, the epitome of "unintended consequences":  

The USSR, wanting to support their puppet Marxist allies, invaded Afghanistan in 1979.  The collective Afghan warlords fought back, aided by 35,000 foreign Sunni Muslim fighters who became known as the mujaheddin, and were supported financially and materially by the USA.  Our goal was to simply foil our arch-enemy the Soviet Union.  There was nothing there for us, we just wanted to poke a sharp stick in their eye.  Our side eventually won and the commies permanently tucked tail and ran in 1989.

Shortly thereafter, in August, 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and the West was concerned (scared shitless actually) that he would get control of the Saudi Arabian oil fields.  If he did, we were SCREWED!  Geo Bush the First quickly offered to send our military to defend the Saudi's and drive Iraq out of Kuwait, and Osama bin Laden offered to bring his battle hardened mujaheddin and do the same.  The Saudi's cast their lot with the US.  This miffed bin Laden and the fight was on.  (Numerous groups of hard-core Islamic fundamentalists had begun to congeal under bin Laden by 1988 and eventually became known as Al Qaeda, "The Base".)

One of the hardest-core of the bunch, the branch in Iraq, later split off and morphed into what we know today as ISIS.  For a while they were going gangbusters, gaining control of large swaths of Iraq and Syria.  As the old saying goes, "success breeds success"....Muslim malcontents from all over the world looked at their brothers winning for a change and wanted in, too.

In short order ISIS began planning for their ultimate demise as a Caliphate controlling land in the Mid East....it was one of their prophecies....and began sending trained soldiers back to where they came from to snipe at us guerrilla-style.  Now they and their home-grown extremist buddies are stalking us.  Their numbers are still pretty small, but it seems like they're hitting far above their weight class.

I wonder if any of this would have happened if we had just told the Soviets back in '79, "You want Afghanistan?  It's all yours....the big rock piles, the ignorant pissed off peasants, the whole mess.  Good luck."  Would Osama bin Laden have ever assembled his merry band of jihadists without US support?  No Al Qaeda, no ISIS?  As objectionable as "fracking" for oil is, if we had pursued it earlier, could we have reduced our crushing dependency on Mid East oil sooner?  Would we have cared then if they had all just jihadided each other into oblivion?

Now the BIG QUESTION....do you think we've learned anything from this mess we've gotten ourselves into?

S

What kind of half-assed war are we fighting?

Has our military gone all squishy between the ears or is it their civilian handlers who are too busy playing with dolls to conduct a proper war? 

Think about it....Al Qaeda is admittedly hard to hit.  They are a rag-tag group of individuals with small arms.  They can duck into a building or a hut or a cave anywhere to escape the prying eyes of aerial surveillance.  If you can't see 'em, it's hard to hit 'em.  But the terrorist group ISIS isn't Al Qaeda.  ISIS owns territory.  They have tanks and trucks.  They control producing oil fields that make millions of dollars (?) to fund their operations.

It seems to me it should be be a fairly simple thing to see a tank in ISIS territory.  If you see a tank, and it isn't one of ours or our allies, it's theirs.  Push the damn button!  Boom!

They have convoys, complete with flags.  Push the damn button!  Boom!

They even have victory parades.  Push the damn button!  Boom!  *I know, I know....collateral damage*

This morning I read this:  "Our spokesperson Colonel (Steve) Warren previously stated that we were going to start going after ISIL's financial abilities."  

"START" to go after ISIS financial abilities?  Shouldn't we have done that on the first hour of the first day of our "war" with ISIS?

Have you ever seen a producing oil well?  They're NOT stealthy.  They have pump jacks, and storage tanks, and pipelines, and manifolds.  If it's in territory ISIS controls, it's theirs.  Push the damn button!  BOOM!

Yesterday French bombers attacked ISIS command and control facilities, weapons depots, training facilities, etc in their "capital" of Raqqa, Syria.  We shared our intelligence information with the French identifying the target's locations.   So if we knew where they were, why didn't WE bomb them weeks / months ago?   

Even the hacker group Anonymous has jumped in:   "Anonymous said Sunday that more than 2,000 ISIS-related Twitter accounts had been taken down in Operation Paris (#OpParis)."  So ISIS has had 2,000 Twitter accounts open until now and we didn't take them down?  Anonymous can find them but we can't?  REALLY?

If I'm going to get in a fight with someone, I'm NOT going to just flick 'em on the ear.  No, I'm going to hit 'em square in the face as hard as I can.  "Fair" and "war" don't belong in the same sentence.  I would lie, cheat, and steal to win and get it over with.

