Showing posts with label Afghanistan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Afghanistan. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 15, 2017
Years
ago there was a little girl, she operated a lemonade and candy stand, her name
was Heaven Sutton. She isn’t with us anymore because she was gunned down in her
front yard. Now years later the names of
children killed by senseless gangland (or any form) violence in places like Chicago are too
numerous to name. Acen King, Ja'Quail Mansaw, Cylie and Caden McCullum, Payton Benson
Antonio Smith Jr., Tiana Ricks and Londyn Samuels are just a few, but you don’t know
their names or even know who they are.
They were never romanticized with hashtags like #remeberhername or
#sayhisname or #bringbackourgirls because although they were black there death's were
not sensational enough for the retro chic political narrative of the day.
If
they were killed by police or an idiotic white lunatic, they would be known and
remembered and we would cite their names with the likes of Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown. But they have
no value in the eyes and minds of social justice warriors because mentioning or
remembering their names does not help to enable their goals of getting rich off
of racial and identity politics and obtain fake fame by receiving television
air time for pretending to be “woke.”
The artificial pretense of the so-called woke culture is metastasizing like a cancer, especially with the election of Donald Trump.
It is as if black folk can only attend to complaining about him and
police shootings and nothing more. Not
the pathetic state of our inner cities. Or our failing government public schools or increasing rates of poverty (all of which by they have been
happening in places that have been run by democrats since the 1940s in most
cases and problems Trump had nothing to do with). The fake outrage at the election of Donald Trump that I have written about before will never manifest
into true honest civic outrage for real problems that confront us daily like
the deaths of the little children or the economic constraints I mentioned
previously.
These
same folk, especially the black ones will protest against Trump and his ban on
seven specific nations but were silent when Obama was bombing families of the
same innocent women and children in the same nations with his drone wars which
he dramatically increased when compared to George W. Bush after giving his 2009 Nobel Peace prize acceptance speech: wars that the former president conducted
with impunity in places like Somalia, Libya, South Sudan, Afghanistan and Syria that created his current migrant-refugee crisis to begin with. They are loud when they are
not allowed within the U.S. proper but were quiet when they were being slaughtered religiously on the orders of America’s first black president. It is
as if they say it is cool to kill them, I can get with that but it is a problem
when we try to improve criterion for entry to the U.S.
For
the life of me I cannot figure this out – being open to individual and personal
acquiesce to murder but opposed to none murderous acts to an option of personal
choice. Likewise, there was no outrage
when Obama stopped Iraqis from immigrating to the U.S. for 120 days. Clearly politics and not protest in the name
of basic dignity is hey problem or issue.
At
Berkeley we saw this in action. Incantations of divide and conquer. Destroying property and setting vehicles on fire has nothing to do with protest based on
what is called for to stand on the side of righteousness regarding human
dignity or else they would affirm the nonviolent approaches of Gandhi, King and
Mandela. This is all show and
mechanically contrived vexation. They do
not really care, they just want attention; and they do not seek change, rather
they only want to define what is acceptable or should be tolerated as meaning
you have to agree with me or else you are wrong and my speech is more important
than your speech. What I am paying attention too is more important than
anything else. But where were they before this?
For
example, cities and states all around the nation have been finding funds
available to deal with litigious actions that may be pending for illegal aliens
under asserted or proposed Trump planes to deal with the issue. You got black folk even out on the front
lines of this fictitious battle. Mind
you that for decades we have been trying to get the same cities and states to hire more public defenders for the many of our fellow men and women locked behind
bars but the response was always “we do not have the money for such.” Yet there
were none of these adamant protestors standing next to us when we made this
request but we stand with them. And all of a sudden places like LA can
magically come up with $10 million for this but no funds for additional public
defenders to defend people born in America.
It
is as if we are living in an alternate reality where all injustices are equal
when evidence dictates they are not.
There were only one specific people designated as slaves in America who
did not have a choice to come him but rather was forced to by a combination of
the Bible and the barrel of a gun. Still opaquely innocent and manipulated we
go along with the flow when it makes no logical senses and supersedes our own
collective interest. We hail the arrival
of Muslim immigrants without out the consideration of the fact that if they are terrorist, they will kill us too, and want to kill us too. Liberal or conservative they do not care,
they will set you on fire and chop your head off with the quickness for things
we call liberties (sexual orientation, wearing revealing clothing if you are a
woman, drinking alcohol, being a Christian or having an abortion).
