Right To Left
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Posts posted by Right To Left
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12 minutes ago, bush_cheney2004 said:
The U.S. can have both...leadership and a forward deployed, potent military...Canada has neither. Canada's government could have taken far stronger measures than just Meng's living quarters and extradition outcome (e.g. expulsions, 5G decision, consulates, air travel, student visas, etc.) but it chooses not too. Therefore no reason for China to budge.
Should have worked out a trade long ago, instead of hiding behind the "rule of law".
Looks to me like China is quietly developing their Belt and Road Strategy to develop and build economic alliances that aren't affected by either US "soft power" economic warfare or US naval threats on the oceans.
I've said all along, that Canada should have never got involved with this bogus attempt of Trump economic warfare against China, since we have nothing to gain/and lots to lose. And we need to recognize that JT and worse Conservative leadership are clinging to the declining empire by arresting subjects for no reason on America's behalf.
America is on the same path the British Empire was on after WWII - trying desperately to hang on to its imperial possessions all through the 50's, before learning the American Way of setting up tin pot proxy dictators who get paid a little to work as the local enforcer of global capitalism. But this system, buiilt by the American Empire is on a downward spiral this year, as the rest of the world moves away from using a currency that is ruinously in debt and can never pay back creditors in the future. Get used to Weimar America! It's coming soon.....likely later this year!
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15 hours ago, Army Guy said:
5. what happens after the US loses aircraft carriers, well i think by then China or Russia would be a smoking hole, or one sheet of glass or miles upon miles of craters...... and you'll have to see what a Chinese man looks like in the museum ... look what they did after 911 can you imagine killing 5000 US sailors... it is not going to be pretty... every nation in the world would have to declare what side of the line they were on, and suit the fu** up, cause it would be game on...to sink 2 or 3 would be the end of days as we know it... and it would not be conventional for long...the entire nation stood to after 911, half the population signed up the next day the other half were women and they signed up as well, and that was a bunch of goat hearders ... i can not imagine what they would do to the Chinese or Russians like, i said suit up it's going to be one wild ride....
I want to jump right to #5 here, because this is most important, since you seem to believe that nuclear wars are survivable for the nations that launch them, and I sure as hell don't when the other side has them too!
The most important takeaway from Daniel Ellsberg's book - "The Doomsday Machine" was that the scientists, engineers and analysts who were tasked by the Pentagon to produce plans for various nuclear war scenarios (including US first strike attacks) all were contingent on a massive, widespread attacks on both Soviet AND Chinese cities during the Cold War years.
Even after Mao had a falling out with Brezhnev and other Soviet leaders, and were pulling away from their alliance and trying to develop relations with the US, the US was still planning to wipe out China along with the Soviets even though they never developed more than 100 nuclear warheads and were certainly not informed that the US still considered them to be part of the same enemy!
And, if your disgusting future American genocide scenario of "you'll have to see what a Chinese man looks like in the museum" is at all accurate, we will all be dead also from the after-effects of such a mass casualty attack, and no one will be alive to see anything! Maybe it will be one way to avoid a climate warming extinction.....if that's a silver lining!
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13 hours ago, bush_cheney2004 said:
What happens ? The U.S. will still have plenty of carriers...plus cruise missile platforms and forward deployed aircraft squadrons to join in the fun. The heavy bombers will take a while longer to get to the party.
After the dust settles, Canada's weak government can get back to asking about the Two Michaels...again.
Stick to the question! The sinking of one aircraft carrier would be a disaster for a nation that (like Israel) has gotten used to fighting pain-free wars! The US is not Somalia....if you recall from the not quite fully acccurate (but close enough) portrayal of the Clinton Blackhawk Down Debacle, what was learned about Somali military strategy as filtered through CIA releases was that the UN-targeted Somali general they wanted US Forces to pick up and deliver to The Hague or some international tribunal for trial, had devised a strategy of counter-attack with his officers that they knew full well would result in high casualties for their side, by shooting down at least one sophisticated and heavily armed attack helicopter.
The incoming assumption was based on the work of US military planners who assumed that the Blackhawks were so capable of inflicting lethal violence on any group of attackers on the ground...who had to get in close enough to aim their fire at the pilots, engine or the base of the rotors, to bring a helicopter down. As soon as it was learned that the Somalis were much more willing to receive casualties and even sacrifice their lives to achieve an objective, then plans had to change!
Nuther topic, but this is the #1 reason why Daniel Ellsberg and other anti-nuclear critics point to about wrong assumptions made by US war planners who are still trying to work out how to win a nuclear war against Russia or China today! They frame their pre-emptive strikes against enemy nuclear targets on the premise, that once the Russians or the Chinese realize they can't mount a successful counter-attack, they will surrender! The notion that nations which have been attacked with nukes might launch theirs anyway...even if they know they can't win, is totally lost on idiots who have dangerous levels of power and destruction today!
AND back to the aircraft carriers....there is no way even one of them can be destroyed by bombs or anti-ship missiles without taking thousands of casualties. US leadership will be faced with the extreme dilemma of either:
1. trying to find a face-saving retreat or
2. going for broke and bombing cities with nukes.
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1 hour ago, Army Guy said:
How long did you have to search to find that story, the reason i ask, is because the Israelis used the F-35 not once but dozens of times already to defeat some of Russia's best anti air systems, such as the S-400, and Pantsir systems in several airstrikes in Syria, that and F-35 have been declared operational in all countries that fly them, thats cleared for combat... not air shows...
