Non-story
‘Noz at Rubber Hose has concise post about the incident in the Strait of Hormuz. Short version [only because it is too late to attempt the LOLcat version this deserves]: it was a routine identification of vessels in the waterway by the Iranian Coast Guard, as the Iranians said. Pathetic, it wasn’t even a “bump and run”. The agitprop unit in Iraq is really getting carried away, and needs to have its wings clipped before it gets someone killed.
Does someone actually believe that if a Mexican Navy vessel started paralleling the Texas coast in international waters, the US Coast Guard wouldn’t ask for identification? How about a Cuban naval vessel paralleling the Florida coast?
Marine channel 16 is the standard hailing/calling frequency, but it is VHF and short-range, so you have to send a vessel or aircraft out to check. If someone sailed out of a Gulf port to the central Gulf and then returns, the Coast Guard will want to know who they are, especially if radar tracking seems to indicate they met another vessel in international waters. This is normal and expected, not a hostile threatening act.
23 comments
Good timing again! 😀
Yeah! Was nothing unusual at all really.
Now… Guess what the rightwing nutters think… go on… guess! Here, I’ll make it easy… this will either make you laugh, or cry!
Ummmm… standard wingnut warning! Please check your soul, sanity and intelligence at the portal before following this link. Thank you.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2008/01/a_new_disgrace_at_huffpo.asp
The bit that really had me in hysterics, was this at the bottom of the post:
“Also, a real expert, our own Stuart Koehl, breaks it down here”
Stuart Koehl… “real expert”!! LMAO ROFL PMSL
And.. just what is this
nutter’s… errr… expert’s opinion?Yup!! Tonkin!! May I scream in rage and despair now Bryan??
You know… believe it or not, I am not a violent person despite my past. I saw more death and horror than a sane man should. But I begin to seriously believe that what the USA needs more than anything right now is a few lynch mobs! These *people* are seriously too stupid to live! They will NOT be happy until the USA and the World has completely gone to Hell!!
/mini-rant
*SIGH*
John Cole at Baloon Juice has a nice blog up about this, and rightly cues Monty Python! LOL (I really like Cole now that he’s found his sanity!) 😉
Another Day in Paradise
PS. Please do read that
moron’sexpert’s post at the Weekly Garbage, the last paragraph is… *sigh* typical.They apparently missed the point that Mr. Majd was making. As an Iranian-American and recording industry veteran he was speaking in his areas of expertise: the voice wasn’t Persian and the video was edited.
If you have ever been in a smaller boat around ships you have to continually “tack” to avoid taking the wake from the side which could capsize you. You cut back and forth with good speed or you’re going swimming.
I’m amazed that the Iranian Coast Guard doesn’t seem to have any weaponry on those boats. The US Coast Guard does. The two officers on board may have small arms, but would have thought that a .50 caliber machine gun would have been appropriate. There are pirates and smugglers operating in the Persian Gulf that these patrol vessels would certainly encounter.
If we had had video of the “Gulf of Tonkin incident” it would have been a travelogue, because the recently released NSA reports show there was no incident in the Gulf of Tonkin. Those of us working in NSA were generally considered party poopers for insisting on actual evidence.
If people weren’t dying this entire administration would be a Monty Python movie, but it has become a vehicle requiring the late Stanley Kubrick’s technique. This is going to make a lot of liberals understand the need for the Second Amendment and a lot of the fringe to go even further around the bend into the land of paranoia.
Yes, John Cole, has seen the light. Real conservatives now understand they have been used and ignored. There was never any compassion or conservatism in the Shrubbery. Ridicule is actually much more effective than rope on these people. In many ways it is much crueler, but they deserve it.
It’s really been blown out of proportion, that’s for sure. Yes, I’m sure we’d confront a Mexican Navy vessel/Cuban vessel…but, but, but, that’s not the point!
I know, OWL. When someone else does to us what we do to them, they are being unreasonable. The exceptualism is nauseating. “Do onto others…” gets forgotten.
there really are two americas: those who do unto others as you would have them do unto you and those who do unto others before they can do unto you.