That
they do like beating women and condemning homosexuals to death don’t outrage us,
nor what they believe. It is this myopia
that believes we are justified not to speak up on behalf of the children I
mentioned earlier because they do not meet our narrative. But don’t let it be an award show, or you
will have protest and outrage out the azz.
There would be #oscarssowhite or the recent #grammyssowhite because
Beyoncé didn’t win album of the year. This is an issue although WORLDWIDE the woman she lost too sold waaaaaaaay more albums than she did. Now let that sink in, cats are so mad that a millionaire didn’t win an award
while sitting in a room filled with other millionaires outfitted in $5,000 or more worth
of sartorial splendor, that they are willing to express emotional disdain. But let a two-year get shot in the head the
result of a gangland hit, and they won’t say jack. But it makes sense, after
all these rich Hollywood cats are oppressed too, with their body guards with
automatic weapons, drivers and walled-in mansions.
Have
we lost our way? Are we so caught up in self-absorbed mindless celebrity
twaddle that we can be eaisly paraded about like a puppet by presentations of what Juvenal
called “bread and circuses?” Do we even know what we are upset by, angered by or protesting against? I don’t think so and
I don’t think for those who are black, really have have any interest in
improving our conditions collectively as a people, if they were, they would
know of Lavontay White, Takiya Holmes or Kanari Gentry Bowers. Unfortunately
they don’t, they just know Beyoncé didn’t win a Grammy for Album of the year
and that it takes precedence above all else.
Monday, January 30, 2017
The
veil of hypocrisy is best seen when one looks in the mirror. It is opaque and empty until we accidentally
see it while we are putting on our makeup, or a tie to adorn our image. Our
hypocrisy is so consistent, especially here in America that it should be used
like a scientific constant similar to Planck’s or Avogadro’s number.
It
seems as that President Trump’s recent announcement of a temporary ban on
immigration from several specific countries got a lot of folk upset, 99 percent
of them who presented no real outrage to the policy or even the ban, but rather
the man who implemented it. They are out
in mass protesting at airports on behalf of these individuals as if their life
depended on it. Now I too disagree with
Trump’s implementation but not the policy. But unlike most, I am rational and
have been consistent, in my views from president to president, but I will never
evince the fake and cosmetically contrived outrage band wagon revolutionaries
show whenever they get their feelings hurt or do not get their way.
It
is comedy at its best and more life-like than anything Hermippus or Eupolis
could have ever written. And I say this
honestly, because although I have been pained by the refugee crisis for more
than six years now, I was more upset at the Obama administration for its
continuous bombing and destruction of these humans homes and murdering their families, for creating this outcome from Libya to the South Sudan and equally
the lack of concern partisan progressive neoliberals, allowed him to carry out
his inhuman slaughter without protest.
You
see, when Obama was droning weddings in Afghanistan, or providing Saudi Air
force with targeting direction to drop US supplied cluster bombs and White
Phosphorus on schools, hospitals and Yemeni markets using US F-15s, few of the
many at the airports across American cities currently said a single world. Since it was Obama, it was “all good.” Even
still, there was nothing said when in 2011, then President Barack Obama and the Clinton state department stopped processing Iraq refugee requests for six months imposing a similar ban as Trump’s. I say similar because if you take the
time to read the EO (as I have) it is nothing like these idiot pundit talking
heads describes it as being. Instead,
they play the herd-like public, so distraught with emotional indignity
and desecration so eager to accept what they see from TV without question. A more accurate representation of the EO is
that it specifically focuses in on Syrians (Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan
and Yemen are not even declared, stated, cited or listed in the EO specifically). If they were, we can thank the past administration for this
policy shift for these visa restrictions for these seven nations exactly, which
was put in place by the Obama administration in 2015 for cats who had been in
said nations after 2011 (ironically it was in March 2011 when a multi-state
NATO-led coalition began a military intervention in Libya and at the same time the Obama administration instigated the civil war in Syria).
