Monthly Archives: March 2015

US Interventionism In-Action: Fighting Both With And Against Iran

Foreign policy confusion is in part a consequence of intervening everywhere. The US can’t get its story straight. NBC’s Richard Engel, an excellent foreign policy correspondent of the Arwa Damon caliber, was on the nose when he recently said the following:

the Obama Administration’s foreign policy toward Iran … seems “convoluted” and “incoherent” at best, given the fact that the U.S. seems to be contradicting itself in its support and opposition to Iran in a number of countries.

Engel explained how the U.S. is fighting both with and against Iran in Syria, which he said is “an incredibly convoluted dynamic.” He said that while the U.S. is negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program, it is supporting the fight against Iran in Yemen, where Iran-backed Houthi rebels recently forced out that country’s president and Saudi Arabia launched air strikes against them in retaliation.

“We’re fighting both with and against Iran in Syria, and fighting with Iran in Iraq,” Engel said. “There are many people who I’ve spoken to — many in the military, many policy analysts — who say that what we’re seeing here is an incoherent policy regarding not just Iran, but regarding the Middle East in general.”

Engel also said many in the military were “taken by surprise” when Saudi Arabia started bombing Yemen because they did not “consult extensively” with the U.S. military.

“Senior officials who would have been expected to know that there was going to be an operation in Yemen, they didn’t,” Engel added. “They were finding out about it almost in real time.”

About one thing Engel is wrong: US foreign policy is not newly “incoherent” and “convoluted” since Barack Obama. Did the CIA not back a coup in 1953 against Mohammad Mosaddegh, the Prime Minister of Iran, even though he was democratically elected? Did we not back the Mujaheddin against Russia in Afghanistan, before the former morphed into the Taliban and al-Qaida? Did George Bush’s puppet government in Iraq not turn to its coreligionists in Iran soon after it was ensconced? Are our people and diplomats not under frequent attack (such as in South Korea, Okinawa, on and on), due to blowback over the perception that the US bestrides the world like an arrogant colossus?

MORE Engel.

Read Mercer Weekly On Leading Afrikaner-Rights Site

IMMIGRATION, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, South-Africa, The State

“The ‘We Need To Have A Conversation’ Malarkey” is the current column, now on Dan Roodt’s PRAAG. An excerpt:

You know just how scholarly a policy paper is when it is studded with a clichéd expression like “we need to have a conversation about …” The pop-phrase is familiar from these farcical usages:

“We need to have a conversation about race”—when, in reality, we do nothing but subject ourselves to a one-way browbeating about imagined slights committed against the pigmentally burdened.

“We need to have a conversation about immigration”—when such a “conversation” is strictly confined to a lecture on how to adapt to the program of Third World mass immigration. This particular “conversation” involves learning to live with a lower quality of life, poorer education, environmental degradation; less safety and security, more taxation and alienation.

In this mold is a policy paper by Jennifer Bradley, formerly of the liberal Brookings Institute. Bradley had a stroke of luck. Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report found fit to link her essay on his eponymous news website site. Titled “The Changing Face of the Heartland: Preparing America’s Diverse Workforce for Tomorrow,” Bradley’s Brookings Essay would have been more honestly titled “Get-With the Program, Middle American. Demography Is Destiny.” …

… The complete column is “The ‘We Need To Have A Conversation’ Malarkey.” Read the rest on PRAAG.

Will We Soon Be Screening For Recent Converts To The Religion Of Peace?

Homeland Security, Islam, Jihad, Terrorism

Before it was deleted, Pamela Geller captured this screen picture of a Facebook Fan page for alleged mass murderer Andreas Lubitz, co-pilot of the doomed Germanwings Flight 9525.

Swirling on the internet are unverified rumors—that’s all they are—that Lubitz may have been a recent convert to Islam. RT hints at an impending revelation:

23:45 GMT: Police investigating co-pilot Andreas Lubitz’s involvement in the Germanwings plane crash have made a “significant discovery” at his residence, the Mirror reported. Officers did not specify what the discovery was, but confirmed it was not a suicide note.

If Lubitz was a convert to Islam, you do realize what that means, don’t you? Conversion to Islam is a risk factor. Screening for recent converts to the religion of peace, Islam, will become imperative before flights, or else people will—and should—stop flying. It matters not that the probability of a convert bringing down a plane is miniscule. Reassuring statistics mean nothing if you’re the odd one out.

Murder In The Skies

Morality, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry

Whenever someone commits an evil act, it is inferred, reasoning backwards—B, therefore A is a logical fallacy; a non sequitur—that the criminal was ill, not evil. It is but a matter of time before the exculpation industry adopts their perennial position with respect to Andreas Lubitz, “the co-pilot of Germanwings Flight 9525, who was in the cockpit when the plane crashed into the French Alps. Investigators called it a ‘deliberate’ move, one that killed Lubitz and 149 others.” (CBS News)

His motive is still unclear, leading to questions about how the aviation industry screens pilots for issues like mental health. … According to investigators, Andreas Lubitz deliberately set the plane on a doomed descent. Data from an aviation flight-tracking service shows the altitude setting was turned down to 100 feet — its lowest possible level. That action appears to firmly rule out any possibility of an accident.

“Overt action is required to reach up, turn a knob many times to change it from 38,000 feet, to in this case, to 100 feet ,” said Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger – known for the Miracle on the Hudson. “One would never normally in flight set an altitude of 100 feet.”

If Andreas Lubitz did indeed do the deed; he is guilty of murder in the skies. Mass murder in the skies.