Hi all, 🙂
Bryan: They apparently missed the point that Mr. Majd was making.
You and I both know it makes no difference if they got the point or not. Facts matter not at all to the majority of these people. Evidence to date leads me to believe that any GOPlover with any honesty or hope of sanity has already jumped onto the ship of sanity and reason (ala John Cole and others). I have NEVER had a problem with their political views, only with their total disregard of truth, reality, and honesty.
Ridicule is actually much more effective than rope on these people.
LOL You are probably right… but… still! 😉 I was peeved. I have been banging my head against the wall of insanity these people have erected for decades really. Many people seem to think all this is a recent phenomenon caused by 9/11. 9/11 was just an excuse these people needed to jump into the public light! At DIO, we had profiles of many of these people which is why I was not surprised by what I saw after 9/11. I tried to warn people, but many were to scared and could only be automatically reactive, others just wanted payback and didn’t care about consequences. The Bush family history makes for interesting reading. Which is why I was totally disgusted by Howard’s love affair with Bushmoron! I became a blogger at a group blog called Loaded Mouth for a couple years until it closed Nov ’06. We were just exhausted, and silly us thought that with the Dem’s win, we were probably not needed as much as we had been (plus we all had some personal ‘life-happens’ reasons for stopping).
I think the hard core pundits and nutters can’t be ridiculed though. They are SO certain of their infallibility and insane rationale’s that you can’t touch them with words at all.
We are never going to alter their delusions, but if you make them the object of ridicule they will never be given a serious hearing again. Their ideas will always be a threat, but that threat is seriously diminished if people laugh when they are mentioned.
If you look around you can see that even the worse offenders of the last 40 years manage to struggle back into the publics good graces if they are viewed as serious people with serious ideas – people like Kissinger.
Think about John Howard. What people will remember is that he lost his constituency to a newsreader – that’s his legacy. 🙂
John who? LMAO 😉
Curious you mention Kissinger. I was discussing that SOB with LadyMin yesterday. People really have no idea how much of the USA’s global problems can be attributed to that nutter! Maybe one day…
Kissinger should never have been allowed to crawl back out from under his rock. With me it’s personal as he was National Security Advisor when I was in and we had to put up with his “grand ideas”.
Nixon and Kissinger were a reason I didn’t stay in and retire from the Air Force. They were impossible to work for and I was way down stream from their office with many layers between us, I get really annoyed when I hear people talking about how “Republicans support the troops”.
I understand completely Bryan.
I saw his handiwork first hand in Cambodia. The number of times (once I discovered his involvement with Pol Pot) that I wish I had him in my scope rather than some guerrilla warlord… Nobody could hate what people such as he did more than I. Millions of innocents were murdered. I still don’t really know how we coped with it all. Two of my team suicided, one there, one 2 years after.
You sound like a very decent human Bryan. I think I would have enjoyed working with you. 🙂 And Americans like you give the rest of the World hope, never underestimate your value. 🙂
Those were “interesting times” as the Chinese say. I wouldn’t want to do it again unless I knew we would do it properly. You have to look ahead to consequences when you knock over that first domino – that’s something that too many Americans in power don’t understand.
Consequences… yes. I often talk about consequences with people. Too many people don’t.
I was trained to evaluate and consider the consequences of my actions. Certainly, that was in tactical situations, and part of the whole *situation awareness* training, but it applies generally just as well, perhaps moreso. I suspect you were trained that way also. Perhaps that is something that really should be taught at an early age in schools all over the World. Wouldn’t that be nice. 🙂
Newton’s third law [for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction] can be applied to covert missions. Often it isn’t what was done, but who did it, that provokes the reaction.
Saddam was a tyrannical SOB, who should have been removed – BUT, he should have been removed by Iraqis with minimum outside assistance as this would provide a uniting force. Having a totally external force remove him does nothing to empower the Iraqis, and, in fact, makes them believe they are weaker than they actually are.
The Soviets often used the Bulgarians to do things that they didn’t want to be caught doing. Everyone used surrogates during the Cold War. We created a surrogate army in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets and then abandoned them when they won. We lost their allegiance and are paying the price. It was predicted by the people in the field, but Washington ignored them. BLOW BACK.