I'll admit I'm not a military man.  If any of you are, and can tell me why we haven't been fighting this "war" with a 100% effort, I'd like to hear from you.  As it is now, I just don't get it.

S

OMG! OMG! WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!

So now the Federales say the Russian jetliner that crashed in Egypt a few days ago might have been blown up in mid-air by a bomb planted by ISIS or Al Qaeda or maybe Dick Cheney, but they're not really sure.  What I do know is that the news media is hyping this for all the ratings they can get.

Right now there are probably people all over 'Merica fretting over whether to go ahead with their plans to fly to grandma's house for Thanksgiving, or to surprise the kids with a trip to Disney World over the Christmas holidays.   

"But what if those mean jihadi people blow up OUR plane?  You heard what Blitz Wolfer said, didn't you?"

Whoa....whoa....let's review:  There are approximately 93,000 airline flights worldwide every day.  That's 33,945,000 flights every year, give or take a couple.  And how often, historically, have bad guys blown up airliners?  Even if they blew up one a year, that would still mean your odds were 1 in 33,945,000 that it would be your plane.  Would you go to Vegas and bet your 401K with those odds?  Really?

So what should we (you and I , Mr. & Mrs. John Q. Public) do?  Easy....NOTHING.  Go about your business...go to work...go to school...go to a movie, do whatever you normally do.  Sure, we should always keep our eyes and ears open for anything suspicious, but that's just everyday common sense.   And honestly, I don't run with a rough crowd likely to bomb anything.  I doubt I'd be the one to hear a couple of jihadists making their martyrdom plans.

I'll admit, I don't have much faith in US airport security.  I think they're a bunch of lightweights.  But I do think there are plenty of super-smart intelligence operatives world-wide who would more than likely hear of something this dastardly (with the obvious rare exception) and alert our TSA Barney Fife's in time for them to get out their bullet.

Seriously, I think ISIS, if it did in fact blow up this airplane, has really messed in their mess kit.  While Western democracies are all too aware of public opinion and take great care to at least appear to dot their I's and cross their T's before they go on the warpath, not so the Russians.  They just crank up their tanks, gas up their planes, and start kicking ass.  Vladimir Putin is not known for his timidity.

It might be in our best interest to just sit back and let the Russians in Syria get all worked up....let them take out their anger on ISIS.  Let them wear themselves out and spend their limited fortune.  Let them be the proud owners of the largest debris pile in the Mid East.

*Now, where was I?  Oh yes...cleaning my guns*  ;)

S

Trouble in Paradise?

Refugee centers in Sweden are being burned to the ground in what appears to be a statement against the significant number of refugees the country has allowed in.  The multiple arsons have all been at facilities which house or are slated to house immigrants.

[>100K immigrants are expected to arrive there in 2015.   Sweden's current total population is estimated to be 9.8M]  

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sweden has long had a reputation for being hospitable to asylum seekers, apparently up 'till now.  It seems there is a backlash growing against the sizable Middle Eastern community of refugees that have made their way to Sweden in recent years.  There are even a number of areas (55) where police, fire, and EMT service is not readily available due to Muslim "gangs" who are terrorizing their neighborhoods.  The gangs run things there, not the civil authorities.
  

The Swedish EMT union (?) has even declared that they would not respond to calls to those areas unless they were provided "military grade" equipment and protection.  [NOTE:  That was in 2014.  I'm not sure if that situation still persists today.]

Here is the real world we face:  Refugees are welcomed in, given all the advantages of their host countries social welfare system, yet are not being assimilated into the mainstream of society. They remain isolated and often unemployed, leading to social unrest.  This is common in much of Europe, and has led to the rise of many nationalistic, anti-immigrant political parties.
  

Just opening your doors out of the kindness of your heart, then walking away while patting yourself on the back is just asking for trouble.  Without having a long term top-to-bottom plan to assimilate new immigrants, including having at least a reasonable hope of jobs available for them when they get here, is just moving problems from one place to another.  

In a perverse way, this kind-yet-not-well-thought-out gesture is actually playing right into the hands of terrorist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda.  Masses of poor, isolated, and unemployed youth are fertile recruiting grounds for evil doers.  It's happening every day!

"Yeah, but that's over there, and we're here.  No problem, right?  Right?"

It's a crazy, dangerous "damned if we do, damned if we don't" world we live in.  Just sayin'.

S

And where they'll land, noooooobody knows....

