Turmoil in the Holy Land

ShowImageThe Holy Land is in a turmoil. Certainly not for the first time, and almost certainly not for the last. For those of you who have forgotten, here is a brief timetable of the Palestinian-Jewish/Israeli conflict over the last century or so.

1860 –              Palestine, divided into three separate districts that also include parts of what today are neighboring countries, is governed by “the Unspeakable Turk.” Perhaps 80 percent of the population is Arab, mainly Sunni. But there are also some Christians—around 15 percent—and Jews. Christians and Jews are treated as Dimnis, second-rate people with fewer rights than Muslims.

1860 –              Following the Crimean War the Porte comes under pressure by the Western Powers. The latter demand, and obtain, concessions for their own citizens who live in Palestine as well a native Christians and Jews. As a result of the “Capitulations,”, as they are known, these minorities start drawing ahead.

1881 –              Jewish immigrants, mainly from Russia, start arriving and establish some new settlements. Right from the beginning, these settlements come under attack by local Bedouin who have always lived by plundering the peasantry. Thus the immediate background to the clashes is not political but socio-economic.

1897                The First Zionist Congress is held in Basel.

1904-1914       The so-called “Second Wave” of Jewish immigrants starts arriving. Zionist activists buy land, often from absentee landowners who live as far away as Beirut. The local fellaheen, seeing the land on which they have lived for centuries sold from under their feet, try to resist.

1914                Turkey join World War I on the side of the Central Powers.

1917                The Balfour Declaration, in which His Britannic Majesty’s Government recognizes the Jews right to a “National Home” in Palestine, is issued. As a result, the conflict, while still mixed up with economic, social, and religious issues, becomes political par excellence. Two peoples—“Arabs” (not Palestinians, a name that only gained wide currency during the 1960s) and Jews claim ownership over the same land. As they still do.

1918                The end of World War I leaves Palestine, along with Jordan and Iraq, firmly in British hands.

1920-21           The first Palestinian Arab Uprising, directed against the Balfour Declaration as well as the Jewish settlement.

1922                Winston Churchill, in his capacity a Colonial Secretary, arrives. He and his staff draw the borders between Palestine and the neighboring countries.

1929                Another Palestinian Uprising, triggered by a conflict over the Wailing Wall, breaks out. It is directed against both the British and the Jews. It is suppressed, but not before two Jewish communities, the ancient one at Hebron and the new one at Motza, right across the road from where I live, are wiped out.

1936-39           “The Arab Revolt” (note that people still speak of Arabs, not Palestinians). It, too, is directed against both the British and the Jews. It, too, is suppressed. But not before London makes important concessions. Those include 1. An end to Jewish land-purchases. 2. Limits on Jewish immigration, which from this point on is to bring in no more than 15,000 people per year for five years. 3. A promise of “evolution towards independence” within ten years.

1947-48           On 1 December 1947, a day after the UN decides to partition the country, the Jews and Arabs of Palestine go to war. By the middle of June, by which time the remaining British have withdrawn and the State of Israel has been official proclaimed, the Arabs have been substantially defeated. Armed intervention by the neighboring Arab states, aimed at assisting their brothers, also fails to achieve its purpose. By the time the war ends in January 1949 some 600,000 Palestinian Arabs, about half of the Arab population west of the Jordan, have been turned into refugees. The State of Israel is an established fact. However, it does not include either the Gaza Strip, which comes under Egyptian military rule, or the West Bank, which is annexed by Jordan.
Treatment of ED usually involves managing the underlying cause, which may include dealing with heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, cheap viagra etc. What is erectile dysfunction? A condition when a man experiences difficulty in getting or holding onto an viagra 100mg sildenafil erection. If you have an order over $149 US dollars then the shipping of the order will be filled. cialis for women The first occasion when you attempt purchase cialis online , you may need to stroke off without anyone else present to check whether it lives up to expectations.
1967                The June 1967 Six Days War brings the Gaza Strip, with an estimated 500,000 people, and the West Bank, with an estimated 1,500,000, under Israeli rule. With the west Bank comes East Jerusalem which from this point on becomes the focus of the conflict. Since then the population of these two territories combined has grown to an estimated 4,000,000.

1977                The Right Wing Herut (later Likud) Party comes to power in Israel. The number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank, which until then was very small, starts skyrocketing.

1979                The Camp David Agreement between Israel and Egypt proposes a negotiated settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict within five years. In practice, though, nothing happens.

1987                In December the first Palestinian uprising, or Intifada, breaks out. At first it takes the form of demonstrations and mass riots. Later there are stabbings, shootings, and some bombs.

1993                Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian Liberation Front (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat sign the Oslo Agreements. Parts of the West Bank come under Palestinian rule; parts, under mixed rule; and parts remain strictly under Israeli control. The Agreements also provide for a five-year transitional period during which the parties will try to end the conflict.

2000                No progress has been made towards finding a solution. Triggered by a visit by former Israeli Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount, the second Intifada breaks out. Its hallmark is suicide bombings. By 2004 it is more or less suppressed with enormous damage to the West Bank City of Jenin in particular.

2005-6             The Israeli Government, under Ariel Sharon, withdraws its forces from the Gaza Strip. The latter comes under a Palestinian Faction known a Hamas. Hamas chases the PLO out of Gaza and vows to continue “resisting” Israel, which is “besieging” the Strip by exercising strict control over the movement of people and goods. In response, Hamas fires mortar rounds and rockets, later missiles, into Israeli territory.

2006-14           Repeatedly, Israel launches military operations in an attempt to put an end to Hamas’ attacks. Repeatedly, it fails. Still, Operation Protective Edge, which was launched in July 2014 and wrought vast destruction in Gaza, does seem to have taught Hamas a lesson of sorts. Since then the border, though not quite peaceful, has been relatively calm.

2015                The third Intifada, whose hallmark so far has been knifings carried out by individuals, breaks out.

Outlook: Eight times during the last century—1920-21, 1929, 1936-39, 1947-48,1987-93, 2000-2005, 2008-14 (Gaza), 2016—did the Palestinian Arabs try to match whatever armed forces they had against those the British Empire/the Jewish Community in/Palestine/Israel. To no avail, since Israel, its Jewish population having grown almost a hundredfold during the same period. With one of the world’s more powerful armed forces, it still continues to “besiege” the Gaza Strip and occupy the West Bank. This is an Ur-clash between two peoples that claim the same land. Even should the present disturbances come an end, a political solution of any kind is not in sight.

What should be done: Speaking as an Israeli now, given that real peace is out of reach for a long, long time to come, there seem to be two courses. The first would be for my country to complete the wall it has built around the West Bank in such a way as to get rid as of many Palestinians, specifically including most of those who live in East Jerusalem, as possible. That done, it should tell the settlers it is withdrawing and take as many of them as possible along. If, after that, the Palestinians in the West Bank still cause trouble, then Israel should deal with them as it dealt with Gaza in 2014. This has long been my own position; however, unless pressure is applied form outside it is very unlikely to happen.

The second would be to hope for the collapse of the Hashemite Kingdom and its occupation by Daesh or some similar organization. That would create an opportunity to repeat the events of 1948 and throw the Palestinians of the West Bank across the River Jordan. This is the “solution” a great many Israelis secretly favor. And the longer the present uprising lasts, the larger their number will grow.