In
all accuracy, if one read it, the only mention of the other nations are as
follows: “For the next 90 days, nearly all travelers, except U.S. citizens,traveling on passports from Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Iran, Somalia, Libya, and Yemen will be temporarily suspended from entry to the United States.“ It also goes on to state: “I hereby proclaim
that the entry of nationals of Syria as refugees is detrimental to the
interests of the United States and thus suspend any such entry until such time
as I have determined that sufficient changes have been made to the USRAP to
ensure that admission of Syrian refugees is consistent with the national
interest.”
If
you read the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington post (and I can only
imagine mainstream TV/cable news), all I
am seeing is messaging pushing the narrative that seven mostly Muslim nations are targeted from entering the US over the ninety day period. But this isn’t true. Don’t believe me, again read the EO yourself.
So
when Democrats like Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth “full-blooded Indian” Warren,
or media pundits whom proclaim to be objective journalist yet clearly do not
know how to read or either comprehend processes that allow for the extraction
of semantic meaning from words, express their OFFENDEDNESS at President Trump's action, I have to question their sincerity, as I do with all these protestors.
I
question if they care so much, then where have they been and why have they been
silent. As I noted earlier, they didn’t
mind when Obama did it for a period of 120 days, nor complained when upon
leaving office ending a privilege bestowed among Cuban migrants and immigrants of being allowed to enter the U.S. without a visa—and to remain with benefits.
They were uncommunicative and closed-mouth even prior to this for when
Obama approved policy designed to destabilize governments (neoliberal interventionism’s), allow for the bombing
countries (undeclared wars of aggression),
and arming jihadist extremists ,
no one complained then even when we saw the massive outflow of people from Niger, Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria among
others. If you never complained about the Obama administration
accelerated/enhanced drone policy, you are really in no moral or ethical
position to complain about Trump's refugee policy. Look in that mirror and ask
yourself, what's worse: Trump not allowing refugees to enter the US or Obama
droning and bombing these peoples’ into
oblivion and creating an environment for fundamentalist cats that cut off
heads, enslave women and girls, and burn people alive in an effort to control their
communities? But no now we have a responsibility to refugees.
It
is nothing wrong with caring and having compassion for others, but when it is
phony and falls along partisan lines it borders on fascism. Such hypocrisy has no moral footing to stand
unless you are willing to take these migrants in your home or have refugee
camps built across from where you live, but I doubt you have that much care and
sincere interest to go that far. I mean we have homeless people right here in
America who many of the anti-Trump EO protestors drive past, don’t help and
even lock their doors and roll up their windows when they approach their car.
Take San Francisco for example. Liberal democrats
all over the city protesting for affordable houses but when plans were made to
put that housing in their liberal democratic neighborhood they fought and still
are fighting against it. I guess it is okay to protest for affordable housing
for the poor and homeless as long as it isn’t put next door to me
Clearly
these protesters like to say it is an all-out Muslim ban when fact dictates
these nations only account for 12 percent of all Muslims in the world – nations
that have had similar bans against Israel but proffered no protest. But this is cool, but some aspects are
not. For example, Starbucks announced it plans to hire 10,000 refuges but when it comes to former inmates or young black
youth in America, they are content with them remaining unemployed. But like I
said before, where was this activism when Obama & Hillary were creating refugees by dropping bombs on the homes they once owned in the places in which
they hail from? And don’t forget about the celebrity Hollywood cats that politicize the #Muslimban yet never mentioning that in the majority of their movies they
portray Muslims as terrorist (which can be interpreted as progressives
protesting under the claim that they are tolerant, but they are not). Tolerance for them only means accepting views
comparable to theirs for reason and compassion is thrown out the window when
you disagree with them. One can only speak your mind if you tow the same ideological
line.
Something
must change, it is as if you don’t agree with someone, instead of listening and
using reason and pragmatism, folks would rather just yell, call names and
argue. This isn’t productive. I will not
point fingers but there is enough hypocrisy to go around feed the world
indefinitely. Strange there's so much
outrage over Trump's refugee ban compared to Obama's disastrous regime-change policies in Libya, Syria and Yemen. I know what trump did was idiotic, stupid and in
American but for you fake outrage and not put in work in your back yard is
equally stupid. This is what I meant by such being comical for the hilarity of
the herd mentality cannot be ignored.
