Showing posts with label jihadi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label jihadi. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

It's the Village that Counts, not the Pitch





 It's the Village that Counts, not the Pitch



Benito Mussolini




The curse of the Enlightenment on Western values is that there is something called reason, rationality, and logic which govern action.   If an argument is not reasonable, irrational or illogical, it is invalid, and inapplicable.  Its underlying assumption is that everything is reducible into measurable, relevant, consistent and accurate labels for reality, that can be consistently added, subtracted, contrasted, combined, allocated, dispersed, and/or measured to good use.   

Descartes didn’t know ducks. The Irrationality of Reason





It is concentrated into what is called, mental as in conscious, subconscious, and unconscious manipulations in a lump of nerves called the brain (cerebral cortex).  Were that true, decapitation would be an irritation.  Were that true, an erection would be irrelevant, and the flu clueless.  One cannot have a head without a tail.  And that includes the Autonomic Nervous as an example of one of many biological systems networked to keep us alive and kicking.




Or the need for “Stifficade”:

The central function in all life is to survive, day to day, and generation to generation.  Breed and Feed, Dinner and a Date, Laid and Paid, and to ensure that, species develop Roles, Rules and Tools to make that happen.  Failure is starvation or extinction.

And that requires an audience of a critical mass of male and females who breed a critical mass of children to survive to puberty.  And that’s a family, and a village of families who have Roles, Rules and Tools to survive.  From the outside, the village is the audience. 
The Eternal Drama between Victim, Rescuer and Prosecutor

And some villages aren’t listening, some have heard it all, and others soak it up like a Magical Elixir (Beer).  This we have in terrorism, radical polarization, and drug addiction. Depending how the Rules and Tools serve the Roles related to Survival (Village wise).
Rules applicable to all forms of life, coded in culture and DNA.
 The core of the Trump audience is made of the inheritors of the Scot Irish driven from Scotland to Ireland to Appalachia because they didn’t listen to the arrogant, erudite, socially elite, and utterly corrupt.  The more erudite, arrogant, and elitist the arguments are, the more corrupt they must be.

17th Century Version of the MBA


And some villages, like families are dysfunctional and/or broken into competing parts.  The street gang, the drug den, high schools, corporations, and political parties are part family, part village, and a part of something else.  The more arrogant, erudite, and elitist the arguments be, the battered and beaten shoot back at. 



Selling soap to the Unwashed is problematic.  Selling the Oxymoronic eventually reaches Cognitive Dissonance, and every once in a while, Rage.  Selling the notion that some people are more equal than others became normalized about 1984. Orwell is crying.  The village is dying.



The Pitchfork and Torches are marching.  

ISIS

OBTW - Watch the body language which language is far more effective than words.

Mussolini

Trump












Wednesday, July 6, 2016

Pork, Fake Pork, Hogwash and the Politically Powerful


Parole Officer on Earth in Elysium

The purpose of life is to live, for the individual and the family.  That depends upon Feeding and Breeding, neither of which is much good without bringing home the bacon as in Pork. 
Pork is some concrete benefit to the voter’s district, job, family, and community.  Pork is honest, something useful in the cultural survivability strategy from Food & Family by Roles to Nurture and Protect, in accordance with Rules regarding Social Status and Tools to make it happen, leading back to dinner and a date, feeding and breeding, or not.  There is a direct link between survival and the pork.  Pork is honest.  The question is, always, whose pork is this? And where’s the Pork?
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Absent real pork, the resources of the policy, tribe, or chamber of commerce eventually cannot sustain the numbers and die off, or dissipate.  It takes, a critical mass, not the uniform efforts of the polity to sustain the numbers.  The Simba and the Stallion have exclusive fornication rights in their pride or herd. The lone stallion of legend is an outsider.  Humans provide an alternate method of gaining political dominance, food, and sex.

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The Roles, Rules and Tools:
The biologically driven roles of survival goes to the XX/XY exchange of precious bodily fluids giving rise to the Children who must be Nurtured and Protected.  Psychologically this works out to three favorite roles played by people both sick and healthy, that of Rescuing and Protecting the Victim.  People get off playing one or more of these roles, regardless of if Pork is involved.  All is necessary to activate the trilogy is the appearance or creation of the Villain (real, fake, hogwash) in order to activate the fears and ambitions of the Victim, Rescuer, and/or Protector.

