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Information Liberation Alex Jones’ Prison Planet Gary North Specific Answers Antiwar The Daily Bell Tenth Amendment Center Economics Policy Journal The American Thinker The New American Lew RockwellPosted by M. C. on December 21, 2021
Headlines are screaming about the rapid increase in the omicron variant. It’s taking over! We are told it is much more easily spread than previous strains of the virus…but what role is testing playing in driving up the numbers? Also today – the US military is screening out extremists – but who are the real extremists? Finally: omicron outbreak in the triple-vaxxed White House? Is it possible?
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Extremists, Omicron, Test-demic, US military | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on December 9, 2021
The reality is that the U.S. military campaign in Syria — from arming the very armed groups it is ostensibly at war with, to its massive undercounting and denial of civilian casualties — has been a dismal display of illegality and failure.
Written by
Kate Kizer
U.S. Central Command reported late on Friday a U.S. drone strike in Idlib, Syria against a senior member of al-Qaida, rather than against a member of the self-described Islamic State — the ostensible legal justification the United States is even in Syria. Even more interestingly, CENTCOM claimed it “immediately self-reported” one civilian casualty that it is investigating.
But U.S. policymakers should not defer to the military’s investigatory promises given its history of covering up or not sufficiently accounting for civilian casualties. In fact, the Associated Press has since reported that the strike wounded a family of 6, including a 10-year-old child.
With such “over-the-horizon” strikes likely to become a key component of Team Biden’s rebranded counterterrorism strategy, the national security committees in Congress have a duty to comprehensively review and interrogate the strategic and human costs of this approach.
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Posted by M. C. on October 29, 2021
While Chinese and Russian military recruitment campaigns appeal to a sense of patriotism, one US Army ad features a woman inspired by the activism of her two moms and who feels the need to compete with her sorority sisters in doing something meaningful with her life. How she does this through operating Raytheon and Lockheed Martin’s Patriot Missile Defense Systems is left unexplained.
By Tate Fegley
Mises.org
Over the course of this year, conservatives have expressed a number of grievances they have with the US military. Tucker Carlson delivered a monologue questioning Joe Biden’s emphasis on the issuance of flight suits designed for pregnant women. (Noteworthy is that Tucker is not against women in combat roles per se, since he states, “If the Pentagon can show that pregnant pilots are the best, we will be the first to demand an entire Air Force of pregnant pilots.” I don’t believe anyone has accused Tucker of thinking carefully about tradeoffs.) Other conservatives, however, do express disagreement with filling combat roles with women. A recurring demand in pursuit of egalitarianism is extending mandated registration for the Selective Service to young women, opposition to which is typically due to the prospect of drafting women to fight, rather than the morally correct position of opposing involuntary servitude for anyone.
A further gripe is the trend of the military’s embrace of wokeness, as evidenced by statements made by General Mark Milley defending the teaching of critical race theory at West Point and the need to “understand white rage,” as well as the approach taken in recent recruitment ads. While Chinese and Russian military recruitment campaigns appeal to a sense of patriotism, one US Army ad features a woman inspired by the activism of her two moms and who feels the need to compete with her sorority sisters in doing something meaningful with her life. How she does this through operating Raytheon and Lockheed Martin’s Patriot Missile Defense Systems is left unexplained.
One of the latest controversies involving the military is Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate, which leaves service members potentially facing a dishonorable discharge if they refuse to be vaccinated. Hundreds of thousands of US troops have not yet complied with this mandate. While it is unlikely that all of them would continue to refuse if the alternative were a dishonorable discharge, a significant percentage will. Hundreds of Navy SEALs who have refused the vaccine are currently considered undeployable.
Many believe that some or all of these issues hurt troop morale and render the US military a less capable fighting force. This is unambiguously the case when discharging or not deploying personnel who are otherwise qualified and on whom millions of dollars have been spent to train. It serves as an illustration of something those of us skeptical of US military adventurism already knew: Americans in the continental US are incredibly geopolitically blessed in terms of being able to live at peace with the rest of the world, if only those with political authority allowed it. We have mostly friendly neighbors to the north and south, no one who poses a threat close by, and thousands of miles of ocean between us and everyone else. And because of this the US military has the luxury of engaging in terrible, wasteful decision-making that undermines effectiveness without much cost in terms of domestic civilian lives lost from foreign aggression (with the exception, of course, of blowback caused by US foreign policy).
