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Area: WoT Operations    WoT Background    Non-WoT        Politix   
Bolton FIRED!
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Page 4: Opinion
6 17:06 DarthVader [] 
8 22:48 JohnQC [1] 
7 19:10 lord garth [] 
6 12:21 Lex [] 
8 22:46 JohnQC [] 
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Page 6: Politix
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-Land of the Free
A French soldier's view of US soldiers in Afghanistan
[AmericanThinker] Go read the whole thing, then go to to the source linked at the link, print it out, and frame it.
Posted by: trailing wife || 09/10/2019 00:00 || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Wonderful sentiment, TW. Thank you.
Posted by: Skidmark || 09/10/2019 1:52 Comments || Top||

#2  SENTIMENT. About two years old, We cling to it nevertheless. One of the first times ( and only ) a Frenchman absolutely gushes, and we lap it up with a spoon.

Posted by: Uneretch Sinatra2689 || 09/10/2019 4:15 Comments || Top||

#3  Now that I have a moment, I traced the links back to the original French piece, which was posted here on 18 September, 2008. The comments also appear to be interesting, though admittedly French is not one of my languages.
Posted by: trailing wife || 09/10/2019 7:05 Comments || Top||

#4  I remember this article. I didn't take it as so much as sentiment, but an indictment of how France does not support its warriors as well as the United States.

Comments are supportive and positive, though no personal affidavits such as, "No merde, there I was with the 173rd..." type of things.

The French (Gallic) soldier is storied and well documented, and there was a reason why the French symbol was a Fighting Cock until recently, much like the venerable 67th Fighter Squad.

That thing they did in Central African Republic (CAR) a few years back, where the French dropped in and built an airstrip overnight, was no small deal.
Posted by: swksvolFF || 09/10/2019 10:36 Comments || Top||

#5  France has plenty of casses-couilles, just as we have plenty of ball-breaker / shit-kicker tough guys - rugby is hugely popular in France - but France's entertainment-media-academic classes have an even tighter and more thorough control over French culture and public discourse than ours do here.

France has its own "flyover" provinces - basically, everything south of Paris and west of Strasbourg - but you never hear about them in the French media, French films or in the stupid things uttered by French politicians and intellectuals.
Posted by: Lex || 09/10/2019 12:15 Comments || Top||

#6  More evidence of the reality vs the image of France: Opposition to gay marriage was/is much higher in France than here.
PC speech and memes are a joke to the French.
Support for the death penalty in France is about as high as it is in the US.

Moral: today the really important cultural differences in the West are not between nations but within them.

The big divide is between the globalists and their virtue-signaling PC identity politics " global citizen" BS, and normal people for whom place, family, tradition and history matter more than abstract obligations involving strangers.
Posted by: Lex || 09/10/2019 12:21 Comments || Top||


Europe
The best speech on Brexit -- from a shocking source
Keep in mind that, according to most of our media (and even more so the European media), we are supposed to regard with fear the German "ultra-right-wing" political party, the Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD). Also, keep in mind that we are supposed to believe that the Brexit battle pits Brits against a united Europe that is horrified at their effort to shatter the European Union.

But, in fact, the arrogant, unaccountable transnational organizations, of which the EU is a leading example, have served global elites better than ordinary citizens of their constuent countries.

Watch this speech in Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, by AfD’s co-leader Alice Weidel and start to realize that populism is a global force in the highly industrialized world, and that the complaints we Anericans feel against our elites, and the complaints Brits have against ceeding controt ot he EU, are all of a piece. She does not hesitate to point her fingers at France, which is leading the resistance to a negotiated Brexit.
I just can't believe that in any business run jointly by Germans & French, the French are calling the shots.


Posted by: g(r)omgoru || 09/10/2019 08:42 || Comments || Link || [1 views] Top|| File under:

#1  I suspect the French can take the lead on anything the Germans don't really care about. Since Germany is the economic engine of the Eu anything they care about is going to be done their way.
Posted by: ruprecht || 09/10/2019 15:06 Comments || Top||

#2  No. THIS is the best speech on Brexit (and the remainiacs in Parliament):

Cromwell to Parliament:

It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonored by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice.

Ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government.

Ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money.

Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess?

Ye have no more religion than my horse. Gold is your God. Which of you have not bartered your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth?

Ye sordid prostitutes have you not defiled this sacred place, and turned the Lord’s temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices?

Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation. You were deputed here by the people to get grievances redressed, are yourselves become the greatest grievance.

Your country therefore calls upon me to cleanse this Augean stable, by putting a final period to your iniquitous proceedings in this House; and which by God’s help, and the strength he has given me, I am now come to do.

I command ye therefore, upon the peril of your lives, to depart immediately out of this place.

Go, get you out! Make haste! Ye venal slaves be gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors.

In the name of God, go!