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Precious body fluids…Dr Stranglove.

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From Dr Strangelove

Villains, in fact, are someone else’s trilogy of nurture and protect their young.  Except we invoke nasty motives to activate the survival instincts of the innocent. 
And Jodie Foster in Elysium as Secretary of Defense, “Do you have children?”

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From the movie "Elysium" with Matt Damon and Jodie Foster

Pork Technical definitions:

2.       Hogwash favors someone else’s Pork.  Anti-fracking, drilling and oil exploration favors Russian E&P. 

3.       Fake Pork denies Pork for others, without a pork payback.  Anti-immigration policies deny pork to immigrants without pork for the locals.  It is a zero-sum game in which someone gains if someone else loses.  Like at the dinner table. 

4.       Make believe pork is Fake Pork without a real winner or loser.  No food, no dinner table.  The present convulsions of the Islamacate* world of Islamdom in violent extremism is fake pork, as is most of the Western response.  Oil is Pork.

DNA, CULTURE and SURVIVAL

* All of these are normal reactions in the quest to nurture and protect the family and community.  In the Animal Kingdom, the selection and control of what female gets the Y (XY) chromosome from the male to enhance the survivability of the female’s progeny.  The males’ priority protective strategy of his Y goes to denial of any other’s Y into his harem.  

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In-breeding and Adultery
Adultery is nature’s way to prevent in-breeding with both male and female seeking to enrich the blood line.  Fake Pork is the other males and female need to prevent such cross breeding which may alter the balance of power in the tribe.  Fake Pork and Hogwash have important roles in the Psychological Role, Sociological Rules, and Technological Tools to make up the survival culture of the polity, tribe, family or battalion.  Thus the biological basis for troubling times, stresses, and bloody war is a necessary part of preventing in-breeding. And for breeding healthy offspring. 

Stamp Collecting in Drama
At present, the public mind is consumed with the introduction of a New Villain to replace the Red Menace, and that is “Islamic Extremism”.  The Red menace was set on stealing the Pork and running the polity, while Islamic Extremism is merely to create the illusion that the Pork will walk away.  The biggest fool in this tragedy is the Islamic extremist or terrorist is that there is no pork in the equation for the Umma. Only fake pork and hogwash.

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Consider the role of the protection of XX/XY swap of precious bodily fluids in Islamdom in the veil and robes found in many Islamicate* societies is a collective women’s fake pork effort to keep out the competition.  Or maybe an elaborate hogwash.

*ISLAMICATE AND ISLAMDOM
*Islamacate is the term used by Daniel Pipes to distinguish between a society that in part runs on Islamic rules and regulations, and in part with other influences to mollify and adapt where Islam lacks the necessary flexibility and profit.
The Qur'an and the Hadith Reports nowhere prescribe mosque decorations or attitudes toward rulers, yet these did typically resemble each other across Islamdom. Lacking a term for what is characteristic of the Muslim experience but not required by the Islamic faith or law, Marshall G. S. Hodgson coined the term "Islamicate."
At the time of this writing there is a mass movement underway to keep the US free of the Sharia XY chromosome as if by insidious inclusion, the republic would convert to Islam, instead of the default Protestant mindset.  This Protestant mindset, so closely tied to the greatness of America, has always felt threatened by foreign religious XY or XX chromosomes such as Catholicism. It wasn’t until a Soviet sniper sainted JFK with a bullet that the furor over Papist influence in America dissipated.
That’s how serious it gets,

Hogwash, Washing Someone Else’s Pork
By way of contrast, Hogwash is washing someone else’s pork which leverages the roles of rescuer, victim, protector vs villainy, even when there is no pork benefit from the Hogwash.   Sometimes hogwash is often bullshit. 
 
Communist Activists in Action
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By way of example in the current political imbroglio starting with the Democrats (liberals, progressives) with their demands for student loan deferments, schooling and medical care for the less fortunate constitute pork for the less fortunate, but hogwash for the affluent advocates seeking to play rescuer and protector to the stupid and unwashed. 