So why would the US military embrace wokeness and other policies if they could possibly come at the slightest cost of effectiveness or morale? The military is a bureaucracy (or rather a set of bureaucracies) and the primary institutional goals of bureaucracies are to preserve their own existence and increase their budgets. Fully embracing the cultural concerns of establishment leftism certainly doesn’t hurt in terms of encouraging the mainstream Left to forget their former opposition to Bush’s wars. Congressional Republicans will present no serious opposition to wokeness in the military, certainly not in terms of reducing their budgets. The CIA seems to be employing a similar strategy. Promoting the fact that they hire gay people covers a multitude of sins, such as assassinations, torture, and regime change. Furthermore, vaccine mandates help purge the military of personnel willing to question certain types of orders.
Indeed, pursuing this strategy seems to come with little downside risk. If it does, in fact, reduce the ability of the military or intelligence agencies to protect Americans (to the extent that that is still considered part of their purpose) and results in civilian deaths, their budgets are far more likely to be increased rather than decreased. Their failure to prevent the deaths of thousands of Americans on 9/11 led to unprecedented increases in their powers and resources. We are now told that their failure to prevent whatever you want to call what happened on January 6 (setting aside their role in facilitating it) justifies further increases in their powers. For them, failure is success.
Thankfully, the veil is being lifted and those with previously promilitary sensibilities are seeing that the military is not unambiguously their friend. This is a necessary step to achieve the ends of peace and a noninterventionist foreign policy. Questioning the military is increasingly considered within the realm of reasonable discourse for those who consider themselves patriots. Polls have traditionally found that the military enjoys among the highest levels of trust among the general public. This is changing and that’s a good thing.
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Posted by M. C. on September 3, 2021
The letter of resignation below represents today the feelings of about just the entire US military according to our sources. Our heroic soldiers have had just about as much as they can take from our woke government and their imposition of woke perversions on the military as sodomy, abortion, critical race theory and transgenderism.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/09/no_author/the-collapse-of-the-us-military-continues/
By David Lifschultz
The Lifschultz Organization
The letter of resignation below represents today the feelings of about just the entire US military according to our sources. Our heroic soldiers have had just about as much as they can take from our woke government and their imposition of woke perversions on the military as sodomy, abortion, critical race theory and transgenderism. We saw the likes of this in the similarly rotten and corrupt Weimar Republic though the German military was largely unaffected where Prussianism prevailed. I always thought that 1933 Germany required the Versailles Treaty, the hyperinflation of 1920-1923, and a 1929-1933 depression culminating in 50% German unemployment to create the National Socialist Revolution but this may not be the case as we watch the US morally implode into an Aldous Huxley medical dictatorship under an Orwellian Animal Farm under the most degraded values in history. Here mass abortion has killed in the US alone 60 million souls not to speak of our US influence on the 1.5 billion abortion murders worldwide not including the after morning pill.
90 RETIRED OFFICERS DEMAND THAT THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE AND THE CHAIRMAN OF THE JOINT CHIEFS RESIGN.
We have written up the history of Afghanistan in two parts below.
Operation Disclosure | So Ends the Afghanistan Heroin War
So Ends the Afghanistan Heroin War: Part 2
The following quote was taken from an RT article by Chris Hedges that appeared today that complements my points. As my above articles just above points out that Brzezinski lured the Russians into Afghanistan and here was the cost:
One million Afghan civilians were killed in the nine-year conflict with the Soviets, along with 90,000 mujahideen fighters, 18,000 Afghan troops, and 14,500 Soviet soldiers. But these deaths, along with the destruction of Afghanistan, were “worth it” to cripple the Soviets.
Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, along with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, oversaw the arming of the most radical Islamic mujahideen groups fighting the Soviet occupation forces, leading to the extinguishing of the secular, democratic Afghan opposition. Brzezinski detailed the strategy – designed, he said, to give the Soviet Union its Vietnam – taken by the Carter administration following the 1979 Soviet invasion to prop up the Marxist regime of Hafizullah Amin in Kabul:
We immediately launched a twofold process when we heard that the Soviets had entered Afghanistan. The first involved direct reactions and sanctions focused on the Soviet Union, and both the State Department and the National Security Agency prepared long lists of sanctions to be adopted, of steps to be taken to increase the international costs to the Soviet Union of their actions. And the second course of action led to my going to Pakistan a month or so after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, for the purpose of coordinating with the Pakistanis a joint response, the purpose of which would be to make the Soviets bleed for as much and as long as is possible; and we engaged in that effort in a collaborative sense with the Saudis, the Egyptians, the British, the Chinese, and we started providing weapons to the Mujaheddin, from various sources again — for example, some Soviet arms from the Egyptians and the Chinese. We even got Soviet arms from the Czechoslovak communist government, since it was obviously susceptible to material incentives; and at some point we started buying arms for the Mujahideen from the Soviet army in Afghanistan, because that army was increasingly corrupt.
