Monday, 27 June 2011
A Touching Golf Story.........
Dave stood over his tee shot on the 450 yard 18th hole for what
seemed an eternity.
He waggled, looked up, looked down, waggled again, but didn't start
his back swing.
Finally his exasperated partner Roy asked,
'What the hell is taking so long?'
'My wife is watching me from the clubhouse balcony,'
Dave explained. 'I want to make a perfect shot.'
His companion Roy said, 'You don't have a chance in hell of hitting
her from here.'
H/T Brian
News..........
Piddler's Green
Obama Administration Passes DREAM ACT by Executive Memo
Fear of Jones
Something Old, Something New
Guest Post: Viewed From the Deckplates
Yankee Doodle Day
A Tokyo-Paris flight in under three hours on the horizon
Obama "Panicked" Over Re-Election Prospects
Stunning numbers want Congress to probe Obama's eligibility
Look Who Wants to Lead the Middle East!
MoD is bureaucratic, bloated and indecisive
British military advisers 'expelled from Pakistan'
Hugo Chavez in 'critical' condition in Cuban hospital
War dead to be driven down side streets to avoid the public
Suspected Islamists bomb Nigerian pubs, killing 25
Moussa Koussa found in Qatar
Nato 'trying to kill Col Gaddafi'
$25 billion art haul prepares high security move six miles down the road
Astounding? Nawwww.............from Rico
Was Timmy Geithner's remark that "taxes on small businesses had to be raised to prevent government from shrinking" astounding to you?
Not if you remember Berry's treatment of Joe the Plumber it was not.
This is the 'tone' of our Government is everything, the People are less than nothing (especially the little people that aren't part of gov't).
- Sacrifice the small business owner on the altar of BIG government while saving the TBTF idiots that heavily $upport Soetoro-Obama and our national Communists (D).
Astounding arrogance/hubris perhaps, and certainly astoundingly clueless.
At least the cartoon Butthead was intentionally funny....our TurboTax guru is unintentionally funny.
Sunday, 26 June 2011
THE NINE-O-NINE FLIES AGAIN
B-17G "Nine-O-Nine" - nicknamed after the last three digits of her serial number: 42-31909 - completed 140 combat missions with the 323rd Bomb Squadron, 91st Bomb Group during World War II - believed to be the Eighth Air Force record for most missions - and she never lost a crewman as a casualty.
Sadly, at the end of hostilities she was eventually scrapped but thanks to dedicated hard-working enthusiasts, the Nine-O-Nine flies again!
Read it at STORMBRINGER
So, you want a LOAN?............from Rico
Change the "Bank" in the attached cartoon frame to 'World' and/or 'China' and you will have the essence of what the future of gigantic, unsustainable, US Government debt...and the greenback, by extension...will be.
Our "full faith and credit of the USG" is now a crappy joke, and it will not be getting any better under the clownish politicos we currently have any time soon.
What cannot be paid back, will NOT be paid back.
The prudent mariner would be looking at diversifying OUT of the US Dollar and/or Dollar-denominated assets. precious metals are one way, but if you insist on holding fiat (paper) currency then may I suggest that Swedish Krona are looking even better than Swiss Francs these days.....
Marines with Battery K fire 120 mm mortars June 21. The battery provides artillery and indirect fire for Battalion Landing Team 3/1, the ground-combat element of the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit. The unit is training with the Expeditionary Fire Support System for an upcoming deployment later this year. Photo by Cpl. Gene A. Ainsworth III
H/T Marc
Stealth QE3 is here!!.............from Rico
While Benny the Bernank dazzled us at the conclusion of the last 2-day FOMC meeting by putting lipstick on our economic pig, he also kinda-sorta 'told' us that QE3 was already in place and how it would work.
It is a "stealth" QE3, without being 'called' QE anything. Here's how it works:
- The FED will use money and principal payments from the maturing bonds it already holds to buy MORE bonds! The purchasing system/mechanism is nearly identical to their Treasury Bond purchase program (a.k.a. QE2).
This is really 'slick' because instead of 'printing more money' the 'reinvestment' of maturing debt (1) does not reduce the government's bloated, indebted, balance sheet, but (2) 'changes' the composition of that balance sheet, and [for Keynesians and Dem's (C)] (3) not for the better.
Reinvesting maturing debt does NOT retire that debt, but expands it with even more debt. it is a continuation of our current fiscal and monetary policies and will be ruinous for our economy.
Look for rising inflation to result from this....say 20% to 50%.
- But not to worry....you can TRUST the Government and our private Central Bank!!!
The Sunday Best......
Al Sadr’s Mahdi Army Vows to Launch Suicide Attacks Against US Troops
Rule 5 Saturday Night: Ana Beatriz Barros
Pride 2011
NGO Urges UN Chief to Retract Blessing for Cynical Iranian Conference on Terrorism
Illegal Aliens Set Arizona on Fire
Propaganda & Hedonic Adjusting 101
Thousands of foreigners snap up Olympics tickets meant for Brits
Election season trumps fighting season as United States retreats from the world
Swearing at police not an offence
Alarm for Syrian President Assad as protesters close in on Damascus
Eurozone relief as China pledges debt bailout
The end of an era for Zimbabwe's last white farmers?
US military leaders fear Afghanistan withdrawal will increase soldier deaths
National Trust fences off cows over fears of risk to public
Israelis mark fifth year of Gilad Shalit's capture
and finally.......
How one American male cooks when the family is away
Losing Patience with Counterinsurgency
At the video is the fascinating exchange where General Petraeus endorses torture in the case of the ticking time bomb. Keith Olbermann, whose "Countdown" program has been resurrected, smeared Petraeus on this in a recent segment, with quotes from other top officials who essentially impugn the general's reputation.
