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Topic: Still here troll? I thought you would be hiding in embarrassment. (Read 1171 times) |
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Hermit
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Still here troll? I thought you would be hiding in embarrassment.
« on: 2008-07-22 13:52:39 » |
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[ Hermit : Still here troll? If you had any decency left you would be hiding in embarrassment. I didn't bother to read your recent posting on the grounds that your posting history of the last several years shows that it is unlikely to contain anything useful or even accurate. One reason that the New York Times might have turned it down would have been had it focussed on the violence besetting the Iraq-Pakistan border that McCain was blathering about last week. In which case the pre-eminent Zionist organization in the USA, the New York Times, perhaps was merely attempting to shield its apparent favorite for the election from further derision.
Note to article: Notice that Natynczyk incorrectly projects this conflict as counterinsurgency, rather than a popular revolt against a puppet government that has failed to buy popularity, and hence legitimacy, through success (due to a lack of resources). Still, in an unusual nod to reality, he doesn't try to hide the fact that the wheels are falling off. ]
Natynczyk says Afghanistan situation is worsening
Source: CTV News
Authors: Not Credited (CTV.ca News Staff)
Dated: 2008-07-20
Despite the significant gains Canadian troops have achieved in Afghanistan, Gen. Walter Natynczyk admitted Sunday the country's overall situation is worsening.
Canada's top soldier told CTV's Question Period that insurgent attacks have increased year over year, specifically in some parts of the country.
"You have a worsening security situation, especially localized in three areas -- the Kabul area, in the Regional Command East, where the Americans are, and in the south where we are with the British forces and the Dutch," he said.
The statement appeared to backtrack from what Natynczyk said earlier this month after he completed his first visit to Afghanistan as the Chief of Defence Staff.
On a five-day visit to the region, Natynczyk put a positive spin on security issues in the war-torn country, which has seen a resurgence of Taliban activity. Natynczyk, who became the country's top soldier on July 2, had said the increased violence is negligible.
"We're generally along the same lines as we have been the past few years,'' Natynczyk said at a news conference on July 13 at Kandahar Airfield. "Looking at the statistics, we're just a slight notch -- indeed an insignificant notch -- above where we were last year.''
On Sunday, Natynczyk agreed with statistics presented on Question Period that suggested year-to-year violence was up 34 per cent.
"The statistics you cite are absolutely true," he said.
"On the other hand, when I was in Kandahar, from a soldiers' perspective, what they see are localized, fragile signs of success."
He noted the Taliban "is throwing everything against" NATO troops and Afghan security forces in an effort to undermine the government ahead of next year's elections. Natynczyk reiterated the need for more NATO troops to help quell insurgent violence.
"In a counterinsurgency, it is troop intensive. It's not enough just to clear the Taliban out ... you need to have that security blanket to ensure that there is time for police and the army to have that capacity to address their own security," he said.
Natynczyk said that NATO troops have helped the country make significant improvements. He said Canadians have helped train police officers who are respected by the local population, and Afghan battalions have increasingly taken on roles to protect major regions of the country.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Blunderov
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"We think in generalities, we live in details"
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Re:Still here troll? I thought you would be hiding in embarrassment.
« Reply #1 on: 2008-07-28 13:41:00 » |
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[Blunderov] There is a meme abroad that the war in Iraq which was thought to be lost two years ago, is now, startlingly, being won instead. The tide has turned it is trumpeted; violence is down.
I suppose it all depends on what is meant by "victory". Yes violence is down. But at what cost? Printing the necessary Danegeld to pacify Iraq has directly affected the world economy; essentially the USA has stopped launching missiles and fired up the money printing presses instead.This has not gone unnoticed by those trusting souls who have put their faith in the US dollar. Sampson pulls his own economy down around his shoulders. Now that's what I call fundamentalist fanaticism....
Not to mention very unpatriotic expedience. Let the Dems drink from a poisoned chalice. The 'candidacy' of John "Daffy Duck" McCain makes a great deal of sense viewed in that light : the last thing the Republican party wants to inherit is the consequences of its' own policies!
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/07/the-splurge-of-course-its-working/
The S(pl)urge: Of Course It’s Working
by E.R. Bills / July 26th, 2008
Every day John McCain chastises Barrack Obama for his original stance on the surge. McCain says Obama said the surge wouldn’t work and was bald-faced wrong. Obama says the surge has been effective, but there were other factors involved.