The latter Democratic Hogwash campaigns against fracking, offshore drilling, nuclear power and the Polar Ice Melt are camouflage for someone else’s pork, which is to say the Russian Energy and Defense Industries.  Long standing linkages back to the days of the Comintern of the Thirties theoretically in line with Communist World Conquest, but now are acting in the corporate interests of Gasprom, Lukoil and  Uralvagonzavod. 

The flap over depleted uranium rounds in Leftish Academia after Russian built tanks were shredded by uranium depleted rounds from relatively small cannon. 

Inverse Attribution.
What simplifies the confusion is the application of the Law of the Inverse Attribution Reflex (LIAR). Inverse Attribution (Bragging & Blaming).
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Accusations by the Left of Corporate Greed, Wall Street Avarice and Capitalist Excess fall under the category of inverse attribution (blaming with one’s strongest vice) as greed, avarice and excess are inherent in the offensive nature of the defense of pork.   Likewise, the Right’s accusation of the Liberal’s Class Warfare, is an example of the Right’s War against the “welfare cheat” and losers, and in favor of the protection of wealthy welfare (tax breaks, contracts, etc).

GREAT AMERICA
Before there was a Buchanan, or a Trump, there were the isolationists and the elite culminating in WW 2 and the Cold War.  Well illustrated in the movie, the Good Shepherd

As Matt Damon put in in The Good Shepherd “The rest of you just visiting” in response to Joe Pesci’s comment concerning what Jews, Blacks, Catholics, and Italians had in their cultures, asking what did “youse guys have”

“The United States of America.  The rest of you are just visiting”
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Matt Damon in the Good Shepherd


 Not long after “Mother” left the agency, the collective repression and control of the normal irrepressible American spirit, failed and the demons of chaos, revolution, and psychedelic tie died non conformity were let slip resulting in the first major defeat of US forces in war.  That was the Pork of the Sixties and Seventies, hogwash and fake pork. 

Great music, terrible clothes, and the counter counter-revolutionary restriction of the law enforcement capabilities of the nation were trimmed to protect future treasonous endeavors of the pro-Soviet kind.   Communism has now morphed into Russian imperial capitalism and the Celestial Empire of China have been restored to what was before the age of Steam powered ships. 

Inversely Constitutional
The Conservative side  of the political scramble this current election cycle is heavy into hogwash with links to pork not so clear.  Save to sanctify in protect the top one percent. Certain themes made by alleged Conservative punditry, if taken seriously, would call for the violent overthrow of the Constitution to be replaced by a designated dictator subject of back room manipulation.   These are some of the popular arguments:

1.       Courts are supposed to interpret the law, not make it. Since the Anglo-American legal and political systems are based on precedent, case law, and the Common Law which cases go back before the Magna Carta.  The term is “stare decisis”, let the decision stand, all cases with same facts and law should be treated the same. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law  

2.       Judicial Review is not in the Constitution despite Case Law going back to Marbury vs Madison in 1803.  Statutory law generally over rides case law except when the case law involves a Constitutional precedent such as due process of law, or when the law is arbitrary and capricious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison

3.       The Founders were Demi-Gods whose godly pronouncements have been blasphemed by all Amendments after the 12th (The loser in Presidential Elections would not be VP). In fact, the Founders were brilliant and practical men who had just defeated one of the largest empires in the world, and knew the tragic history of abuses and misuses of political power as evidenced during the course of English history, particularly from the Tudors to the Stuarts with the English Civil Wars in between.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War

4.       Congress is irremediably corrupt, and should be purged of the politically correct. The essence of a republican form of government (guaranteed in the Constitution) is a legislature.  Anglo-American political systems are built around protecting the legislative function, Federal and State. This goes back to Queen Elizabeth’s barring the bishops during consideration of the Book of Common Prayer, and Cromwell’s purge of Parliament in 1648.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride%27s_Purge

5.       The poor, displaced and unfortunate are a clear and present danger to the successful “doers”.  Denial of basic services is in the best interests of keeping the poor in their places. As in the past, some frustrated lawyer will rise up and arouse the “masses” as they ineptly describe those down on their luck.  