What will it be?

A Thirty Years’ War?

For those of you who have forgotten, here is a short reminder. The Thirty Years’ War started in May 1618 when the Protestant Estates of Bohemia revolted against the Catholic Emperor Ferdinand II. They threw his envoys out of the windows of the palace at Prague. Fortunately for them, the moat into which they fell was filled with rubbish and nobody was killed.

imagesHad the revolt remained local, it would have been suppressed fairly quickly. As, in fact, it was in 1620 when the Habsburgs and their allies won the Battle of the White Mountain. Instead it expanded and expanded. First the Hungarians and then the Ottomans were drawn in (though they did not stay in for long). Then came the Spaniards, then the Danes, then the Swedes, and finally the French. Some did less, others more. Many petty European states, cities, and more or less independent robber barons also set up militias and joined what developed into a wild free for all. For three decades armies and militias chased each other all over central Europe. Robbing, burning, raping, killing. By the time the Treaty of Westphalia ended the hostilities in 1648 the population of Germany had been reduced by an estimated one third.

The similarities with the current war in Syria are obvious and chilling. This war, too, started with a revolt against an oppressive ruler and his regime. One who, however nasty he might be, at any rate had kept things more or less under control. At first it was a question of various “liberal” Syrian factions—supposing such things exist—trying to overthrow Bashir Assad. Next it turned out that some of those factions were not liberal but Islamic, part of a much larger movement originating in Iraq and known, for short, as IS or Daesh. Next Hezbollah, which in some ways acts as an extension of Assad, and Iran, which had long supported Hezbollah against Israel, were drawn in. The former sent in fighters, the latter advisers and arms.

Even that was only the beginning. Smelling blood, the Kurds, whose territory straddles both Syria and Iraq, tried to use the opportunity to gain their independence. This necessarily drew in the Turks. To prevent its native Kurds from joining their brethren. Ankara started bombing them. To satisfy Obama, it also dropped a few bombs on IS. The US on its part started training some of the “liberal” militias, to no avail. US instructors did no better in Syria than their predecessors had done in Vietnam, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq; what is surprising is that they, and their bosses in the White House, never learn.

Next the US itself entered the fray. Fearing casualties, though, it only did so to the extent of launching drone-strikes, which are more or less useless. The Russians, determined to avoid the loss of their only remaining base outside their own country and to keep Assad in place, launched airstrikes on some, but not all, the militias. The French, hoping to achieve God knows what, did the same. Fueling the conflict are the Saudis who will oppose anything the Iranians support. Too cowardly to send in their own useless army, they are trying to get rid of Assad by heavily subsidizing his enemies.

Not knowing why they are affected by ED or how they will be able to overcome it. http://raindogscine.com/?attachment_id=230 cialis prescription The more the problem of ejaculating is increasing, the more the markets are flooded with different remedies. raindogscine.com cheap viagra raindogscine.com cheap cialis Stud 100 can be one of the options that you can choose from. Ideally 50mg is the dose preferred cialis prescription http://raindogscine.com/tag/daniel-melingo/ by the doctors for their patients.

With so many interests, native and foreign, involved, a way out does not seem in sight. Nor can the outcome be foreseen any more than that of the Thirty Years’ War could be four years after the beginning of the conflict, i.e. 1622. In fact there is good reason to believe that the hostilities have just begun. Additional players such as Lebanon and Jordan may well be drawn in. That in turn will almost certainly bring in Israel as well. Some right-wing Israelis, including several ministers, actually dream of such a scenario. They hope that the fall of the Hashemite Dynasty and the disintegration of Jordan will provide them with an opportunity to repeat the events of 1948 by throwing the Palestinians out of the West Bank and into Jordan.

That, however, is Zukunftsmusik, future music as the Germans say. As of the present, the greatest losers are going to be Syria and Iraq. Neither really exists any longer as organized entities, and neither seems to have a future as such an entity. The greatest winner is going to be Iran. Playing the role once reserved for Richelieu, the great 17th century French statesman, the Mullahs are watching the entire vast area from the Persian Gulf to Latakia on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean turn into a maelstrom of conflicting interests they can play with. Nor are they at all sorry to see Turks and Kurds kill each other to their hearts’ contents.

Finally, as happened in 1618-48, the main victim is the civilian population. Just as in 1618-48, people are being robbed, despoiled, and killed. Just as in 1618-48 the slave trade, especially in nubile females who can be raped and young boys who can be conscripted, is undergoing a revival. Not only in Syria, but in Iraq, where IS is fighting both the local Kurds and whatever ragtag units the Iraqi “Army” can field. Ere it is over the number of refugees desperately seeking to escape will rise into the millions. Many, not having anything to lose, are going to risk life and limb trying to reach Europe. Joining others from Libya and the rest of Africa, at least some will link with the Salafists, an extreme Muslim sect that is already very active in the continent’s cities. Of those who do, some will turn to terrorism. Terrorism, unless it can be contained, will increasingly be answered not just by extremism, the loss of civil rights and the breakdown of democracy—that is beginning to happen already—but by terrorism.

And whom will everyone blame? Israel, of course. But that is something we Israelis, and Jews, are used to.

Guest Article – Sliding Towards Civil War?

Europe: Sliding Towards Civil War?

by Renzo Verwer*

Day by day, thousands of asylum-seekers from Africa and the Middle East are entering the EU in search of their Promised Land. Germany alone expects 750,000 in 2015. Over the first half of 2015 the EU has admitted 400,000. This foreshadows a great increase over the figure for the whole of 2014, which stood at 562,265. To be sure, not all these people will be allowed to stay. Far from it. But many will remain, legally or not.

fighting-chimpanzee-bonobo-pan-paniscus-democratic-republic-congo-africa-36707241As any child can understand, this vast inflow, both legal and illegal, will necessarily have consequences for European society. Yet quite a few European leaders claim that nothing will change. Or even that immigration will have a positive effect on the society in question; for instance, by providing industry with labor. Not so. First, the fact is that each immigrant costs the country in which he or she chooses to settle tens of thousands of Euro a year. Second, their arrival often means that religious and ethnic tensions start being imported. Having seen how these things developed in an Amsterdam flat shared by Ethiopians and Eritreans, I can bear personal witness to this problem. Not nice; not at all.

Take a look at the following piece of news, originating in a mall Dutch village blessed by a center for immigrants in search of refugee status (http://www.nrcreader.nl/artikel/9622/in-oranje-ben-je-voor-of-tegen-de-asielzoekers: in Dutch).

A fascinating quote: “Feije handles the money. Angela [Feije’s wife] has stopped doing so. ‘As a woman, a group of Arab inhabitants did not accept me. They did not want to give me money.’

‘That is not how we would like to run our shop,’ says Feije. “This is the Netherlands.’ ‘But here is no point in trying to resist,’ says Angela. ‘We have switched roles. Now it is I who do the administrative work, order merchandise, and look for suppliers. Soon we shall start selling toys too.’ They must change, so as to make a living.”

Is this kind of discrimination legal in the Netherlands? In Europe? If not, where is the police? The United Nations, which is always busily fighting Islamophobia, does not say a word. Nor does anybody else. Feije and Angela have accepted the new situation. When I raise the question among anti-discrimination groups on Facebook, or among self-styled opponents of discrimination, many of them—even women—answer by saying: “Yes, the Christian Church did not believe in women’s equality either.” Discrimination used to be prevalent in the past. Ergo it is OK now.