What’s suspicious about Obama’s response is that it trusts the American people to ponder those other factors. Obama could come right out and enumerate them, and John McCain and even General David Petraeus would have egg on their faces. The other factors are not a secret; they’re simply embarrassing because they expose the success of the surge to ridicule and pessimism.
I commend Obama for taking the high ground, but there’s not enough room for all of us in the thin air, and I think it’s time we spoke frankly about the Bush Administration’s most effective secret weapon.
All you need to know about the “surge” is that it should have been called the “splurge.” Sure, we sent 30,000 extra troops to Iraq, but during the first six months of the operation, violence went up, not down. As Retired Army Colonel Douglas McGregor put it, “Up until that point, the surge was simply providing more targets for the insurgents to shoot at.”
Under extreme pressure to produce results and fill less body bags, General Petraeus cut deals with armies of enemy combatants. These deals, now part of what is referred to as the Concerned Local Citizens program, simply pay insurgents to become temporary allies of the U. S. military. Approximately 70,000 former enemy combatants are now paid to play nice and all it costs us is $700,000 a day.
That’s right. For $255 million a year, 70,000 IED-planting, sniper-firing, roadside-booby-trapping insurgents will be our friends and the death toll will drop and we can pat ourselves on the back because the “surge” is working or at least paying off in better press.
Curiously, conservatives, Republicans and Neocons are notorious for their contempt and opposition towards hand-outs. As they strut around golf courses and hunting lodges, martinis in hand, they grandly extol the merits of pulling one’s self up by his or her own bootstraps. These days, however, they’re polishing the boots of our heretofore enemies in Iraq and giving them per diem hand-outs so we can look like we’re no longer fumbling over our own bootstraps.
Now I’m usually loath to get behind any conservative, Republican or Neocon ideas, but I like this one. It’s an excellent flip-flop. In fact, I recommend we apply it to more of our problems.
So far this year, our federal, state and local governments have spent $56 billion on the War on Drugs and arrested just over one million drug law offenders. That amounts to $56,000 per offender, not including long-term incarceration costs. Why not pay offenders to clean up and stand on the sidelines? A few years of college and a pimpin’ ride with 20’ titanium rims would cost less than fifty-six large. And our courtrooms would be less log-jammed and our prisons would be less overcrowded.
Instead of vilifying, chasing down and prosecuting illegal aliens, why not just pay them to stay home? Mexicans abroad sent $23 billion home in 2006 and even with the housing market slump and the American economy flailing, they’ll probably send at least $15 billion home this year. I say double their 2006 homeward remittances and start mailing checks to their residences in Mexico. It would be cheaper than trying to catch and prosecute them or station troops on our border or build border walls, right?
Each Iraqi insurgent we’re paying off will receive a $3,640 this year (plus bragging and thumbing-his-nose-at-the-U.S. rights). That’s six times more than each of us received in George W. Bush’s measly economic stimulus package. And it doesn’t even account for our higher cost of living expenses or inflation. I think we’re being ripped off.
We’re stateside “Concerned Local Citizens” and if President Bush and John McCain want us to keep voting Republican, pledging allegiance to Exxon Mobile and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and condemning homosexuality and comparing Obama with Nazis, they better ante up.
Lots of folks in this country say that money is what makes the world go round. The Bush Administration is clearly proof of that, but they’re thinking too small. It’s time to spread the wealth. If we’re gonna pretend to be happy and sit idly by while they continue to screw everything up, the least they could do is compensate us accordingly.
It’s the smart play. And it’ll make their war against us go much more smoothly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danegeld
Danegeld
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Danegeld ("Danish gold") was a tax raised to pay tribute to the Viking raiders to save a land from being ravaged. It was characteristic of royal policy in both England and Frankland during the ninth through eleventh centuries.
Danegeld in England Anglo-Saxon era
The first payment of the Danegeld to the Vikings took place in 845 when they tried to attack Paris. The viking army was bought off from destroying the city by a massive payment of nearly six tons of silver and gold bullion. English payment, of 10,000 Roman pounds (3,300 kg) of silver, was also made in 991 following the Viking victory at the Battle of Maldon in Essex, when King Aethelred "The Unready" was advised by Archbishop Sigeric of Canterbury and the aldermen of the south-western provinces to buy off the Vikings rather than continue the armed struggle.
