Open Thread - 14 September 2016

pl

Comments

[euclidcreek]

UC Berkeley suspends mistakenly approved course on Palestine - The Daily Californian 9.15.16

http://www.dailycal.org/2016/09/15/uc-berkeley-suspends-mistakenly-approved-palestine-decal-amid-outcry/

[Fred]

It looks like the R+6 are repositioning for the next phrase of the battle:
https://southfront.org/syrian-army-withdraws-heavy-military-equipment-create-demilitarized-zone-castello-highway/

[YT]

http://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/little-known-tale-of-generous-turkish-aid-to-the-irish-during-the-great-hunger

I know only of their massacring the Armenians...

Little did I know that when the perfidious limeys were starving the Micks, these turbanheads actually sent them much-needed provisions.

[J]

Colonel,

The World Nomad Games recently concluded in Kyrgyzstan, the U.S. Team brought home 2 Silver and 2 Bronze Medals.

[Babak Makkinejad]

So, per the implication of your ideas and that of doug above, there is a Market for War - and if there is not, one ought to be created.

And through this War Market various wars and battles may be priced and sold. And just the stock market and the commodities market - there could be a War Materiale Market that complements the War Market.

I suppose, in that case, we could have a War Futures Market as well as derivative products; all very rational and proper.

But, who would be doing the dying?

[Fred]

YT,

No connection to Turkey or Armenia. but hopefully the Irish have not forgotten the USS Macedonian bringing aid to Ireland during the famine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Macedonian_(1836)

[The Porkchop Express]

Colonel

This was an absolutely fascinating read. How true do you think this is? I know TTG has suggested on multiple occasions to "shoot the radio immediately on the ground," but this goes way beyond that. Would SF soldiers do this? If true, it would constitute extremely gross (albeit admirable from my civilian, non-military service perspective) insubordination, would it not?

https://sofrep.com/63764/us-special-forces-sabotage-white-house-policy-gone-disastrously-wrong-with-covert-ops-in-syria/

[turcopolier]

PCE

Yes, that is one of the reasons the Big Army hates and to some extent fears us. We were created by Aaron Bank to be thinking warriors. How dangerous is that! The Big Army wanted to get rid of us after VN, but the rise of counter-terrorism as an obsession in the 70s saved a remnant even though as CT commandos, but the selection and training never ended and now the phoenix of the UW Green Berets (men like the crucified Jim Gant) is reborn in the Borg Wars and it will be very difficult for the Big Army to rid itself of these men who do what the rest cannot. De Opresso Liber. pl

[Joe100]

Some good photos of (apparently) US SF working with the Kurds today at today at Col. Cassad - https://translate.yandex.com/web?ncrnd=8084 and http://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/2960000.html. Also a claim that US Marines are engaged at a broader crossing with Turkey.

Curious if TTG can confirm the SF photos..

[Jack]

All

Taleb on IYI - Intellectual yet Idiot

https://medium.com/@nntaleb/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e2d0577#.7z1mz3eqa

[turcopolier]

jack

I like the part about the intellectuals not being able to "find a coconut on Coconut Island." pl

[Jack]

Sir

Nassim Taleb has been excoriating the Ph.Ds that run our monetary and economic policies as well as our foreign policy elites among others. His notion of skin -in-the-game mirrors your suggestion for a quai-draft to ensure those that vote for war have some skin-in-the-game.

My pet peeve are the Bernanke's, Summers, Krugman's of the world screaming for more inflation and justifying their money printing debauchery due to a lack of it. What they're really saying is that they want to reduce the purchasing power of median households whose incomes have stagnated as well as the savings of their grandfathers. Despicable.