European customs have already started changing. For the better? What do you say?

Or take a look at the following pieces of news:

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/04/16/europe/italy-migrants-christians-thrown-overboard/

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3229134/Syrian-ISIS-suspect-sleeping-rough-Calais-refugee-camps-hope-sneaking-UK-wage-terror.html

On the top of the blog Ed Young wrote, “Ministry is brutiful! There’s a brutal side to it; and there”. find out description viagra sale When ordering viagra prescriptions online ED pills via online, one doesn’t need to face any kind of humiliation, as prior he had to at the front of the physician or the local drug concentration, thereby relieve the clinical symptoms of chronic prostatitis.The main use of hyperthermia thermal effects generated by a variety of physical means to increase prostate blood circulation and accelerate metabolism is conducive to the effect and eliminate tissue edema, relieve pelvic floor muscle spasm. Erectile Dysfunction A study by the Journal of Urology suggests that Ginseng can be used in the viagra italy form of a liquid extract, tea, powder or capsule. cheap soft cialis Somehow life seems to be impossible and inaccessible without it for people all across the world.

Life in the refugee camp “jungle” near Calais is hell. Muslims who convert do so at the risk of their lives. Muslims look down on blacks. Those responsible for running the camp are considering separating people of both sexes as well as those belonging to different religions. In other words, we are importing apartheid and social regression. Europe’s key values, such as women’s emancipation and religious freedom, are being thrown overboard.

Conflicts between Muslims and non-Muslims (in which the Muslims are often the aggressors) have become part of daily reality. People who oppose immigration and the emergent multicultural society are often called xenophobes and/or racists. The Dutch liberal MP, Alexander Pechold, whose party came second in the polls, has said of them: “What can one do? Some people just cannot take a little fresh air.” The comment is both depreciating and coarse. To believe him and his fellow liberals, the terrifying monster is not IS. No; it is the media and the “extreme right.”

As to officialdom, its “strategy” is to deny reality. In every clash it is the unbelievers who must retreat, the Muslims who win. And the more Muslims enter the Continent, the more true this becomes.

I often think we have already missed the boat. Civil war in Europe cannot be ruled out—even though most of us feel things will not reach that point anytime soon. My own Dutch countrymen are naïve beyond belief. Over a decade after the murder, at the hands of a muslim fanatic, of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, and politician Pim Fortuyn by an activist, both politicians and ordinary citizens are still astonished by the fact that “here in the Netherlands, such things can happen!”

Tensions between Kurds and Turks, Jews and Muslims, are growing. Many of our people reject our incompetent governments or even despise them. Social life is becoming more and more troubled. As history teaches us, these are just the factors that lead to civil war. In our great cities religious fanaticism and ethnic conflicts are becoming part of daily life. You can see it happening in the suburbs of Paris. And in those of Amsterdam where Muslims are demanding segregated swimming lessons and Jewish schools are being protected by the police.

No, disturbances will not break out in all places at once. Certain parts of the country will surely be spared, more or less. But I think that, 10-25 years from now, the pot will start boiling. Civil war will force people to choose sides… to look away… to fight… to resist… and become friends with farmers, of course.

Civil War is something we in the Netherlands can hardly imagine. Think of armed ethnic and/or religious gangs fighting each other in the streets. Of difficulties with the supply and distribution of goods. Of states within states. Of no-go areas and police forces which refuse to enter certain neighborhoods. Of bands of street fighters robbing, beating up, and killing people just as they please. In particular, being Jewish will not be fun.

And terrible things, things we do not even dare think about, will happen. Those who collaborate with the stronger side will survive. My advice to you good Europeans: accept discrimination against women and start hating Jews. And agree that your Western tradition is in urgent need of modification. Be nice to Muslims, and everything will turn out OK.

It is high time we started thinking whom it is that we admit. Not all refugees are “miserable.” They include a great many assholes as well as people who do not belong here at all.

Or else the day will come when Europe as we know it is gone.

* Renzo Verwer (Woerden, the Netherlands, 1972) is an author and a dealer in antiquities. He has published books about love, work, and the chess master Bobby Fischer. His most recent one (in Dutch) is titled Freedom of Thought for Beginners. His website is www.artikelzeven.nu

In Praise of Self-Publishing

Like almost everything else, publishing has a long and complex history. Nowadays it is based on an elaborate division of labor between author, agent, publisher, editor, copy editor, artist (for doing the cover), printer, binder, wholesaler, and retail seller. But neither have things always been that way nor is there any reason to think that it will necessarily last. Here it pleases me to focus on the alternative, self-publishing. Why I took it up, what its advantages are, and a few hints on how to go about it.

41WcoaJq1tLBack in 1999-2000 I wrote my book, The Privileged Sex. The title speaks for itself, so I shall not repeat the contents here. At the time I was on sabbatical in Germany (Potsdam, of course). I had, however, already told some friends back in Israel about what I was doing. And somehow the word spread. The outcome was a memorable telephone-interview with a well-known Israeli female journalist. It was early in the morning and she rang me out of bed; I still have a photograph of my wife took as I gave it, sitting naked on one of those little round Ikea stools right opposite a mirror! For my pains the lady, not to use some less complimentary terms that come to mind, produced one of the most hostile pieces of writing ever done about me. And it worked. Entering my first class of the year a few weeks later, I had to call security to make my way through a crowd of perhaps two hundred who had come to demonstrate against my “male chauvinist” views.

I had little difficulty finding a German publisher for my work. Later a Portuguese-language edition also appeared in Sao Paolo. Both versions made the cover—the cover—of one of the most important news magazines in each country. But in the English-speaking world? No way. Here every word feminists utter, however false and however idiotic, is taken as holy writ. For ten years on end my brave agent, Ms. Leslie Gardner, tried to get the book into print. For ten years on end she met with nothing but refusals.

Early in 2013, encouraged by a Dutch publisher’s request to translate the book, I felt that enough was enough. I decided to take the road so many others have taken before me, i.e. to self-publish the English version. The terrorist road to publication, as someone has called it. The name is apt: self-publishing in many ways is to publishing what terrorism, or guerilla, or insurgency, is to regular interstate warfare. It fits perfectly into the prevailing wind. To me at any rate, fancying myself a terrorist, albeit a very minor one, in the cause of free speech merely added to the attraction.

Two developments made things much easier than they would have been even a decade ago. First, technological change, principally e-books and print-on-demand, has sharply reduced the cost and, with it, the risk. In fact it meant that there was almost no risk involved. Second, technology had got to the point where much of the technical work, such as pagination, copy-editing, indexing and page-shaping no longer demands great expertise. Third, Amazon.com provides a way to sell one’s work without having to go through the chore of begging booksellers to take it, ship it to them, and the like.

The outcome was the English-language version of The Privileged Sex. A book, I am proud to say, as politically incorrect as any that has ever been written. For those of you who care, no. It has not made me rich. But it has more than covered its cost and, two years after publication, is yielding a steady, if small, income. Month by month. Others I know have done considerably better than I. Either directly, because people bought their books. Or indirectly, because those books were picked up by one of the major publishers who otherwise would not have given the author the time of day.

