Friday, November 27, 2015

The Way of the Warrior

The French public is lining up to join army, army reserves, police or whatever other state organ with a militaristic orientation that will take them on. A rabbi previously an American Jewish Press award winner is now publishing a book called 'The Israel Warrior's Handbook'. It seems everyone's keen to be a soldier. Jihadists must be chuckling over their tea (they don't do champagne) watching us gear up for the war of religion they've been trying hard to convince us exists.

Daesh and its ilk are reminiscent of the landsknechts and other wandering Mediaeval European hedge knights who descended on unprotected villages to slaughter and pillage and hole up. Our Sunni bandit 'knights' of today have the same outlook but better weapons. They take over territory that they have no capacity for managing effectively over time. Rapine, slavery and butchery is the order of the day.
 

The authorities in a region affected by mounted troupes of medieval villains would eventually get round to slaughtering or expelling the cancer that they represented, but the dislocation caused by never-ending local conflicts, especially during the Hundred Years War and the later Thirty Years War, ensured that new groups of bandit horsemen emerged on a regular basis. This we see today in the Arab and other dysfunctional Muslim lands where new Al-Qaedas and Boko Harems are popping up year after year.

One doesn't 'declare war' on such criminal trash so dignifying them as the 'enemy'; one eliminates them in a massive police action using all the technology at one's command. One doesn't tolerate terms like 'Islamic State' since the likes of Daesh lack the attributes of a civil state. Just as no-one in the Middle Ages expected a robber baron and his followers to develop a social conscience, we can have no expectation that murdering Sunni jihadist units will ever join the community of nations.

I have real doubts that the answer is larger armies, bigger domestic police forces, or new 'warrior' groups packed with vengeful citizens who believe like Hollande that we are 'at war' with fundamentalist Islam. Better is a coordinated international 'police' action using already highly-trained special forces working under a UN mandate to capture or exterminate these psychopaths who are a danger to all nations. A cancer is cut out or killed so that it cannot spread to other parts of the 'body of nations'.

Thursday, November 19, 2015

Welcome to the Age of Surveillance


This is face of the devil today
"They hate us because we are free, we are told. The fact that we've responded by giving up ever more freedom doesn't seem to matter" from 'After Paris, there will be no stopping the surveillance state now' by Neil Macdonald, Senior Correspondent CBC News. Macdonald makes the point that Europe, especially Britain and soon France, are essentially surveillance societies where, if you are in an urban area, your mug shot is captured dozens of times a day by your 'protectors'. 

Having spent my career working in complex and highly regulated advanced scientific businesses where I interacted with a plethora of well-educated bureaucrats and regulators, I can say without a blink that I don't trust governments with anything but the simplest and most obvious data on me and mine. 

To my younger brother, who once worked as chief scientist for the UK military and therefore was part of the hydra which we can think of for convenience as the 'Man', I am an innocent at best, and more probably a deludedly dangerous libertarian. He has told me more than once that I just have no concept about how many bad people there are out there who want to do us all harm. 

Before he got the job as Q's boss, I, as his closest living relative, was 'checked out' by our RCMP. Thus they have a file on me somewhere that I'll never see. Frankly I'd rather they hadn't, especially since compiling it would have involved checks with people with whom I have interacted. It isn't that unreasonable to assume that people in the surveillance business are not that different from the police in that, from experience, they generally assume the worst about the rest of us.

Jihadist psychopaths like the newly-killed Paris mass-murderer Abdelhamid Abaaoud (picture above), a man whose satanic world view is encapsulated in this comment he made about his practice of dragging murdered victims behind a vehicle - "Before we towed jet skis, motorcycles, quad bikes, big trailers filled with gifts for vacation in Morocco. Now, thank God, following God's path, we're towing apostates", want us to lose our freedoms. They want enemies like a Mongol warrior needed them under the great khans. Just like the khans, the more fear they can induce, the more pleasure and profit for them in manufacturing further terrors. Turning free societies into police states through terror is an old, old trick.

Why are we falling for it?