So what are the details about the dance Russia and Israel have been doing in Syria for the past 5 to 10 years? Cause the Israelis are flying around (rarely using F-35's) Western Syria bombing Syrian and Iranian targets...omitting Russians somehow, and their planes make it back to base afterwards. The only time I remember them having a close call was when a Russian spokesman condemned the IDF for launching a missile strike at a Syrian target from behind a civilian aircraft that had taken off and was still climbing in altitude (major nono in air combat maneuvers). If any Syria has S-400's, they likely have restrictive parameters they're allowed to use them. Not sure about the cheaper, less complicated Pantsir's, but it seems like Russian units don't directly target Israelis and Israelis know where the Russians are and avoid hitting them.
This is an arrangement the US and Russia has had for a long time in Eastern Syria....though the latest example of Biden keeping another war going featured a complaint by some Russian official that they weren't provided adequate warning before Joe launched his anti-Iranian missile strike. It would be nice if the US was actually fighting ISIS and Al Qaeda, instead of once again trying to cripple the only forces who are fighting Saudi and Qatari Islamofascist groups. But, that's the world we live in now.
QuoteYes it is true that the US Airforce is buying legacy aircraft such as the new F-15EX, to replace some of their older F15 C and D models.... and perhaps even some of their F-15E older models... yes they did lock at the newest F-16 and F-21 aircraft but no orders as of yet... todate over 615 F-35 have been built, thats more than any generation 5 aircraft in the world, those numbers out pace a lot of fighters or multi role aircraft. and production is not slowing down, but has not reached peak performance yet... I don't care what anyone says the F-35 is light years ahead of any gen 3 or 4 or 4.5 aircraft.. with a price point expected to be lower than 80 mil a copy for that much tech, no one can compete, shit even the new F-15EX has not yet approached that price point, but it is expected to...
The US Airforce will be flying F-35 for decades to come, and it is still the top contender for the Canadians Airforce as well despite what Justin thinks about it...with sales only expected to climb world wide.
That Forbes writeup I linked sure sounded like the USAF was looking for the exit, and wanted a new plane to be developed specifically for Air Force needs. Doesn't mean they'll get it after almost 2 trillion has been sunk into this white elephant so far, but it sure gives the impression they don't consider the F-35 reliable or worth the costs. On that note it has to be mentioned that the Israelis up till now, have been riding for free on all this new tech! How often are the Israelis flying F-35's into potential combat zones is never spelled out.
And what of the other branches of US Military...are their modified versions of this plane going to be flying for decades to come? The big problem, as some forward looking Air Force generals are trying to get across, is that the problematic F35 has already been around too long to remain cutting edge and "lightyears ahead" of potential competition coming from Russia and China. And then there's the added problem of 'how are planes going to be able to match the maneuverability of unmanned drone aircraft that don't have the burden of having to avoid making moves that could injure, black out or kill a human pilot?
Just as some weapons analysts declare that the age of aircraft carriers has been over for decades, and the only thing keeping them all from being sunk is that there hasn't been a major power war with an enemy equipped with enough effective anti-ship missiles to start knocking them off like ducks in a pond. There is precedence for this early in WWII, when Germany discovered too late that the age of large battleships was over, and even the greatest, like the much ballyhooed Bismarck were sunk by shear weight of numbers....the British Navy realizing they could surround the smaller German fleet with faster, more maneuverable corvettes and sink any German ship they came across. From then on, the German fleet had to stay in port and only their half-submarine U-boats were used to continue the war on the North Atlantic.
Considering the way the US ...now under new management, continues to threaten and try to bluff its way around to continue the shakedown of the 'lesser powers.' Next question is: when the inevitable happens and saber-rattling in the Persian Gulf or more likely now - the South China Sea leads to 3, 4 or more US aircraft carriers sinking to the bottom, and what happens after that?
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Another reason climate change is coming at us whether we believe it's happening.....or not:
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation could be showing signs of slowed current circulation
Translated into English, this current, know to meteorologists as the AMOC. This Atlantic Ocean circulating current begins with warm water running up the coast of West Africa, where it is deflected due west and reaches max heat content in the Caribbean...which in turns into the Gulfstream current everyone is familiar with...especially people living in Western Europe. The AMOC moves up along the Atlantic Coast, and as it cools and loses heat content, it turns around somewhere off the coast of northern Norway and returns as a submerged ocean current underneath incoming warmer waters along Greenland and our side of the Atlantic on its way down along the coast of South America. Well, that's how it goes in a normal year at least!
By latitude, you'll notice that England and the British Isles are at the same latitude as Labrador on our side of the Ocean. Big difference in weather though!
Published in the journal Nature Geoscience, a new study (behind paywall) examines evidence pointing to the AMOC’s slowdown due to anthropogenic climate change, or climate change caused by humans.
Using long-term proxy data to substitute for a lack of information about the AMOC’s patterns before 2004, researchers look at surface temperature patterns that reflect changes in how the AMOC could be transporting heat across oceans.
Some of the proxies included temperatures, marine productivity and ocean heat content. Select data to measure the heat of subsurface ocean temperatures were derived from coral samples, and marine productivity was recorded by looking at the marine sediment and methane sulfonic acid concentration in Greenland ice cores.
The results indicate that prior to the 19th century, AMOC weather patterns were “relatively stable.”
Declines in movements of the current are visible after the 19th century, with “a phase of particularly rapid decline” measured via proxy data beginning in the 1960s.
Scientists further saw a small recovery in the 1990s, but then saw the same decline occur in the first decade of the 2000s.
So, the rapid loss of ice in the Arctic has been slowing big ocean currents like the AMOC even faster than expected. Historically, when Atmospheric CO2 levels were around 300ppm for an extended period of time, there would be a slowdown in these ocean currents so much that the Gulfstream would stop flowing and Europe would go through a deep freeze and precipitate the next ice age.