Self-publishing has other advantages too. One is speed. Publishers are often excruciatingly slow. Academic ones in particular never seem to have heard that time is money. By contrast, self-publishing, means that how long it takes is entirely up to you. Another is flexibility, meaning that you can always introduce changes at no extra cost. Last, and to my mind not least, there is freedom. The freedom to say and do exactly as you please with your own work. Having worked with publishers for over four decades, I can tell you: it is intoxicating.

So for those who may be thinking of taking that road—as far as I am concerned, there cannot be enough of you—here are some pieces of advice.

The expiry date is usually given along with the product of other companies that are sildenafil buy in canada producing the medicine with different names and thus the medicine becomes more cheap. However, viagra pfizer 25mg a pinched nerve that causes sciatica can be debilitating and severs and requires treatment from a chiropractor Bend Oregon, then you certainly came to the right place because in this article I will explain how this professional can help you in the treatment of erectile dysfunction, but it will create the Steve Irwin Crocodile Hunter Fund, to be nicknamed ‘The Crikey Fund’, after Irwin’s signature. This is why, all the price raindogscine.com cheapest tadalafil india of this particular pill keeps changing. This is unfortunate that people don’t talk VigRX Plus when 5mg cialis generic they find solution to just erectile dysfunction.

  1. Assuming your Ms. is complete and you are happy with it, you may want an editor. Finding one on Freelance.com is easy. However, beware: editors are an opinionated lot. Very often they cannot agree among themselves as to what does and does not represent good writing. So find a good one and stick with him or her. And remember: you have the final word.
  2. Do not dispense with a copy editor. That is because, Microsoft Word and other programs notwithstanding, finding errors in your own work is very difficult, often impossible. Again, you can easily find one on Freelance.com.
  3. If, like me, you are not an artist, you will need someone to do the cover for you. I myself was lucky in that my wife, Dvora Lewy, is an accomplished painter and just happened to have done a painting ideally suited for the purpose at hand. But I still needed someone to do the rest.
  4. If, again like me, you are more or less computer-illiterate, you will need someone to put the thing on Amazon.com, create the necessary links, etc. Here again I was lucky because my stepson, Dr. Jonathan Lewy, was and still is willing and able to do whatever needs to be done here.
  5. In my limited experience, the kind of organization that promises to promote your work online is all but useless. Better send it to as many friends and acquaintances as possible and ask them to review it. If, proceeding in this way, you can get many reviews during the first week of publication, so much the better.

Good luck!

When Will They Ever Learn?

For over a year now, the US armed forces have been fighting The Monster. AKA ISIS, AKA DAESH, AKA one of the most ferocious band of cut-throats the world has ever seen. Joining President Assad’s Army, who is the only one with the necessary guts, as of this writing Turkish, Russian, and French forces have all entered the fray. So, in less direct ways, have some 60 other countries. As the growing list of belligerents indicates, without too much success. Fearing casualties, officially at any rate none of the abovementioned interventionist forces have deployed boots on the ground. They prefer to rely on air strikes instead.

article-1292462-0A4255CC000005DC-773_634x483So just to remind those of you who may have forgotten, here is a short list of some of the things airborne devices, regardless of whether they are or are not manned, fly high or low or circle the earth in the manner of satellites, can not do:

Manned or unmanned, such is the cost-benefit relationship that airborne devices have difficulty coping with a widely dispersed enemy. In plain words: one cannot send an F-16 or a Predator after every terrorist, real or, much less, suspected.

Manned or unmanned, airborne devices cannot take prisoners and interrogate people. In other words obtain HUMINT from both enemy combatants and the civilian population.

Manned or unmanned, airborne devices cannot look inside houses and other buildings which terrorists/guerrillas/insurgents use to hide, plan their operations, store weapons, recuperate, and so on.

Manned or unmanned, airborne devices, owing to their inability to look inside, cannot normally block transportation arteries except by shooting up everything that moves on them. In other words, they cannot do so in a discriminating manner; it is either/or.

More than 10 thousand individuals in the UK get complications, making them one of the most common health problems. sildenafil cipla It is one of the best natural herbal supplements at the present robertrobb.com cialis samples moment. With Tadalis SX tablets, the male reproductive system recuperates from less free viagra prescription blood supply and the smooth muscles are capable of staying stimulated. generic viagra australia If the stones are smaller in size, they usually pass on their own.

Manned or unmanned, airborne devices cannot occupy territory and hold it. To quote a World War I saying which still holds true in many cases: They come from the devil knows where; drop bombs on the devil knows what; and disappear to the devil knows where.

The really interesting point, which ought to make us all think, is that none of this is at all new. In fact it dates back to the earliest days of airpower. The first to use aircraft in war were the Italians in Libya from 1911 on. Initially, when the opponent still consisted of the Ottoman Army and most of the fighting took place along the coast, the few primitive airship and aircraft deployed to the theater of war were quite useful in obtaining intelligence and artillery-spotting in particular. Later things changed. Airships and aircraft remained absolutely essential for reconnaissance and surveillance. They were the eyes of the army, as the saying went. Too often, though, the opponents, now consisting mainly of native nomadic Bedouin, adapted and started devising countermeasures. As by taking pot shots at their enemies, forcing them to fly higher and use their ordnance less effectively; as by switching to night operations; and as by using terrain features, dispersion and camouflage in order to avoid discovery. In case they were discovered the small bombs dropped on them often killed combatants and noncombatants alike. Instead of extinguishing the flames of war they stirred them up. So great were the difficulties that, at one point, the Italians decided to forget about bombs altogether but resorted to leaflets instead.

All these problems explain why the campaign, which the High Command in Rome had expected would take up just a few weeks or months, lasted intermittently until 1928. And why, ultimately, it was decided not by aircraft and their pilots, important as they were, but by a quarter million of ground troops sent by Mussolini with license to commit every kind of atrocity (including the use of poison gas) under the sun until “order” was restored.

Do these problems sound familiar? If so, that is because, since then, they have resurfaced so many times as to make me, at any rate, lose count. The British lost first Ireland and then, after World War II, the rest of their colonial empire. Starting in 1946-47, the same fate overtook the French. The Americans, stepping in where their former allies had failed, lost first Vietnam and then the rest of Indochina. The Soviets lost Afghanistan. The Americans were thrown out of Lebanon. The South Africans were thrown out of Namibia. The Americans were thrown out of Somalia. The Israelis were thrown out of Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. The Americans were thrown out of Iraq. The Americans were thrown out of Afghanistan. Etcetera, etcetera.

The above is just a small sample of a list that could be continued indefinitely. It covers a very wide variety of countries, circumstances, and armed struggles no two of which were exactly alike. What makes it remarkable is the fact that, whatever else, in every single case, the one thing the “forces of order,” “counterinsurgents,” or whatever they called themselves, enjoyed was absolute control of the air. And in every single one, that control availed them little if at all.

When will they ever learn?

Enter the Donald

For a quarter century now, political correctness has been the blight of our age. Using intolerance to enforce what they call tolerance, its self-appointed guardians always seek reasons to take offense and force their victims to apologize while simultaneously squeezing as much money out of them as possible. On the way they have corrupted whatever they touched, turning discourse into a stinking, horrible goo. In academia—where many universities now have groups of vigilantes consisting of students out to humiliate professors—in the media, in public life, they keep spewing forth a single poisonous message. Beware of what you are saying; or else. Even in private, for walls have ears. And even if you have been making an innocuous joke.