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Marianne, symbol of French Liberty



What is difficult in the case of Conservative Right Wing propaganda is the nature of the Pork of interest to the Right.   In part, the war over Pork is treated as a zero sum game, someone else’s loss is automatically your gain.  It is difficult, however, to see how a collapse of civil and criminal law benefits the Conservative base.  In short, the four points of how to do a coup should not be taken seriously, as such a coup would destroy the one percent even if the downtrodden stayed in their place.

Geography
The Geography Japan, Britain, and the US have idyllic geographical circumstances, the rest of the world usually have borders that can be crossed in force.  Present technology does not provide anyone else the avenues of approach to the US and its key terrain to present a credible invasion threat.

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 Regardless of any terrain or population objective, the defense of the US is defined in law as the defense of the Constitution which can be revised only by three quarters of the State legislatures concurring.  This the geographic control of all but thirteen states (one quarter), frustrates any attempt domestic or foreign to overthrow the United States.

Not long ago, we thought that Global Thermonuclear Warfare was an existential threat to the US.  As such the radioactive remains of our enemies would still have to negotiate the formidable geography of the US.     A rule of thumb based on the last full mobilization of the US in WW2 is that ten percent of the total population wing up in uniform and another forty percent are in defense production.  Right now that would 32,000,000 in uniform using the same factors.  And doable in four years.

The important pork is here, with additional pork necessary to sustain our pork by way of trade. Hence the defense of the nation involves pork export and import capabilities by sea and air, plus whatever land forces are necessary overseas to hold and defend the necessary facilities and locations.  

The Gini Index - Who’s Got the Pork?

The Gini Index measures income inequalities with a simple set of numbers and graphs.  It comes as no big surprise that income inequalities have skyrocketed in the last few decades.  Of revolutionary importance, is the poor people don’t revolt, it is the recently disposed that do.  This was the case of the French after Louis XVI impoverished the nation by supporting the US revolution, plus the failure of the wheat crops.  And in Russia during WW 1, the Russians had been improving their economy after the fashion of Western Europe and the US, but it failed due to incompetent leadership, resulted in more incompetence under the Bolsheviks who denounced free markets and human ingenuity. 

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Where’s the Pork?
People, Pork and Geography

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Monday, April 18, 2016

ISIS - THE NAZI STATE


ISIS – THE NAZI STATE
SS Division Handshar - Bosnian SS

The ideological underpinnings of ISIS came from WW 2 resistance against Britain and France with the support of Nazi Germany and later Stalin of the Soviet Union.  The fusion of Arab nationalism plus bits and pieces of Arab Socialism aka National Socialism took shape in the Baath Party which held power in Iraq and had been influential in other Arab states.  Nasser and Sadat were both German agents in the period before El Alamein to time the Egyptian Army’s revolt from garrison against the British.

 The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin Al Husseini was a Nazi who raised Bosnian and Arabs SS units.

Fig 1
The pattern of total submission to ISIS version of Islam and the execution of all others is a purely Western notion, the worst examples being the Holocaust and Stalin’s purges.
The default manner of dealing with minorities ethnic groups by Islam from the time of the Rashidun Caliphs, through the Ottoman Sultans was flexible and accommodating of various groups’ values closest to family, village and tribe. 


Fig 2
Proof of the matter is the fate of minorities in Iraq and Syria who have survived the entire period of Muslim rule, and some go back before the Israelites.  The Yazidun, for example go back before Zoroastrianism.   Now for the first time in all that time, they are being butchered like the Nazi Death Squads was loose. 
Under the Ottomans, minorities were ruled in a flexible and conciliatory mode, known as the Millet System. 

“In the heterogeneous Ottoman Empire (c. 1300–1923), a millet was an autonomous self-governing religious community, each organized under its own laws and headed by a religious leader, who was responsible to the central government for the fulfillment of millet responsibilities and duties, particularly those of paying taxes and maintaining internal security. In addition, each millet assumed responsibility for social and administrative functions not provided by the state, conducting affairs through a communal council (meclisimillî) without intervention from outside. From 1856 on, a series of imperial reform edicts introduced secular law codes for all citizens, and much of the millets’ administrative autonomy was lost.”
Encyclopedia Britannica
 
Massacre at Sinjar
Fig 3
The early Muslim empires from the Rashidun Caliphs, Umayad, Abbasid, Seljuk, Fatimid and Ottomans offered the conquered a simple choice, of minding their own business plus tax, or converting with a tax break.  The loss of revenue from those converted then, as now, operated as an incentive to keep the peace. 