[turcopolier]

All

Someone has stated to me that when BHO applied to Occidental College he applied for a scholarship for foreign students. He may have been a dual national US/Indonesian at that time. Do any of you know anything about this? pl

[Martin Oline]

Regarding Congress' bill to allow U.S. citizens to sue Saudi Arabia, I saw this tonight on RT's internet site:

A Guantanamo Bay prisoner said he heard a phone conversation between a religious figure who talked about his qualifications for jihad, and a person the figure addressed as “your highness,” who the prisoner believes to be a Saudi royal.
Ghassan Abdullah al Sharbi, a 41-year-old Saudi national, is among the remaining 61 terrorist suspects being held at the US detention facility in Cuba. In June, he reported the alleged conversation with a Saudi royal family member to the Periodic Review Board, which assesses whether Guantanamo prisoners can be released. On Thursday, the Pentagon published a redacted transcript of his words.
The conversation Sharbi described happened in early 2001, shortly after he returned to Saudi Arabia from the US, where he had taken some flight school courses in Phoenix with two men who would become hijackers in the 9/11 attacks, AP reported. The religious figure was urging him to go to America again and take part in a plot against the US.
The prisoner said he listened to his recruiter speak with another man on the phone to discuss Sharbi’s US experience. “I remember, ‘yes, your highness, yes your highness,’ and he was talking to him about me,” he said. He believes the other man, who he never met, to be a royal.

[Chris Chuba]

Is the U.S. encouraging enemy regimes to fight to the death?
I'm expanding a topic that I touched on earlier. If a regime (not a pejorative here) is on our bad guy list and they try to make a deal with the U.S. are there any examples where the U.S. didn't push it to the maximum disadvantage of that regime even to the dissolution of that govt?

The problem with this approach is that our only tool becomes the use of force which would be okay if it was always successful and had a good outcome but obviously the use of force is inherently risky and destabilizing. I am personally avoiding the moral implications of this premise but if others want to address that in reply to my post that is fine.

Here is a list of what I am referring to.
1. Libya, we made a deal with Gaddafi, okay, his WMD was a Potemkin village but he opened the veil, the rest is history.

2. Iraq, we made a deal with Saddam after he lost in 1992. He disposed of his WMD and we disposed of him.

3. The Soviet Union, we said we would not expand NATO. They withdrew from Eastern Europe and felt so good about it that they even broke into separate Republics. This way they got a nice homogenous country with no unruly subjects to worry about. We then added as many of those states as possible to NATO and tried (are trying) to turn the others against them.

4. Iran, this was a very simple transaction as it did not involve any disarmament, border changes, or troop withdrawals and we even managed to twist this one up like a pretzel. We agreed to let Iran trade with Europe but are using our Treasury Dept. to prevent Iran from doing that.

I have to say that the Iranians were brilliant, they looked at our past transactions and insisted on getting their frozen assets back in hard currency in Euros and gold.
Here is a link where they talk about Libya, so I don't think that I am speculating all that much here … en.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13950621000852
Yeah, we are messing up their European deals but as time goes on they will be able to get more of what they need from China and even Russia. So Iran is walking away with their shirt.

In each case we dealt with a regime on our bad guy list, they gave up something of value and we ...
So if you were N. Korea would you even consider giving up Nukes or disarming without a fight?

[jsn]

Sociopaths engage in the commerce of war all the time, generally at the margins. When leadership in a society thinks in terms of "a market for war", as I believe ours now does and did the Renaissance Princes before us, they are confusing money for what value it represents.

This works until it doesn't: that's the point of the Charles VIII reference, sooner or later someone comes along with a patriotic view of his/her society that values that society, the real creator of wealth rather than the mere monetary representation of it, and kicks some commercial ass.

Commerce and markets are necessarily subordinate to the polities within which they function, even cross border trade is but an arbitrage of the different material conditions of the trading societies. In periods of epic decay, like now, this reality becomes occluded behind venal and greedy ideologies, but eventually a patriotic force surfaces to shovel the Augean stables.

I think this is the secret to Putin's success in Russia, for instance. I won't glamorize him, but he has been good for most Russians and bad or at least constraining for the Oligarchs there.

[Martin Oline]

Sir:

I'm writing on this thread because it is an open thread, I read this today. You have probably seen it already. I think it would make a good post for someone who has the time to do it. This is not intended to be posted but if you do, wipe out this sentence or edit it however you want. The link:

http://www.thompsontimeline.com/the-hidden-smoking-gun-the-combetta-cover-up/