Dougie93

I just follow Canadian Army doctrine, which is you're perfectly within your professional bearing to talk about your experiences of something, but moreover, that's not an argument, so I'm not arguing with you, that was just my view of 1 RCR, Victoria Barracks (Y101) is not called the Chicken Ranch for nothing, the chickensh*t gets piled high. Other battalions are more laid back, and the Vandoos is a love camp. /shrugs

LOL!

Not a problem, because anybody who is prepared to fight kill and/or die for anything in Canada, defends and upholds the Constitution of the United States of America. The whole sneering knee jerk anti-American thing is entirely amongst the bourgeoisie, and they're mostly harmless. They do harm to their own interests more than anything, because they don't actually know what their interests are. Without the central narrative of Canadian history, they don't know the story of their people, in the cause and effect sense.

Plenty of time for that, I'm not going anywhere, I like it here. Compared to the forums I'm used to, this forum is swanky, it's got all the bells and whistles.

No thanks, super boring. I don't waste time on moral panics and faux outrage, particularly for things beyond my control. Kadr is Trudeau's problem, not my problem. /shrugs

I like the Kremlin's plan better, where you sneak a nuclear torpedo up the Potomac with a multi megaton warhead, no launch detection for the American SBIRS, point blank, no warning decapitation strike,

I mean, if anything, for our own existential safety, we should be helping the Russians retain their end of the Balance of Terror, because the whole point of MAD, or mutual vulnerability as is the term of art, is to achieve a stable paradigm and then don't mess with it. The American Neoconservatives however, being born of the Cold Warrior Reagan Democrats, do not believe in mutual vulnerability, because they don't have faith that it is going to work. Rather, it is more likely that a conflagration is inevitable at some point, and when it comes, America will have no choice, with backs against the wall, but to come out swinging. Ergo; America better be getting ready to fight and win a nuclear war lest the Union perish from this earth, and be damned with the peace hippies screetching "you can't win a nuclear war!" Unfortunately, the Neoconservatives are right, a nuclear war is inevitable, because America will never accept mutual vulnerability, because MAD is defeatist and American Ingenuity will not accept defeat, in the face of Kobayashi Maru, America is Captain Kirk and so they will keep trying to solve the problem by technological innovation. This then becomes a self fulfilling prophecy as the Russians and Chinese counter escalate in the face of it, until somebody sometime is gonna make a mistake. But, you know, no need to rush things, creeping towards a thermonuclear exchange is still better than charging headlong into one.n

Indeed, because the only Russian port which remains ice free is Sevastopol, but that only gives them access to the Black Sea. In order to keep NATO at bay, Russia cannot allow itself to be completely boxed into the Black Sea. They need to have one foot on either side of the Bosporus in order to retain their freedom of action on their southern flank. Syria is the foot on the far side of the Bosporus. To try to take this from them is the definition of picking a fight with Russia which would escalate and counter escalate until is spins out of control and goes global over the Pole.

Indeed, and it is folly to try to overthrow this status quo, not as a morality play, but because the status quo ante is actually called the Balance of Terror and destabilizing it leads to the breach and the brink of world war three. In the end, I'll take the morality of avoiding a countervalue strategic thermonuclear exchange over the morality of going social justice warrioring to free the Arabs from themselves.

Not to mention it was a glorious death, a warrior sings his death song. Leans into the howling storm, to go forward under rain of fire, to recover best friend's body, as cannot leave a man behind, certainly not to the hands of the Taliban? That was Mellish. Supersoldier, Infantry God in the classical sense. His name will be wreathed in valour in the annals of the Canadian Army, forever. I don't see him as a victim. Not everyone who serves has the privilege of being heroic, but Warrant Mellish lived and died it.

To the point where the Kurds are actually seeking the protection of their other arch nemesis Putin and Damascus, because that is better than falling into the hands of IS. Basically Putin and Assad are winning, slowly but surely, simply by waiting it out and then being the only force that can assert any sort of control in the power vacuum incited by Obama.

Realpolitik; The American Hegenomy simply props the House of Saud up as the least worst option, because it's not actually run by them, it's run by the Clerics and the House of Saud fear them, which is why the House of Saud has to be so strict, it's not MBS who wants to be quite so strict, but he as to be careful, cause the Cleric demand it be pretty damn strict, and if the House of Saud falls, those Clerics will rule directly in their place, at which point the Islamic State will actually have a country, and with all that oil, a shee-it load of money. In terms of Syria that's mostly right, close enough, except Turkey is not fighting the Islamic State, the Islamic State has protected bastions inside Turkey, Turkey is only fighting the Kurds, and that's why they are protecting IS, because Turkey is using IS as a proxy against the Kurds.

I'm quite confident and it's a generational project anyways, you get one shot per generation as Canada booms and busts, and the next bust is looking like a doozy. But aside from economics, the real issue is ethno-nationalism, which is what Quebec is, an ethno-nationalist state within Canada, and as such in the face of Liberal Party of Canada open borders, the anti-immigrant sentiment outside of Montreal is starting to incite fascism. You are talking about Montreal. But we don't need Montreal, that is not our target market.

Well, first of all "That's utter bullshit" is a circular logic fallacy, so there's no need to address that, I let others come to their own conclusions. I merely submit a view of it, and let the market decide, but since the market is not one yip yammering fallacious Eastern Elite Academic Liberal Party of Canada Troll, there's no need to convince such a dingbat of anything, they are immune to evidence anyways, because they will say anything to prop up their socialist welfare gulag Confederation. Because they have internalized it as being indistinguishable from themselves as free thinking individuals. And moreover, without it, they'd all have to come out with the rest of us and get a real job or business in the private sector, and they don't want to be reduced to that, as they are treated as a kind of royalty now by the Liberal Party of Canada.