Otherwise, Islam would have been forced back into the desert instead of fostering a higher degree of tolerance for minorities than the Europe until after the French Revolution allowed Jews to be treated as mensch.  Jews were driven out of Spain and found home in the Ottoman Empire.  Jews and other minority figures could rise to positions of wealth and power, by playing according to the rules.
While many can argue about script and dogma, the treatment of minorities was practical, pragmatic, and profitable. Consequently the arguments used by ISIS to massacre those who Islam has protect for over a thousand years, are insults to the Caliphates they purport to represent. 

It should be remembered that Iraq revolted against the British with Nazi assistance (that didn’t amount to much).   Saddam Hussein’s surrogate father, his maternal uncle Kairallah, had fought in the 1941 uprising against Britain, and suffered thereafter because of it.  The Ba’th (Arab National Socialist) party was nationalist not religious, and subsequent use of religion since 9-11 is convenient propaganda for Saddam’s humiliated legions. 


Fig 4
Saddam’s butchery to his own people are legend, and the tradition continues with ISIS. 
Suffer the Children,


Fig 6

Gordon S Fowkes, LTC USA RET

Saturday, September 20, 2014

Stabilization and Destabilization Operations, a Continuum.

Stabilization and Destabilization Operations, a Continuum.

The Monsterization (demonization) of a Foe assumes that said Foe has no environmentally sound strategy for the survival of their people.  All living things, including the St Augustine grass that wants to hide in the flower bed, have a strategy for survival.  The core of that survival is day to day, and generation to generation. 

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Pashtunwali 

All behaviors are directed at that goal (feed and breed).  Each species, faith, culture, group, and combat unit play specific Roles in the competition for feeding and breeding.  There are heroes and villains, some imaginary, some not.  The competition is played out according to a set of Rules (social status and the relation to the physical world).  In order to succeed in the Roles, in accordance with the Rules, Tools are used.  Tools normally are extensions of the body, like rifles, pistols, and the Tango.

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Russian Destabilization-Stabilization Conquest of Crimea

Given the horrific expense of combat formations in fuel and ammunition, which expenditures damage those parts of the survival strategy as to invoke strong counter measures like IED's, Kamikaze, Banzai, and King Tigers.

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Combat Service Support of Firepower

  
The principle problematic group in this fray are the Arabs who have just returned from a 900 year occupation by the Turks.  They had learned how to resist but not how to rule, and rule they want in accordance with their survival strategy.  The more we enhance their abilities to rule in accordance with their survival strategies, the more likely we are to defeat the counterproductive strategies of a bastardized and murderous blasphemy called ISIS.

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Two Sides to Stab Ops

This requires a revision in US doctrine that does not segregate Stability Operations from Defense and Offense as it tends to be.  That means that there are Offensive Stability Operations that foment strategies that are both counterproductive for the malevolent and supportive of a positive adjustment in the Survival Strategies of the population, their culture and governance.



All the graphs and charts are already published, a few have to be expanded.

Sunday, March 31, 2013

REMFCOM, FUBAR, and Failure


Few can criticize the shortfalls of a decade of blood, sweat and tears on the conduct of operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and (CLASSIFIED) of the combat efficiency and effectiveness of the troops on the ground, or in the just over.  That which was accomplished was done in the face of serious efforts by REMFCOM (Pentagon) most particularly by the Mufti Cabal aka SES aka Senior Executive Service. 


Those in uniform in the Pentagon are transients as are the appointed.  The efforts to emasculate the chain of command, from flags to boots follows a clearly identifiable trail over twenty years long.  No one other than the Permanent Party (SES) has the longevity to pursue a single minded effort to neuter our armed forces in order to control the troops through personnel mismanagement or control the procurement process without regard to the directions that develop in the field.





Criticism of the actions of any establishment from someone outside that establishment either entrenches justifications for that action or does a complete 180.  This happened Immediately after the Fall of Saigon, any doctrine, hardware, or type units having justified it's existence of Stability Operations were wiped clean.