Next Hedges writes about the Afghanistan heroin war that was justified by 9-11 that no one in Afghanistan was involved in. The CIA brought us in there for only one purpose which was to restart the heroin. As my heroin war pieces point out, no member of Islam was involved in 9-11 but we invaded Afghanistan for the only purpose which was to restart the heroin production shut down by Mullah Omar which was a righteous act. Here is the cost of the Afghanistan War Two.
Here Chris Hedges:
Things are already dire. There are some 14 million Afghans – one in three – who lack sufficient food. There are two million Afghan children who are malnourished. There are 3.5 million people in Afghanistan who have been displaced from their homes. The war has wrecked infrastructure. A drought destroyed 40 percent of the nation’s crops last year. The assault on the Afghan economy is already seeing food prices skyrocket. The sanctions and severance of aid will force civil servants to go without salaries, and the health service, already chronically short of medicine and equipment, will collapse. The suffering orchestrated by the empire will be of biblical proportions. And this is what the empire wants.
UNICEF estimates that 500,000 children were killed as a direct result of sanctions on Iraq. Expect child deaths in Afghanistan to soar above that horrifying figure. And expect the same imperial heartlessness Madeleine Albright, then the US ambassador to the United Nations, exhibited when she told ‘60 Minutes’ correspondent Lesley Stahl that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children because of the sanctions were “worth it.” Or the heartlessness of Hillary Clinton, who joked, “We came, we saw, he died” when informed of Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi’s brutal death. Or the demand by Democratic Senator Zell Miller of Georgia, who after the attacks of 9/11 declared: “I say, bomb the hell out of them. If there’s collateral damage, so be it.” No matter that the empire has since turned Libya, along with Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, into cauldrons of violence, chaos, and misery. The power to destroy is an intoxicating drug that is its own justification.
Death of 500,000 Innocent Children is Worth It – We Want Oil – Madeline Albright
Murdering innocent civilians in war did not start in Afghanistan or Vietnam, or Korea but in World War Two. It was not US policy in World War One for its soldiers to kill women and children as we did at Hiroshima and Nagasaki which were not military targets. Secretary of State James Byrnes persuaded Truman to nuclear bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki to deter Stalin from overrunning Europe as our forces could not hold back the Russian Army which had faced 80% of the German Army finest divisions whereas the US faced at Normandy and in Europe largely the rump of the German Army except at the Battle of the Bulge where we suffered an attack by crack German Panzer divisions brought from the Eastern Front. Hitler rolled the dice in an attempt to cut off the bulk of the Anglo-Saxon Army that required capturing allied fuel depots. Germany largely lost the war based on lack of oil. It was a close call anyway as they came near to some major oil depots. Allied forces suffered over 75,000 casualties.
“The Cherwell memo described in quantitative terms the effect on Germany of the British bombing offensive on Germany between March, 1942-September, 1943. This paper laid down the strategic policy. The bombing must be directed essentially against German working class houses. Middle-class houses have too much space around them, and so are bound to waste bombs; factories and “military objectives” had long since been forgotten, except in official bulletins, since they were much too difficult to hit. (The meaning here is that more women and children could be murdered per bomb for lower classes as their homes were closer together.) The paper claimed that–given a total concentration of effort on the production and use of bombing aircraft–it would be possible, in all German towns (that is, those with more than 50,000 inhabitants), to destroy 50% of the houses.”
The US Air Force General Jimmy Doolittle vehemently opposed bombing women and children unlike General Curtis Lemay who supervised the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: abortion, collapse, critical race theory, Hiroshima, innocent civilians, Nagasaki, sodomy, US military | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on February 8, 2021
It’s also quite likely to backfire. Being spuriously accused of “domestic extremism” is the sort of thing that might turn an ‘ordinary’ soldier into an anti-government ‘extremist.’ After all, what sort of gratitude is rewarding a person who just signed up to die for their country with the ideological equivalent of a prostate exam?
The FBI, DHS and other security agencies have, at various times, declared almost every American to be some sort of anti-government extremist or other, from “conspiracy theorists” to, well, veterans, depending on that season’s trend in fear. But even the most ambitious diversity consultant can’t just lock up millions of Americans for thoughtcrime – yet.
