Category Archives: The State

‘Whoring and Warring In the Military: What’s New?’

“Former CIA Director David Petraeus has been sentenced to two years probation and handed a $100,000 fine for leaking classified information to his biographer and former mistress.” (FoxNews)

What exactly did Petraeus do? Here’s the chronology in “Whoring and Warring In the Military: What’s New?”

There’s David Petraeus, former CIA director, formerly a four-star general who cultivated his own celebrity. There’s his mistress-cum-stalker, the bombastic, narcissistic Paula Broadwell, who despite—or, rather, because of—her pockmarked character has been propelled to prominence by the country’s elites. There’s Petraeus’ even skankier BFF (Best Friends Forever), Tampa socialite Jill Kelley, and her dysfunctional twin. Primped like street walkers, the twins can be seen in pictures, flanking their BFF and his ungroomed, graying wife, Holly Petraeus.

The fawning press takes the position that this—the flotsam and jetsam of American society—is indeed an aristocracy of talent and merit. Broadwell, they tell us, was soul-mate and intellectual companion to our grandiose general. Their mating was a meeting of minds. Woe is me!

In the tradition of this “meritocracy” is U.S. Marine General John Allen. Mentored by Petraeus, Allen is the top American commander in Afghanistan, and candidate for supreme commander of NATO. Allen and Kelley were caught in flagrante. As a shrinking segment of America toiled to support these ponces in-style, the two had been exchanging 20,000 to 30,000 steamy, pixelated pages over the course of two years.

On behalf of the twin sister of the Tampa tease, Allen and his mentor Petraeus went so far as to join forces and intervene in a (no doubt sordid) child-custody dispute, heard in the District of Columbia Superior Court.

Petraeus’s paramour blew her cover as the lover some months back. The pushy, dumbbell-obsessed lightweight is said to have threatened the cheap-looking BFF (Kelly). One source dismissed the threat as a mere “cat fight”; the other hyped it as a “stay away from my guy, or else” broadside. (And the difference between these “barbed” observations?)

Described by ABC’s Brian Ross as a “name-dropping, social-climbing, bored socialite, who ingratiated herself to the brass through parties and favors,” the Tampa tease’s grating self-importance played out on a 911 call, in which she demands protection from the media. “‘Cause I’m an honorary consul general, so I have inviolability” she told the dispatcher in Kim-Kardashian twang.

Why appeal to the rights of private property, when you enjoy the prerogatives of celebrity?

As for Broadwell’s romp through elite institutions stateside and abroad: A graduate of West Point, Broadwell holds degrees from and a research associate’s position at Harvard. She was made a poster girl for “Inspired Women Magazine.” By invitation of our country’s cognoscenti, Broadwell took her groupie tour to C-SPAN’s Book TV, and on the speaker’s circuit. (Bristol Palin is there too, commanding between $15,000 and $30,000 a pop.)

Richly revealing is the Ph.D. in “Petraeus” on which Broadwell is “working.” Broadwell’s “thesis” tells you all you need to know about intellectual life in the West. This Anatomy-of-a-Leader dissertation was green-lighted by the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, no less, where Broadwell was accepted as a Ph.D. candidate.”

Read the rest.

Freddie Gray’s Arrest Conjures Carol Anne Gotbaum’s

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Justice, The State

Freddie Gray, whose fatal injury in police custody led to his death, was clearly manhandled by the officers. Three to 4 oafs likely dug their knees into the spinal column of this slim man. Something bad happened to the vertebrae. The arresting oafs failed to immobilize Gray’s neck in the patrol wagon, even though he was already limp and listless. The affected vertebrae could have further snapped or moved by the van’s motion, resulting in the injury that killed Gray.

The reports on Gray’s injury conjure Carol Anne Gotbaum’s trauma. The petite 45-year-old who weighed 105 pounds was scrummed by meaty policemen in Phoenix’s Sky Harbor, tackled to the ground, and a knee jabbed into her skinny spine. She was then thrown in a holding cell, where she was shackled and chained to a bench. Minutes later Carol Anne Gotbaum was dead.

What a shame that nobody marched for Mrs. Gotbaum, too.

Remembering The Worst Crimes Against Humanity, Ever

Communism, Crime, History, The State

Did you know that Jews tried to flee back into Hitler’s Germany from the Communist-controlled, adjacent territories? As hideous as it was, fascism was more merciful than communism. Read “Remembering The Worst Crimes Against Humanity, Ever,” and its source, “The Black Book Of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression.” And teach it, Brother!

An excerpt:

April the 15th marked Holocaust Memorial Day. Nearly everyone knows about the industrial killing of 6 million Jews, for no other reason than that they were Jews. “Serious historiography” of the subject has ensured that The Shoah, Holocaust in Hebrew, is “consigned to posterity”; its lessons remembered and commemorated throughout the civilized world.

