This week we found out who will be running in our binary presidential election in six months. Hillary's coronation nomination is expected in a few weeks, but I suspect we still may have a convention fight over Donald Trump.
A few days ago, a blog post from Weapons Man appeared which dealt with American politicians using their power in the form of willing police and military to fire on, detain or otherwise punish errant American citizens on American soil. The article is short but comprehensive, so you come away with the idea that for all the protestations over the oath that enlistees utter when they join US security services, hell yes, those men and women will willingly fire on US citizens if ordered to. Plenty of examples exist in the past which support this conclusion.
How this affects the presidential campaign is how the two respective candidates would deal with armed protests, not armed resistance, but protests held by armed men and women. If national guard and local security forces were sent to confront the protesters, would they fire on them? The shooting of Lavoy Finicum provides some answers. From what I have read to date agents for the federal government and for the state of Oregon fired first without provocation. As I have said before, all the golden throats and public figures who wanted blood finally got it.
Hillary Clinton was an active agent in her husband's administration, so it is impossible to believe she had zero input in the solution the government had at Waco in 1993. Since that time, her supporters have evolved with regard to armed citizens. Instead of the finger wagging from 20 years ago, they want blood and piled up bodies of the political opponents who own firearms.
And I believe Hillary Clinton will oblige her supporters and give them the show they have been begging for.
But what about Trump? The Weapons Man article provides some insight into his thinking. Trump has said in the past he would order his military to eliminate the families of terrorists. Many people I have spoken with greeted this with glee. Now, finally someone will do something about terrorism!
And I think very few military would hesitate to obey the order, unlawful as it is. It depends on how the violence is formed. A US Navy F/A 18 pilot who is given nothing more than coordinates and an order to eliminate military assets in a village will obey the order, but I think once non combatants are observed, the pilot would end his attack. He essentially would defy orders.
Terrorists' families would survive and propagate new terrorist fodder unaware of being spared a violent fate.
It is a hard choice. President Barak Obama has been executing terrorists using drones with the presumptive approval of military lawyers. With this administration's penchant for bald face lying it is equally hard to imagine they have not already killed non combatants just because of their personal nexus to an illegal combatant. It is hard to imagine how that would change under either candidate.
You should read the post along with the comments. It is all thought-provoking.
Loads.
Rantburg's summary for arms and ammunition:
Prices for pistol ammunition were mixed on the minus side. Prices for rifle ammunition were mostly steady.
Prices for both used pistols and for used rifles were mixed.
Note: For the second time in two weeks, the average price for a used AR-10 Pattern Semiautomatic jumped, this time 5.5 percent average, with Florida leading the way. Average price: $1,300. This is reverse the trend from last year when the AR-10 pattern semiautomatic rifles was selling $820 average nationwide just nine months ago.
New Lows:
None
Pistol Ammunition
.45 Caliber, 230 Grain, From Last Week: Unchanged (7 Weeks)
Cheapest, 50 rounds: Goose Island Sales, Tulammo, FMJ, Steel Cased, .24 per round
Cheapest Bulk, 500 rounds: Top Shot Ammunition, Store Brand, RNL, Brass Casing, Factory Seconds, .23 per round (From Last week: -.01 Each After Unchanged (3 Weeks))
.40 Caliber Smith & Wesson, 180 Grain, From Last Week: Unchanged (3 Weeks)
Cheapest, 50 rounds: Cheaper Than Dirt!, American Bullet, TMJ, Brass Casing, .20 per round
Cheapest Bulk, 500 rounds: Ammo Marketplace, Leadhead, RNFP, Brass Casing, .20 per round (From Last Week: Unchanged (2 Weeks))
9mm Parabellum, 115 Grain, From Last Week: -.01 Each After Unchanged (3 Weeks)
Cheapest, 50 rounds: Bud's Gun Shop, Tulammo, FMJ, Steel Casing, .16 per round
Cheapest Bulk, 1,000 rounds: SG Ammo, Tulammo, FMJ, Steel Casing, .16 per round (From Last Week: Unchanged (8 Weeks))
.357 Magnum, 158 Grain, From Last Week: -.02 Each
Cheapest, 50 rounds: Cheaper Than Dirt!, Tulammo, FMJ, Steel Casing, .25 per round
Cheapest Bulk: 1,000 rounds: SG Ammo, Tulammo, FMJ, Steel cased, .25 per round (From Last Week: Unchanged (4Q, 2015))
Rifle Ammunition