That's where we should have been already, thousands of years ago, but the minor carbon contributions of small human populations became too much for 'negative' carbon sequestration techniques to pull more carbon out of the atmosphere; so CO2 stayed at 300 for thousands of years....until the mid-19th century, when humans started pulling tons of carbon out of the ground and putting it back into the atmosphere.
At first...when CO2 levels started rising above 300, the increases were at a slow rate, then in the 1960's, carbon levels started rising faster and faster until today - at 416ppm - hopefully this year's maximum draws down CO2 levels again till fall. Because, at 416, more heat will be trapped and held in by the atmosphere, while what's left of the cold may reek havoc every now and then, but as the years go by now, less and less ice up north will mean higher temperature spikes in the tropics and mid-latitudes, with fewer cold fronts to moderate temperatures.
When all the arctic ice melts up north, there will be nothing left to relieve extreme heat waves in the northern hemisphere. We'll have alligators and crocs migrating and attempting to adapt to life in the Arctic Ocean again (PETM-55 million yrs ago) while all the people, plants and animals that can't migrate from extreme heat in the tropics (below 30 degrees latitude) will die from heat exhaustion, and the tropic oceans slowly turn into toxic deoxygenated swamps that can't support normal life any longer.
How long will it take for really bad stuff to happen? Who knows....the decline in the AMOC is way ahead of any schedule predicted 30 to 50 years ago. But it doesn't matter exactly when if the change is inevitable now.
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4 hours ago, Army Guy said:
1. I won't blow smoke up your ass, there were Afghanistan locals that did not want us there, they were more afraid of what the Taliban could do to them, than what we could ever do, but i will also tell you this, a vast majority of Afghans were very happy that the Taliban and the other terrorists were no longer in power. And for the areas in which we had full control the locals liked the security and law and order we brought, i can't count how many times we were approached by locals who would tell us as much. Yes we killed a lot of bad guys, and 99 % of them had it coming, and trust me the locals cared very little for their oppressor's, the Taliban or any of the dozens of terrorist groups operating in the country.
2. When i joined the military, i did so with eyes wide open, my father was in the military's, infact i was the 5 th generation of the family to join the service, for me it was already written in the sky, join the family business. Not just me my brothers and our wives as while... And if there was any doubt, our pre deployment training was so real that it left NO doubt on what was coming, and that training was done mostly by those soldiers that had just come back... and they instilled how easy it was to get killed or maimed, over and over again...we trained constantly until the day we left to go over... by that time you could have been 190 years old and we would all know what was going to happen once we landed in Afghanistan, the world largest killing machine.
Recruiters have one job, to bring in fresh young minds into the fold, i don't blame them for any of my issues, be it physicals or mental, don't get me wrong i take my share of responsibility, i was the one that said yes sign me up, and send me into battle... but unless you missed all my other posts I place a large portion of the blame on the government and the majority of Canadians citizens, for not having our backs be it with buying the proper equipment to survive, and making us beg like dogs for benefits that are life saving like medical care and mental health issues..., for not acting when we needed you, for not forcing the government to look after us after everything we sacrificed on your behalf...
Recruiters don't make policies they follow orders like the rest of us, governments make policy, and it's citizens force government s to make policy. remember not that long ago there was a young white girl who had been convicted of murder, the media found out she was about to be sent to a healing lodge to partake in BBQ's and pow wows, dancing into the night in their own cabins and place by the lake... Canadians from the left and right stood up and said WTF this is not right, a judge had already signed off on it , it was all legal and she was getting ready to make the trip....and they used their voice to get it all changed, today she remains in prison.. all that happened in less than a month... so i know Canadians can make a difference they can change anything they want including a legal transfer of a prisoner... but we some how can not treat our vets with any respect or dignity, more like pieces of shit, with less medical benefits than the average Canadian, and with an overwhelmed mental health capacity, that sees far to many vets spilled over the sides in long waiting lists only to take their lives to end the pain...
3. Yes because Canada's military has been marching across the world and making most nations our bitches for decades now, Canada's military has been barely able to respond to domestic disasters, in Afghanistan we had problems keeping a 3500 man battle group supplied and manned... and in case you don't know it yet todays world is much more dangerous than in any time in our history, not having a military for defense is just not sound decision making , kind of like throwing out your smoke detectors because you think we are never going to have a fire...
4. a kid could make a IED with a cell phone and some diesel fuel and fertilizer, it does not take a rocket scientist, Bomb makers where number one on the list of kill or capture, and we hunted them down by the dozens by any or all means possible, some were foreigners but the majority were home grown wanting to cash in on the Taliban's huge reward for killing any foreign soldier.
5. this is another myth made up by those anti war organizations that could not pigion hole why the coalition was in Afghanistan, first it was pipe lines, NATO was protecting pipelines meant to haul oil from Russia to asia... ya no pipelines where ever built across Afghanistan ... then there was oil....nope no oil could be extracted due to the war and conflict....and it was to expensive, now it is rare minerals trillions of dollars worth deep under ground....and no one is mining them go figure... The US and most of the coalition is drawing down all of it's troops with only small numbers there today, if they were there to rape resources one would only think that numbers be climbing and mining would have started...
I've enjoyed this debate, but I think I am going to have to pull the plug on it now! Cause I have occasional interruptions when I'm online, and I noticed that, even though MLW doesn't seem to tiime out, and you have to log out to leave, this is the second time I've been workiing on a post...stepped away for two or three minutes and found the whole thing disappeared by the time I got back!
I was just starting to work on #4 when everything went poof! And if I can't find a way to save content so I can go back to it, I'll have to stick to the mindless, boring strategy that reddit forums work by: short, usually evasive comments that don't address all the points I'm intending to respond to....oh well!