More video from the testimony at Gateway Pundit, "American Hero General David Petraeus: “I Disagree With Barack Obama… I’m No Quitter”."
Yeah. A hero. Not to Keith Olbermann.
Anyway, on the implosion of counterinsurgency, see National Journal, "Washington Losing Patience with Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan."
John Nagl is the kind of guy who brings to mind F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wicked line in The Great Gatsby about people who succeed at such an early age that “everything afterward savors of anticlimax.” A star at West Point and a Rhodes scholar, the native Nebraskan was only 37 when he landed on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in January 2004. In that article, Nagl offered an inside-the-Sunni-Triangle tutorial on what he came to call “graduate-level war.” Nagl’s mantra: “We have to outthink the enemy, not just outfight him.” In an era when small but wily bands of nonuniformed insurgents could stymie America’s mighty military machine with stealthy guerrilla attacks and roadside bombs planted in the night, the U.S. had to figure out how to hunt down the bad guys and cut off their support from the local population. Nagl, after studying the British and French colonial experience, as well as America’s handling of the Vietnam War, helped to develop what has since become famous as U.S. “counterinsurgency doctrine,” or COIN. As his celebrity grew, Nagl proselytized about it everywhere, even on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.RTWT.
By the late 2000s, the precocious Army major had become part of a brain trust around America’s uber-general, David Petraeus, the commander who implemented the Iraq troop surge. Commissioned by Petraeus, Nagl helped to author the official counterinsurgency manual that has since reoriented American military doctrine, shifting the center of gravity from rough-and-ready conventional war fighters to cerebral specialists in irregular warfare and targeted response. After retiring from the Army as a lieutenant colonel in early 2008—even though he seemed to be on the fast track to four-star fame—Nagl took over a little-known think tank, the Center for a New American Security, and turned it into what journalist Tara McKelvey called “counterinsurgency central in Washington.”
Brilliant and brash as ever at the advanced age of 45, Nagl delivers a sober endorsement of the military’s current COIN strategy in Afghanistan, which, because it was adapted from Iraq, is partly his brainchild. It is a strategy that many experts believe is not working—and the skeptics may now include President Obama himself. “I think any sane person would be disillusioned,” Nagl says over a lunch of mussels and mozzarella salad at Finemondo, a lushly decorated restaurant around the corner from his office. Even some of those around Petraeus (who is retiring from the military to run the CIA) are losing heart. But Nagl says that the Janus-faced core of COIN strategy—winning over the Afghan population with kindness, aid, and a multibillion-dollar policy to “clear, hold, and build” towns and villages while ruthlessly killing off insurgents—is just starting to succeed. He laments that the debate in Washington is dominated by critics who complain that the war is almost 10 years long and already more hopeless than Vietnam.
Yet another reason I'm unhappy with the president. Cut-and-run is one thing, but running when the tide is turning is another. George W. Bush refused to abandon Iraq, and that's when the consensus from all quarters was that the war was a "fiasco." We persevered in Iraq, and it's a stable emerging democracy today. In Afghanistan, I'm not confident we'll be able to say the same thing a fews years from now.
Cross-posted: "The Implosion of Counterinsurgency."
On Allison Benedikt's 'Life After Zionist Summer Camp'
A lot of this is Jewish inside baseball, so I'm only partly competent to weigh in authoritatively, but my first impression while reading is that Allison Benedikt is, to be frank, a monstrously ignorant, enormously indecisive groupie/wannabe hipster. The essay's written in a kind of droll childish style. It reminds me of someone you might see walking down the street but looks like they don't have the slightest clue where they're going. Benedikt, a Jew from the Midwest, lived her entire life thinking she was going to make aliyah, only to decide that, nah, Zionism wasn't so cool after all. The clincher is that she met, and then later married, a "progressive" non-Jewish dude named Mark (not Marc, to the horror of her parents). Mark had been duly programmed as a zombified anti-Semite by some sections of the modern Jew-hating left. He obviously liked Allison, despite religious differences, and thus quickly went to work destroying her faith in Israel, and since she'd spent an entire life refusing to really learn about the country of her faith --- and her parents' enduring commitment --- she basically melted into a Hamas-defending self-hating American Jew who would be perfectly at home in the comment threads at Daily Kos. It's a long read, so find a few minutes before diving in. The main takeaway is how the piece is like catnip for the neo-communists now cheering the next Gaza flotilla.
Anyway, I saw this when it came out, and then William Jacobson wrote a pithy post, so I was reminded: "Least Shocking Blog Post Title Ever: “Village Voice Editor discovers she hates Israel, curses when challenged”." Check that entry, but the preview is that she told Israeli historian Yaacov Lozowick to f**k off on Twitter. Not surprising, I know. And check the Memeorandum link as well. Benedikt gave a cryptic citation to the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, and he felt obligated to comment, and at considerable length as well. And the debate devolved to include Andrew Sullivan, but I don't read him so you'll just have to check it out.
Cross-posted: "Allison Benedikt's 'Life After Zionist Summer Camp'; or, The Mysterious Evolution of a Dumb Hadassah Youth Activist to Hip Progressive Israel-Basher."
Kate Upton Jenna Leigh Photo Shoot
This young woman is becoming a superstar virtually overnight.
See: "Kate Upton, Jenna Leigh Lingerie Photoshoot, Spring/Summer 2011."
Bonus: At Randy's Roundtable, "Thursday Nite Tart: Vanessa Marcil."
Extra: At Bob Belvedere's, "Rule 5 Saturday: Caterina Murino."
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