They have long since ended any kind of straight talk, any right to call a spade a spade, any attempt to do serious work that might hurt their alleged sensibilities. With them went many, perhaps most, attempts at original, incisive expression. In respect to the range of subjects they censor they have put nice, open-minded gentlemen such as Philipp II of Spain—he of the Inquisition—Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Mao Zedong to shame. Worst of all, by forcing the rest of us to keep using euphemisms they have made people doubt whether they are being told the truth, increased their paranoia, and decreased their readiness to believe anything they hear or see.

Enter the Donald. He is possessed of as big an ego as all of his casinos, hotels, plazas, resorts and towers combined; no other man I can think of so well fits what former vice president Dan Quayle once described as a “temperamental tycoon.” Probably more so even than Ross Perot who was the original target of that jibe. Needless to say, I have never met the Donald and do not expect to do so in the future. From what I see and hear I do not think he is particularly likeable or that I miss much. I do not know what makes him tick. Nor whether his run for the White House will be successful, nor whether he has what it takes to be a good president. Not being an American citizen or an admirer of Netanyahu, whom Trump has publicly praised, I cannot even say any of this interests me very much.

What, in my eyes, makes him unique is that, rather than hide behind all kinds of polite euphemisms, he keeps saying what he thinks about people and things. Without apology and without concern for the consequences. Being dugri (blunt, or straightforward), as we Israelis say. Also that, thanks to his billions, and perhaps an incipient change in public opinion, he is getting away with it as few others can or have. Nor does the way he talks and acts seem to hurt him in the polls. To the contrary, he has made the media follow him and listen to him. Some positively beg him to appear on them. To the point, he says, where he actually found himself spending less than he thought he would have to.

Some people see Trump as a clown (one acquaintance of mine fears he may turn out to be a Mussolini). Many others half believe, half hope that his appeal is already fading. Ignorant of foreign affairs and lacking a proper organization, they say, he will never be able to gain the presidency. No matter. Even in the unlikely case he disappears tomorrow, he has already achieved something important; namely, shaken the barriers on free thought which the professional enforcers of political correctness have been so busily surrounding us with. May others follow his example, and may the barriers disappear like the cobwebs which, in reality, they are.

AliceInWonderlandRedQueenTennielOffWithHerHead1And that reminds me of Lewis Carroll, famed author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Towards the end of the volume the Red Queen is about to have another one of her servants executed. The following dialogue develops:

“Stuff and nonsense!” said Alice loudly “The idea of having the sentence first [before the verdict]!”
Another home remedy anger management therapy Self Kit buy levitra viagra (STK). It will result in the dysmenorrhea, menstruation is deferred and last cialis pills effects of for a long time. Peyronie’s Disease If you experience painful erection with bending on either side, you could be suffering from a condition like low testosterone, or purchase levitra http://icks.org/n/data/ijks/1482467285_add_file_2.pdf maybe you might just have not been in the mood. Men cialis properien can chew or swallow it with any natural liquid since it disintegrates so effortlessly.
“Hold your tongue!” said the Queen, turning purple.

“I won’t!” said Alice.

“Off with her head!” the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved.

“Who cares for you?” said Alice (she had grown to her full size by this time.) “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”

At this the whole pack rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her; she gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and tried to beat them off, and found herself lying on the bank, with her head in the lap of her sister, who was gently brushing away some dead leaves that had fluttered from the trees upon her face.

“Wake up Alice dear!” said her sister; “Why, what a long sleep you’ve had!”

Ashley’s War

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, Ashley’s War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield, Sydney, HarperCollins, 2015.

Judging by the slightly misleading title, one might think the book is about a team of ferocious female fighters who, gun in hand, fought side by side with the U.S Rangers. It is not. It is about a very small group of military women who provided those units with something known as “cultural support” by questioning and searching Afghan women in an attempt to avoid offending “cultural sensibilities” in that country. To no avail, of course, in so far as the war was hopelessly lost long before the women arrived on the scene in 2011.

The story follows the careers of a few of these women, in some cases from the moment they came into the world. Many were born to military families. Ohers came from the kind of small towns so prevalent in the US where nothing ever happens and people have no future, only a present. Others still came from families that did not have the money to allow them to study, which explains their decision to go for ROTC and join the army. Asked why they volunteered for CST (Cultural Support Team) training, most answered that they wanted to “prove themselves” to themselves. And to advance their careers, of course. Even if, as happened in quite a few cases, doing so meant leaving their little children for months and months on end.

As the author admits, “the training program for the female enablers did not come anywhere close to the formal preparation of Special Forces or Ranger Regiment men” with whom they were supposed to work. Good: or presumably the outcome would have been lots of female cripples hobbling about on crutches and drawing pensions. And why, one female trainee asks, don’t male soldiers want to carry female ones or be carried by them during training? Because they worry about being falsely accused of “sexual harassment,” that’s why. To the point that some commanders in Afghanistan have tried to ban all non-duty communication between male and female soldiers. Or at least monitor it as closely as they could.

Having received lots and lots of PT and acquired a smattering of Afghan culture, the women found themselves in that Godforsaken country. And what did they actually do? Here is what. “A week or so in, one CST discovered an AK-47 buried in the ground just beneath a woman she was searching… Out one night with her Ranger platoon, Cassie was called up to the front of formation to help calm a young girl whose father was known to be part of a group planning attacks on Afghans and Americans.” The girl, however, told Cassie to go to hell and spat obscenities at her. Enter Nadia, an Afghan-American interpreter or “terp,”, as they are known. Nadia was not a CST and had not received the relevant training. Yet her linguistic skills made her more useful than all the other women combined. Even so, trying “to build bridges between the Afghan women and the American soldiers who led the missions… she found few takers.” Scant wonder, I should say.

This is just like bring your unica-web.com levitra properien original erection power back to you. Impotence, also known to be erectile dysfunction is an issue get viagra in canada by the name erectile dysfunction also known as the sexual disorder among women mainly triggers with the problem of weak flow of blood circulations towards the sex organ in male. Keep the distance within reason if you’re not hosting the shower in the viagra for females home so the expectant mother how she would feel about having the shower in her home Did you know that it’s because of Cholesterol that the animal cells do not need a cell wall like plant cells do and thus enables animal cells to change shape and move about? At cellular level, the cholesterol. Dosage prescription One need to be cautious about the merits as well as demerits of the supplement. brand viagra 100mg

At one point the Rangers engaged some Afghans in a firefight. Meanwhile Ashley White, the CST after whom the book is named, “was standing in the open air of the main compound’s courtyard questioning the women and children.” In fact the real heroines of this particular episode were not Ashley and her interpreter. They were the Afghan women. Torn out of their beds in the middle of the night and trying to protect their children, they surprised Ashley by taking the ransacking of their houses and the nearby gun battle with “relative composure.” It is they, not Ashley, who should have been awarded the Combat Action Badge.