Although she failed to dignify the Armenian genocide of 1915, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour certainly covered the Holocaust, the killing fields of Cambodia, Bosnia, northern Iraq, Rwanda and Darfur, for a 2008 documentary about genocide. In the interest of pacifying its Turkish allies, American officialdom has generally aped Amanpour, refusing to implicate the Ottomans in the mass murder of up to 1.5 million Armenians, 100 years ago.

This month, Kim Kardashian and Pope Francis, in order of importance, remedied the Armenian “omission.” The Pontiff called the massacre “the first genocide of the 20th century.” The Armenian-American reality TV star, her posterior and the rest of her entourage, visited the Genocide Memorial in Yerevan, Armenia, to pay their respects.

There is no philosopher of Hannah Arendt’s caliber, today, to give dignity to the victims of the Stalinist, systematic starvation of the Boers by the British, during the Second Boer War. Fifteen percent of the Afrikaner population was rounded up, interned and starved to death–27,000 women and children. The image of young Lizzie van Zyl, who died in the Bloemfontein concentration camp, ought to be engraved in popular memory. It is not! When she died, Lizzie looked like the Jewish bags of bones who perished in the Nazi death and concentration camps.

Mention of Hannah Arendt is a must since this remarkable Jewish philosopher illustrated the similarities between “our century’s two totalitarianisms,” the Nazis and the Soviets. Arendt’s “Origins of Totalitarianism” spoke to a truth unmentioned until the publication of “The Black Book of Communism”: Both “systems massacred their victims not for what they did (such as resisting the regime) but for who they were, whether Jews or kulaks.”

If anything, “The Black Book” treads too lightly when it comes to qualitative comparisons between the Nazi and “Marxist-Leninist phenomenon.” On the quantitative front, “Nazism, at an estimated 25 million,” turned out to be distinctly less murderous than Communism, whose “grand total of victims [is] variously estimated at between 85 million and 100 million murdered. … the most colossal case of political carnage in history.”

Qualitatively, the “‘class genocide’ of Communism” is certainly comparable to the “‘race genocide’ of Nazism.” In its reach and methods, moreover, nothing compares to Communism’s continual, ongoing invention of new classes of “enemies of the people” to liquidate. “Mass violence against the population was a deliberate policy of the new revolutionary order; and its scope and inhumanity far exceeded anything in the national past.”

The fact that socialists and communists are still voted into power—with swagger in Greece—demonstrates that communists, despite their murderous past, “belong to the camp of democratic progress,” whereas the Right is forever open to suspicions of unforgiven fascist and Nazi sympathies. …

… The complete column is “Remembering The Worst Crimes Against Humanity, Ever.”

TSA: Real Home-Grown Terrorists

Homeland Security, Private Property, Terrorism, The State

At last, that statist strongholds, The Washington Post, has permitted a contrary position on the sacred homegrown state terror that is the Transportation Security Administration. However, the solution offered is wrong. It is not the privatization and regulation of the cattle prodders and molesters at the airports that must be sought; but the privatization of airports and airlines.

If the past 10 years have taught us anything, it’s that, one way or another, the TSA is going to get at your crotch. The latest data point comes from Denver, courtesy of CBS4:

‘A CBS4 investigation has learned that two Transportation Security Administration screeners at Denver International Airport have been fired after they were discovered manipulating passenger screening systems to allow a male TSA employee to fondle the genital areas of attractive male passengers.’

Apparently, the two screeners, one male and the other female, worked out a system. The female screener operating the body scanner would misidentify attractive men as women on the scanner, so that the machine would flag the extra, uh, bulk in their groin area, which then initiated a pat-down from her partner in lechery.

I once had a similar experience at a TSA checkpoint. I had thoroughly emptied my pockets, but the body scanner nevertheless detected an object in my pants. Fortunately, my TSA agent did not appear to take any pleasure in the business and went about his duty with grim professionalism.

At the time, I was merely annoyed at the inconvenience, not to mention the poor performance of the taxpayer-funded $170,000 millimeter wave scanner that I had assumed was able to tell the difference between a brick of C-4 and genitals. It turns out those scanners have never stopped a terrorist, but maybe one day the TSA screeners will inadvertently catch a cute jihadist.

It’s a sign of just how resigned we’ve become to the TSA’s existence that most of the men getting felt up probably shrugged it off and thought, “Well, that’s the TSA for you.” We’ve become desensitized to being scanned and prodded and told our toothpaste is too large and must therefore be confiscated in the name of national security. TSA’s expansion of its PreCheck program and an announcement that it would stop searching black women’s hair for weapons are what pass for progress. …

… MORE (but no need to bother; the gist was summed up above in my into).