.223 Caliber/5.56mm 55 Grain, From Last Week: Unchanged (7 Weeks)
Cheapest, 20 rounds: Ammunition Supply Company, Tulammo, FMJ, Steel Casing, .21 per round
Cheapest Bulk, 500 rounds: Cheaper Than Dirt!, Tulammo, FMJ, steel casing, .21 per round (From Last Week: Unchanged (3 Weeks))
.308 NATO 150 Grain, From Last Week: Unchanged (2 Weeks)
Cheapest, 20 rounds: LAX Ammunition, Tulammo, FMJ, Steel Casing, .37 per round
Cheapest Bulk, 500 rounds: J&G Sales, Tulammo, steel casing, FMJ, .34 per round (From Last Week: Unchanged (7 Weeks))
7.62x39 AK 123 Grain, From Last Week: -.01 Each After Unchanged (4 Weeks)
Cheapest, 20 rounds: AmmoFast, Wolf WPA, steel case, FMJ, .24 per round
Cheapest Bulk, 1,000 rounds: Ammunition Supply Company, Wolf WPA, steel case, FMJ, .22 per round (From Last Week: Unchanged (3 weeks))
.22 LR 40 Grain, From Last Week: +.01 Each After Unchanged (2 Weeks)
Cheapest, 50 rounds (10 Boxes Max): Ammomen, CCI Blazer, RNL, .08 per round
Cheapest Bulk, 5,000 rounds (1 Cases Max): Ammunition Supply Company, Aguila, RNL, .07 per round (From Last Week: Unchanged (4 Weeks))
#1
American Egyption Said murdered his two daughters, Amina and Sarah Said, in Texas. His family no doubt facilitated his escape and continued evasion of capture. This shows that even in America, a tight nit group can assist another escape justice after a brutal murder of innocent people. Some even believe Said is still driving a cab deep in the concrete jungles of NYC. Under current conditions this evasion of justice is doable in the US.
However, if the Trump approach of going after the family with real pressure had been used, maybe justice would have been served by now.
Posted by: Ho Chi Crinens5363 ||
05/07/2016 0:31 Comments ||
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#2
I am not longer comfortable with violating the civil liberties just to "serve the interest of justice."
Find some other way.
American civil liberties have been wrecked all on the alter of law, justice and antiterrorism. It is past time for that to end.
#3
The article is short but comprehensive, so you come away with the idea that for all the protestations over the oath that enlistees utter when they join US security services, hell yes, those men and women will willingly fire on US citizens if ordered to Plenty of examples exist in the past which support this conclusion. Aided by all those NIMBY attitudes to keep ugly and smelly vitals in the outlands..
Yep, except when they realize it's their own kin they're told to kill. Why do you think the Party brought in outsiders to do the killing in Beijing? It'll fracture the armed forces. That won't be able to control the entire population. We couldn't turn things around in Iraq till the Iraqis decided they had skin in the game and joined in the pacification process. All those rails, bridges, and power lines are going to be very tough to keep open or operational to the major cities. Cold/Baked and on rationed food doesn't make for stability.
#4
You can now get a fully functional 3" Ordinance Rifle with implements for $7,500.00.The limber and limber chest are extra.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
05/07/2016 10:49 Comments ||
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#5
In this age of Euro suicide bombers wearing civilian clothes, female Paleo teenagers stabbing innocent Joos, suicide bomber Boko Haram children, who's a noncombatant on visual inspection? Few wear uniforms in this era of non-state warfare, and that Islamist Militia guy who just set his AK down is not a noncombatant...
Bombing an Islamist training camp is likely to kill some noncombatant camp-followers but it should still get done
Posted by: Frank G ||
05/07/2016 11:17 Comments ||
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#6
I read the entire linked essay, and some of the comment thread. I'v been now retired from the military for nearly as long as I was in it for a career, and now and again I wrote on SSDB about illegal orders. And it was always my own contention that - yes, you might be given them, and it might seem initially the easiest way out to be to obey them ... but you ought not. Not if you wanted to sleep at night for years to come.
It always appeared to me that the best defense against being given illegal or even somewhat questionable orders was to be, and to cultivate the appearance of being such an absolute straight-arrow and obstinate stickler for old-fashioned morality -- that one would never be given an illegal or questionable order to begin with.
The military likely has changed since I retired from it, though.
Trinidad and Tobago suffered the western hemisphere's only attempted Muslim takeover in 1990, despite a Muslim population of under 5%. Nearly three decades later Trinidad is still in trouble, as the writer explains.