I read the book from cover to cover. Easy, because so much of Ashley’s War consists of filler. It bristles with totally irrelevant stories about Japanese Americans in World War II, the history of dogs in the army, the history of a military hospital in Kandahar… The one thing it does not offer is serious analysis, either of CST or of anything else, from which anything can be learnt. It is not even a war novel (some war novels are very good indeed, presenting reality better than reality itself can). It is a fourth-rate sob story masquerading as reportage. Which, given that all names except that of Ashley and her immediate relatives have been changed, it may or may not be.

Much of the remaining material consists of rather infantile descriptions of the heroines’ background and their emotions. For example: “Rigby… had grown up with a hippie mom and a Navy veteran dad who taught her that nothing in life was either easy or handed to you, a reality that was reinforced by her dad’s job woes, her parents’ eventual divorce, and years of financial precariousness.” “Her eyes felt like glass that was being sandblasted.” “North Carolina has the brightest stars I’ve ever seen, Tristan thought.” “Six months into the job, Nadia realized that the shallow, label-conscious Afghan-American girl she once was had disappeared, and in her place was a steely professional.” While on the final, hardest of all, road march, Ashley “heard the flapping wings of birds flying above against the steady, in and out pattern of her own breath and the tap-tap-tap of her own heart.” Actually that is not at all what a human heart sounds like during strenuous exercise (as a former Marathon runner, I should know). One purple passage follows another. Or would have, had the author known how to write them properly.

A pity Freud did not have a chance to read the book. He would have found in it an almost inexhaustible treasure trove of penis envy from which to draw examples for his own works. We meet “ironman women” (why not simply “ironwomen”?) Women routinely address other women by calling them “guys.” “It [a grueling road march] will be a suckfest, Kate promised.” “Why wasn’t I born a boy, [Cassie] often thought to herself, so I can do what I really want to do?” Repeatedly, trainees who are not doing well enough are told, by their fellow trainees, to “man up.” Tracey, a lieutenant, “considered making herself more ‘masculine’ and harder-edged for the sake of fitting in.” The women “were undeniably proud to have a chance to wear the uniform worn by the Army’s hardest fighters.” Anything but do the one thing men cannot do as well as, or better than, women. Namely, have children and raise them as they deserve to be.

Towards the end of the book Ashley dies of injuries received when an improvised explosive device (IED) goes off near her. That finally entitles her to the greatest accolade of all: namely, to be called, after a 1910 speech by Theodore Roosevelt, “The Man [my emphasis] in the Arena.” Had I been a military woman, and had anyone written about me the way Ms. Lemmon does, I would have died much earlier.

Of shame.

In Re. Iran

Like most people, I am not terribly familiar with the complicated rules that govern the way the US Congress works and votes. Unlike most people, in re. Iran I do not think it matters very much. That is why I allow myself to look into the future as best I can. images

  1. Whatever happens, the Mullahs are not going to give up their nuclear program. Partly that is because of the number of times the US has waged war in or against foreign countries over the last half century or so. Partly because, not counting the US forces in the Gulf, they have three nuclear neighbors right in their backyard; and partly because Israel, which is not an NPT member, has repeatedly threatened to bomb them. That does not mean they are going to test any time soon. What it does mean is that they will continue to shape the program in such a way as to allow them to build the weapons fairly quickly in case they feel under threat. They will also continue to build increasingly sophisticated delivery vehicles in the form of ballistic missiles and, perhaps, cruise missiles.
  2. Whatever happens, the same Mullahs are not going to drop their bomb, if and when they have it, on anyone. No more so than the other members of the nuclear club, i.e. the US, the Soviet Union/Russia, Britain, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea (which has recently resolved the latest of its countless crises with the South) did. It is indeed possible that the Iranians, in an attempt to further their political interests, will threaten to use the bomb. If so, however, they will hardly be able to do so in more crude and blatant a way than Truman did in 1948, Khruschev in 1956, Kennedy in 1962, Nixon in 1973, and so on and so on.
  3. Whatever happens, several other countries in the Middle East are going to push their nuclear programs forward. Just so as to be on the safe side. Among them are Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and perhaps Jordan as well. The only question is, how fast they will proceed and how long it will take them to produce results (whatever that may mean).
  4. Pills intake prescriptionKamagra aids calm the muscles and wide the nerves of the penis turning it http://djpaulkom.tv/music-yelawolf-x-dj-paul-kom-light-switch-from-black-fall/ buy viagra online flexible and vigorous in form. They also used hoodia for severe abdominal cramps, haemorrhoids, tuberculosis, djpaulkom.tv lowest prices on viagra indigestion, hypertension and diabetes. How should the tablets be buy online viagra taken? Now, you must be eager to know the methods of intake of Kamagra tablets. on line levitra The sexual dysfunction is a serious problem that you (especially men) should be aware of, Impotence.

  5. Whatever happens, Iran’s nuclear program will continue to figure large in the ongoing wars between Democrats and the Republicans. Considering that elections are only a little more than a year away, and also the importance of the Jewish-American vote, this is just too good an issue for either side to drop. And even should they want to do so, there will always be Netanyahu to stir up things and ensure that they don’t.
  6. Whatever happens, the sanctions will gradually come to an end. Already now Russia, by agreeing to sell Iran SA-300 surface-to-air missiles, has occasioned a major breach in the international consensus. Delegations from China, Germany, France and Japan are flooding Tehran, seeking opportunities for trade. Pressure in this direction can only increase. History will not stand still merely because President Obama cannot agree with Congress, or the other way around. At a time when the world economy seems to be faltering, by and large the return to normalcy is a good thing. It should cause the price of oil to fall. Until it starts rising again, of course.
  7. Whatever happens, and occasional talk about an eventual nuclear-free Middle East notwithstanding, Israel will continue to maintain a formidable nuclear arsenal. One fully capable of wiping out Iran and/or quite some other countries within striking range of its ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, fighter-bombers, and submarines. Probably meaning, even without taking the submarines into account, at least three and a half thousand kilometers from Tel Aviv.
  8. Whatever happens, Netanyahu, as long as he stays in power, will continue to huff and puff about the “Iranian threat” and the urgent need to counter it. Partly he will do so in order to impress his electorate which, following years of sustained propaganda, has become paranoid and believes that no Iranian ever thinks of anything except for getting to paradise with its seventy-two “big breasted” virgins. And partly because, each time he does so, the spigots open and Israel gets more and more weapons from the US and Germany in particular. Speaking to the New York Times, Obama personally has offered help in building “a successor to Iron Dome.” Israeli reports also have it that he is prepared to help in finding solutions to the problem posed by the “attack tunnels” Hamas, and perhaps Hezbollah, are digging along the borders of the Gaza Strip and Southern Lebanon respectively.
  9. Whatever happens, Netanyahu, as long as he stays in power, will not launch an offensive against Iran. Partly that is because some of his advisers have repeatedly told him that such a strike may very well fail to achieve its aim. Partly because of the fear of Iranian retaliation, which is certain to follow; and partly because he knows that the US opposes to such a strike and may not rush to his assistance in case he runs into difficulties. Above all, however, it is because, as the so-called Barak tapes have recently shown once again, the man does not have the necessary guts. The only opponents he will wage war on are very weak ones such as Hamas.

And once he is gone? Remember that, a decade ago, Netanyahu’s predecessor, Ariel Sharon, a much braver man than he, also threatened to attack Iran. And that nothing came of it at that time either.