Aviation and Special Forces were able to re enter the arena after showing relevance of Fulda and of certain Caribbean adventure.




In rebuilding the Army post Vietnam which also included the Mobilization matrix that Jimmy Carter kicked off. The Congress, exercising it's specified powers over military doctrine and organization made the requirement that reserve and Guard units must have a valid combat contingency plan.   The plan created wartime alignments between specific contingencies and the units designated to carry them out.  This was known as the Capstone Alignment of units and a Capstone mission which by law and regulation all units regardless of component had to adhere to. 



Some units had more than one.  The 49th Lone Star Armor Division had a III Corps contingency mission with NORTHAG, the NATO command that covered the North German plain.  I commanded a MI Bn (CEWI type) aligned with the 49th.  All my training plans had to show a clear alignment with operations and plans of those in my Capstone mission.  The 49th also had a mission in the defense of Japan and flew to Japan to participate in the annual Yama Sakura exercise with the Japanese SDF.


The existence of the Capstone program had a downside, it cut the Flag Ranks in the administrative garrison establishment out of determining which way units were to jump.  Fifth US Army and the 90th ARCOM  then in San Antonio worked overtime to wreck the linkage between unit commander and the Capstone mission.


Desert Storm showed REMFCOM (Pentagon) that Weekend Warriors not only could fight, but often better than the Full Time amateurs, particularly in Artillery and Aviation. This was always the case since the airplane and the cannon were invented. This competence in combat posed a Clear and Present Danger to REMFCOM control of the definition of war and of promotion timing and opportunity of AC Field Grades.


In between the Iraq Wars, a group of hacks masquerading as a doctrine research element created a fake doctrine called "Transformation" which restored the Pentomic Battle Group (disbanded under JFK) but with the addition of field grade command positions that the Battle Group took away.  The "Modular" Brigades were identical with no regard to METT-Tc.  The field grades missing from the Battle Group were restored with mini-battalions, but most importantly, the two O-6 Colonel command slots that were dropped from the Pentomic division when the three brigade organization of the ROAD division was adopted.


The move to Kuwait and the invasion of Iraq was done with the ROAD MTOE, but as soon as possible  Transformation was instigated but with no notion or concept by REMFCOM (Pentagon) of logistics and fires.  The organization of fires in Continental, Union, Confederate, and Armies of the United States was top of the World Class ranking.  American logistics were the best since the Romans,  Both had to go.


Artillery is never sub optimized, fire support is centrally coordinated with the priority of fires and ammunition supply rate.  Transformation diluted firepower due to the dominance of National Guard artillery. :Likewise  logistics which formerly consisted of a task organized Combat Service Support (CSS) and Service Support predominantly from the Army Reserve were dismembered, and privatized. 


In order to camouflage the destruction of the effectiveness of the Field Army, REMFCOM deception and psychological operation directed against the US Congress, American People, the Congress, and the Total Force, "Capstone" was reset as a buzzword, back by a fabrication called "operational reserve" to replace a non-existent program called "strategic reserve"
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Monday, December 18, 2006

Movie Sets, Oil Wells, Infantry and Unholy Terror

Plots, conspiracies, oil drilling, research labs, infantry companies and movie crews all are capable of achieving an objective through collective action, but vary considerably on the amount of central direction to do it. Whether facing one or running one, it is important to understand the differences.

Plots imply considerable formal planning covering a large number of details on the part of at least one of the participants, with decisions reached collectively or through manipulation. Most successful plots depend upon a supreme manipulator who can keep the inner secrets to him/herself like a spider in the middle of a web. Because of the vast number of details, long term plots are usually limited to the reign of the supreme plotter and the nature of the plot is the retention of his/her control. Such was the case of Adolph Hitler and Joe Stalin.

Conspiracies, in the Common Law, do not necessarily require detailed central direction, only common action to an identifiable end. Those involved in a lynch mob, or those involved after the fact can be convicted of conspiracy even if no central plan or agreement has been made so long as the objective is illegal. Theoretically, rush hour traffic is a conspiracy, particularly here in Houston with thousands of illegal speeders invading the central city each day and nationally resulting in annual casualties in excess of the Vietnam War.

