1st Lt Andrew Grayson’s honor is unbesmirched as he was fully acquitted of charges for the Haditha incident. This isn’t going to make Murtha happy. As more comes to light on the incident it has become apparent that Haditha was an agitpropaganda set up from the get-go, and that the attempt by our enemies to recreate My Lai in Iraq has failed.
With aid from a gullible mainstream media and politicos trying to gain profile from the war Haditha gained much more mileage than it should have, but at heart and core our soldiers are the finest. While one individual might do something wrong on occasion, no group of them will fail in their overall duty or mission, and Haditha is about a group of highly trained marines. To the milbloggers it stunk from the beginning like agitpropaganda, kudos to them all for reporting this well, questioning the evidence and charges, and most of all for keeping public support of these Marines at high levels.
More at Little Green Footballs
Please take a stop by Lawhawk’s – today is the 19 year anniversary of the day the Tankman became a world reknowned figure.
You know thing are bad when the UN calls for Capitalism. Ban Ki Moon called for the end to tariffs, protectionism, and trade barriers in face of mounting food inflation:
“We simply cannot afford to fail,” the UN secretary general told a news conference at the UN Food and Agriculture (FAO) summit on food security. “Hundreds of millions of people expect no less.”
That’s understatement. Millions are hungry right now, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better. The sustained high energy prices the past few years have caught up to food production, and while the lowering of trade barriers will help the problem of “food inflation” quite a bit, lowering barriers alone will not stop the steady creep of hunger and poverty. It takes high energy to farm abundantly and cleanly; a point which is easily proven.
It’s June, there are graduations, and the usual silly season has started with journalists reporting alien sightings. I’ve taken a brief hiatus to enjoy the Spring, as there haven’t been too many warm days this year until the past two weeks.
In politics the battle royal has begun with the thousands demonstrating at the DNC rules committee yesterday. A tentative agreement was reached, but it’s not real — you will likely see this play out at the credentials committee at the convention. Right now Democrats must feel foolish — allowing the convention to be decided by superdelegates and rules committee fights isn’t going to enthuse the average voter who will likely feel disenfranchised no matter the outcome.
Barrack Obama resigned from his radical church finally, it’s well overdue by about 18 years. Black liberation theology is too closely akin to plan old Latin America Liberation theology where Marxism is clothed in the vestments of Christ and indigenous tribal supremacist movements.
The sturm und drang, hair-pulling, and chest beating in the Democrat party is surely fascinating, but in the grand scheme of things isn’t that important. This will all be forgotten in under fifty years. In under fifty years we will still need massive amounts of energy to support the 9 billion souls who will be inhabiting the planet at the time, and Congress just doesn’t seem to be able to focus past the 24 hour news cycle and MMGW for the moment.
Not many noted it but the shuttle went up again yesterday, carrying a payload for the space station, a monarchy was abolished in Nepal, and a shift in politics in Pakistan now has the PPP and PML-N trying hard to get back together, with the likely outcome being the re-instatement of the Chaudry Court and the ouster of Musharraf or severe curtailment of presidential authority. These might not seem important, but in the long range they are probably three of the more significant events of the week.
In this brief interview you will see Baitullah Mehsud, leader of TTP, or Pakistan’s Taliban, deny the assasination of Benazir Bhutto (methinks he doth protest too oft and too much…) as well as praise Bin Laden. He states that Bin Laden is not “in this region”, but they would do whatever he asks.
Then he goes on to exhort the Pakistan government to use their Nuclear power against the enemies, later he identifies the enemies of their Jihad as Christians and Jews.
Watch here at Memri.
Keep in mind that Baitullah is a well practiced liar and manipulator — way back during the putsch of Uzbeks in his region he had me hoping that he was actually anti-AQ. That hope was false, and like the rest of the Neo-Takfirist Pashtun Jihadis in Pakistan, he is their lapdog.
You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour.
or
Neither shall you bear false witness against your neighbour.
.
Electing Obama would be disastrous for our energy future because for energy policy Obama is not the candidate of change – instead he would give us more of the same. Barrack Obama is the candidate of energy ennui from the party of entropy – he represents stasism and zero change for energy policy.
His “green jobs program” amounts to jobs for activists and entrenched luddite energy lobbies that would have us use antique power generation methods (solar, coal, and wind) to create energy. These sources are centuries old and if there were real promise of abundance in these technologies we would have seen it by now. Before you bluster about that, how long have windmills, water-wheels, and solar motors been around? What supplied power to farmers in the great plains during pioneer days, where did ancient Romans get energy? How long have windmills been in Europe? Haven’t we been using Biomass since we discovered that wood burns? Did any of the above means except coal ever provide abundant energy by today’s standards?