And this is sad because as one writer pointed out describing all of the
anti-Trump protest: “…marchers aren’t waiting for the policy fog to lift. Their anger is directed at people, not policies. [These] protests [are] intended,above all, to express the protesters’ moral superiority to the president and those who voted for him…. Why complain now, when no decision has been made? It delegitimizes the future protests and exposes the bias of the opposition. . . .An opposition focused on personality.”
I just ask, is this you? Are you as loud when Israel already has a wall?
Wednesday, January 4, 2017
The hissy fits of the Democratic Party over the election victory of Donald Trump continue. If one
pays strict attention to their whining, it all seems to be a cloak for inherent
and clandestine fears based on emotion more so than pragmatism and reason. It reminds me of how one of my uncle friends
described being in Vietnam when I was between 11 and 12 years old (1973-74). He
told me about how what he would never forget outside of the sounds of war, were
the marshy fields he and his company would be dropped off in, feet tall above
the head of Elephant grass. He said
these fields were packed with booby traps but what scared him most was not
being able to see around him. The tall
grass in addition to the grown-man high ant mounds, concealed the unexpected,
seeing that the Elephant grass was tall enough to hide an entire military
detail ready for ambush.
I suspect that this is
how the democrats feel. As if they were
dropped off in a field of Elephant grass, not know what the future holds in
store for them. Could it be they expect
to be invalidated by Trump and the GOP? Could it be that they fear Trump will
make good on his campaign promises and lead to the destruction of the
Democratic Party for years to come? Or could it be it will show the US
citizenry how democratic policy has placed America in its current predicament?
All are
possibilities. Let’s face it, no matter
how democrats and the media try to paint Obama’s eight years as a success, math
shows the opposite. The math, as pure science reveals the truth that
politically the democrats are powerless and stuck in a destitute defensive
posture. Thus their primary weapon is crying and/or attacking the incoming
administration through mere emotional displacement. Jamil Smith attacks Trump
on his “intellectual laziness” suggesting that this “may be the most dangerous
thing about him,” and that “Vladimir Putin wanted Donald Trump to be presidentof the United States, and the Russian government deliberately tried to help him win the election.” Jamile Bouie suggest that “Trump is defined by his shameless disregard, and even disdain, for the bonds that hold political life together.”
Or in the case of some, they simply stick to praise of Putin as being evidence of incompetence and dishonesty. All
unfounded and groundless allegations pure in rhetoric singularly.
All of these are just
emotional invective. These writers will never back up their words with tangible accomplishments of President Obama to
compare these statements of rhetorical grandiose to purport the accuracy of
their assertions. Never will they objectively examine real life measure of
American success and economic improvement like the Housing Affordability Index
for example. The Housing Affordability Index measures whether or not a typical
U.S. family makes enough money to just to qualify for a mortgage loan on a
typical home let alone buy one. But this will never be included in their
writings because data indicates that US housing affordability is at its lowest point since the fourth quarter of 2008. This most likely is a consequence of
stagnate wage growth that cannot keep up with increasing home prices.
They may cite job
creation as an indicator of Obama’s success but will go no further than the
Whitehouse press statement to examine the fine details of the data, for if they
did, as a new study by economists from Harvard and Princeton note, nearly 95%of the 10 million new jobs created during the Obama era were part-time or temporary positions. I won’t even include that additional analysis of liberal
media pundits will not note or question how many of these new jobs are being taken by people that already have a job or even two. In all accuracy, since
Obama took office, there remains 1 million fewer workers, overall, working than
before he took office (Another actor to consider when attempting to comprehend
why US housing affordability is so low and wage growth so paralyzed).
In simple terms,
although Obama did inherit an economic mess, his policies have led to
deteriorating affordability in home ownership, a segment of the U.S. economy
that traditionally has proffered parents with the best opportunity to safeguard
a better future for their children. Instead, his Keynesian economic approach
has added another obstacle for lower-income Americans regardless of race. I
mean, the housing market bubble burst almost 10 years ago, yet sales and construction in this sector are well below their peaks in the early 2000s
meaning the housing sector is stagnate along with wage growth.
