Good Vs. Bad Collateral Damage; American Vs. Russian Killing

Foreign Policy, Middle East, War

From Afghanistan comes news of the toll the US’s ongoing, indiscriminate bombing is taking on the long-suffering people of the region: “Possible US airstrike in Afghanistan kills at least 19 at Doctors Without Borders hospital.”

Deranged ex-military men such as Col Ralph Peters, David Hunt or Oliver North will make the case that a good country killing (US) is not the same as a bad country killing (Russia in Syria). Homegrown chicken-hawks like Chucky Krauthammer will concur.

Tell that to those whose lungs are airless, whose hearts are not beating, and whose eyes and limbs are missing. They are not free and will never be free.

Via Target Liberty (where you can also catch “Lady Di of The Papacy,” if you missed it elsewhere):

Médecins Sans Frontières said 37 people were seriously wounded, 19 medical staff among them.
“We are deeply shocked by the attack, the killing of our staff and patients and the heavy toll it has inflicted on healthcare in Kunduz,” said Bart Janssens, director of operations for MSF.

“We do not yet have the final casualty figures but our medical team are providing first aid and treating the injured patients and MSF personnel and accounting for the deceased.”

Is should be noted that this US bombing attackkilled more innocents than Christopher Harper-Mercer did this week at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon.

Just hours before the incident, on Friday evening, the US state department issued a joint statement with the government’s of France, Germany, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the UK castigating Russia for causing “civilian casualties [which] will only fuel more extremism and radicalisation,” reports FT.

Guns, Grandstanding Media, And The Goon Du Jour

Britain, Crime, GUNS, Individual Rights, Media

Let us speak of “goon violence,” not gun violence, I urged earlier this month in “Gun Violence’? No! Goon Violence” (9/4/2015).

So the goon du jure is Chris Harper Mercer, 26 (no relation).
He shot up a college, in Roseburg, Oregon, killing 10 people and wounding seven.

Initially, the moron media made a song-and dance of not reporting the culprit’s name. Grandiosely, The Kelly File announced its policy of keeping viewers in the dark for their own good, I suppose. They forget that as news media, their mandate is to report the news, not babysit the public or grandstand. That’s the only news I have for you. Otherwise, everything is as it always is:

Obama cried foul about the 2nd Amendment. The BBC bellyached about your right to defend yourself, because in their crap country, Britain, you go to jail if you fail to offer a cuppa to your assailant.

If you don’t believe me as to how backward the home of the Magna Carta has become, here’s The New American:

British citizens seeking advice on what’s legal to use for self-defense found some answers at www.askthe.police.uk, a website sponsored and operated by the government’s Police National Legal Database.

Question 589: Are there any legal self-defence products that I can buy?

Answer: The only fully legal self-defence product … is a rape alarm.

There may be other products, according to the website, but they haven’t been fully tested and “if you purchase one you must be aware … there is always the possibility that you will arrested and detained until the product, its contents and legality, can be verified.”

Who’re the Brits calling primitive atavists!!!!

Your moment of zen:

“Guns are not the root cause of man’s evil actions. Neither are the multiplying categories in the psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Evil is part of the human condition, always has been, always will be. Evil can’t be wished away, treated away, medicated away or legislated away. Evil is here to stay. Bad people do bad things. Deal, as they say in the hood.”—Excerpted from “Gun Violence’? No! Goon Violence” (9/4/2015).

About Pope Francis, The Lady Di of The Papacy

Celebrity, Christianity, Federalism, Founding Fathers, Government, Islam, Reason, Religion

“About Pope Francis” is the current column, now on the Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine. An excerpt:

In the wake of America’s week-long, Pope Francis bacchanalia, a few column titles suggest themselves:

“Benedict, What Have You Wrought?”

“The Global Village Idiot.”

“Lady Di of The Papacy.”

The last hints at the trendy, pop-philosophies that animate Pope Francis’ Lady Di-like belief system. The intellectual equivalent of these papal shopworn shibboleths you’ll find in a Chinese, fortune-cookie wrapper.

Ultimately, the editor will decide which of these unflattering headings best describes the man whom one devout Catholic—libertarian jurist Andrew Napolitano—called a false prophet for overturning Catholic canon law without consulting his Bishops. Yet another reason Pope Francis is drawn to an authoritarian president who rules by presidential veto.

Intellectually, Pope Francis is no match for his predecessors.

With his 1998 encyclical, the Polish pope—how the Polish people suffered under the communists whose creed Pope Francis is inadvertently dignifying—sounded a lone voice for both “Faith and Reason” in the postmodern religious wilderness.

Who other than Pope John Paul spoke with such unhectoring clarity about the errors of relativism in modern thought? Certainly not Jorge Bergolio, who is too simple to consider such abstractions.

The anti-intellectualism evinced in the Holy See’s 2015 environmental encyclical made this pope’s “close advisers,” in all their “ill-tempered diction,” the butt of ridicule over the pages of the Catholic Crisis magazine:

From the empirical side, to prevent the disdain of more informed scientists generations from now, papal teaching must be safeguarded from attempts to exploit it as an endorsement of one hypothesis over another concerning anthropogenic causes of climate change. It is not incumbent upon a Catholic to believe, like Rex Mottram in “Brideshead Revisited,” that a pope can perfectly predict the weather. …

In the same badly written potboiler, the pope took a swipe at the richest nations, blaming them for despoiling the earth. In truth, however, the developed world has advanced the technologies (and attendant ethics) that are helping to clean up the atmosphere, the waterways, the oceans and many a landmass. It is the developing and underdeveloped nations—China and India, for one—that despoil the earth and devastate its creatures. So polluted are the waterways in former communist countries that rivers are known to catch fire. Watch. …

… Read the rest.“About Pope Francis” is now on the Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine.

No Wonder Assad Needs A Sugar Daddy

Foreign Policy, Islam, John McCain, Middle East, Neoconservatism, Russia

Crazy neoconservative John McCain has repeated his crazy talk to the effect that Bashar Assad is the father of ISIS. The guy doesn’t know Shia from Shinola. As an Alawite, Al-Assad belongs to the opposing, Shia strand of Islam.

Like the Iranians, Assad is enemy of ISIS. (Another forgetful folk are the Israelis, who’ve forgotten that Assad’s grandfather, a wise man, was a Zionist.)

The neocons destabilized the Middle East all by their lonesome. Now American mainstream think tanks are framing strongman Assad for what they wrought and have trained their sights on him. The neocon ghouls are just waiting for a clueless clown like Marco Rubio to oblige them with a war on Syria.

Assad knows he and his family are at the mercy of loons like McMussolini; that his wife and kids will live and die by the say-so of the fools. Any wonder Assad has wisely sought out the Russians to help him stay alive?

McCain’s vacation pictures to Syria, in 2013, were snapped by his then ISIS pals. Don’t believe me? Read on.