Read if you dare.

The link above comes with a simple warning: it is extremely Politically Incorrect and not for everyone. You will in fact find a similar warning at the page it delivers you to.

I have my opinions on it, and I'd be very interested to hear those of others if you are so inclined as to leave some. Other than that, I'll let it speak for itself (as long as it lasts).

Cart before the horse, as usual.

This has been going on for a while and it serves as another example of people who just don't get it. Work has been a bit hectic, so I’m not on top of stuff, (i.e. the delay has caused me to lose the link to this story) but hey, nobody’s paying me for this. ;)

"The mission in Afghanistan is fundamentally unbalanced," NDP Leader Jack Layton said Tuesday in Parliament's question period."Approximately one dollar in aid is spent for every nine dollars on combat ... will the prime minister heed the calls of Canadians, including more and more military families, and rethink this mission?" (CTV News, 25 Oct)

Yes, I've been on this guy (Layton) before, and this is more of the same. There seems to be a fundamental disconnect with a lot of people about cause and effect. Let me see if I can use small enough words to get it across...

The catch-all group of malcontents in Afghanistan that we call the "Taliban" don't want us there, and are willing to go to extensive lengths to get us to leave so they can run the place again. That is the situation, and although there are a lot of factions at work, that doesn't change anything about what needs to be done.

Another revealing quote:

"The U.S.-led international community's narrow, homeland security interpretation of security has misdirected urgent development funds towards physical security-related objectives, to the extent that military spending outpaces development and reconstruction spending by a colossal 900 per cent."

Well, duh. War is expensive, and the same person described Kandahar as "a complete war zone". Why would you then be surprised that these funds have been “misdirected” to killing the bad guys? I suspect these people would have complained about us blowing up French farmhouses to kill the Germans shooting at us from them in 1944.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll likely say it again, we need MORE troops in Afghanistan, and I mean a lot more. We need to interdict the bad guys BEFORE they get to the villages, and we need a lot of boots on the ground for that.

The Americans are the key element in this, and if there is any hope for a civilized Afghanistan (and I don’t necessarily mean it’ll look like us) the Americans will have to pull out of Iraq and re-invest in Afghanistan. I can’t foresee that happening exactly, so we’ll have to muddle through as best we can with the current program.

So, yes the locals are getting (justifiably) annoyed or worse that we’re breaking things and hurting people unintentionally, but the alternative is to abandon large parts of the country because we’re afraid to do any damage. This is, coincidentally EXACTLY what the other side wants to see, and they tailor their tactics to accomplish it. Look at the last scrap in south Lebanon, with Hamas winning the media battle by making the Israelis look badly for targeting civilian areas.

Our adversaries are far from stupid, and the preponderance of carping articles about NATO ruining peoples’ livelihood suggests to me that we’re in for a repeat of Tet 1968. If you don’t know what I mean by that, a few clicks (and a bit of critical analysis…) should get you the answer.

Let's Roll.

In my ongoing attempt to keep this spot from turning into a one-note symphony rant against the Islamist threat to my way of life, I bring you this:

'BURLESON, Texas (AP) -- Youngsters in a suburban Fort Worth, Texas, school district are being taught not to sit there like good boys and girls with their hands folded if a gunman invades the classroom, but to rush him and hit him with everything they've got -- books, pencils, legs and arms.
"Getting under desks and praying for rescue from professionals is not a recipe for success," said Robin Browne, a major in the British Army reserve and an instructor for Response Options, the company providing the training to the Burleson schools.
That kind of fight-back advice is all but unheard of among schools, and some fear it will get children killed.
But school officials in Burleson said they are drawing on the lessons learned from a string of disasters such as Columbine in 1999 and the Amish schoolhouse attack in Pennsylvania last week.'

The article can be found in full here, and as always I’ll leave it you to make up your own mind about the utility/advisability of this tactic. However, also as always, you won’t get out of here without hearing what I think about it. ;)

For the record, I think it’s about bloody time we stop thinking like victims-in-waiting and start being prepared to ass-kick anyone who wants to do us harm. The gist of the tactics are to overwhelm armed attackers with numbers, chaos and noise, swarming them and taking them down instead of cowering on the floor hoping not to get shot. For those of you who think this won’t work, I can again offer a bit of Kipling:

We sloshed you with Martinis, an' it wasn't 'ardly fair;
But for all the odds agin' you, Fuzzy-Wuz, you broke the square.

To save some of my loyal readers a bit of research/head-scratching, the poem refers to the fact that mobs of Sudanese warriors armed with medieval weapons managed to overrun the strongest formation (the Square) of the best conventional troops of the late 1800s due to sheer numbers and gumption. And oh yes, in this context a Martini is a breech loading rifle, not a mixed drink.

So my example isn’t precisely analogous, so what? The principle is the same, and 20 kids and a teacher in close quarters armed with books, binders, pencils or just hands to grab hold of arms, legs, etc. will be able to overpower pretty much any single gunman before he can get off more than a few aimed shots. Once he’s down, he can be disarmed by whatever means are available (kids taking turns stomping on his neck, for example) and neutralized. And now you, the hunted, have the gun, aimed at the door by anyone who’s ever watched a movie, ready to shoot anyone who isn’t one of yours who comes in.