Posted by: Steve White ||
05/07/2016 00:00 ||
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The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) recently declared Mehmet Görmez, the head of Turkey’s Presidency of Religious Affairs – the “Diyanet” as it is often referred to – an apostate. The Diyanet is in charge of Turkey’s nation-wide network of mosques, making this an attack on mainstream Sunni Islam in Turkey. The third issue of ISIL’s Turkish-language magazine argued that the Diyanet was Turkey’s tool of “adjusting the religion of Islam to the new religion of secularism.” The article featured photos of Görmez with the Pope and the Bishop of the Eastern Orthodox Church, as well as photos of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the secularizing leader of modern Turkey, all of which, to ISIL, is akin to shaking hands with the devil. “The mosques of Diyanet are these people’s schools of jahiliya [the time of ignorance before the prophet],” the article says, “and its teachers are the regime’s imams who have sold their religion for a pittance.”
ISIL has never been shy about expressing its opinions about Turkey’s government, but it did not start this particular fight. The Diyanet did.
Interesting read for a Saturday about the religious tensions in Turkey, and how this means that the Turks oppose ISIL and yet yearn at the same time to wear the curly-toed slippers.
Posted by: Steve White ||
05/07/2016 00:00 ||
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[11129 views]
Top|| File under: Islamic State
The New York Times has an article describing how Ben Rhodes, President Obama,s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, sold fiction as truth in communicating the president's foreign policy.
Thomas Ricks, writing in Foreign Policy, calls the article "a stunning profile of Ben Rhodes, the asshole who is the president's foreign policy guru."
But it is also a profile of the president. As David Samuels wrote in the NYT source article, Rhodes saw himself as a reflection of the president:
Rhodes is the reflection. Obama is the originating image. Rhodes is just a flunky who transcribes what the president dictates. Still the Samuels article, by printing the administration's admission of its willful deception on Iran policy, provides crucial insight into the fascinating subject of whether Barack Obama -- if you believe he is a failure -- is incompetent or malevolent.
At first glance the admission that the administration lied to the public seems a slam-dunk case for malevolence. But there's more to it than that. There is a perception that political imbecility is a lesser offense than malice. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the anti-Nazi activist, while in prison waiting to be executed, reflected that "stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice" because evil left behind in its conscious perpetrators "a sense of unease."
Against true imbecility even reasoning was useless since you couldn't even appeal to your enemy's self interest because they were too dumb to see it. "Against stupidity we are defenseless," he wrote, because imbeciles never feel a qualm. Against the stupid "neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything ... reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict ... simply do not need to be believed ... and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this, the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack."
It's worse than all that.
Rhodes and his people (and he had a nice team of staffers) played the MSM. He called them what they were: inexperienced, wet-behind-the-ears kids. Noobs. Stupid kids with stupid degrees from high-priced colleges that didn't educate them. They were there to be played, and he played them. He understood them after all, he's one of them -- just a little smarter, maybe, and with mentors who knew how to direct him. Jarrett. Axelrod. Plouffe. And of course, Obama himself. Rhodes was a tool -- a computer calibrated, finely crafted tool. Obama and his team used Rhodes as a tool on the MSM, and it worked. Gloriously. Far better than any of them could hope.
But it's worse than that. Those kid reporters? Whores, the lot of them. Or wannabe whores. As Glenn Reynolds calls them, Democratic operatives with bylines.
When this story broke the MSM had a choice: they could stand up on their hind legs, protest, and trash Rhodes for revealing what he revealed. Or they could pick up the twenty on the bedside table and remain quiet.
[Daily Caller] Ben Rhodes, President Barack Obama's close confidante and national security adviser, just supercharged the ongoing feud between former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and the National Security Council by calling Gates an incessant whiner.
The same Gates who has largely earned the respect of experts and politicians alike, across the aisle, for his measured, pragmatic approach to foreign policy: according to Rhodes, an incessant whiner.
Honest, that's not my editorial snark, that's the actual headline at Foreign Policy magazine. Though I'd be proud to claim it if only I'd written it first.
This may be behind a paywall.
Posted by: Steve White ||
05/07/2016 00:00 ||
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[11126 views]
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#1
Well, it is true. He is an asshole and he is a little Gobbels.
Leftists are all alike when you get down to it.
Zombie, government worshiping freaks that care nothing for their own Nation.
#2
The Ben Rhodes interview just confirms what most of us already knew from the moment Barack Obama announced that he was running for President: that there's no "there" there, just a cynically concocted fiction.
Posted by: Dave D. ||
05/07/2016 8:04 Comments ||
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#3
After November 2008, I anticipated four years of misery. I got eight instead.