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/514780-extremism-military-pentagon-stand-down/
Helen Buyniski
is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23
The US military is making a big show of cleansing its ranks of ‘extremism’ – because nothing says tolerance like raining fiery death on innocent strangers at the command of a guy who just stepped down from Raytheon’s board.
With “domestic extremists” now officially the enemy du jour in Washington, the top order of business has become finding some. On Wednesday, newly-anointed secretary of defense (and former Raytheon board member) Lloyd Austin ordered a two-month stand-down so that commanders could engage in “needed discussions” with their subordinates on the issue.
Did we mention they have a lot of subordinates? There are 3.6 million service members in the most expensive military in the world, and evaluating every single one of them for a characteristic that lacks even a universally-agreed-upon definition is certain to be both time-consuming and frustrating.
It’s also quite likely to backfire. Being spuriously accused of “domestic extremism” is the sort of thing that might turn an ‘ordinary’ soldier into an anti-government ‘extremist.’ After all, what sort of gratitude is rewarding a person who just signed up to die for their country with the ideological equivalent of a prostate exam?
The FBI, DHS and other security agencies have, at various times, declared almost every American to be some sort of anti-government extremist or other, from “conspiracy theorists” to, well, veterans, depending on that season’s trend in fear. But even the most ambitious diversity consultant can’t just lock up millions of Americans for thoughtcrime – yet.
It takes extreme conditioning indeed to abandon one’s humanity and learn to kill on command – “Thou shalt not kill” isn’t just a religious commandment. Former military personnel describing the process through which they were transformed from “normal” people into killing machines talk about a radicalization process quite unlike anything ever posted to 4chan or wherever 21st-century “radicals” are supposed to be born from. Yet anti-extremism nonprofits wring their hands when confronted with the seemingly disproportionate number of Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, Boogaloo Bois, and other militia and quasi-militia groups that have served in the military. Do they expect veterans to simply forget their entire training upon returning to civilian life?
Indeed, what’s denounced as extremism “back home” is very likely to be praised as bravery “over there.” Such doublethink makes it difficult for many returning veterans to readjust to civilian life – and the government – and it doesn’t help that Washington basically washes its hands of them once they remove their uniforms. What good is all that college money they dangle in front of young recruits’ faces if all that “life experience” leaves you a dysfunctional PTSD-stricken shell of a person, incapable of forming meaningful relationships or even sleeping through the night? Not every service member sees conflict, of course, but those who do are irrevocably changed by it.
Certainly, it’s not clear what sets the alleged “extremism” on display during last month’s demonstration at the Capitol apart from business as usual in the military. The former and current service members charged in relation to the riot are being demonized as seditious fake-patriots with no respect for Our Democracy, unlike those truly devoted bastions of tolerance willing to give 110 percent in defense of God and Country, etcetera, eagerly kicking in doors in the middle of the desert, guarding patriotic poppy fields in Afghanistan, and perhaps getting their legs blown off by an IED for their trouble.
The Pentagon, for all its exhortations to “support our troops,” categorically refuses to do the same, instead sending those troops to war after war against countries that pose no real threat to the US, yet happen to be occupying some choice real estate or sitting on top of some natural resources Uncle Sam would really like access to.
Meanwhile, they’re turning entire generations of young people into monsters – extremists – capable of killing a stranger just because someone they’ve been taught to obey at all costs orders it. A culture that fetishizes mass murder in order to steal natural resources from halfway around the world – while pretending to make the world safe for democracy, no less! – is long overdue for some changes, starting with using some of that $717 billion in Pentagon dollars on something useful.
The real question, then, is not who in the US military is a domestic extremist. It’s who isn’t.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: DHS, domestic extremism, FBI, Lloyd Austin, thoughtcrime, US military | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on July 22, 2020
“As we think about how automation and media are changing the way we fight wars, it’s concerning to think that children are being given the impression that the military is like a video game,” Hendrix said. “Whether it’s drones or killer robots, the last thing we need is less humanity in war.”
“Have a nice time getting banned, my dude,” Army recruiter and gamer Joshua “Strotnium” David told me right before he booted me from the US Army’s Twitch channel. I had just reminded viewers of the United States’ history of atrocities around the globe, and helpfully provided a link to the Wikipedia page for US war crimes.