Surrogates. 😀 Very true! Australia have been surrogates for both the British and USA! LOL
I read a statistic somewhere that Aus has been involved in more Wars and Peacekeeping missions than the USA. Might make a list one day and see if that’s true. 🙂
And you are correct about Iraq (or any other sovereign state for that matter). Also about Afghanistan, and you can add a long list of other countries to that.
Australia has been assuming an important role in the Pacific, especially regarding the island nations, so I would guess that it is very possibly true. The US turns isolationist at odd moments and withdraws into itself. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it happen in the near future.
They have no historical perspective in Washington. They don’t learn history, so they certainly don’t learn from it.
During the early 80’s when I was working a desk in Canberra, I got to study a lot of reports about what was happening around the World. It was amazing how often Kissinger’s name popped up, but there was another name also… Cheney. Wherever Kissinger was, it seemed Cheney was nearby. Rumsfeld popped up now and then also. Oh, and Enron, Unocal and the Taliban.
If my foresight was as good as my hindsight, I’d have spent a lot more time studying them. I am certain that Kissinger is still working in the shadows and has a lot to do with Iraq. It has his disastrous fingerprints all over it.
People really need to wake up and look behind the superficial facade of Politics and have a good look at *the way things are done*! I have said many times, Ignorance is NOT bliss!
Oh well… the more things change, the more they remain the same. Yup!
For whatever reason some people seem to believe that their ideas are the only ideas worth considering, so when those ideas fail, often disastrously, they assume that something else was the problem, not their incredibly stupid ideas. As a result the US keeps attempting the same stupid things in the same stupid fashion. Most of the disasters can be traced back to the Dulles brothers, John Foster at State and Allen at the CIA under Eisenhower. Very few Americans recognized that Reagan reverted to the Dulles foreign policy, and it failed again.
Yes, I have seen that often also. I believe it’s either a pathological inability to accept responsibility, or a pathological belief in ones own infallibility. No matter how often they are wrong, it’s always someone else’s fault.
I came to the conclusion early during G.W. Bush’s Presidency that he displayed the characteristics (along with Chaney and others) of an amoral personality.
Part of the work I was trained to do, was to build psychological profiles of *persons of interest*. I am not a psychologist, and have never claimed to be, but certain characteristics become very evident. Usually, once we had a rough profile of a person, we would worked with a specialist Psychologist to gauge our accuracy and adjust or fill in the gaps. We got quite good at it. 🙂
It amuses me now how almost everyone truly wants to believe they are so unique and different to everyone else. The reality is quite different. When one understand patterns and how to follow threads, they become easy to see. This is of course why the GOP have been so successful. They understand this. It’s always been about manipulation and started a long time ago. I think that Americans in particular don’t realise, generally, how easy they are to manipulate. The environment has been carefully manipulated over a long period of time. And it’s much easier to manipulate a very large population. Not all will succumb, but they become the minority. We know that a big lie is often wrapped around a small kernel of truth, and that if a lie is told often enough, it becomes truth. This is one reason torture, especially prolonged torture, it unreliable. It’s only used to get the result the torturers want, and to convince the tortured that a lie is the truth.
It may be a generational thing, that every 10 or 20 years the same failed policies are pulled out and tried again by the “students” of the sponsors of the policies.
FDR was unique in that he would try anything, including a few things that were frankly dictatorial, but if it didn’t work, he would drop it and move on to something else. If you study his administration it wasn’t doctrinaire, it was utilitarian. If it worked, it was good. No other President has ever managed to pull that off. I believe that it was because of the dire straits the US was in when he took office that he was able to get away with it, and he was showman.
The Repubs had been working towards 2000 for decades, building their support network, subverting the media, fashioning the message. They then wasted all that work on a collection of corrupt incompetents and are seeing it collapse. They gather together groups that really didn’t have a lot in common other than to win elections, and now those groups are splintering over their differences.
