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

Military, Morality, The State

“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.

The Geopolitics Of Genocide-Recongition

History, Israel, Middle East

The following puzzling snippet comes via Vox Day:

Israel does not plan to recognize the Armenian genocide perpetrated by Turkey, Rafael Harpaz, Israel’s ambassador to Azerbaijan, told Azeri website Trend.

“Israel is a democratic country, everybody has two opinions, not one opinion,” Harpaz said. “The government has a very clear opinion.”

He said Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman had made Israel’s policy clear. Harpaz told Trend he hoped Israel’s troubled relations with Turkey would improve.

Vox correctly notes that “this decision makes sense from a geopolitical grand strategic point of view.”

I would go further and venture that Israel’s “willingness to throw away the moral high ground” on the Armenian genocide is indicative of the Jewish State’s sense of insecurity in a region that is rapidly forming new alliances. This, coupled with the alienation from the administration of Barack Obama has clearly made Israel a lot more cautious as to which Middle-Eastern potential partner it annoys with symbolic gestures.

Government’s Critter Kill List

Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Ethics, IMMIGRATION

Central planners and their scientists, especially the liberal ones, like a perfect natural world. To that end, they’ve developed a utopian idea of the natural world and will kill, kill, kill to achieve Order at all costs. Thus, when a remarkable flock of conure parrots made San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill its home, radical environmentalists wanted this flock—which has a complex and highly evolved social life—exterminated because it was not indigenous. It took a remarkable man to save these precious parrots.

While animals may not deviate from the preordained natural order, unless part of the indigenous human population, established human populations must be destroyed by centrally planned, human mass migration.

Of course, bureaucracies under Republican are no different in the critter kill lists they develop. Via Mother Jones:

… Department of Agriculture’s tally of every animal it killed or euthanized over the last fiscal year [is] … 2,713,570 … from 319 different species. … The culling, conducted by the agency’s Wildlife Services division, is controversial. That’s because—much like the actual kill list—the USDA’s operations are shrouded in secrecy, prone to collateral damage, and symptomatic of an approach that often uses force as something other than a last resort. (A 2012 Sacramento Bee series explored the problems with the USDA’s methods in detail.) One of the problems with culling wildlife is that once you’ve gotten into the business of killing some animals to save other animals, it’s awfully hard to get out of it.
The contradictions can be glaring. To wit, the USDA killed cats (730) to save rats, but if you’re scoring at home, it also killed 1,327 black rats, 353 Norway rats, 74 Hutia rats, 7 Polynesian rats, 4 bushy-tailed woodrats, and 3 kangaroo rats. It slaughtered more than 16,500 double-breasted cormorants to save salmon. It’s shooting white-tailed deer (5,321) to save various plant species and the small fauna, like rabbits, that eat them. But the woods aren’t safe for Thumper either—the agency bagged 7,113 cottontail rabbits, plus assorted varieties of jackrabbits, swamp rabbits, and feral pet rabbits. The USDA killed 322 wolves and 61,702 coyotes to save livestock, perhaps in an attempt to atone for the 16 unspecified livestock it killed by accident.

Via RT: “The Obama admin accidentally killed 113 porcupines last year.”

And:

Avoiding controversy can lead to cover-ups.

Gary Strader, a former USDA employee, told the Sacramento Bee he once discovered a federally protected golden eagle dead in a trap.

“I called my supervisor and said, ‘I just caught a golden eagle and it’s dead,'” said Strader. “He said, ‘Did anybody see it?’ I said, ‘Geez, I don’t think so.’”

“He said, ‘If you think nobody saw it, go get a shovel and bury it and don’t say nothing to anybody.’ ”

“That bothered me,” said Strader, whose job was terminated in 2009. “It wasn’t right.”