If you look at history and follow the growth of civilizations they centered around those antique power nexus. Every ancient harbor is a center of wind-powered transport in the form of sailing ships. Ancient Chinese and Egyptian civilization grew along the rivers, where energy in the form of food (food is human fuel,) wood, water power, and water-borne transport was abundant by that day’s standards.
The middle class industries of Europe grew where the energy was during the middle ages and the Renaissance, and the power sources the Eco-luddites propose are quite antique – they’ve all been given plenty of time to develop, and proven less than effective (the first modern solar engine was built in 1860, ancient Roman and Greek cities used passive solar heating.)
The key thing about these ancient renewable sources is that they are desirable in small niches where they can be used, but they are not enough in themselves. (As past articles have pointed out: if you paved the entire Southwest in solar grids it still wouldn’t provide the amount of energy that we burned in cars in 2006)
The net energy effect of an Obama presidency would be no change at all and more of what we’ve seen for the past 34 years from the establishment Democrat party. Carter-style Stagflation would return. We would see continued increase in coal power generation, since that’s the only source of energy allowed to grow in today’s eco-luddite regulatory environment, and cap and trade is just another way to let it grow if you look under the covers of the proposals to the fine print inserted by coal and eco lobbyists.
With nuclear, oil, and gas halted by prohibitive legislation that favors antique energy sources an Obama Presidency is a stasist formula for a dirty environment and economic disaster. It would mean no new nuclear energy, existing nuclear energy plants storing fuel in dangerously dispersed locations, no new oil, no new gas, no new refineries.
In past articles you’ve read of the need for new energy sources to aid ecology, growth, and food security as well as the beneficent effects of abundant energy. Abundant cheap energy reults in lower birth rates, higher wealth, lower infant mortality, cleaner environments, and longer lives.
Since the needs for plentiful energy as well as the bonuses of abundance has been covered in sufficient detail here, here, and here, it’s time you learned more about the political forces of entropy impeding the energy economies of the world. This loose knit neo-luddite cabal of energy stasists cuts across political, class, and cultural divides. You will see odd alliances, such as greenpeace advocates and coal lobbyists, Marxists and venture capitalists, social conservatives and social liberals.
The “strange bedfellows” syndrome you’ve seen in the spate of commercials featuring staunch political opponents sitting on couches is not recent, Virginia Postrel noted the cause of these alliances in her book “The Future and its Enemies,” where you see Pat Buchanan and Jeremy Rifkin both reveling in agreeable xenophobic nihilism on Crossfire in the ’80s.
Today you see similar strange bedfellows in the form of Greenpeace and Sierra club activists teaming with Biodiesel pimps, coal lobbyists, oil lobbyists, wind and solar lobbyists, foreign energy interests, and other supposed opponents in a strange dark pact that keeps us in a deep freeze for energy policy.
Over the next few weeks you will see more details on this in a series of articles here.
Our familie’s war memorials are scattered – a picture on a wall, a worn conch shell with broken spines, a piece of slagged shrapnel that looks like a dark meteor with ragged edge, a name on a wall, an exploded mine, and of course our own memories. On this memorial day, please honor all of those who served.
Previous Memorial Day Post
In the Philippines 17 soldiers were wounded and two terrorists died in fighting after Moro Islamic Liberation Front (affiliated with Al Qaeda) attacked two outposts in the town of Tipo Tipo on Basilan Island. The military states that Abu Sayyaf fighters were involved as well, and the attack on the outpost was sophisticated, including IED’s planted on the retreat route.
This is just another front in the global war on terror and the attack breaks a ceasefire just a week after the Islamists demanded that troops be removed from the island with the threat of attacks if they were not.
Capsule analysis:
The Southern Philippines Islamist Jihadis can bluster, but as elsewhere they can’t mount effective attacks against prepared military forces. Expect one to two more abortive attacks on military forces before they revert to form. They prefer soft, unprepared targets and will likely revert to terror bombings, kidnappings, and IED attacks in the months ahead if the truce is not re-established.
More at Breitbart:
At least 17 marines were wounded and two Muslim separatist rebels killed as fierce prolonged fighting broke out in the southern Philippines Sunday, the army said. The violence erupted after Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) rebels attacked two military outposts in the town of Tipo Tipo in Basilan island, the military said, causing civilians to flee the area in fear.
Ten marines were wounded in the initial clash, while another was hurt when an armoured personnel carrier ran over a landmine, the military said.
Six other soldiers were wounded in running gunbattles that raged throughout the day, while two MILF rebels were killed, the military said.
In a statement, the military said MILF rebels were backed by fighters from the Al Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf group, which also operates in the area.
“We condemn the treacherous attack by some MILF members with the aid of the terrorist Abu Sayyaf in Basilan this morning,” the statement said.
It said air support has also been dispatched to evacuate the wounded and help ground forces.
MILF chief negotiator Mohagher Iqbal blamed the troops for the hostilities and denied knowledge of casualties on either side.