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2 hours ago, Shady said:
Apparently this is a new lefty trend. They’ve hit peak insanity now. And they wonder why people vote for Trump.
Nice rack at least! Reminds me of way back when I was in grade 9, and miniskirts were first appearing as fashion. We had a young...just out of teachers college english and math teacher - Miss U_____, who liked to wear short miniskirts to school and in class.
Us boys in the class were driving her up the wall, because when we were asked to write sentences, we would write near the top of the blackboard, where our teacher...being only about 5 feet tall, had to stretch even on her tippy toes to reach, when she was trying to check and correct our grammar. We would make sure we had front row seats for class and would lie across our desks or bend down just see up her skirt a little for a cheap thrill.
Fun times! Until one of the girls told the teacher on us! Then it was game over. We didn't get any reprimands, but our favorite teacher started wearing more....'appropriate' clothing to class after that....oh well, it was fun while it lasted!
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1 hour ago, Army Guy said:
Perhaps a better question would be How many Canadians died from exposure to agent orange, CFB Gagetown, NB is where this chemical was developed, Did you also know there is still a few Canadian military vets and their families suing the Federal government for compensation. No party has agree to see everyone who had a part in this chemical cluster fu** compensated, yours or mine...
The idea was a great idea, from a military stand point( jungle warfare), no place to hide easy target...and it was not the locals that were the problem, it was the VC and NVA that was the problem.
Problem here is the Vietcong were locals living in the South, who saw themselves as fighting foreign invaders in their country. And until the Tet Offensive near the end of the War, the NVA was not a significant factor in the fighting. The rice farmers and village locals all wanted the big, smelly, aggressive foreigners who spoke a foreign language out of their homes. As with "terrorists" or "insurgents" in Iraq or Afghanistan etc., these operations follow a recipe to create enemies even where they didn't exist before! Go in to a strange place, kill a bunch of people, and see how the others react to having you around!
Aside from the oft-quoted 55,000 US combat death toll, there were an estimated 3 million Vietnamese casualties of the War. That was one of the points so many P.O.'d former antiwar activists made about the Ken Burns documentary on the Vietnam War a couple of years ago. His presentation would make the viewer assume that US combatants were the only lives that counted, and the locals didn't have a right to be there!
QuoteBurn pits have been ongoing for as long as militaries have been on the move, including Canada's, and in a war zone how much time and effort do you think a soldier puts into something that can have long terms effects ..." like burn pits" In KAF they were just over 50,000 soldiers on that base, the raw sewage plant was a massive open air lagoon, with summer temps averaging 55 degrees plus, you could smell that on every corner of the camp. it's not until you get back home that family doctors warn about exposure... everyday my main focus was getting home to see my family, my kids, not how much bad air i was breathing....but rather what could kill me short term,
Exactly! And that's why military recruiters worldwide want 18 year olds to enlist, to be sent off when needed to fight on behalf of "our country." If the enlistment age was 40, foreign war ventures would have ended long ago! I just wish those who do the manipulating and recruiting, factored in ALL of the costs before deciding to go along. And worse: why aren't they paying whatever it costs for returning veterans to be free of worry about how they will meet their medical and other costs after returning home!
I'm reminded once again of the classic short book - "War Is A Racket" by former Maj. Gen - Smedley Butler, from his own account back in 1935, in between the so called 'Great Wars.' Butler's memoir is about feeling he did little more than serve as an official, decorated goon squad leader for the worst businessmen, bankers and industrialists who needed muscle to enforce order in poor, undeveloped nations where they were seeking to extract the wealth. It's fascinating that long before the Cold War and talk of a Military-Industrial Complex, a smart, reflective and insightful man like Smedley Butler was seeing a picture developing in world affairs that can't be masked or covered up today!
And his book is of course available for free in pdf form and as an audio download also: https://archive.org/details/war_is_a_racket_1903_librivox
Very rarely, do any nations gather and build armies for defense. In recent decades, warmongering has shifted to pushbutton drone bombing and recruiting some nearby mercenary goons to go in and do the killing. The net result doesn't change for the unfortunate people living in the war zone, but it has made it so safe and easy to ignore for those living in the countries that sponsor the war effort, that for the first time in my recollection, even most liberals are warhawks today, and alternatively ignoring or promoting aggressive policies against Russia, China and voicing their support for resource wars in the global south nations.
Quotewhen everyday we had to worry about getting blown up, by Vehicle mounted IED's, people mounted suicide vests, or just plain IED's not to mention getting shot at by every dick with a gun this happened every day, 3 or 4 times each day...... it was not if we were going to get hit, it was when we were going to get hit and by what....there were other things like depleted uranium, toxic wpn fumes, white phosphorus wpns , or here is a good one, how about carbon monoxide poisonings because there was so much armor placed around your truck or vehicle it actually funneled it to the inside of the vehicle, within hours you would have massive headaches, and puking, the cure was to stick your head out of the vehicle, which kind of defeats the purpose of armor right...........not to mention all the snakes and spiders, rabid dogs, goats, donkeys ,attack roosters not to mention the other millions ways to die... But hey here is the final kicker.... many people from the the left side like to use all these excuses to show how dangerous a modern battle field can be.... and yet when it comes time to stand up for our vets where are they, there concern seems to drop when you mention our soldiers....it is after all, them who know first hand how bad combat can really be, it is them who carry those scars for a long time... but when it comes down to it i was never about my country, or it's citizens... it was about the guy on the right and left of me, for those guys i would die for in a second...and for the haters , i would not cross the road to piss on them if you were on fire...