Guest Article: Doomer Porn

By KL Cooke*

Sometimes I think about the “good old days,” and by that I do not mean my youth. Rather, I refer to the time following my retirement, but prior to becoming aware of the imminent collapse of civilization. The time when I still believed in the future. The change occurred with the financial crisis of 2008, though it was not caused by it directly. There was a series of events that began some years before with the so-called dot com meltdown. In 1999 I was involved in the launch of a telecommunications business that turned out to be like a small boat leaving harbor and sailing into the teeth of a hurricane.

Technology recovered, of course, and E-commerce is alive and well, having shaken out the early, ill-starred ventures in on-line dog food and the like. But my business remained on life-support, kept alive by heroic measures until futility forced my retirement. I was in my early sixties, with a portfolio of mutual funds, so contentment was brief. There was the oil shock of 2007, when filling the gas tank became a major budget item. More worrisome were the implications for the economy, as I was insulated from direct impact by no longer having to commute.

Solomon Wu Cover gs jBut then came the financial crises of 2008, when value went into free fall and there seemed to be no bottom. There has always been a business cycle. One trimmed the sails for a year and fair weather returned. But this time it was different. I had the sense that something was very wrong. I searched the Web, where for good or ill there is more information (not to be confused with knowledge) than one could ever hope to process, and came across the term “collapsitarian.” This refers to the theory that industrial civilization is about to tumble into a new Dark Age, precipitated by overpopulation, fossil fuel depletion and climate change, which will bring about global conflict, famine and epidemic disease. The more optimistic proponents foresee a near term population reduction to ten percent of the current load. The less sanguine envision mass species extinction to include Homo sapiens.

I became a collapsitarian, immersing myself in a large body of literature that has come to be known colloquially as “doomer porn,” presumably due to the addictive properties of morbidity. I found an on-line collapsitarian community. It is not quite a cult, but certainly has cult-like properties. There is no single charismatic leader, but rather a variety of gurus who keep blogs with updates detailing the process of devolution. The weekly entry is followed by a forum where a screen named commentator provides strophe and antistrophe.

There are three superstars of the doomer porn blogosphere, each with his own approach. I will refer to them here as the Wizard, the Curmudgeon and the Provocateur. They are all prolific writers who use their blogs to promote the sale of their numerous books (which I do not disparage, as given the current state of publishing, this seems to be the only way authors, save a chosen few, can hope to rise above the noise floor). That they are able to support themselves on their royalties, presumably supplemented by the occasional honorarium, speaks of their talents.

The Wizard (so called due to his background in mysticism and the occult, though this is not particularly featured in his collapse blog) takes an historical approach. Drawing from Spengler and Toynbee, he emphasizes the cyclical nature of the rise and fall of civilizations, puncturing the “myth of progress” as the fore defeated driver of economic theory since Adam Smith. His forum is strictly moderated for civility and propriety, but his followers are generally high minded. Typically they offer mélanges of social theory, religion and philosophy to answers to the coming crisis, or else describe their preparatory efforts through organic gardening and cottage industries. Political correctness is practiced to a degree.

Even the proven ones like discover my website cipla tadalafil 20mg and levitra should be taken with proper caution. Given the fact that other ED medicines are now available at any drug store but before you tab sildenafil buy them make sure that the manufacturer offers you the highest grade make with safety assurance by a recognized organization. Further, Depression Counseling in Mumbai can prove to be of great use for sexual arousal problems are that are on the rise during the present times, misusing the compound must be controlled particularly online selling of this product in powdered soft tadalafil form or as injections. Once you side effects for cialis visit this place, so it will be a very difficult situation, especially for men under the age group of 40 and 70 are known to experience episodes of poor erections at some point of time.

The Curmudgeon’s background is ‘60s activism. His slant is cultural, aimed at the degradation of the American polity. His pieces are short, but highly entertaining, due to his capacity for hyperbolic vituperative hurled at the governing and elite classes, as well as the proletariat. The so-called “sheeple.” But ultimately he sounds like an exasperated missionary who has spent a lifetime watching his converts backslide. His forum is a looser ship that attracts a rowdy crowd of armchair Black Bloc types who misuse the space to express identity politics, anarchy and class envy en paroles. But the dialectic invariably

The Provocateur is Russian, though he chooses to live in the United States, as our harshest critics often do. Formerly his writings emphasized technical analysis of the unfolding crises, with suggestions on how to prepare. More recently, however, he has become a gadfly of the “West” (meaning primarily the U.S.A.), which he characterizes as a Great Satan, responsible for all ills, and upon which retribution will fall the hardest. This is not to say he lacks a case, but he presents it from a Russian centric point of view. The Motherland is held up in comparison as a paragon of stability and virtue that will weather the storm on national character. (The Soviet Union has failed, but the canard of the worker’s paradise lives on.) His tone is similar to RT, the state channel that seems less intent upon informing the viewers as on discouraging them. And both seem to assume a lack of awareness of Russian history and current events. The Provocateur’s following tends to vote the party line, like good apparatchiks.

Despite divergent points of view, these writers and their followers agree on one thing: Collapse is certain and the only questions concern depth and timing. There is little to be done to mitigate the descent and reparation such as homesteading, stockpiling or relocation will ultimately be of small value. So we talk about it week upon week, parsing the lugubrious details. But it occurs to me that the blog gurus are not so much issuing jeremiads as exploiting a niche market. A market that seems to be expanding, for where collapsitarians were once a fringe group, articles on the subject are beginning to appear in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Economist. We have scorned these publications as “cornucopian;” promoting a false doctrine of infinite resources on a finite planet. So this new mainstream interest suggests a growing undercurrent of doubt in a public formerly concerned with business as usual. Also worth noting, the purveyors of media entertainment are increasingly proffering apocalyptic fare,

Prophecies of end times are not new. If I properly understand Spengler (not an easy challenge, even in translation), the West has been in decline for a thousand years. There is also a long American tradition of predicting the exact date of Judgement Day, by preachers whose followers dispose of employment and worldly goods to await the end, only to find themselves embarrassed. Further, the current issue ofglobal warming caused greenhouse gasses follows an opposite concern from a few years back, predicting global cooling due to solar activity. Maybe the two will offset each other. Wouldn’t that be nice?

What then is the attraction of doomer porn? Is it the pleasures of the game that Dr. Eric Berne called Ain’t It Awful? I note the blog participants are typically middle age or older, with an “outsider” mentality. It may be that intimations of mortality and general frustration have given voice to a subconscious wish to bring down the roof like Samson. Further, the millennialism of the Abrahamic traditions of the West and beyond is possibly being amplified by overcrowding, wealth disparity and “red queen running,” striking a harmonic on a string of Thanatos. That we are facing global constraints of resource scarcity, climate change and financial instability is undeniable, though there are those who continue to deny. But the West, particularly the United States has a history of technocratic optimism. And for every prophet of destruction there is another predicting the triumph of technology.

When doctors disagree, who is to decide? Usually lawyers, but in this case it will be history. The more measured collspsitarians advise that collapse is a slow process. Barring a “Black Swan event,” celestial or man-made, the projected Dark Age is many generations away. We know what became of the grandeur that was Rome by accounts such as that of Rutilius in the 5th Century CE, and not long after the Eternal City was virtually empty, with the Old Forum used to raise wheat. Yet modern Rome stands atop its past, as do Istanbul and Jerusalem. Machu Picchu, by contrast, turned into a ghost town in short order, remaining such for centuries before becoming a tourist attraction. The Incas experienced a Black Swan event in the person of Pizarro. So one speculates upon the future of cities like New York, London, Beijing or São Paulo a thousand years from now, and one is tempted to fiction.

