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MULLDE102f



Joined: 15 Jun 1997
Posts: 131

PostPosted: Thu Sep 18, 2014 3:39 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Isobars wrote: "even I have a life outside iWindsurf"

Not that any of us can tell.....

isobars:
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pueno



Joined: 03 Mar 2007
Posts: 2807

PostPosted: Thu Sep 18, 2014 5:02 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

MULLDE102f wrote:
Isobars wrote: "even I have a life outside iWindsurf"

Not that any of us can tell.....

Or care.....
.
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uwindsurf



Joined: 18 Aug 2012
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PostPosted: Thu Sep 18, 2014 6:23 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Who?
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boggsman1



Joined: 24 Jun 2002
Posts: 9118
Location: at a computer

PostPosted: Thu Sep 18, 2014 6:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I know mr Gybe to be a man of great integrity, and I doubt he will frequent the pages anytime soon now that he's being defended by the anti Christ of web gibberish.
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17743
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Thu Sep 18, 2014 6:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

For giggles, check out Isobars getting into it with his Gorge-mates on this thread: http://www.iwindsurf.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=28981&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

When you are empathy challenged...
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17743
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Fri Sep 19, 2014 11:08 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I heard Conn Hallinan speak last night. I don't buy it all, but I do believe that our critical thinking is enhanced by listening to different viewpoints, not just the echo chamber. Check it out:

http://peacenews.org/2014/09/18/foreign-policy-lord-palmerston-appendectomies-hallinan-dispatches-edge/
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17743
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Sun Sep 21, 2014 12:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Perhaps it is a good idea and post in the war thread commentary about war.

For whatever reasons, I am grateful that Obama engaged Congress formally. There is authorization for military activity in Syria as well as Iraq, even if it falls well short of a declaration of war, or any effort to establish metrics of success, or even progress. And I think we should ignore the ranting of those who blame this on religious extremism that exists only in those of a Muslim faith--old men will always find reasons to send young men to die.

What I am disappointed with, again, is the quality of the debate. This seems to be a direct result of the endless campaign, and lazy journalism. The question that remains in my mind, since 9/11, is do we have a sustainable strategy that reduces the threat of terrorism, or an approach that increases the number of terrorists exponentially while we kill some. But it is folly to ignore the biases and financial interests of those beating the war drums--even if they contribute massively to political campaigns. Here is an interesting article from the not-yet published Nation:

Quote:
Who’s Paying the Pro-War Pundits?
Talking heads like former General Jack Keane are all over the news media fanning fears of IS. Shouldn’t the public know about their links to Pentagon contractors?

Lee Fang September 16, 2014 | This article appeared in the October 6, 2014 edition of The Nation.
If you read enough news and watch enough cable television about the threat of the Islamic State, the radical Sunni Muslim militia group better known simply as IS, you will inevitably encounter a parade of retired generals demanding an increased US military presence in the region. They will say that our government should deploy, as retired General Anthony Zinni demanded, up to 10,000 American boots on the ground to battle IS. Or as in retired General Jack Keane’s case, they will make more vague demands, such as for “offensive” air strikes and the deployment of more military advisers to the region.

But what you won’t learn from media coverage of IS is that many of these former Pentagon officials have skin in the game as paid directors and advisers to some of the largest military contractors in the world. Ramping up America’s military presence in Iraq and directly entering the war in Syria, along with greater military spending more broadly, is a debatable solution to a complex political and sectarian conflict. But those goals do unquestionably benefit one player in this saga: America’s defense industry.

Keane is a great example of this phenomenon. His think tank, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), which he oversees along with neoconservative partisans Liz Cheney and William Kristol, has provided the data on IS used for multiple stories by The New York Times, the BBC and other leading outlets.
Keane has appeared on Fox News at least nine times over the last two months to promote the idea that the best way to stop IS is through military action—in particular, through air strikes deep into IS-held territory. In one of the only congressional hearings about IS over the summer, Keane was there to testify and call for more American military engagement. On Wednesday evening, Keane declared President Obama’s speech on defeating IS insufficient, arguing that a bolder strategy is necessary. “I truly believe we need to put special operation forces in there,” he told host Megyn Kelly.

Left unsaid during his media appearances (and left unmentioned on his congressional witness disclosure form) are Keane’s other gigs: as special adviser to Academi, the contractor formerly known as Blackwater; as a board member to tank and aircraft manufacturer General Dynamics; a “venture partner” to SCP Partners, an investment firm that partners with defense contractors, including XVionics, an “operations management decision support system” company used in Air Force drone training; and as president of his own consulting firm, GSI LLC.

To portray Keane as simply a think tank leader and a former military official, as the media have done, obscures a fairly lucrative career in the contracting world. For the General Dynamics role alone, Keane has been paid a six-figure salary in cash and stock options since he joined the firm in 2004; last year, General Dynamics paid him $258,006.