Thus to abrogate the use
of data, anything is not only open to vapid complaints by democrats but is also
the fault of the man who has not even been sworn in as president yet. This is the ultimate profile of the traumatized individual. This can be made even worse for progressive peace-loving democrats
when we include Obama’s foreign policy record.
When Obama took office he vowed to end the war in Afghanistan.
This too has not happened and to use the same language pundits use to
describe the statements of Trump, was a lie.
Not only has he increased military operations in Afghanistan, he has
dropped more bombs, employed more drone killings than Bush, and has killed
inordinate more innocent civilian in the country when compared to his predecessor.
Then there is Libya and Yemen. The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winning PresidentAdministration has sold more weapons than any other American president since
World War II, totaling plus $200 billion from 2008 to 2015. Sales to Saudi Arabia alone has swollen to $115 billion. Now he has sent US Special Forces to Lithuania to saber rattle on the Russian border.
Democrats and in
particular Obama, really do see
Donald Trump’s election victory as a personal repudiation of his pluralistic
and globalist agenda and legacy. Add to this that democrats need to not only
figure out how to have policy messages that include all instead of dividing the
nation in to mutually exclusive voting blocs based on labels and message of
race, gender and sexuality, they also have to figure out how to formulate new integrative
domestic policies with how to communicates
those policies with a single unified message for all (and this can’t be done by
just speaking at colleges, universities, unions and big cities).
The
democrats understand that what they have to stand on are Obama’s past eight
years and the political agenda of the democratic elite. While murder rates in traditionally
democratic cities like Chicago, Memphis, Baltimore and DC are out of the
atmosphere, they are doubling down. By some estimates, the Obama Administration
and sanctuary cities and their mayor including in NYC, San Francisco and Chicago spend around $113 billion on illegal aliens annually but they ignore
that there are U.S. citizens that can use these funds including but not limited
to homeless veterans, our inner cities, our youth and/or rural areas, all being
poor black and white folk alike.
Yes the
Democrats have their own battle of Ia Drang Valley and they cannot see for the Elephant grass and are taking fire
from all sides yet responding by shooting in all directions and at anything
that moves from a Simon & Schuster book deal for Milo Yiannopoulos, to theHBCU band from Talladega College performing at the inauguration to GM CEO Mary Barra being appointed to Trump’s business Advisory council (yet don't mention how Obama pimped US tax payers for GM), to
Putin, WikiLeaks and so-called ‘fake news’.
They have been dropped off in the middle of their own Landing Zone (LZ) X-ray
and do not know what to do. They never look at themselves to determine if their
battle plan was defective yet instead blame everything else. But now they have
run out of replacement parts for the Iroquois “Huey” helicopters that carried
them into battle and are running out of ammunition and have few if any
reinforcements arriving for some time. The Battle of the Ia Drang Valley was
one of the most noteworthy battles of the Vietnam war, likewise, the battle the
Democrats have on their hands after the 2016 presidential election loss, will
be just as significant.
Monday, September 19, 2016
Rubble is a noun that describes waste or debris
from the demolition of buildings in the form of stone, brick, and/or concrete. After saying U.S. “generals
under Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have not been successful,” and that
under their leadership “generals
have beenreduced to rubble, reduced to a point where it is embarrassing for our
country” during a
media extravaganza produced by NBC, Republican presidential nominee Donald
Trump has been deluged with criticism for his assertions. Unfortunately criticism aside, there
is both truth and merit to his statements whether the word used was rubble or
rubbish.
By
definition rubbish is something very bad, worthless or useless, it means that
something has lost its utility (the state of being useful, profitable, or
beneficial). If one looks at how the military leadership has been rendered
impotent (utterly unable to do something for lacking in
power and strength) he is correct. Since Obama began his term in 2009, with
respect to the U.S. military and armed forces, one thing has been clear – he
has removed more of the top military leadership brass than any president in
modern times. Let us just look at his record to start with. Since taking
office, high ranking
military officers have been removed from their positions at a rate that has
never been seen before by a U.S. President. In fact it is somewhat
reminiscent of what we have just observed Erdogan do in Turkey. One report notes
that President Obama has removed or purged the military of at least 197 top admirals and generals
in his first five years.