Wait for the $64,000 Question at the end

The mass exodus of desperate refugees from the war torn regions of the Mid East (which is most of it) continues.  Men, women, and little children are running for their lives, carrying with them little more than the clothes on their back.  Over a million are expected to make it to Europe this year, but exactly where they will eventually call home is still up in the air.

Our Western sense of decency and compassion, at least mine, says we must help them.  We can't simply sit idly by when people are exhausted, hungry, homeless, and desperate.  To do nothing would be absolutely heartless.

But now we're told it's almost guaranteed that embedded within these migrants are terrorists.  The jihadists are certainly cruel and brutal, but they are NOT stupid.  I doubt many of the fearful refugees making the trek are carrying official paperwork, so it would be easy for a few hundred....thousand?....ISIS/Al Qaeda-types to sneak through, too, where they could link-up later with cells already in place in Europe or elsewhere.

Let's back up and review for a second.  What is the ultimate root-cause of all this mess?  IMO, it's Islam.  Have you seen a religion, in the modern era at least, that condones killing to this degree in the name of their Supreme Being?  That seems to be one bitter religion.  Shia vs Sunni....Wahhabi....Salafist....they're just out of control!  My understanding is they aren't fighting for economic gain, or territorial gain, but to conquer others in order to please Allah.

Sure, Christianity has had their dark periods, too....think The Crusades, and more recently in Northern Ireland and the Balkans and a few other places as well.  (I don't think you could include the Nazi era, Stalin's reign of terror, the Japanese atrocities in the Orient, or the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia, etc, as they were NOT about religion.)  But looking at the big picture of modern world history, the brutality of Islam seems to be in a religious class by itself.

Of course not ALL Muslims are terrorists, far from it.  But the crazies are gaining momentum, and the rest seem to be becoming more marginalized.   Now ordinary, middle class, educated, (mainly young and impressionable) Muslims are drinking the jihadist Kool Aid, too.  The European Union is right now trying to decide how many refugees each member country should take in, and the US is also weighing in on how many should be admitted here as well.

The $64,000 Question

Considering the horrendous death, destruction, and panic that could be inflicted on the general population today by a terrorist attack, is it time to revisit "profiling"?  I know it's wrong to profile kids just because they're wearing hoodies, or because a minority drives through an affluent white suburb after dark, but the consequences of missing a jihadist plot as it's being hatched are quite different.  It's a tough question, and definitely a slippery slope.  How do you balance the rights of the many vs the potential harm that could be caused by the few?

Let's apply this to a scenario closer to home:  You're taking your son to begin his freshman year at college.  Due to a dorm SNAFU he's been assigned to a new room at the last minute.  You get the key and go to room 234 and find his new roommate already there.  

As you enter he and several friends abruptly cease their rather animated conversation, and you notice a scene on a laptop of an explosion or maybe a hooded man holding a huge bloody knife, before it's snapped shut.  The friends leave without making eye contact, and after Mohammad introduces himself, leaves as well.  He has no room decorations, no pictures or posters on the bulletin board, and the textbooks on his shelf suggest he's a chemical or maybe electrical engineering major.

Do you give your son a good luck handshake, slip him a couple hundred dollars extra "fun money" and remind him to behave himself, then mosey back home?  Or do you consider that maybe a semester back at the local junior college might not be such a bad place for little Timmy after all?

What would you do?  

S

FOR SALE: Iraqi Army rifles....

....never fired....only dropped once.
 

 

The pride of the 10th Annual Baghdad Jaycees Goat Roast and Labor Day Parade has proven they aren't worth a damn when it comes to defending their country.

Observations of a non-military man:  What is it about middle eastern / Arab armies that makes them such lousy soldiers?  I've read that the Egyptian Army fought fairly well at the opening of the Yom Kippur War with Israel in 1973, but other than that they seem to fold up like a card table when faced with anyone actually shooting at them. Snappy parade performers, lousy fighters.

After investing a decade of our time, thousands of American lives, and hundreds of billions of dollars helping get Iraq to the point they can become a self-sufficient, stable, law-abiding citizen of the world, it seems they can't even stand up to the first hint of determined opposition they faced.

Shades of the Fall of Saigon!  Al Qaeda affiliated rebels have seized control of the northern city of Mosul while the Iraqi Army was loading up and making a run for it.  

Now the insurgents are even in control of a formidable armored force left by the Americans for and now abandoned by the Iraqis.  Emboldened, the insurgents are now marching towards Baghdad while the Iraqi Army is melting away.

