Gary Lefebvre's Posts (3)

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DON'T GIVE UP THE SHIP Bob Lonsberry © 2016

Posted by Gary Lefebvre on January 19, 2016 at 10:27am


Another view/account.   This all comes from the top.

 

DON'T GIVE UP THE SHIP 
Bob Lonsberry © 2016 
 
The account of two U. S. Navy vessels being seized by the Iranian navy earlier this week seems completely implausible. 
No part of it makes any sense.
The story is that two river patrol boats – bristling modern-day incarnations of the Vietnam swift boats – were navigating south from Kuwait to Bahrain. At some point, via some means, the two boats, with their contingent of five sailors each, surrendered to the Iranians.    
Two accounts have been offered as to how that happened. The first was that one of the vessels lost its engine and that they both then drifted into Iranian waters. The other was that the two boats had been operating fine, but inadvertently navigated into Iranian territory.    
Simply put, they got lost. 
Neither account seems possible. 
First off, if one of the boats broke down, and the sailor aboard trained to tend the engine couldn't fix it, the other boat would merely take it in tow and they would proceed on their way. That is not a novel maritime undertaking.    
The second scenario – oops, we got lost – is even less likely. It turns out that navigation and navigation equipment are kind of a high priority for the Navy. Boats don’t get lost. Highly technical navigation equipment on both boats would have told crew members exactly where they were.    
And in the unlikely event that both boats lost all electronic navigational equipment, and the compasses lost track of magnetic north, there is the simple fact that sailing from Kuwait to Bahrain pretty much involves nothing more complex than keeping the shore on your starboard side. And should you lose sight of shore, and can remember that the map has safety to the west and danger to the east, you’d think that the position of the sun in the sky or the fact that prevailing winds in the Persian Gulf in the winter are northwesterly, would somehow have allowed our sailors to find the Saudi shoreline instead of Iranian waters.    
And all of that presumes that these two boats were operating alone in the open seas, which they presumably were not. There is, in fact, a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier battle group operating in the Persian Gulf.    
The USS Harry S Truman owns the Persian Gulf these days, and the significant American military presence in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait – lands immediately proximate to the waters where our sailors were operating – makes us the biggest dog on the block.    
And we’ve got radar and helicopters and airplanes and stuff like that. 
And if an American vessel breaks down at sea, or strays from course, under those operational conditions, there are a lot of American assets that would both notice the problem and be able to offer relief.    
Yet no one did. 
We’re supposed to believe nobody radioed a couple of inexplicably lost boats to ask where they were going? When one of them supposedly broke down, a carrier battle group had no means to come to their assistance?   
That makes no sense. 
It’s completely unbelievable. 
So is the apparent conduct of the sailors in the face of a supposed challenge by the Iranian military. 
If one of the vessels was disabled, as is claimed, and hostile craft are approaching, bringing with them the prospect of capture and captivity, don’t you put all 10 sailors on the able boat, sink the disabled boat, and race the bad guys back to international waters?    
From the Iranian video, it looks like two or three bass boats and four guys in mismatched uniforms, with a couple of AK's, captured two far-larger and better-armed American boats, both of which were bristling with mounted machine guns.    
Here’s a fact: When you're kneeling on the deck of your own boat, with your hands clasped behind your head, and some guy’s shouting at you in terrorist language, things didn't go right.    
And yet, that’s exactly what supposedly happened here. Ten American sailors, successors to Captain James Lawrence, are on their knees next to their unfired guns, in the face of a smaller and less well-armed opponent – with little American flags snapping in the breeze.    
This is not the stuff of Commodore Perry and Admiral Farragut. 
And you wonder whose call it was. 
How far up the chain of command did they have to go to find the cowardly lion who ordered this genuflection before a bunch of savages? Did this get bounced all the way to the Pentagon, or the Situation Room? Which secretary of what made the decision not to put a squadron of naval aviators above those two boats to keep the camel jockeys at bay?    
It is shameful, a worldwide embarrassment for the nation and the Navy. 
And it is topped off by an obsequious videotaped apology, and pictures of our sailors, captive in hostile hands, the female with a towel over her head. 
The President can ignore this. 
But we can’t. 
We got pantsed. We got humiliated. We showed either weakness or incompetence. And unfortunately either one only invites aggression against us. 
It is inconceivable that you could find 10 Americans willing to surrender themselves and their equipment without a fight. It is not plausible that any young man or woman entering into the naval service would willingly kneel on the deck of a combat-capable ship.    
Somebody told them to give up. 
And that somebody, and the philosophy he represents, will be the death of us. 
- by Bob Lonsberry © 2016