Obviously this won’t work if the SAS/JTF2/Delta storms your school, but that’s not who does this sort of thing. It’s one or rarely two guys, usually students, and in any event, they won’t be highly trained, armed and equipped with the best kit and operating in teams.

The important thing here is to ensure that the training sticks, and that a critical mass of students, etc will do what needs to be done and not hesitate. This is a lot to ask of adults, let alone kids, and some of them will inevitably freeze. This couldn’t just be a one-shot training deal. This would have to be practiced regularly, even more than fire drills, and leaders would have to be identified and encouraged.

What I see as important is to get people, not just kids, mentally prepared to defend themselves, and give them a realistic appraisal of the options and likely outcomes. Hostage situations don’t seem to be what’s going on, and a shift in the threat means a shift in the response. 9/11 could only work once, and United Flight 93 that day marked the realization that you may die if you fight back, but you will definitely die if you sit around waiting for help that might not be coming.

Well, that's one way...

We can apparently thank the British NHS for this one. A nice change from the unpleasantness, I thought. More of that later, I'm sure.

A Veiled Threat

I'm a bit behind, but I couldn't leave this alone completely. There are some signs that parts of Europe are getting fed up with being pushed around by Islamists and the lack of integration into society, and I think this is one of them.

The other sign of hope for civil relations is the position of the Muslim Council of Britain, but of course that got nowhere near as much media attention as the the hotheads out to push their agenda. It has indeed gotten to the point that no one can say anything in any way negative about anything to do with Islam without running the risk of an unpleasant faction demanding your head (sometimes literally).

The British government is starting to make some sensible moves, such as backing Mr Straw's right to say what he thinks. I'm a bit under the weather today, so I'll see if I can catch up a bit later. The collapse of Western Society will have to get by without me for a little while. ;)

The Ice Age is comin', the sun's zoomin' in...

I just can't leave this topic alone, but I consider it important to preserve some semblance of a "debate" in the whole Global Warming thing. It seems to have been hijacked by some sort of Luddite soft-lefty/environmentalism cabal who have an agenda I don't quite fathom.

The US Senate speech the title links to gives me some hope that there is more than one side to the issue. For the record (again), I have enough geology and history to know that the Earth's climate isn't constant, "an inconvenient truth" that Al Gore and co. don't seem to want people to know about. Check out the link provided for "the Science" and see a lot of alarmist claptrap with no supporting evidence, and if you're so inclined go look it up. I've done my research already and I know it's taken from very self-interested sources who ignore things that conflict with what they want to put across. That, by the way, is NOT science.

I am a sensible person, and I'm very much in favour of us limiting the amount of waste we dump into the ecosystem just on general principle. This is where I think our efforts should go, to keep us from poisoning ourselves and everything else. However, I remember a geology poster session I went to in the late 1980s. The topic I reported on for class was "Holocene Proxy Climate Data from the Canadian Arctic".

It was a while ago, and before the current hysteria about warming, but the upshot was that 5000-8000 years ago it was a lot warmer in the arctic than it is now, evidenced by the remnants of plant life that couldn't possibly survive there now.

So is it getting warmer? Looks like it. There are a number of other questions, the big ones being: is this such a bad thing? And, is destroying the industrialized world's economy (Kyoto Protocol, if implemented) going to make a difference to the result?

I have yet to be convinced that the answer to either of these is anything but "no". It was warmer than this when humanity thrived in places we can't really live today (e.g. Greenland). China, Russia and the entire developing world have not ratified Kyoto, so it'll only screw us over and not cool a damned thing.

Al, spend your time and money on things that will produce results, like improved alternative energy sources. The writing is already on the wall for our dependence on oil, and I am not going to freeze in the dark in the meantime to meet some feel-good international agreement that most of the world has no time for.

Talk - Action = uh, something, maybe?

This encapsulates as well as anything else the problems the West has to survive.

I can understand that a lot of people are wary of another war, though it might be necessary. However, to be worried about something, and yet so mentally paralyzed as to be incapable of thinking of ANYTHING to do about it, even in theory, is something any thinking person in the “West’ should be very concerned about.

When countries are democracies, for good or ill they get the governments they deserve. With the bunch of puddin’ heads suggested by those poll results there is a lot of trouble ahead for some of these countries (not mine for the moment, but this is a minority government…) until something radical happens to make things better or much worse.

A more reasonable government could arise in Iran (odds low without outside “assistance”) or they could get nukes and give one or more to somebody who wants to use it against us. It’s not hard for me to see which option I’d prefer, and I don’t see a lot of others right now.

Personally I don’t look forward to the idea of another big war either, but with the noises Iran has made/is making and the governments’ increasing lack of relevance to the Iranian population, there may be no decent alternative. There is a long history of governments whipping up external trouble to distract from domestic trouble, and Iran seems to be on that road. How far they want to go on it will likely determine how hostile things get.

Changing topics slightly, Hamid Karzai gave a very effective speech to Canadian Parliament today, dealing fairly effectively with the self-interested political statements of certain groups (see back a few posts). NATO is not in Afghanistan for fun or profit, but because it’s the way to keep the forces that wish us ill from re-establishing there.

Others may wish to look at it as restoring a functional country to the world, but the end result is the same, and both are accomplished the same way, fighting fire with (more) fire. And now that we’re at last sending some tanks to Afghanistan, that’s exactly what we’ll be able to do more effectively.