A new billboard off of Interstate 70 in Missouri provides a short “citizens guide to REVOLUTION of a corrupt government” and issues a call to “PREPARE FOR WAR.”
This billboard replaces one that warned that the socialist “Obama-Nation” is “coming for you.” It’s unclear who the owner of the billboard is, but the first one was the work of a “Missouri businessman.”
While it’s unclear who owns it, the Lafayette County Republican Central Committee seems to endorse it.
“There is an event coming in the very near-term future that is going to effect the USA to its very soul,” former Kansas State Trooper Greg Everson of The Heartland USA and former host of Republic Broadcasting “Voices from the Heartland” told host Steve Quayle in a special two hour “Survive 2 Thrive” broadcast Thursday.
Here are two opposing views on how to win in Afghanistan:
1. An Air Force general's view from the Top Down
2. Army Special Forces major's view from the bottom up
SOF Major Strategy for AF
My comment: While I think the major is far closer to reality than the general, I would argue that the Pentagon, which is run by generals, does not have a clue how to go about executing the major's strategy, if they chose to do so — and they won't. But that might not matter, because, paradoxically, I think the major's excellent appreciation of the Afghan conundrum illustrates indirectly why we need to get out of Afghanistan asap.
There are at least two reasons why this is so:
First, the military has no clue how to execute the kind of strategy advocated by the major. That is why General McChrystal asked for a large increase in conventional troops. The surge just approved by the President shows (a) that the military is completely wedded to an approach that uses a large US footprint, centralized command and control, and a reliance on heavy firepower, like the AF general's predilection for bombing; and (b) the politicians are wedded to the concept that strengthening an already corrupt centralized Afghan gov't and Afghan national army and national police forces will “win the hearts and minds” of the rural population.
Note that the weakest parts of the major's excellent analysis occur when he tries to reconcile support of the Afghan central government and Afghan national army with his decentralized tribal strategy — they can not be reconciled except through tribal mediation processes that start a village level jirgas and slowly work upwards to “national” level loya jirga. But that traditional approach would result in a repudiation of the central gov't as it is now constituted.
Second. I am not sure there will ever be enough time to make his strategy work on a war-winning scale. As the major makes clear, we are struggling to deal with a culture that is based on profoundly important concepts of honor and revenge. Planners in Washington and Kabul are trying to shape the cultural DNA of a rural tribal society that is the product of a 3000 years of cultural evolution. This culture may seem primitive to strategists in Washington trying to export the our way of life (not the major, who clearly understands that strategy must be shaped by the mores of the Afghan culture), but this tribal culture is in fact a highly evolved in a complex relationship to its environment. The problem as I see it is that too much water has gone over the dam since we foolishly began trying to cynically manipulate the value systems of this tribal culture by inflating the Islamic crazies in late 1970s (with goal of making it more likely that Sov's would invade and enmesh the Sovs in their Vietnam-like quagmire).
There's nothing inherently wrong with the analysis of Al Qaeda (I just glanced at it, if you wish I can read in detail today). The PROBLEM lies not so much in how we analyze support to terrorism (state, crime, other) but rather in the way we analyze (or rather do NOT analyze) EVERYTHING.
Here's what I have thrown together for you, in six pages with links.
He calls himself the “The ‘Real' hope for America – not hype,” according to his MySpace page, and if the number of friends he has on there is any indication – nearly 200,000 – Ron Paul isn't fading into the dust, at least not with the technologically savvy generations.
. . . . . . .
“The very good thing that has happened here in the last two years is that government's credibility is crashing,” Paul said. “There's been way too much trust in the government. That has been our moral hazard over many, many centuries. Trust in the government that it's here to help you, it's here to protect you … they're going to scare everybody to death to try to argue the reason why you have to have big government, and you really don't. What we need is more faith, more confidence and a better understanding of what individual liberty is all about.”
Nov. 30 (Bloomberg) — Mark Pittman, the award-winning reporter whose fight to make the Federal Reserve more accountable to taxpayers led Bloomberg News to sue the central bank and win, died Nov. 25 in Yonkers, New York. He was 52. . . .
He drew the attention of filmmakers Leslie and Andrew Cockburn, who featured him prominently in their documentary about subprime mortgages, “American Casino,” which was shown at New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival in May. . . .
At the time of his death, Pittman’s outgoing messages offered a link to a black-and-white photo of folk musician Woody Guthrie. Written on Guthrie’s guitar: “This machine kills fascists.”
But that was it. All that’s known about the meeting itself is that attendance is expected from most of the remaining 27 members, a group that includes the following luminaries: Paul Volcker, the chairman of the G30’s Board of Trustees and currently head of President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board; Lawrence Summers, director of the White House’s National Economic Council; Paul Krugman of Princeton and the New York Times’ opinion page; Citigroup’s William Rhodes; European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet; Bank of Japan Governor Masaaki Shirakawa; San Francisco Fed President Janet Yellen; and Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England.
Phi Beta Iota: WIRED Magazine has put together a number of questions that ably illustrate the confusion in the public mind over why we are in Afghanistan and what that has to do with Pakistan. Based on the history of the Cold War, which appears to have been a Fity Year Wound, In Search of Enemies, or as General Smedley Butler, USMC (Ret) put it, War is a Racket, we have to wonder. When one combines the scandals associated with health care (50% waste according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers), the economy (a fraudulent Federal Reserve and phantom wealth leveraged by Wall Street to the detriment of the commonwealth), and all of the other pressing problems facing America, the larger question is not really about Afghanistan or Pakistan but rather about process. Is America a democracy? Is our policy process reasoned and informed? Is the public interest being served? Does the White House really understand The True Cost of Conflict/Seven Recent Wars and Their Effects on Society?