 
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Why Hillary will win in 2016

Posted by Gary Lefebvre on June 11, 2015 at 6:32am

 
This is a well written and thoughtful perspective on today's voting populace:
 
 
         Why Hillary will win in 2016
 
  Please take a moment to digest this provocative article by a Jewish Rabbi from Teaneck , N.J. It is far and away the most succinct and thoughtful explanation of how our nation is changing . The article appeared in The Israel National News, and is directed to Jewish readership. 70% of American Jews vote as Democrats. The Rabbi has some interesting comments in that regard.

Rabbi Steven Pruzansky is the spiritual leader of Congregation Bnai Yeshurun in Teaneck, New Jersey
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
"The most charitable way of explaining the election results of 2012 is that Americans voted for the status quo - for the incumbent President and for a divided Congress. They must enjoy gridlock, partisanship, incompetence, economic stagnation and avoidance of responsibility. And fewer people voted.
 
But as we awake from the nightmare, it is important to eschew the facile explanations for the Romney defeat that will prevail among the chattering classes. Romney did not lose because of the effects of Hurricane Sandy that devastated this area, nor did he lose because he ran a poor campaign, nor did he lose because the Republicans could have chosen better candidates, nor did he lose because Obama benefited from a slight uptick in the economy due to the business cycle.
 
Romney lost because he didn't get enough votes to win.
 
That might seem obvious, but not for the obvious reasons. Romney lost because the conservative virtues - the traditional American virtues – of liberty, hard work, free enterprise, private initiative and aspirations to moral greatness - no longer inspire or animate a majority of the electorate.
 
The simplest reason why Romney lost was because it is impossible to compete against free stuff.
 
Every businessman knows this; that is why the "loss leader" or the giveaway is such a powerful marketing tool. Obama's America is one in which free stuff is given away: the adults among the47,000,000 on food stamps clearly recognized for whom they should vote, and so they did, by the tens of millions; those who - courtesy of Obama - receive two full years of unemployment benefits (which, of course, both disincentives looking for work and also motivates people to work off the books while collecting their windfall) surely know for whom to vote. The lure of free stuff is irresistible.
 
The defining moment of the whole campaign was the revelation of the secretly-recorded video in which Romney acknowledged the difficulty of winning an election in which "47% of the people" start off against him because they pay no taxes and just receive money - "free stuff" - from the government. 
 
Almost half of the population has no skin in the game - they don't care about high taxes, promoting business, or creating jobs, nor do they care that the money for their free stuff is being borrowed from their children and from the Chinese. 
 
They just want the free stuff that comes their way at someone else's expense. In the end, that 47% leaves very little margin for error for any Republican, and does not bode well for the future.
 
It is impossible to imagine a conservative candidate winning against such overwhelming odds. People do vote their pocketbooks. In essence, the people vote for a Congress who will not raise their taxes, and for a President who will give them free stuff, never mind who has to pay for it.
 
That engenders the second reason why Romney lost: the inescapable conclusion that the electorate is ignorant anduninformed. Indeed, it does not pay to be an informed voter, because most other voters - the clear majority – are unintelligent and easily swayed by emotion and raw populism. That is the indelicate way of saying that too many people vote with their hearts and not their heads. That is why Obama did not have to produce a second term agenda, or even defend his first-term record. He needed only to portray Mitt Romney as a rapacious capitalist who throws elderly women over a cliff, when he is not just snatching away their cancer medication, while starving the poor and cutting taxes for the rich.
 