Was I undiplomatic? Sure. But if the military is going to use one of the world’s most popular platforms to recruit kids, then it shouldn’t be able to do so without some pushback. Right now, with the support of Twitch, gamers with the US military are spending hours with children as young as 13, trying to convince them to enlist.
The Army, Navy, and Air Force all stream on Twitch using dedicated e-sports teams. These teams are comprised of skilled gamers who compete in tournaments for cash prizes. While members of military e-sports teams offer the regular gaming skill set, they’re also on-screen talent and recruiters. Instead of approaching a recruiter behind a table in a school cafeteria, kids can hang out with one who is playing their favorite video games and replying to their chat messages for hours on end.
Twitch, a livestreaming platform owned by Amazon, boasted more than 5 billion hours watched from April through June. (For comparison, Netflix claims that during quarantine people have been viewing around 6 billion hours of its shows and movies a month.) A typical military stream looks something like this: A recruiter, usually a man in his 30s, sits comfortably in his gamer chair inside a dimly lit room illuminated by a monitor and colorful LED lights inside his computer tower. An American flag hangs on the wall behind his right shoulder, an oversized stuffed animal to his left. He’s playing Call of Duty or Valorant. He’s friendly, and talks about how much he loves being in the Army. Despite being older than most of his young viewers, he speaks like them. “It do be like that sometimes. We do have some great comms,” said a recruiter in one recent session.
The practices employed on Twitch by military e-sports teams are part of a system by which recruiters target children in unstable and/or disadvantaged situations. Recruiters take advantage of the poor seeking steady income, the vulnerable longing for stability, and the undocumented living in fear because of their citizenship status. Now, at a time when all those factors are magnified by a pandemic that has left half the country out of work and over 30 percent unable to afford their housing payments, conditions are ripe for recruiters to prey on the vulnerable.
“I see you guys are upgrading from recruiting out of low income schools, nice,” Twitch user xCanyon916 said in a Navy stream on Tuesday while the recruiter was fielding questions about life in the military and chatters expressing desire to join the Navy e-sports team. The recruiter warned xCanyon916 that if they said something again about the Navy’s recruiting practices, they’d be banned. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: disadvantaged, e-sports, Online Gaming, Recruit Teens, Twitch, US military | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on March 18, 2020
The only disease the military will be brought in to control is the one reading this.
https://news.antiwar.com/2020/03/16/pentagon-warns-they-arent-set-up-to-fight-coronavirus/
With many politicians long seeing the military as an all-purpose problem solver with a bottomless budget, it is unsurprising that the outbreak of coronavirus has many, particularly high-ranking Democrats, angling for a declaration of war and an outright militarization of the domestic issue.
“I would call out the military now,” Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden said on Sunday. He said it’s an emergency and the US needs to treat it like a war. He suggested that the military could provide a “surge” for US hospitals, building more beds and tents that are secure. “We’re at war with the virus,” Biden added.
They all think that sounds like a great idea, except for the US military itself. Pentagon officials are warning that fighting a virus really isn’t their thing, and that those tent hospitals are designed to treat combat casualties, not respiratory illness.
Gen. Paul Friedrichs, the top medical adviser to the Joint Chiefs, said that the US military simply doesn’t have any 500-bed hospitals designed for infectious disease. Even more of a problem, they don’t have a bunch of idle doctors and nurses to man them if they did.
If the military was expected to set up such tent hospitals, they’d have to call in reserves and the National Guard to staff them, and many of them would be taken away from civilian facilities, meaning they’re just shifting people from a building to a tent.
Friedrichs added that the military is eager to help, but that he thinks the Pentagon needs to be transparent about its limitations before starting this huge “war” for the sake of public health. Whether that will deter anyone remains to be seen.
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Posted by M. C. on October 2, 2019
They apparently missed the fact that the US military is the largest single source of pollution on earth. And if you think the government will put your climate-guilt tax dollars to good use, I have a bridge to sell you.
By Joe Jarvis
Studies have shown that people who believe in top-down government action to protect the environment are actually less likely to take personal steps in their own lives to reduce their negative impact.
When it comes to climate change, they somehow think giving the government more money will reduce carbon emissions. They apparently missed the fact that the US military is the largest single source of pollution on earth. And if you think the government will put your climate-guilt tax dollars to good use, I have a bridge to sell you.
But they still take the bait and think the end of the world can only be averted through government action. Again, they must have missed the study which found planting trees is the single most effective way to sequester carbon. And we all have that power, as individuals, to plant some trees.