Posted by: Mercutio || 09/10/2019 16:29 Comments || Top||

#3  Wow
Posted by: g(r)omgoru || 09/10/2019 16:33 Comments || Top||

#4  Well, you got... Cromwell. Didn't go too well, did it?
Posted by: European Conservative || 09/10/2019 16:34 Comments || Top||

#5  A little reminder: Winston Churchill called Cromwell "a military dictator".
Posted by: European Conservative || 09/10/2019 16:44 Comments || Top||

#6  Mixed reviews, I'd say. Wikipedia

Cromwell is one of the most controversial figures in the history of the British Isles, considered a regicidal dictator by historians such as David Sharp,[5] a military dictator by Winston Churchill,[6] and a hero of liberty by John Milton, Thomas Carlyle, and Samuel Rawson Gardiner. His tolerance of Protestant sects did not extend to Catholics; his measures against them in Ireland have been characterised by some as genocidal or near-genocidal,[7] and his record is harshly criticised in Ireland.[8] He was selected as one of the ten greatest Britons of all time in a 2002 BBC poll.[9]
Posted by: Bobby || 09/10/2019 16:45 Comments || Top||

#7  And yet Cromwell's status stands outside Parliament.
Posted by: Rob Crawford || 09/10/2019 20:47 Comments || Top||

#8  It wasn't Ringo Starr?
Posted by: JohnQC || 09/10/2019 22:48 Comments || Top||


Home Front: Politix
NY Times Opinion Writer has slipped into total Whacked Out Land.
Posted by: 3dc || 09/10/2019 00:46 || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Whacked Opinions Matter!
(WOM)
Posted by: Skidmark || 09/10/2019 1:43 Comments || Top||

#2  I've seen this movie. The only thing missing was 'Don't Forsake Me O'my Darling' in the score.
Posted by: Procopius2k || 09/10/2019 8:10 Comments || Top||

#3  That is Gawd Aweful.

Really the only way that crap is tolerable is to do it in a Schwarzenegger (80s) voice.

Must be a Macro Test.
Posted by: swksvolFF || 09/10/2019 9:14 Comments || Top||

#4  But we need The Spice
Posted by: Frank G || 09/10/2019 9:36 Comments || Top||

#5  A Town Has Turned to Dust
Posted by: M. Murcek || 09/10/2019 9:39 Comments || Top||

#6  1) Who else besides hard-core socialists uses the phrase 'trade unions'?

2) Really the only way that crap is tolerable is to do it in a Schwarzenegger (80s) voice.

Every time I talk about CPU's, I do the same thing; that goes for every time I see a helicopter flying overhead.
Posted by: Raj || 09/10/2019 11:03 Comments || Top||

#7  the writer was supposed to produce something that might be written in the future

he did do that - what's the big deal
Posted by: lord garth || 09/10/2019 19:10 Comments || Top||


Home Front: WoT
Robert Mueller helped Saudi Arabia cover up its role in 9/11 attacks: suit
A taste:
[NYPost]

After a lengthy investigation, special counsel Robert Mueller charged Russia made "multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our election" and said the incursion "deserves the attention of every American."

But former FBI Sherlocks say their old boss didn’t feel the same concern when they uncovered multiple, systemic efforts by the Saudi government to assist the hijackers in the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks ‐ a far more consequential, to say nothing of deadly, foreign influence operation on America.

As the head of the FBI at the time, they say Mueller was not nearly as interested in investigating that espionage conspiracy, which also involved foreign intelligence officers. Far from it, the record shows he covered up evidence pointing back to the Saudi Embassy and Riyadh ‐ and may have even misled Congress about what he knew.

9/11 victims agree. "He was the master when it came to covering up the kingdom’s role in 9/11," said survivor Sharon Premoli, who was pulled from the rubble of the World Trade Center 18 years ago.

"In October of 2001, Mueller shut down the government’s investigation after only three weeks, and then took part in the Bush [administration’s] campaign to block, obfuscate and generally stop anything about Soddy Arabia
...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual hajj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. When the oil runs out the rest of the world is going to kick sand in the Soddy national face...
from being released," added Premoli, now a plaintiff in the 9/11 lawsuit against Saudi Arabia.

In fact, Mueller threw up roadblocks in the path of his own Sherlocks working the 9/11 case, while making it easier for Saudi suspects to escape questioning, multiple case agents told me. Then he deep-sixed what evidence his agents did manage to uncover, according to the 9/11 lawsuit against the Saudis.
Posted by: trailing wife || 09/10/2019 00:00 || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under: Govt of Saudi Arabia

#1  So, is there a way to see if he has numbered Swiss accounts?
Posted by: g(r)omgoru || 09/10/2019 1:13 Comments || Top||

#2  Or Epstein tapes?
Posted by: Skidmark || 09/10/2019 1:54 Comments || Top||

#3  Swamp goona do what swamp does
Posted by: Injun Bucket8891 || 09/10/2019 5:42 Comments || Top||

#4  Swamp denizens need to lose their citizenship.

Who are they actually protecting?