In 994 the Danes, under King Sweyn Forkbeard and Olaf Trygvason, returned and laid siege to London. They were once more bought off, and the amount of silver paid impressed the Danes with the idea that it was more profitable to extort payments from the English than to take whatever booty they could plunder.
Further payments were made in 1002, and especially in 1007 when Aethelred bought two years peace with the Danes for 36,000 troy pounds (13,400 kg) of silver. In 1012, following the capture and murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the sack of Canterbury, the Danes were bought off with another 48,000 troy pounds (17,900 kg) of silver.
In 1016 Sweyn Forkbeard's son, Canute, became King of England. After two years he felt sufficiently in control of his new kingdom to the extent of being able to pay off all but 40 ships of his invasion fleet, which were retained as a personal bodyguard, with a huge Danegeld of 72,000 troy pounds (26,900 kg) of silver collected nationally, plus a further 10,500 pounds (3,900 kg) of silver collected from London.
This kind of extorted tribute was not unique to England: according to Snorri Sturluson and Rimbert, Finland and the Baltic states (see also Grobin) paid the same kind of tribute to the Swedes. In fact, the Primary Chronicle relates that the regions paying protection money extended east towards Moscow, until the Finnish and Slavic tribes rebelled and drove the Varangians overseas. Similarly, the Sami peoples were frequently forced to pay tribute in the form of pelts. A similar procedure also existed in Iberia, where the contemporary Christian states were largely supported on tribute gold from the taifa kingdoms.[2]
It is estimated that the total amount of money paid by the Anglo-Saxons amounted to some sixty million pence. More Anglo-Saxon pence of this period have been found in Sweden than in England,[3] and at the farm where the runestone Sö 260 talks of a voyage in the West, a hoard of several hundred English coins was found.[3]
Geld in England after the Norman Conquest
The Danegeld, now known simply as the geld, was based on hidages, an area of agricultural land sufficient to support a family, and farmed (collected) by local sheriffs. Records of assessment and income pre-date the Norman conquest, indicating a system which Campbell describes as "old, but not unchanging"[4]. According to Bates, it was "a national tax of a kind unknown in western Europe."[5] It was used by William the Conqueror as a principal tool for underwriting continental wars, as well as providing for royal appetites and the costs of conquest, rather than for buying-off the Viking menace. He and his successors levied the geld more frequently than the Anglo-Saxon kings, and at higher rates, such that by 1096 the geld in Ely, for example, was double its normal rate.[6] Green states that from 1110, war and the White Ship calamity led to further increases in taxation efforts.[7]
Current British usage
In the United Kingdom, the term "Danegeld" has come to be used as a warning and a criticism of any coercive payment, whether in money or kind. For example as mentioned in the British House of Commons during the debate on the Belfast Agreement:
“ I feared that the Belfast agreement might be built on sand, but I hoped otherwise. But as we have seen, Danegeld has been paid, and the thing about Danegeld is that one keeps on having to pay it. Concession after concession has been made. What will be the next one?[8] ”
To emphasise the point, people often quote two or more lines from the poem "Dane Geld" by Kipling as did Tony Parsons in The Daily Mirror, when criticising the Rome daily La Repubblica for writing "Ransom was paid and that is nothing to be ashamed of," in response to the announcement that the Italian government paid $1 million for the release of two hostages in Iraq in October 2004. [9]
“ That if once you have paid him the Danegeld,
You never get rid of the Dane. ”
In Britain the phrase is often coupled with the experience of Chamberlain's Appeasement of Hitler[10].**
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_victory
Pyrrhic victory
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
A Pyrrhic victory is a victory with devastating cost to the victor. The phrase is an allusion to King Pyrrhus of Epirus, whose army suffered irreplaceable casualties in defeating the Romans at Heraclea in 280 BC and Asculum in 279 BC during the Pyrrhic War. After the latter battle, Plutarch relates in a report by Dionysius:
The armies separated; and, it is said, Pyrrhus replied to one that gave him joy of his victory that one more such victory would utterly undo him. For he had lost a great part of the forces he brought with him, and almost all his particular friends and principal commanders; there were no others there to make recruits, and he found the confederates in Italy backward. On the other hand, as from a fountain continually flowing out of the city, the Roman camp was quickly and plentifully filled up with fresh men, not at all abating in courage for the loss they sustained, but even from their very anger gaining new force and resolution to go on with the war.[1]
In both of Pyrrhus's victories, the Romans lost more men than Pyrrhus did. However, the Romans had a much larger supply of men from which to draw soldiers, so their losses did less damage to their war effort than Pyrrhus's losses did to his.