It's a sad situation.  On the one hand I feel sorry for all the downtrodden in the region, all the women who are treated little better than cattle, the little girls who are denied an education, etc, but the bottom line is it seems beyond our ability, anyone's ability, to bring them into the 21st 20th 19th Century.

Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and all the rest are simply from a different branch of the Homo Sapien family tree.  Our values are irreconcilable, our brains wired differently.  We can build them all the sewer treatment plants they could possibly use, but they're still gonna crap on the sidewalk.  The only reason we have anything to do with them at all is because of a freak of geography....they're sitting atop an ocean of oil.

I say we learn to live without their black gold, keep far, far away from them all, and let them stew in their own juices.  F___ 'em.

S

Odd things I've heard today....

Did you hear about the stink involving NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) as they track Santa Claus?   It seems some people are upset that kids are seeing FA-18's escorting Santa as he slips into North American airspace.  

They say kids will think that either Santa himself is suspect, or that he might be attacked by bad guys.  Either way, it's a sight kids shouldn't be exposed to.  "Our society is just too violent" they say.

I agree.  How can we expect kids to enjoy playing Black Ops-Call of Duty on their new XBox One or to knock off hookers and dopers playing Grand Theft Auto 5 when their innocent little minds are worried sick over whether Santa is about to get whacked by Al Qaeda?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I'm all for government doing what they can to save a few taxpayer dollars, but I'm wondering if Wisconsin might have taken things just a bit too far?

I've never been to Wisconsin in the winter (and I'd like to keep it that way), but I understand there's a lot of ice and snow all over their roads.  To supplement the usual salt they spread around to aid drivers, they've now begun to also spread around "repurposed" provolone and mozzarella cheese brine, byproducts of their cheese industry.

Does this mean they'll soon change the slogan on their license plates from "Wisconsin:  America's Dairyland" to "Wisconsin: Come Smell Our Dairy Air"?  *think about it*

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Merry Christmas everyone.  I hope you have a wonderful, safe, happy holiday.  :)

S

I'd make a lousy vegetarian

Last night I grilled these two prime NY strips.

I come from a long line of carnivores.  When I was a kid my parents and neighbors got together almost every Saturday evening and grilled steaks.  Even us kids had our little tiny steaks.  Graduating to being able to use your very own steak knife was considered a right of passage.  I would say that was a right proper upbringing.

We always had a baked potato and salad with our steaks....no substitutions.  I hate it when I go to a nice steak house today and they serve my steak with asparagus or some other atrocity on the same plate.  IMO that's a crime against humanity, or at least against a true carnivore.  It would be like serving sauerkraut with ice cream.  Surely that's prohibited somewhere in the Geneva Convention, right?

We know now that too much red meat isn't good for you, and we certainly don't have it every day, but a couple of times a week keeps me happy.  A steak this nice is an every-few-weeks event.  

As a "live and let live" peace offering to all those vegetarians among us, I am donating my share of the world's asparagus crop to them with my best wishes.  Bon appetit.  

A reciprocal gesture of good will would be appreciated.  ;)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Speaking of herbivores, did you hear what our government security people are doing with some of our embassies in Africa and the Mid-East?  They closed them through next weekend due to an imminent terrorist threat.

So who is dumber, our security folks for announcing when our embassies will re-open, or al Qaeda for not simply postponing their attacks until next week?

If they ask, just tell 'em it's a potato.

I'd call it a toss up.

S

The doctor said I could easily pass for an "artist's model"

I went to the doctor yesterday where he removed the bandages and stitches from my face / nose.  He said I could easily pass for an "artist's model".

He just forgot to mention the artist was Picasso.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I've heard it said, probably more seriously than in jest, that the world would be a better place if we elected women as our leaders instead of men.  Men, the reasoning goes, are quick to pick up arms and go to war when they don't get their way, while women would be more likely to sit down with their adversaries and work out their differences.  But why limit it just to our elected leaders?  Why not our military, too?

Think about it:  Instead of having the oceans filled with these...

and the skies filled with these...

we would only need a couple hundred of these...

We could strategically park them around Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, North Korea....really any country we wanted to bring to their knees, then just turn up the volume.  My proposed new all-female army could nag any male dominated country in the world into doing anything.  

Give up their nuclear arms aspirations....done.  Stop threatening their neighbors....check.  Whip those Al Qaeda boys into shape....watch a Sex In the City marathon....learn line dancing....eat quiche...."yes dear".  And we could cut our military spending from $700B a year to just a few million.  What budget deficit?

Oh....and the world would be a much better dressed place, too.  ;)

S