Does seem to me that 5eyes is an establishment defence agency, the people's role is merely to fund it.
Posted by: Bright Pebbles || 09/10/2019 7:57 Comments || Top||

#5  Did he do so under orders from the White House? If he acted independently he's a traitor. If he followed orders (as I suspect) then... well we already knew Bush let the Saudi's off so this isn't really anything new, we just know the footsoldier who dutifully carries out orders despite the moral issues involved.
Posted by: ruprecht || 09/10/2019 9:56 Comments || Top||

#6  And yet we just had to invade Iraq and Afghanistan.
Posted by: Abu Uluque || 09/10/2019 10:38 Comments || Top||

#7  Invading Afghanistan wasn't a bad thing, trying to turn them into a Democracy was.

Invading Iraq is another story altogether.
Posted by: ruprecht || 09/10/2019 15:04 Comments || Top||

#8  Maybe the cover up had something to do with the Boosh family connections to the Bin Laden family.
Posted by: JohnQC || 09/10/2019 22:46 Comments || Top||


Home Front: Culture Wars
PROSPERITY BREEDS IDIOTS
h/t Instapundit
At the start of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel In the First Circle, a Soviet diplomat on home leave in Moscow tries to make an anonymous call to the U.S. embassy. His purpose: warning the Americans of a Soviet theft of atomic secrets. But he gets a dull-witted, indifferent embassy staffer on the line, and the call goes nowhere. Or almost nowhere. The call is monitored by Soviet security. Arrested and imprisoned at the end of the novel, the diplomat’s final thought about Americans is that "prosperity breeds idiots."

Solzhenitsyn’s diplomat channels views that were clearly held by the author himself. Comfort and safety, enjoyed too long in the West, invite complacency‐and complacency leads to stupidity. As a gulag survivor, Solzhenitsyn had a barely disguised disgust for Western elites with little experience of political murder and repression. Nor could he abide the legion of fools who seemed fascinated, from a secure and prosperous distance, with socialist thought. In his foreword to The Socialist Phenomenon‐an extraordinary book by his friend Igor Shafarevich‐Solzhenitsyn noted "the mist of irrationality that surrounds socialism," and stressed that

The doctrines of socialism seethe with contradictions, its theories are at constant odds with its practice, yet due to a powerful instinct, [these contradictions] do not in the least hinder the unending propaganda of socialism. Indeed no precise, distinct socialism even exists; instead there is only a vague, rosy notion of something noble and good, of equality, of communal ownership, and justice . . .

...A Lenin Prize-winning mathematician and a Soviet math genius of global standing, Shafarevich (like his friend Solzhenitsyn) eventually turned to Russian Orthodox Christianity. He became a leading Soviet dissident, and was a vocal supporter of Andrei Sakharov. He divides his thinking in The Socialist Phenomenon into three parts.
Posted by: g(r)omgoru || 09/10/2019 11:40 || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Prophetic words unread in the bubbles of our coastal elites.
Posted by: NoMoreBS || 09/10/2019 12:05 Comments || Top||

#2  "Easy times for individuals, are bad times for the race" Heinlein
Posted by: g(r)omgoru || 09/10/2019 12:30 Comments || Top||

#3  What the man said.
Posted by: Procopius2k || 09/10/2019 14:45 Comments || Top||

#4  Not really.

Unearned wealth is though
Posted by: Bright Pebbles || 09/10/2019 15:18 Comments || Top||

#5  Yeah, so?
Posted by: Skidmark || 09/10/2019 15:46 Comments || Top||

#6  More like it breeds laziness and contempt of those that have a lower status.
Posted by: DarthVader || 09/10/2019 17:06 Comments || Top||



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Two weeks of WOT
Tue 2019-09-10
  Bolton FIRED!
Mon 2019-09-09
  Inner Harbor buildings evacuated in downtown Baltimore after vehicle found with 1,000 gallons of gasoline
Sun 2019-09-08
  Pakistan denies Indian president's request to use its airspace for overflight
Sat 2019-09-07
  Taliban loses deputy intelligence chief, dozens of militants in Farah city clash
Fri 2019-09-06
  Comrade Robert ''Bob'' Mugabe Finally Croaks at 95
Thu 2019-09-05
  Arrested Terrorist Admits Being Pak National, Says Many Waiting At Launching Pads
Wed 2019-09-04
  Libya's Coast Guard rescues over 100 migrants off the coast of Sabratha
Tue 2019-09-03
   Saudi-led airstrikes on Yemen rebel-run prison kill over 100
Mon 2019-09-02
  Haftar's forces strike Murzuq in southern Libya
Sun 2019-09-01
  Live blog at this link on IDF vs Hezbollah current battle.
Sat 2019-08-31
  Islamic State claims suicide bomb attack on separatist fighters in Yemen's Aden
Fri 2019-08-30
  28 Taliban militants killed, wounded in Balkh operations
Thu 2019-08-29
  Israel Police Arrest Palestinian Trying To Enter Court With Pipe Bomb
Wed 2019-08-28
  Drone belonging to #Haftar destroys an ambulance
Tue 2019-08-27
  VIDEO LINK MUSK DID IT! Starhopper flys and LANDS!

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