Keane did not immediately return a call requesting comment for this article.

Disclosure would also help the public weigh Keane’s policy advocacy. For instance, in his August 24 opinion column for The Wall Street Journal, in which he was bylined only as a retired general and the chairman of ISW, Keane wrote that “the time has come to confront the government of Qatar, which funds and arms IS and other Islamist terrorist groups such as Hamas.” While media reports have linked fundraisers for IS with individuals operating in Qatar (though not the government), the same could be said about Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, where many of the major donors of IS reportedly reside. Why did Keane single out Qatar and ignore Saudi Arabia and Kuwait? Is it because his company, Academi, has been a major business partner to the United Arab Emirates, Qatar’s primary rival in the region?

Other examples abound.



If you poke around a little bit, assuming that perhaps your relatives and oil executive's views do not provide all of the insight you need into Middle East politics that might be educational, you find some interesting things. First, funding for ISIS comes, in substantial part, from American allies.

Quote:
The extremist group that is threatening the existence of the Iraqi state was built and grown for years with the help of elite donors from American supposed allies in the Persian Gulf region. There, the threat of Iran, Assad, and the Sunni-Shiite sectarian war trumps the U.S. goal of stability and moderation in the region.

It’s an ironic twist, especially for donors in Kuwait (who, to be fair, back a wide variety of militias). ISIS has aligned itself with remnants of the Baathist regime once led by Saddam Hussein. Back in 1990, the U.S. attacked Iraq in order to liberate Kuwait from Hussein’s clutches. Now Kuwait is helping the rise of his successors.

As ISIS takes over town after town in Iraq, they are acquiring money and supplies including American made vehicles, arms, and ammunition. The group reportedly scored $430 million this week when they looted the main bank in Mosul. They reportedly now have a stream of steady income sources, including from selling oil in the Northern Syrian regions they control, sometimes directly to the Assad regime.

But in the years they were getting started, a key component of ISIS’s support came from wealthy individuals in the Arab Gulf States of Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Sometimes the support came with the tacit nod of approval from those regimes; often, it took advantage of poor money laundering protections in those states, according to officials, experts, and leaders of the Syrian opposition, which is fighting ISIS as well as the regime.

“Everybody knows the money is going through Kuwait and that it’s coming from the Arab Gulf,” said Andrew Tabler, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Kuwait’s banking system and its money changers have long been a huge problem because they are a major conduit for money to extremist groups in Syria and now Iraq.”


Second, for a period of time, ISIS refrained from attacking government targets in Syria, allowing, allowing Assad to focus his military efforts on the more moderate opposition. http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2014/0616/Why-ISIS-gains-in-Iraq-are-reshaping-Syrian-regime-s-war-strategy-video

To be sure, I am particularly skeptical of arguments by oil executives, retired or not, who have financial interests that bias their views. See for example this article:


Quote:
But with Iraq's oil output, if not its national integrity, apparently still intact, global oil markets are treading water after pushing crude prices up to nine-month highs late last week.
The real problem posed by the offensive unleashed by the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) is not what happens to Iraqi oil production this week, but whether OPEC's second-biggest producer can meet outsized production-growth expectations for the rest of the decade. If it can't, energy analysts say, the world's inexorable thirst for oil could soon collide with limited growth in supply, leading to higher prices and lower economic growth in the United States and around the world.
Iraqi forces in Baghdad braced for the possible arrival of ISIS fighters on Tuesday, June 17, and the southward spread of violent insurgents forced the closure of Iraq's biggest oil refinery and the evacuation of foreign personnel working there. The shutdown and evacuation of the Baiji refinery -- prompted by fears of ISIS mortar attacks -- won't directly affect Iraqi oil output, but it does threaten domestic supplies of refined petroleum products.
So far, ISIS militants have not threatened Iraq's giant oil fields; most of those are farther south, and oil exports are still flowing out of the country through ports far from ISIS-held territories in the north.
The relative security prevailing in the south, where exports could hit near-record levels of 2.8 million barrels a day next month, is keeping a lid on oil prices. Crude trading in New York and London held steady at about $106 and $113 a barrel, respectively, or roughly 3 percent higher than before the ISIS march began.


Of course, we will get the predictable snarky attacks by those who believe (without any need for evidence) that their experience in the oil industry and charity efforts in Africa immunize them from listening to any alternative viewpoints.
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17743
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Sun Sep 21, 2014 4:31 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Even better:

Quote:
Guest commentary: ISIS is an ideology and war will not defeat it
By Abraham H. Miller, guest commentary © 2014 Bay Area News Group
POSTED: 09/20/2014 04:00:00 PM PDT0 COMMENTS

President Barack Obama will not defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. He can temporarily degrade their military capability. He can force them to retreat and go into hiding.