Yes it was tragic that civilians died at the hands of coalition troops mistakes, but where is your disgust at how many were killed by the terrorist , did you know that 80 to 90 % of all Afghans killed where killed by these terrorist, most of these terrorist are not even from Afghanistan. try to goggle on just what methods they used to kill women and children, what they used to do to families that dared to send their girls to school, or how they skinned a man alive and left him staked out in the sun for us to find, because we had asked a question on how to get to the next town....or how a terrorist strapped 20 lbs of explosive to a 5 year old and sent him peddling his bike toward our Vehicle check point , all that was left of him was shin bones and feet still strapped to sandals....we caught the guy in a market, handed him over to the ANP (police) they wrapped him in barbed wire and drug him down the street behind their truck screaming the entire way... just another day in Afghanistan....,
So we heard afterwards, the IED's and other explosive devices were not being designed and built by terrorist nobodies, but instead were the product of ex-Iraqi soldiers and some Baath Party members, who on Day One of an occupation that should never have occurred, were told by their new American administrators, that they would all be considered no better than former Nazis and summarily dismissed from their jobs, regardless of importance or lack of importance..they were all immediately unemployed. And being mostly part of an elite Sunni ruling class, their new American administrators turned first to the Shias...because they represented the majority of the people of Iraq.
So chaos was baked in! With both a lot of instant, angry new terrorists and a complete vacuum left in civil society, with no functioning bureaucracy.
As for Afghanistan, it became a 'hell-hole' after competing outsider-led occupations, first by the Soviet Union, who, after one stalemate and broken treaty after another, were determined to prop up the country's first Marxist president...a man almost totally unknown outside the capital - Kabul. He was part of an educated elite in the country, and from a communist irreligious family. This would become a problem in the 80's, when the Reagan Administration put together a plan with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, to flood the country with every ragtag clown who could hold a rifle, to fight against the Soviet Occupation and free Afghanistan. Problem was that after the Soviets gave up under final president - Gorbachev in 1986, Afghanistan turned into a complete hellhole where nobody was safe to go outside. A work friend of mine happened to open up on the subject a bit and gave me a first hand account from a civilian perspective in Kabul during the late 80's. He noted that both he and his sister were very young at the time, and their mother gave them strict orders not to go out on the balcony of their apartment...because snipers were often shooting at each other, and everyone who looked out a window or stepped out of a doorway in the wrong place at the wrong time could be shot!
The Soviet relatively poorly equipped and financed occupation of Afghanistan paled in comparison to the US Occupation of the past 20 years. The Soviets tried to adapt and put more soldiers in Afghanistan who were from their own Central Asian republics and at least able to speak local languages in the northern part of the country, BUT were not welcomed in the Pashtun South!
And because the Soviets pulled out and left Afghanistan after 8 years of wasting money, resources and lives, the Taleban religious recruits who had taken over the country by 2000, both they and their rich Arab helpers - Al Qaeda, thought the same pattern would occur if they started killing Americans and other foreign nationals coming in. But, recent history shows us that the US under Biden is bent on a case for permanent war! For the most part, American soldiers and private mercenaries are staying in their base compounds most of the time, and the Taleban has few opportunities to get at them with bombs and other weapons except when they are recruiting new prospects for the Afghan Army. Certainly more Afghan soldiers have killed US troops in the past 10 years in these "green on blue" attacks than anyone else there.
So why does the US stay there? There is great rare earth mineral wealth in the eastern mountains apparently. And the country has a unique strategic location that presents an ongoing threat to China's commercial goal of building a 'new silk road' or rail equivalent, that will carry freight overland instead of along dangerous and difficult to protect sea lanes along the Asian Coast. Even when its Afghanistan, it's all about the money in the end!
But, I lost track of my first point! Afghanistan would not have had Al Qaeda, Islamofascist extremists or other barriers to development and normal life if both the Soviets and Americans had stayed away and not brought their proxy battles into their country.
QuoteYou can call the Americans what ever you want to, it is after all a Canadian right of passage... I was proud to serve along side every American soldier that we came across. Atleast we could count on them to have our backs, when our own nation had forgotten us...
Okay, I'll grant you that, but that is not a reason to back our country turning into a glorified vassal state that has no independent foreign policy any longer. A certain space alien who's been active on this forum since the last time I was here a few years back, keeps badgering me and others perceived as anti-American with 'why not talk about your own country - Canada' etc., to which I reply that we can't get to the source of any major problem here now if we can't look further than Ottawa!
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1 minute ago, bush_cheney2004 said:
Not my concern...your domestic politics and squabbles are your own, plus you seem to make time for worrying about American leaders and politics as well. Justin Trudeau is a failure in most any context, except for legalized cannabis and dopers.
We should have continued attempting to set an independent course in world affairs, rather than sidle up to the inheritors of the Global Empire. America is the attack dog of globalized capitalism. You're stuck debt-financing a ruinously bloated and still expanding military-industrial complex because it's the primary stick the global oligarchs wield to enforce the rules of global capitalism today. *
*I could get into the F-35 Debacle ...the 1.7 Trillion debt sinkhole that has led Air Force planners to determine they need to go right back to the drawing board and order some new F-16's and get to work on a real stealth fighter project that isn't a hybrid crossover like the F-35 has been trying to do for the past 30 years. Old saying, sometimes you try to please everybody and you please no one! So, if the Air Force pulls their plug on the project, what does the Navy and the Army do with their modified versions of the same plane?
Years ago, shrewd outside observers were warning that the F-35 Project was a giant, complicated and sophisticated white elephant that wouldn't serve much useful purpose, other than burning money with jet fuel!
The U.S. Air Force Just Admitted The F-35 Stealth Fighter Has Failed
Funny that all the news networks and newspapers haven't been able to fit the story in with their regular news coverage.