The report is often quoted as "Another such victory over the Romans and we are undone,"[citation needed] or "If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined."[2] While it is most closely associated with a military battle, the term is used by analogy in fields such as business, politics, law, literature, and sport to describe any similar struggle which is ruinous for the victor.
**[Bl.] Does it hurt much? Only when I laugh. <tee hee>
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Hermit
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Re:Still here troll? I thought you would be hiding in embarrassment.
« Reply #2 on: 2008-07-28 16:27:23 » |
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[Blunderov] There is a meme abroad that the war in Iraq which was thought to be lost two years ago, is now, startlingly, being won instead. The tide has turned it is trumpeted; violence is down.
[Hermit] I find it more offensive that the Republicans are now bragging of having won a war of aggression - the supreme war crime - against a nation that has never posed any threat to the USA and in the absence of any legal cover save the post factum purchase of authority to act as police in the wreckage of the country they destroyed and whose legitimate leadership - which the US knowingly supplied with chemical and biological warfare precursors - was silenced through execution by US appointed and enabled kangaroo courts. What are the accomplishments leading to the conclusion of victory? Much of the country's civilian infrastructure was deliberately destroyed during the first American Gulf campaign, and the rest systematically reduced to dysfunction through boycotts and bombing in the subsequent 18 years. Some 1 to 2 million Iraqi surplus deaths at our hands. Some 2 million internal refugees and another 2 million or so external refugees. The devastation of the professional class and a brain drain unseen in any other country. A puppet government more responsive to Iran than Iraqis - or the US. Half the population unemployed and more people starving today under US mismanagement than under Saddam Hussein at the height of the illegal sanctions perpetrated largely at the instigation of the USA on Iraq. A population divided into tiny pockets of racially segregated people seething with hatred and intolerance. The destruction of the most secular, best educated country in the Middle East. And for what?
[Hermit] Not forgetting the responsibility for occupiers to sustain the civilian population (we hanged people for this after WW II), and I know I did not mention the near destruction of the US volunteer army and its equipment, the devastation of the US economy and the knock on effect to the world economy; if this is victory, what could a defeat accomplish that could be worse?
[Hermit] As for the claims about the surge, it began before the violence dipped (due in no small part to the Danegeld mentioned above and here previously), and has allegedly ended leaving more US troops and mercenaries at risk, Iraqis still being murdered on a daily basis and a catastrophic political situation more frangible than it was when the surge began. Only a fool would regard this as an accomplishment about which to crow. Showing once again that our troll is nothing if not a fool.
Kind Regards
Hermit
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Walter Watts
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Just when I thought I was out-they pull me back in
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Re:Still here troll? I thought you would be hiding in embarrassment.
« Reply #3 on: 2008-07-28 20:45:51 » |
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Quote from: Blunderov on 2008-07-28 13:41:00
[Blunderov] There is a meme abroad that the war in Iraq which was thought to be lost two years ago, is now, startlingly, being won instead. The tide has turned it is trumpeted; violence is down.
I suppose it all depends on what is meant by "victory". Yes violence is down. But at what cost? Printing the necessary Danegeld to pacify Iraq has directly affected the world economy; essentially the USA has stopped launching missiles and fired up the money printing presses instead.This has not gone unnoticed by those trusting souls who have put their faith in the US dollar. Sampson pulls his own economy down around his shoulders. Now that's what I call fundamentalist fanaticism....
Not to mention very unpatriotic expedience. Let the Dems drink from a poisoned chalice. The 'candidacy' of John "Daffy Duck" McCain makes a great deal of sense viewed in that light : the last thing the Republican party wants to inherit is the consequences of its' own policies!
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Well observed Blunderov. Well observed.
Walter
[as my grandfather-in-law, who was an American Airlines union shop steward in the 50's through 70's, used to rant]: "dim reepublicans is a tricky bunch!"
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Walter Watts
Tulsa Network Solutions, Inc.
No one gets to see the Wizard! Not nobody! Not no how!
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