Even the most hawkish battle plan of hitting ISIS from both north and south with boots on the ground and expanding the air war will not conquer it. It will become like the once-outlawed Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, operating in secret, waiting patiently to resurface.

Obama made the perfunctory and the politically-correct disclaimer that ISIS is not about Islam. ISIS is about Islam. It is not our neighbors' Islam. It is not the Islam that most Muslims practice. ISIS is the outgrowth of some spiritual need that has taken root in parts of the Islamic world.

After the beheadings, Americans see ISIS as an abomination. The public now supports the war.

Americans, however, are an impatient people. They want their wars short and painless, antiseptic, without casualties, and without the brutalities war inevitably produces. They want their war to be like a war in a movie, to last 190 psychological minutes and for the good guys to do no wrong.

In the Middle East, time is not expected to produce an imminent result. There is a golden past to be emulated and re-embraced in word and deed. There are sacrifices to be made in the name of that belief. If need be, generations must be forfeited, but one must have time to resurrect the golden age.So ISIS will wait. Just as the Taliban waited. There will be pictures of collateral damage. There will be pictures of harsh interrogations. There will be echoes from the peace and justice crowd that it is all our fault. It is our foreign policy, our undeserved success, our arrogance, or some other flaw that justifies people hating us. The war will drag on. It will become unpopular. People will forget the beheadings, the brutalities, and the threats.

As Obama finds it expedient to enter this war with enough force to gain some traction in the forthcoming congressional elections, other politicians will later find it equally expedient to leave.

ISIS knows this. We never lost a battle in Vietnam. Tet wiped out the Viet Cong, incapacitating it forever as a fighting force, but we lost the war. As North Vietnamese diplomat Le Duc Tho told Henry Kissinger, his people's capacity to die exceeded America's capacity to kill them. He was right.

The war is already lost. Obama's grand scheme is based on a coalition, but do the Sunnis fear ISIS or Iran?

The irony of this war is that while America bombs ISIS from above, Shi'ia militia that had been busy killing Americans in Iraq, are now busy fighting ISIS on the ground. Syrian strongman Bashir Assad can only cheer America bombing his mortal enemy, an enemy paid for and supplied by the Sunni oil sheikdoms who allegedly will train the "moderate" militias to destroy the opposition to Iran.

There will be training, but only the Arabs will be able to do the appropriate vetting. And if we learned anything from Charlie Wilson's War in Afghanistan, it was the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence that did the vetting and shipped the stinger missiles to their proxy, the Taliban. The Pakistanis created the Taliban with our weapons, under our nose.

But there is no longer anything significant left of the moderate militias. They got caught between ISIS and the Syrian Army. The moderate militias only exist in strength on Barack Obama's TelePrompTer. There is nothing to be vetted.

A competing ideology will defeat ISIS, but it will not be one produced by infidels. ISIS is a product of the fundamentalism sweeping through the Islamic world, incited, in part, and paid for by our Arab coalition partners. We now ask them to destroy the very thing they helped create.

We "lost" Vietnam because we had no hero of the stature of Ho Chi Minh and no ideology as easily disseminated as communism was to land-hungry peasants. The long-run solution to ISIS and groups like it will have to be found in Islam. You cannot fight a virulent ideology without a counter ideology. You can't fight a religious ideology by denying its existence. And we can win battles, but we will not win this war, for truly their capacity to die far exceeds our capacity to kill them.

Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati. He has lived and worked in the Middle East and is a contributing writer to the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. He lives in Walnut Creek.
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17743
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Sun Sep 21, 2014 7:16 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Life outside windsurfing? No wonder Isobars wants to carry a gun. Here is one of his calm comments from the windsurfing, non-political side of the aisle:

Quote:
Go to his vehicle. Look on top of his rear tire or inside his bumper. Open his car, eat his lunch, and strangle his dog. Shit on the driver's seat, put a cherry bomb in the shit, and light it. Send his car over the embankment onto the river bed. Then gather some fellow WSers and put him in the hospital when he comes ashore ... if he can come ashore at all despite the rain of big rocks pelting him every time he gets in range. He'll be an easy target whether climbing the stairs or the embankment beside them. Let him crawl to the nearest phone booth -- I think there's still one outside Powell's Book Store -- and call an ambulance. Meanwhile, phone his wife and mother and inform them that if his legs can be saved and he ever does anything like that again, they won't see him again.

At that point I'd call it equal and give him one more chance to step from the primordial ooze into the human race.

OTOH, if his name is Benito (or Mark), he's had all the chances he deserves.


I vote to give him the biggest gun he can carry and send him to Syria--on a diplomatic mission!
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