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7 minutes ago, blackbird said:
Microsoft News has a report from the Canadian Press:
"OTTAWA — Public Safety Minister Bill Blair says he assumes security authorities signed off on an arrangement to allow a company owned by a Chinese police force to run Canada's visa application centre in Beijing." ..."Questions have been raised about the centre since The Globe and Mail reported earlier this month that its operation has been subcontracted to Beijing Shuangxiong Foreign Service Company, which is owned by the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau."
What is the matter with our government that they would allow such a thing to happen. They allowed Canada's Visa application centre to be run by police in China which handed it over to another company in China. Stunning news. What a disaster our government is in not protecting Canadians.
Still can't provide links?
Since I don't trust your bible college sources, I looked and found this:
Conservatives authorized Chinese police-owned company to run visa centre: Blair
When you were quote-mining, you also missed this part at the end of the article:
"It was signed in 2008. So it's been in place for 12 years now and so its origin and who actually authorized this contract predates me or my government and frankly my knowledge."
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1 minute ago, bush_cheney2004 said:
China doesn't need a war to treat Canada like a chew toy....all it needs is Justin Trudeau.
And you think our goofy Conservative opposition leader is going to do any more than spew more hot air.
My own misgivings about Justin are very similar to the way I assessed Barack Obama... superficial, no core values or goals, and only concerned with his own popularity and polling numbers.
But Conservadweeb would cause more damage because he represents a rightwing constituency that is determined their leaders need to act like tough guys, even when they would be better off by keeping their mouth's shut!
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Just now, bush_cheney2004 said:
Agent Orange and other defoliants were also tested and manufactured in Canada.
...back to China.
Feel free to go ahead and declare war on China! I'll wait right here and have another drink!
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3 minutes ago, Queenmandy85 said:
I am not doing well on this topic. Nuclear weapons are a deterrence, but they cannot be used. The US deterrent in the 1970s was weakened when the Soviets started to believe the US would never dare use them. President Reagan set about convincing the Soviets that he was very serious about using them.
In the early 1970's, I was writing a paper exploring a Warsaw Pact invasion ove wesstern Europe. I attended a seminar with a Canadian Forces senior officer who had recently been the senior Canadian Officer in Norad. I asked him how well NATO would do in a War with the Warsaw Pact including the use of nuclear weapons. He said 90% of the world population would be dead at the end of the first month. The rest would survive another couple of weeks. I abandoned my paper.
Nuclear weapons keep the peace, or so we pray. Wars between India and Pakistan ended when India acquired nuclear weapons. The same with Israel. Stalin, clearly the most evil crazy individual ever to lead a government, had nuclear weapons and even he did not use them.
As far as Canadian Defence policy is concerned, the contributers above have articulated the situation better than me.
Canada is not able to do anything to influence China on our own. It is frustrating but that is real politique.
I'm quickly coming to the conclusion that you have to be a delusional idiot to "do well" on this topic! Canada does not and never did have a stick to wield at China.
The now - 90 year old retired whistleblower - Daniel Ellsberg released what is certain to be his last, and most important book: The Doomsday Machine 3 years ago; mostly compiled from secret notes he had kept from his early days in the 1950's while working for the Pentagon-connected Rand Corporation. It's a shame that MSM is so thoroughly co-opted by the deep state Eisenhower warned about 60 years ago, that aside from a few elite publications, he was unable to spur any widespread interest in his now unclassified work as a designer and game theorist part of the groups who were plotting out nuclear strategies. They weren't aware of biological after-effects like the 'nuclear winter' scenario that could create vast, black clouds of smoke and particles in the upper atmosphere and cause mass extinction of ALL life on the planet. They still knew it would be bad!
And yet the generals and civilian staffers at the Pentagon persisted, and wanted all nuclear scenarios played out: surprise Soviet attacks and even US first strike attacks, which the Pentagon chiefs had determined would have to destroy China, along with the Soviet Union, even though they had only a handful of A-bombs at the time.
In retrospect, considering the studies on atmospheric physics, the massive US first strike, would have precipitated mass human extinction all by itself, even if there were no Soviet missiles launched or bombs dropped!
The numerous false alerts and aborted launches by both sides over the Cold War years, showed Ellsberg that there were many times when a full blown nuclear war almost occurred just because of computer glitches and operator errors, and could have ended life on this planet, if no one was able to think outside of the box and re-assess plans.
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2 hours ago, Army Guy said:
Lots of guys on this forum with more expertise on nukes than i , Bush used to sail on US subs, dog on the porch , or argus have studied the topic more than i, what i do know is what they taught every grunt, nukes are very bad. during the cold war any use of WMD would result in MAD, that included the use of chemical wpns, atleast those you could take precautions and maybe live if you were lucky, but it is a terrible way to die.... Nukes be it inter continental or tactical meant death to everyone in range, either by blast, or fire, or by radiation poisonings or by all three . There are many types of nukes, and ways to deploy them, like air burst, meant to contain damage to target area, but also fry "all" electronics through eltromagnetic pulse, ground burst typical nuke wpn, and then delayed burst meaning more radioactive material thrown up into the air... also nuetron as you mentioned, it still had a blast wave, and massive light , or burn damage, but much reduced... either way, any one caught in the death zones would die.. these zones could be out to the 300 KM ring in some of the bigger blasts or city killers. tactical nukes the death rings could be measured in few KMs either way you would know when a nuke is used....first the blast , massive amounts of light that sets everything on fire, then the blast wave ...you would be better off at the impact area, than die a slow death from rad poisoning and burns. My opinion...
Mother Russia had lots of soldiers all of them are expendable , so driving or operating in high rad zone was normal practice, and when the unit started dying off they were replaced with another... NATO would atleast make an attempt to avoid, but sometimes that was not possible. Today we have very limited means of operating in or near a rad or chemical wpns zone, due to cuts.