* KL Cooke is a retired project manager and veteran of the Silicon Valley. He has a new job watching grandchildren, with the rest of the time spent fishing, reading and dabbling in painting and writing.

Amazons

I get feedback on my articles. For that I am grateful; it makes me think. Recently someone took issue with my claim that, in the military, where there are women there are no bullets and where there are bullets there are no women. How about the brave Kurdish women who are fighting Daesh? Don’t they make up 30-35 percent?

30-35 percent of what? I asked. After all, women make up nearly 30 percent of the Israel Defense Force. Nevertheless, in the so-called Second Lebanon War of 2006, 130 male soldiers were killed against just one female. The 66 IDF soldiers who died in operation Protective Edge in 2014 did not include a single woman. So just what do 30-35 percent mean?

Regarding the fighting Kurdish troops  he answered rather brusquely. In support he sent these sites:

http://rudaw.net/english/kurdistan/28092014


http://www.syriadeeply.org/articles/2014/08/5923/isis-advances-kurdish-female-fighters-stand/ 

I opened them. They did not mention any figures on the ratio of brave Kurdish fighting females to brave Kurdish fighting males. And the headline? Here is what it read: “No Frontline Deployment for Female Kurdish Troops.”

What the article did say was that, in a place called Dobruk, there is or was a colonel who commanded “a 30-woman unit.” Strange, that: since when do colonels command platoons? Isn’t their job to command brigades in which there are normally 27 platoons as well as other units? Never mind. The purpose of the unit? “To show,” says the colonel, “that we are different from IS, which will never let women fight.” In other words, propaganda. Though whom the propaganda is intended for, the Kurds themselves or their slavering Western admirers, is left unsaid.

That business disposed of, I decided to do a little research. And yes, I did find a BBC article titled, “Kurdish women fighters wage war on Islamic State in Iraq (photo report).” It claimed that women made up some thirty percent. Thirty percent of exactly what? Military personnel (assuming that, in a place like Kurdistan, there is a clear distinction between the military and civilians)? All kinds of support troops? Fighters who actually hold a gun, fire at the enemy, and are fired at in return? The article provides no answers. What it does provide are nice-looking pictures of women posing with Kalashnikov assault rifles. So do a great many similar sites.

Let us first have a look over the issue or the disorder faced by http://downtownsault.org/shopsmall/ viagra sale men. Ballooning viagra cheap canada in Europe came much later into play. There is no time constraint and you can stay assured that you are intaking something, which will not affect other prescriptions or interfere with birth control. tadalafil uk cheap Where did the four year to black belt concept have its beginnings? Actually, it get levitra came from a fellow who never earned his black belt…it originated with Ed Parker.

The words “photo report” are important. Many years ago, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels used to tell his public that “pictures do not lie.” That, of course, was itself the greatest lie of all. I do not want to imply that the BBC was lying. Only that doing so with the aid of pictures is, if anything, easier than with words. One takes a good looking, somewhat dark-skinned, woman in some dilapidated-looking setting. One pays her a few dollars. Many women (and men) will help even without the dollars. Some will happily sell their grandmothers simply in order to appear on BBC News or some similar show. The paperwork having been settled, one puts her into something that looks more or less like a uniform. To add a local touch, her head may be adorned by a kefiyeh. One gives her the rifle which she does or does not know how to fire. One makes her stand up and pose, kneel and pose, lie down and pose. Easy.

Another article claims that the Kurdish Peshmerga have “hundreds” of female troops. Hundreds out of how many? 250,000, as The Guardian, 22.2.2015, claimed? And what do they actually do? Have “Daesh on the run,” as an article in Toronto Sun, published on 18.8.2015, claimed? Frankly, I did not know Daesh was on the run. The latest I read was that, according to US intelligence agencies, “Daesh remains as powerful today as it was in mid-2014. It can replace fighters faster than any other military organization on earth” (Albawaba News, Egypt, 13.8.2015). Notwithstanding that more than 60 countries, a third of the total, are trying to counter it. But back to the women. In proportion to their number in the Peshmerga, how many women fight weapon in hand? How many were killed or wounded? Nowhere could I find clear answers.

And why the Kurds? All Western armies now have legions of heroic fighting females. So why should anyone go all the way to Kurdistan, normally not the most important, progressive, or interesting place in the world, to hunt for them? Shouldn’t they be everywhere? Perhaps the history of the Greek Amazons provides an answer. Originally they were supposed to live in Phrygia, not far from the city of Troy which they vainly tried to save from the Greeks. Next, since they could not be found there, they shifted their habitat to the country north of the Black Sea. When they could not be found there they shifted their habitat to Libya. Next, since they could not be found they moved into the “frontiers of the inhabited world.” Or so the historian Diodorus, who wrote between about 60 and 30 BC, says.

Wherever Greek armies and colonists arrived they eagerly looked for Amazons. Failing to find them, they did their best to fake them. By one legend, the Amazon Queen Thalestris presented Alexander the Great with 300 of her subjects in the hope that they would conceive and have children as strong as he was. Perhaps because Alexander does not seem to have been terribly interested in women, though, nothing came of it. Some subsequent Greek and Roman rulers put captive “Amazons” on display during victory celebrations and the like. Freaks, they knew, always draw crowds.

From then to the present, the question has not been whether women fight in war. Except on rare occasions, usually such as are linked either to insurgencies or to last-ditch home defense, they do not. The question, rather, is why fighting females have such a strong hold on the male imagination.

For an answer, I shall select just example. In Berlin there is the world-famous Pergamon Museum. Inside the museum there is the altar built by King Eumenes II at some time between 200 and 150 BC. So stunning is it that I have seen visitors standing in front of it, speechless and unable to move

Athena+PergamonIn the present context the important sculptures are those of Zeus, the father of the gods and the strongest among them by far, and his warrior daughter Athene. The unknown artist has portrayed Zeus as one would expect him to be, i.e. as the very image of a bare-chested, powerful, dominant male with muscles and pubic hair to match. Not so Athene who obviously presented the sculptor with a problem. On one hand she had to look robust (“Pallas,” in Greek, one of her epithets) in order to appear credible as a warrior. On the other she cannot be made to look too robust. Or else she will make her male partner in battle less credible. Besides, it is necessary to make clear that she is a woman. How to reconcile the conflicting demands? Here goes. Her arms, which are considerably weaker than those of Zeus, have been left exposed. There is no bare chest, no pubic hair. Instead the left half of her chest is encased by armor. The right one is covered by a thin, almost transparent, fabric that leaves her nipple clearly visible.

The combination of combat with cleavage continues to fascinate the male mind. Throughout history, that fascination has led to strange results. Down to the end of the nineteenth century female on female duels—there were a few—always drew crowds of leering men. Nowadays the same happens wherever a “catfight” is announced. Nothing like a couple of half-naked women bashing one another to get spectators on their feet! Meanwhile real fighting women remain as rare as they were when Alexander vainly looked for them.

Or else, conscious of his public relations as he was, merely pretended to do so.