But today I want to give credit where credit is due. I want to praise a conservation group for going about environmentalism the right way.
The Save the Redwoods League is NOT trying to force the government to seize or restrict private land to protect the forest.
Instead, they are buying the land.
The San Francisco-based Save the Redwoods League negotiated for the past 20 years for the purchase of Alder Creek, a 530-acre hillside grove that houses 483 trees with a trunk diameter of more than six feet, including the 3,000-year-old Stagg Tree — the world’s fifth largest tree, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported…
The land had been owned by the same family since the 1940s. It was bought for its logging potential.
And while plenty of smaller pines and firs were harvested from the land, the owners left the vast majority of the majestic sequoias intact.
The group will purchase the land themselves for over $15 million–that is, if they can raise the money.
Last year, the Save the Redwoods League purchased Red Hill, a 160-acre property in the Sierra Nevada’s that is one of the two largest unprotected giant sequoia forests in the world, after raising $4 million, as CNN reported.
What do you think? Will all the people who shared videos of Greta Thunberg crying and yelling kick in one dollar to save the redwoods?…
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Climate Change, environmentalism, Save the Redwoods, US military | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on May 1, 2019
Overall, the U.S. has spent $737 billion on the war and lost more than 2,400 military lives, according to the Pentagon.
Code for the real numbers are higher.
https://www.apnews.com/253f6e2504ad4c72aed8a2d0499a673e
WASHINGTON (AP) — Amid a battlefield stalemate in Afghanistan , the U.S. military has stopped releasing information often cited to measure progress in America’s longest war, calling it of little value in fighting the Taliban insurgency.
The move fits a trend of less information being released about the war in recent years, often at the insistence of the Afghan government, which had previously stopped the U.S. military from disclosing the number of Afghans killed in battle as well as overall attrition within the Afghan army.
The latest clampdown also aligns with President Donald Trump’s complaint that the U.S. gives away too much war information, although there is no evidence that this had any influence on the latest decision.
A government watchdog agency that monitors the U.S. war effort, now in its 18th year, said in a report to Congress on Wednesday that the U.S. military command in Kabul is no longer producing “district control data,” which shows the number of Afghan districts — and the percentage of their population — controlled by the government compared to the Taliban.
The last time the command released this information, in January, it showed that Afghan government control was stagnant or slipping. It said the share of the population under Afghan government control or influence — a figure that was largely unchanged from May 2017 to July 2018 at about 65 percent — had dropped in October 2018 to 63.5 percent. The government’s control or influence of districts fell nearly 2 percentage points, to 53.8 percent…
The war in Afghanistan is largely forgotten in much of America, as is the enormous, continuing financial cost. This year the Pentagon budget includes $4.9 billion to provide the Afghan army and police with everything from equipment and supplies to salaries and food. That is one piece of a wider array of “reconstruction” assistance the U.S. government has provided since the war began in 2001, totaling $132 billion.
Overall, the U.S. has spent $737 billion on the war and lost more than 2,400 military lives, according to the Pentagon.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Afghanistan, battlefield stalemate, district control data, Taliban, US military, war information | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on January 3, 2019
It reflected their values perfectly. The only way you could possibly encapsulate the US military’s values in a 42-second video clip more perfectly than cramming it full of footage of $2,000,000,000 war planes cruising around dropping $3,500,000 GBU-57 bombs would be to also show the human bodies they land on being ripped to pieces.
US Strategic Command (or “Stratcom” if you’re trying to make a nuclear-capable arm of the US Defense Department sound cool) has issued an apology for a poorly received New Year’s Eve tweet which has since been deleted.
“#TimesSquare tradition rings in the #NewYear by dropping the big ball…if ever needed, we are #ready to drop something much, much bigger,” the offending tweet read, with an attached video featuring B-2 stealth bombers flying all stealth bombery and causing gigantic explosions with bunker buster bombs while words like “STEALTH”, “READY”, and “LETHAL” flashed across the screen. The tweet concluded with the ostensibly unironic hashtag “#PeaceIsOurProfession”.
“Our previous NYE tweet was in poor taste & does not reflect our values,” Strategic Command tweeted. “We apologize. We are dedicated to the security of America & allies.”
This statement is, obviously, a lie. The part about “security” of course, because dominating the globe with nonstop military violence and aggression has nothing to do with security, but also the “does not reflect our values” part. The US military deleted the post and apologized for it because
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: New Year’s Eve tweet, US military, US Strategic Command | Leave a Comment »
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