How many US vets were sickened and died from exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam? Great idea, drop chemicals to defoliate an entire jungle so local peasants can't hide, and then spend decades denying that there were any longterm side effects! A more limited version of this were the Burn Pits in Western Iraq, which killed a lot of Americans along with thousands of locals. Dimwit Pres Biden's eldest son being one of the victims! But Smokin Joe still won't admit it or take responsibility for supporting that and every other US foreign war just to pad his resume a little more.
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On 2/24/2021 at 11:47 AM, blackbird said:
There has to be some form of justice in the world for crimes against humanity, just as there were war crime trials for the Naziis. Likewise there has to be trade sanctions for countries guilty of crimes against humanity. We will have to look elsewhere to trade.
If there was, the US of A would be judged to have been the number one criminal in the world at least since the end of WWII....not counting that oopsie - annihilating two Japanese cities to test the new atomic bombs near the end of the War!
Aside from active engagements causing millions of civilian deaths in Korean and Vietnam wars, the US has handpicked and applied proxy dictators to carry out mass killing operations in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Columbia (Operation Condor), Congo etc., mostly because they made the mistake of locating their nations above oil and/or great mineral wealth, and had populations who were reluctant to comply with the demands of foreign ownership....so declare them communists and send them off to the liquidation camps. And for some reason, guys like you who can't be bothered reading actual history think it's communists who killed most of the people in the world!
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3 hours ago, bush_cheney2004 said:
Great...you are admitting that extinction events are natural occurrences, regardless of "anthropogenic warming". But...alarmists have to alarm.
And who is or was denying that mass extinctions are naturally occurring? The point that environmentalists have long tried to get across to the self-proclaimed civilized world is that there are no natural correlates for the present extinction!
Too the contrary, the sudden increase in atmospheric carbon and rising temperatures has come about at a time when many climatologists figured that the exact opposite - a long cooling trend to another ice age - would be underway, if we weren't kicking up too much carbon for natural negative carbon sequestration to reabsorb and return to the earth.
If one of the continents had started splitting apart, or two continental plates collided together, then we would have a naturally sourced global warming event. Instead, it's just us, building smokestacks, millions of cars, chopping down millions of trees etc. that has knocked the carbon cycle out of whack!
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1 hour ago, blackbird said:
Greta should be in school, not being a tool for the environmental radicals or the UN. She had been assessed as having some mental issues, such as obsessive compulsive disorder by a psychiatrist in Germany.
If you want to believe in a global warming calamity, that's your choice. I don't believe in it. I prefer to believe in God who created us and trust he has the climate under control. Another fact pointing to God is the existence of good and evil in the world. If there were no God, there would be no accountability for all the good and evil going on in the world. That wouldn't make sense. There has to be some reckoning or accountability for what humans are doing in the world. The Bible teaches us there will be judgment.
That doesn't mean climate doesn't change. It does. But I doubt man is causing it. Better to adapt to climate change than to try to stop it. We can't stop it any more than we can stop the earth from revolving.
I believe in reality! And I will take real evidence of what's headed our way into consideration of future plans. I just wish it was easier to sift through the bullshit dumped all over the place by competing idealogues fighting to impress or convince everyone else.
The truth is out there...it just takes a little background study and sifting and sorting of today's news to find it.
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1 hour ago, bush_cheney2004 said:
Quite to the contrary, there will be no mass "extinction" and the very same economic forces that scare all the alarmists into spouting such hyperbole will be brought to bear on "climate change". Green is for the money...not alarmists.
No mass extinction because you say so? Based on what? It hasn't happened before in your lifetime?
Actually, we are already in a mass extinction- the sixth! Here are the first five of the Paleozoic Period. ..biologists have a hard time calculating the rise and fall of biological diversity prior to 500 million years ago, when multicellular, complex life forms started rising. Though it's widely accepted that Planet Earth's rough transition from anaerobic life to an oxygenated atmosphere that caused great cooling periods would have been a mass casualty even for anaerobic bacteria that live on underground and deep in the ocean...except when the kinds of extinction events we are concerned with, start to happen!
"In fact, some studies show that the interacting conditions experienced today, such as accelerated climate change, changing atmospheric composition caused by human industry, and abnormal ecological stresses arising from human consumption of resources, define a perfect storm for extinctions. All these conditions together indicate that a sixth mass extinction is already well under way."
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09678
It will last be noticed by isolated, cocooned people living in artificial environments, and eating artificial foods!
The Sixth Great Extinction started first among large predators (on land and in oceans) who accumulate the highest levels of toxic metals and minerals in their bodies.
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22 hours ago, blackbird said:
If you don't believe in God and the Bible, you are likely a climate change alarmist. Lots of people afraid the sky is falling like little Greta. Watch the video of the debate between the famous atheist Dawkins and John Lennox just to learn what the central issues are. How one views the global warming debate is effected by how they view God and what the Bible teaches. That is just a simple fact. Some worship mother earth, some worship a false interpretation of science, and some worship the U.N. IPCC and whatever it says even though it is more of a political group than science.
Apparently, 'believin' in God means being the reverse: a climate change denier! Because when the effects are too great to deny, bringing an end to normal, predictable, seasonal weather changes, 'bible-believin christians' are the lieutenant Drebins of the world, declaring 'nothing to see here, everything's normal while flames and explosions shoot up behind their backs!
Your demeaning "little Greta" reference, shows your 'christian values' are for show, and not any sign of character or virtues, since you spend your time marinating in rightwing vitriol. I'm not happy with the way Greta Thunberg's minor quest was turned into making her the masthead for the corporate shift from carbon fuels to building new, high tech "zero carbon" electricity sources. But, I am not going to disparage Greta Thunberg, who didn't start this with a desire for celebrity status that was thrust upon her by Gates, Klaus Schwab and the other bastards who gather at Davos every year to try to plot out how to keep their economic system functioning, and profiting from it for as long as possible!