There is no word for good conspiracies, but there are numerous examples of collective action for positive ends without central direction. These are often called customs. Christmas shopping and decoration are customs with predictable results. Teenage social prancing within any given community or high school can achieve high degrees of complexity. In the days of “American Graffiti”, “dragging the main” was a ritualized method of mating behavior no less relevant than birds, bees, and bucks. There is a “way” of doing things. Many corporations have an instinctive “way” of doing things that defy central direction developed without central direction.

Infantry companies and the military in general have highly ritualized methods of making decisions and the military sends its members to formal residential training lasting as much as ten percent of a career soldier’s time to learn it. Houston traffic patterns vary little month to month, but the situation that an infantry unit faces can change radically in seconds which requires rapid and effective delivery of the decision making process even when the key decider has been killed. This is the military “way”, a decision making process independent of objective or motive.

The entertainment industry and the oil exploration business have something in common, a highly developed and intricate business process. The oil exploration industry is a vast conglomerate of independent, sometimes mom and pop, specialized companies like mud companies, mouse hole companies, hot wax companies, hot shot companies and fishing companies each dedicated to one particular slice of the drilling process. A mouse hole company drills the three holes the drilling stems are place when the bit is replaced.

Like drilling, the movie industry is a vast aggregate of small companies and talented individuals who have a specific role in a highly defined work process. Movie production is so defined that there is a specified number of checks that must be written “above and below the line”. Just look at the credits of a movie. That’s advertising and the credit counts in the trade. It’s a long list.

Research labs and intelligence agencies are full of giant egos, manipulative back stabbers, and incredible talent. Fortunately there are some standards of what constitutes professionalism, but mavericks abound. Leading such a mob is like herding cats. Put a plate of food in the room and get out of the way. Or find a chief cat the other cats admire and get out of the way.

While long term plots as the legendary Protocols of Zion, or International Communist Conspiracy, or Corporate-Media Capitalist conspiracy or Islamic terror are not the products of central direction but of custom, collective “ways” of direction which may include a formalized decision making process. There is, most importantly, no snake whose head removal will affect anything anymore than arresting the lead speeder at rush hour, other than a temporary slow down of gawkers. The Zionist "conspiracy" in effect is the custom of hard work and study which in many less energetic communities is seen as a personal threat. The Final Solution had little effect on a culture used to pograms, purges, and persecution.

The current Islamic Jihadi is a compendium of “ways” of doing business including the tribal connectivity of relatives, and the flotsam and jetsam of the various Communist efforts to overthrow capitalism. The Communist system of cells, methods of warfare, infiltration, propaganda, subversion, and deception developed in the Russian, Chinese, and Vietnamese experiences were passed on formally in the Lumumba Institute in Moscow, in Ghaddafi’s desert training camps, teach-ins at Berkeley, and in the mountain vastness of Afghanistan and mingled with various revolutionary dogma to add a flavor of righteousness to bloody business.

Ironically, while the terrorists trained in this network espouse ideological purity, the camps were quite ecumenical regarding ideology. Irish Catholic members of IRA trained peacefully with Maoist Shining Path, and Islamic members of the Brotherhood. Even Al Qaeda is composed of often opposing views of Islam. And this is the important point, psychology not ideology counts.

This is the central theme of Eric Hoffer’s book “The True Believer” a title which has become a noun. Hoffer was a University of California Professor of Philosophy who never went to school and whose day job was as a Longshoreman on the San Francisco docks. He clearly pointed out that True Believers change sides, as he noted regarding former SS soldiers recruited in the East German Volkspolizei. It is doubly ironic is that Joseph Goebbels greatest achievement in the early Nazi days was to recruit the Communist Red Front into the SA “Brown Shirts”.

The psychology of the True Believer is not ideology or purpose, but rage. A rage most likely derived from a dysfunctional and abusive early family life. Hitler was beaten to an inch of his life by his half Jewish father. Hitler’s revenge was to turn his father’s gravesite into an artillery impact area and by extension the Final Solution. Stalin and Saddam likewise fared poorly from the immediate family male members and were coddled by an over protective mother. Their rage, like the rage expressed by Mohammed Atta drives the War of Terror which runs on rails of Red rails of Ways of doing business.

And there are lots of very angry folks out there acting out Oedipal rage.