If you know to look for them the signs have been obvious since Reagan took office. The power brokers assumed they could control the Shrubbery, and they were wrong with effects piling up daily.
Isaac Azimov’s Foundation series was built around the basic concepts of mass control, and sociology is no where as finite as it needs to be, but masses of people have always been easier to control than individuals, because humans are social animals by nature. Mobs do things that the individual members wouldn’t consider.
I can’t solve the problems from my little home on the ‘Net, but I have no intention of ignoring them.
I understand what you mean about it possibly being generational. But this is something that really has been going on for centuries around the World. The Catholic Church is a prime example of mass manipulation over a long period of time, and other religious organizations also. In the USA, you have your home grown *religions* (I call them pseudo-religions) Scientology and the Mormons. (I spent time in Utah. Learned a lot. If you have a lot of Money, and don’t really believe in Christianity, becoming a Mormon is a great idea.) 😉
The primary difference the past century I think, is the emergence of mass media and communications, culminating in the Internet. 🙂 I think the Internet is the GOP’s undoing. They underestimated it and they had little control over it. Until the Internet, the people had no real means of truly global mass communication to fight back, as you do with your blog and so many others are doing also. 🙂
You may only have a ‘little home on the ‘Net’, but it’s an extremely important piece of the whole ‘rebellion’. 🙂 Because you have your audience, and your message is essentially the same as so many other sensible, intelligent, observant bloggers, and that audience reads other blogs with a similar message, and they become convinced to varying degrees. With your background, you are part of a small peer group of bloggers with a unique perspective than can fill in the very important missing pieces, such as about Kissinger etc. 🙂
Imagine where the USA and the World would be today without the Internet!! I for one find that thought horrifying. The Internet has essentially become the medium of the people. This is why the MSM and the MIC and the GOP are desperately trying to control it or destroy it. The MSM is loosing this battle, and perhaps they will loose the war! 😉 We can but hope! 😀
Just call me Kryten the Anarchist! LOL
BTW, I have almost all Azimov’s fictional books, and many non-fiction. He was an amazingly prolific writer! At an interview, he was asked “What would you do if you knew you only had 6 Months to live?” His reply was “Type faster!” LOL
Thanks again! And please keep doing what you do! I know how difficult it is day after day (I have been there), but you are a valuable voice amongst the noise.
Cheers m8! 😀
The mass media definitely makes it easier, and many people miss the implication of the literacy program after the Communist Revolution in Russia. The Party wanted to be certain that the “people” could read its agitprop, so it established schools throughout the country. That was the only real change the vast majority of Russians saw between the Imperial government and the Soviet government – it was still a tiny elite with absolute power over the mass of people.
One of the factors in the fall of the Soviet Union was samizdat [самиздат] the “self published” works of dissidents, educated in those schools. The ‘Net is a faster version of self-publishing with a much wider potential audience than the hand-typed carbon copies of Bulgakov, Pasternak, or Solzhenitsyn. The blogs can be traced back to the pamphleteers of 18th and 19th centuries. Outside of government control, and annoying the establishment has a long and occasionally proud history.
Ah yes! 🙂 Samizdat… I had to research Samizdat some years ago. It was a fascinating study! It started so simply with Poetry reading in Moscow that became popular with the ‘intelligentsia”. The Gov tried to stamp it out in the early 60’s, but the hunger was established by then and it was too late to eradicate. Like the US Prohibition (the 18th Amendment) of the early 1920’s & 30’s, all it did was increase the publics appetite for it and drove it underground. Several arrests were made including Kuznetsov & Ginzburg. Some, such as Solzhenitsyn were more careful and to well known globally to arrest then. It happened in other countries during the 60 also. After Ayatollah Khomeini was exiled from Iran, his sermons were smuggled in on tapes for example. 🙂
Also, like Prohibition, the roots of the Samizdat movement began much earlier. Prohibition was essentially begun by the Methodists in the mid-19th Century, then driven later by the temperance movement.
I actually found a website when looking for some free eBooks online called Samizdat. LOL
The B&R Samizdat Express
Isn’t the Internet amazing?! Where was it when I was a Uni student! *sigh* LOL