Obama fired Rear
Adm. Chuck Gaouette, commander of the John C. Stennis Carrier Strike Group,
for disobeying orders when he sent his group on Sept. 11 to “assist and provide
intelligence for” military forces ordered into action by Gen.
Carter Ham. By the way, Gen. Ham. was also relieved as head of U.S. Africa
Command after only a year and a half because he disagreed with orders not to
mount a rescue mission in response to the Sept. 11, 2012, attack in Benghazi.
Then there
is the strange issue of President
Obama’s approach to defeating
the Islamic State. It is well documented that President Obama
typically silences any general that advises the use of US groundtroops in Iraq. The Whitehouse has done this publically and behind
closed doors. His consistent mantra, regardless of the advice of those with
military and combat experience is that the US
will not fight another ground war in Iraq nor will he put US boots on the
ground.
This albeit US commanders inform him that
it is improbably that the United States military will ever be able to defeat
ISIS via air power alone. Gen.
Lloyd Austin was the top
commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East and Gen.
MartinDempsey was the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2011 to 2015 both advised President
Obama that ground troops would be required t defeat ISIS. Yet still, any advice
offered that didn’t match Obama’s political aims (not military aims) were
rejected, in particular the use of ground troops. Instead, President Obama
unilaterally decided that he knew better and would only send an additional 475
U.S. troops to assist Iraqi and Kurdish forces. Even General Austin’s
predecessor, retired Marine Gen. James Mattis, said Obama’s decision not to
send ground troops basically makes the mission to defeat ISIS improbable.
It is true Obama had to reduce the number
of troops on the ground in Iraq, but namely because he failed to even try to
argue against the levels outlined in the 2008 Status of Forces
Agreement with Iraq. At the
time there were around 45,000 U.S. troops stationed in Iraq and generals on the
ground had requested a reduced number but did not foresee the military's
troop-level going below 10,000. But such a number was too high for the Obama
administration which preferred a number closer to 3,000,
which meant that this was never a combat mission but rather served a training
only commitment.
The same can be said for the mission in
Afghanistan as well. It is well know that the Afghan military do not have the
necessary combat troop levels and power to protect every part of the country
let alone to be in the position to effectively
counter the Taliban. Gen. Martin Dempsey replacement, Marine Corps General
Joseph Dunford during his
confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, stated that he
didn’t agree with Obama’s decision to pull all troops out by the end of
2016. His purview was that such a troop reduction seems to place policy
over military implications.
This has been noted by several military
experts. Retired Army Gen. John Keane, who devised the 2007 Iraq troop surge
and has advised Afghan commanders in the past question Obama’s approach to
Afghanistan as well as Army Gen. John Campbell, the top NATO commander
in Afghanistan, among
others.
Keane
pointed outthat Gen. Campbell wanted
to retain the current force of 9,800, but Mr. Obama “cut that in half,” adding
that President Obama frequently “does not listen to his combat field general,”
and on six occasions ignored “field commander recommendation on force levels
for troops in combat.” And like ISIS, the Taliban is becoming more brazen and
powerful while claiming more area without any real push back from the Afghan
security forces or police.
In addition, Obama’s plan will have
to depend on an unlikely assumption: that the formation of an inclusive Iraqi
government under Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi can manifest. This is the
only way President Obama will have a 1 percent chance of defeating the Islamic
State without U.S. troops being on the ground. In addition, this means
that Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi will have to make significant inroads into
healing sectarian wounds that were engendered by Nouri al-Maliki. But bringing
the new Shia-led government to a Kumbaya
moment with Iraq’s
Sunni minority may proffer to be a lot more difficult and could result in Sunni
tribesmen moving towards ISIS instead of away from them. This approach is not
only mousy and incoherent; it also involves serious risk (mainly having to
depend on an incompetent and dysfunctional Iraqi military).
So Donald Trump may be more accurate than
some may desire. When the President fires, without hesitation, top Brass the
likes of the aforementioned, and never even considers firing or disciplining
appointed member of his staff when they break the law, there has to be some
additional motive and or reasoning behind such. Obama. The question is why
deliberately reduce or military leadership to rubbish?
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