The original environmentalists from my generation (now marginalized as the 'Deep Green' movement) have long understood the same thing that indigenous pre-civilization people have intuitively understood all their lives: however we live and acquire food and essentials for life, our activities have to remain with the balance of life or we are charting a path to destruction! The difference is that primitives had to pay a more immediate and much higher price if they broke that balance and exceeded the limits of their local environment. But 'civilized' humans who work at their computers in concrete and glass jungles have even less awareness and respect for nature than the early Judeo-Christians, who became the first large philosophical movement to have the arrogance of thinking they were superior to nature, and created a god who sanctioned all of their wars and plunderings! So, we have no reference points in common, as we are not even speaking the same language!
There is a war going on among the billionaire class who rule over us, because the new, subsidized, green tech billionaires have deflated the stock values of the oil billionaires. This war is being played out as the fight between the Republican and Democrat Parties in the US, and the Conservatives vs. Liberals here in Canada. The Euros don't have a convenient analog because they don't have homegrown oil industries.
BUT, the takeaway for everyone else is, there is nothing in this debate that has or will do anything to stave off environmental calamity and extinction! We will likely be pushed over the precipice in the coming decades, because the billionaires who rule over us and fund private and public mass media, are psychopath/narcissists who have no interest or concern for longterm goals and objectives. Everything for our ruling classes is all about wealth and prestige in the here and now/ not about what happens to future generations or all of the wildlife that is fast disappearing today!
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4 hours ago, blackbird said:
Right to Left, This shows China's CO2 emissions are 28% of the global emissions, while the U.S. is 15%. But the total fossil fuel emissions is still about a miniscule amount of the CO2 in the atmosphere.
AND IT DOESN'T SHOW WHEN!!!! But don't worry, I found it!
The 20 countries that emitted the most carbon dioxide in 2018!!!
https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emissions
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9 hours ago, blackbird said:
Enjoy this debate.
Richard Dawkins vs John Lennox | Has Science Buried God? Debate - YouTube
And what has that got to do with either AGW or me?
Are you saying that someone has to be a materialist atheist like Dawkins to accept evidence we are having an adverse effect on the environment today? Or conversely, bein a believa means denying that mere humans who chop down forests and build smokestacks can poison the environment?
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On 2/22/2021 at 4:14 PM, Cannucklehead said:
So basically the bible tells you that its own prophecy came to be exactly as it predicted, but gives no evidence to support its claims. Good to know.
BTW we are way off topic about climate change.
I was waiting for some sort of rebuttal about the "golden cities" while allowing abject poverty thing....but didn't see it. The fact is that there are so many books of the Bible and so many authors that you can find or at least stretch verses to support every belief or objective!
It would have been nice if Christian socialists, like the 'revolutionary theologians' and priests in South America prevailed. But, as things turned out, Nixon and Kissinger were making sure that the murderous military despots the CIA picked in South and Central America prevailed, and millions died under the Capitalist Death Toll ....the one Dinesh D'Souza and similar propagandists can't talk about!
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6 hours ago, bcsapper said:
Should they be allowed to catch up, or is climate change real?
They will have no choice other than reign in carbon emissions. I haven't checked lately, but pictures from Chinese cities today indicate that the air is cleaner than it was 10 or 15 years ago, when big city air was toxic.
Ten years ago, China alarmed western environmentalists when they announced a plan to build 1000 coal-fired generating stations. Those plans changed, or were drastically scaled back because of pollution and was premised on the assumption of having long term supplies of cheap coal from Australia. Now that the Aussies are back to being America's little brother, under Trump, they stopped Aussie imports and are now paying for more expensive coal, wheat and other essentials from other sources.
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6 hours ago, myata said:
It is the 21st century now, there is barely any distance barriers and very smart people all around the globe ready to work long hours for pennies. Nothing is guaranteed, and we want to behave like those dinosaurs that merrily chewed on (few) remaining leaves not noticing that they are shrinking and disappearing.
And I would go out on a limb and venture to say that you're not one of the people ready to work long hours for pennies! But, instead profit in some undisclosed way by having a globalized system that forces others to be turned into slave labour.
At one time, long long ago, that's why nations had tariffs and import duties to prevent bloodsucking leeches like you from profiting off the misery of others! And today, this is the people living in the 'under-developed' nations who being cleared off of common lands and left with one option to survive, and one option only: move into dirty, dangerous, already overcrowded city hellholes and compete with other desperate former farmers for sweatshop jobs, and try to earn enough to buy food at the local market...and hope it isn't tainted either!
If it's a textile manufacturer, the t-shirts or shoes are being produced by a third party sweatshop operative, who produces brand name products for big name retail chains who don't want their names connected directly with the ways their imported products are made. And that brings us right back to tariffs and duties! If big capitalist leeches (and those down the chain who also profit) want to outsource manufacturing, they should pay for the money they saved by not hiring local workers!
Do You Believe in Man-Made Climate Change?
in Moral & Ethical Issues
Posted · Edited by Right To Left
It was more than Tucker, more than Foxnews, it was all across rightwing oil-funded media that the power failures from the Texas blizzard were due to windmills and solar panels freezing up. Then we learned that most of the power stations were failing....NG, oil, coal-fired and even nuclear power plants were shut down or partially shut down due to the weather. And then there were the problems with Texas's own, deregulated electricity grid. The only Texans who still had the lights on were counties that were part of the national grid and not relying on libertarian, unregulated services.