During his 1956 presidential campaign, a woman called out to Adlai Stevenson: "Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person!" Stevenson called back: "That's not enough, madam, we need a majority!"  Truer words were never spoken.
 
Obama could get away with saying that "Romney wants the rich to play by a different set of rules" - without ever defining what those different rules were; with saying that the "rich should pay their fair share" - without ever defining what a "fair share" is; with saying that Romney wants the poor, elderly and sick to "fend for themselves" - without even acknowledging that all these government programs are going bankrupt, their current insolvency only papered over by deficit spending.
 
Similarly, Obama (or his surrogates) could hint to blacks that a Romney victory would lead them back into chains and proclaim to women that their abortions and birth control would be taken away. He could appeal to Hispanics that Romney would have them all arrested and shipped to Mexico and unabashedly state that he will not enforce the current immigration laws. He could espouse the furtherance of the incestuous relationship between governments and unions - in which politicians ply the unions with public money, in exchange for which the unions provide the politicians with votes, in exchange for which the politicians provide more money and the unions provide more votes, etc., even though the money is gone.
 
Obama also knows that the electorate has changed - that whites will soon be a minority in America (they're already a minority in California) and that the new immigrants to the US are primarily from the Third World and do not share the traditional American values that attracted immigrants in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is a different world, and a different America . Obama is part of that different America , knows it, and knows how to tap into it. That is why he won.
 
Obama also proved again that negative advertising works, invective sells, and harsh personal attacks succeed. That Romney never engaged in such diatribes points to his essential goodness as a person; his "negative ads" were simple facts, never personal abuse - facts about high unemployment, lower take-home pay, a loss of American power and prestige abroad, a lack of leadership, etc. As a politician, though, Romney failed because he did not embrace the devil's bargain of making unsustainable promises.
 
It turned out that it was not possible for Romney and Ryan - people of substance, depth and ideas - to compete with the shallow populism and platitudes of their opponents. Obama mastered the politics of envy – of class warfare - never reaching out to Americans as such but to individual groups, and cobbling together a winning majority from these minority groups. If an Obama could not be defeated - with his record and his vision of America , in which free stuff seduces voters - it is hard to envision any change in the future. 
 
The road to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and to a European-socialist economy - those very economies that are collapsing today in Europe - is paved.
 
For Jews, mostly assimilated anyway and staunch Democrats, the results demonstrate again that liberalism is their Torah. Almost 70% voted for a president widely perceived by Israelis and most committed Jews as hostile to Israel . They voted to secure Obama's future at America 's expense and at Israel 's expense - in effect, preferring Obama to Netanyahu by a wide margin. 
 
A dangerous time is ahead. Under present circumstances, it is inconceivable that the US will take any aggressive action against Iran and will more likely thwart any Israeli initiative. The US will preach the importance of negotiations up until the production of the first Iranian nuclear weapon - and then state that the world must learn to live with this new reality.
 
But this election should be a wake-up call to Jews. There is no permanent empire, nor is there an enduring haven for Jews anywhere in the exile. The American empire began to decline in 2007, and the deterioration has been exacerbated in the last five years. This election only hastens that decline.
 
Society is permeated with sloth, greed, envy and materialistic excess. It has lost its moorings and its moral foundations.. The takers outnumber the givers, and that will only increase in years to come. 
 
The "Occupy" riots across this country in the last two years were mere dress rehearsals for what lies ahead - years of unrest sparked by the increasing discontent of the unsuccessful who want to seize the fruits and the bounty of the successful, and do not appreciate the slow pace of redistribution.
 
If this election proves one thing, it is that the Old America is gone. And, sad for the world, it is not coming back." 

The problems we face today are there because the people who work for a living are outnumbered by those who vote for a living.
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