This is why I voted for Gerry Butts and his sock puppet Zoolander, because Gerry Butts was the Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne sock puppets, and his strategy is to steal the NDP's platform to box the NDP out. So Ontario was run by the shadow NDP and as a result is a fiscal and economic basket case now. Gerry Butts is now going to do that to Canada. Which is fine by me, give them what they want with a fire hose, and then ride the populist outrage when it blows up in their face.

It's going to keep coming around again and again, it ebbs and flows with the Corporate Welfare, the last referendum was in wake of a deep recession due to a debt crisis, but the Government of Canada is going to keep booming and busting like that, and when they bust again, which isn't going to be that long, the Pequistes will rise again. "Vive le Quebec, vive le Quebec . . . LIBRE!" ~ General De Gaulle Due to the dysfunction of Confederation, it will bring itself down, because Canada cannot actually afford to keep bribing Quebec to stay in Confederation, and when they finally have to give Quebec the bad news, it will be sayonara.

I mean, I worshiped Frank Mellish, he was an Infantry God in the classical sense, he was a super soldier, and his bearing was so cool, he was like Clint Eastwood. When they said Frank Mellish had fallen, that was a shock, make no mistake.

It kicked me in the heart too, I knew some of these people personally, either they been at some point my immediate boss, like Warrant Mellish had been, or I had been at some point their immediate boss, as with Cpl. Dyer fallen at Tarnak Farms. I stood at his grave as they lowered him into it. But devastation is absurd, devastation is me falling down and can't go on, which is not the case, everybody gotta die sometime, Red, sh*t happens, you take a life moment to grieve, then ya gotta buck up, ruck up and stand to again.

Just don't come crying when you impose deep inefficiencies unto your companies and then we short them into bankruptcy to strip them and restructure. Creative Destruction, who knew?

Whatever, I don't bother to go round and round pointlessly with knee jerk protectionsists, it's a fool's errand but more power to them, because I have structured my personal financial strategy to hedge for all sorts of nonsense to include protectionist populist backlashes, so I'm just chillin in the markets, which are international and don't care about borders and can be accessed from anywhere anyways in a worldwide digitally networked Information Age. Protect away, blow yourselves up, see if I care. /shrugs

The UK is significantly different from Canada because the UK was an Industrial power and Canada is a commodities power, so Canadians are richer than most of the British, Britain just has more rich people. The socialists in Britain are also not held in check to the same degree by the proximity of the freedom loving Americans, so as a result the UK is now and has long been even more Bolshie than Canada is.

Particularly when 9-11 wasn't revenge for "bombing Muslims", it was revenge for propping the ultra Muslim House of Saud up, because AQ wanted to overthrow said absolute monarchy so they could have an absolute monarchy of their own. In terms of the vast, vast majority of Sunni Muslims, America has rained wealth down upon them and protected them from the Soviets with thermonuclear weapons.

As Yzermandias just said, that's another nostalgia for something that never was, the high marginal income tax rates of the immediate post war "the rich paid 90% tax!" No they didn't, you can't possibly think that the ruling elites of the global hegemon would really accept confiscatory tax rates if the politicians didn't add loopholes, if there were no loopholes to avoid a 90% marginal tax rate, said politicians would simply be conveniently assassinated on the spot, because 90% tax is communism. I mean, there's more than one way to have a revolution to bring a democracy down, and that can be in favour of a better democracy also. So the socialist nanny welfare gulag has a hard ceiling as to how far they can go in terms of confiscation. See; the War of Independence, which was not a grass roots revolution from the masses, it was a tax revolt by a super wealthy land owning aristocracy, to protect their God given rights, the most important one being their property rights. A bunch of little kings overthrew their King so they could be a Nation of Kings, every man a sovereign; America in a nutshell. The only caveat being that those Kings of Virginia were overthrown at Gettysburg, and as a result the rights of a sovereign were extended to all, through the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, and then America basically went from there to the Moon like it was shot out of a cannon. Now the left in America wants to have a revolution to overthrow the Nation of Kings and turn it into a nanny socialist welfare gulag like a Giant Canada. Which would be very bad for Canada, because the only reason Canada can afford its nanny socialist welfare gulag is that the Americans are churning out wealth exponentially and it is raining down upon us. If the Americans go to a nanny socialist welfare gulag, all that will cool off significantly and then Americans won't be able to prop Canada up anymore. America will rein everything in and then Canada will be out in the cold. Canada is run by American corporate socialism, and it's a Cold War legacy project, because with backs against the wall in the face of World War Three, the Americans did not want civil disorder on their northern frontier, so they've propped the little basket case up all this time, just to keep it within Fortress North America.

Not really, because the wealthy don't pay income tax, the wealthy incorporate and then pay themselves as a low wage employee from their own company, and then they invest those incorporated profits and pay capital gains tax instead, which in Canada, capital gains ain't a bad tax actually, and it's better than the American capital gains tax.

Tho not devastating, the worst losses at Op Medusa was Warrant Nolan and Warrant Mellish, not because I knew them, but because they were both elite of the elite super soldier Warrant Officers, and while you can get another Private Soldier off the rack, you cannot replace a Frank Mellish easily, he was one of the best soldiers in the whole Canadian Army, and he was an exponential force multiplier as a leader/instructor. Rick Nolan and Frank Mellish are the sort of fellows who make an army work, if you don't have men of quality like them, you'd have a mutiny on your hands, because the chain of command is a clown show. Not all senior NCO's are created equal, many of them are complete bags of shite and total a-holes, so when you lose a real deal super elite one, that's a big hole to fill.