When it comes to foreign policy, President Obama has spent more than seven years now living the dream. And I mean dream, as in fantasy -- a trip to an alternate universe. Never mind the dangerous and in some cases deadly realities that increasingly beset the rest of the planet. For the White House, it's been one glorious fiction after another. Russia was a "reset." Libya was a success. So was the pivot to Asia. The tide of war is receding. There was a red line in Syria (until there wasn't). The Iran nuclear program is now "exclusively peaceful." America's standing in the world is now -- according to a White House tally of nameless surveys -- higher than when Obama took office.
Remarkable. But don't credit Obama alone for the creative talent behind these fictions. In a story just posted by The New York Times Magazine, veteran reporter David Samuels brings us a long, appalling and masterfully reported look behind the scenes at influential White House senior staffer Ben Rhodes, "The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama's Foreign Policy Guru." Rhodes, 38, serves as assistant to the president, deputy national security advisor for strategic communications and speechwriting, and oversees, as the White House web site tells us, "President Obama's national security communications, speechwriting and global engagement."
How did Ben Rhodes get there? From New York prep-school, Rhodes went on to study creative writing at New York University. He published one short story, before enlisting his mother's connections to enter the world of foreign policy. He then rose to become, as Samuels describes it, "the master shaper and retailer of Obama's foreign-policy narratives, at a time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the sand castles of the traditional press." Samuels notes, "His lack of conventional real-world experience of the kind that normally precedes responsibility for the fate of nations -- like military or diplomatic service, or even a master's degree in international relations, rather than creative writing -- is still startling."
In an era when the-most-transparent-administration-ever is prone to such locutions as "Off the record, we have no comment," Samuels has done a superb job of pulling back the curtain on Rhodes, "Boy Wonder of the Obama White House." Samuels describes Rhodes as relatively low profile (he tends to turn up in big stories as "an unnamed senior official in paragraph 9"), "But once you are attuned to the distinctive qualities of Rhodes's voice -- which is often laced with aggressive contempt for anyone or anything that stands in the president's way -- you can hear him everywhere."
[DAWN] WHEN Pak students open a physics or biology textbook, it is sometimes unclear whether they are actually learning science or, instead, theology. The reason: every science textbook, published by a government-run textbook board in Pakistain, by law must contain in its first chapter how Allah made our world, as well as how Muslims and Paks have created science.
I have no problem with either. But the first properly belongs to Islamic Studies, the second to Islamic or Pak history. Neither legitimately belongs to a textbook on a modern-day scientific subject. That’s because religion and science operate very differently and have widely different assumptions. Religion is based on belief and requires the existence of a hereafter, whereas science worries only about the here and now.
Demanding that science and faith be tied together has resulted in national bewilderment and mass intellectual enfeeblement. Millions of Paks have studied science subjects in school and then gone on to study technical, science-based subjects in college and university. And yet most -- including science teachers -- would flunk if given even the simplest science quiz.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
05/07/2016 00:00 ||
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[11131 views]
Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistan
#3
Word Brer. I've been teaching for the last 9 months---which brought me in contact with a lot of (Israeli) textbooks (and I assume EU/USA are worse). AGW is a fact, so is interchangeability of genders. Hell, they even managed to louse up the grade school math books.
[DAWN] THE action ordered by the army chief against six officers for offences committed during their tenures in the Balochistan ...the Pak province bordering Kandahar and Uruzgun provinces in Afghanistan and Sistan Baluchistan in Iran. Its native Baloch propulation is being displaced by Pashtuns and Punjabis and they aren't happy about it... Frontier Corps ...a provincial paramilitary force. Total manpower is about 80,000. They are tasked to help local law enforcement in the maintenance of law and order, and to carry out border patrol and anti-smuggling operations.... generated considerable debate on social media where some commentators lauded the military action while others questioned why the offenders were allowed to keep their pensions, medical benefits and were not locked away Drop the rosco, Muggsy, or you're one with the ages! Such questions were expected against the backdrop of the army chief’s call for steps to curb corruption as the battle against terrorism could not be won with widespread corruption eating away at the vitals of society.
Many observers said his statement that came on the heels of the Panama Papers leak amounted to ’interference’ in the civilian domain and advised him to also focus on corruption within his institution.
But insiders defended their chief, saying he was not asking anyone to do what he wasn’t doing within his own rank and file. "His men have responded to his call and have taken casualties in several thousands in the fight against terrorism. He will demonstrate how he respects their memory and will not tolerate wrongdoing within his institution," said one source.
Before further ado, the ’dismissals’ news was leaked to the media though officially it took the army’s spokesperson a couple of weeks to confirm it in passing during a TV interview where he wouldn’t give any further details.
Posted by: Fred ||
05/07/2016 00:00 ||
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[11128 views]
Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistan
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
