chris_gerrib | Entries tagged with have we been stung

"A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on," said Winston Churchill. Today's lie is that Sharia police are legally patrolling the streets of Germany.

Here's the truth. In September 2014, five German mooks (admittedly radical Islamists) put on red hi-vis vests with the English words "Sharia Police" on them and walked the streets of Wuppertal, a town in Germany. They made sure to get photographed doing so, and their "police activity" consisted of telling people to not go to bars.

Nobody over the age of five thought these mooks were police (the German police wear yellow hi-vis with the word "Polizei" on them, for starters) and they didn't try to arrest anybody. They were, in fact, arrested by the real police and charged. A lower court ruled in their favor but an appeals court ordered them tried. While all the legal wrangling was going on, our mooks were patrolling their gardens and living rooms.

It was, in short, a photo-op, staged to create a propaganda overreaction in English-speaking countries. It worked, thanks to the same pants-wetters running to vote for Donald Trump.

Current Mood: cranky

When saying “Benghazi is not Watergate,” it helps to remember what Watergate was. It was commission of felonies (breaking and entering, wiretapping) in an attempt to throw an election done at the behest of the sitting President. Saying that “the cover-up was worse than the crime” is not accurate. However, that cover-up was ordered by the President and designed to protect him.

Benghazi is (at worst) a series of bad judgment calls about the security posture of a remote diplomatic outpost. The “cover-up” is at worst an attempt to spin the attack into a spontaneous demonstration. Since there were several spontaneous demonstrations at the same time in the Arab world, saying “video caused attack” was at least plausible. Actually, if the video didn’t cause the attack, it was one hell of a coincidence.

In no event was the attack ordered by the President, nor was the response delayed by him. Simply put, we did not have any useful military assets at hand to respond faster than they did. Neither Obama nor Hilary Clinton personally managed the consulate’s security, and Ambassador Chris Stevens was apparently unconcerned enough to drive there and spend the night. Nakoula, the video-maker, was sentenced, not by Obama, but a Federal judge, to one year in jail on parole violations. He was released in 2013.

In short, there’s not much there. Most people, other than rabid partisans, understand that.

Current Mood: contemplative

There's so much craziness going on at the moment, I'm not sure where to focus on, so I'm not going to bother with mere "focus."

1) Bundy - rumor has it his militia has tossed up roadblocks. It appears to me that local law enforcement is going to try and wait him out. Presumably the "militia" have, like, day jobs and/or will get bored standing in the hot Nevada sun in the ass-end of nowhere.

2) John C. Wright quit SFWA. When I mentioned that the goings-on in SFWA would, if they occurred in any other professional organization, resulted in the same sort of firings, I got called "gentle reader" and "a damn liar" in the same post.

3) Over at The Usual Suspects, Judicial Watch got hold of a collection of emails from three days after the Benghazi fiasco. In one of the emails, somebody says "blame it on the video" which since, while the email was being written, other video-related riots were occurring seemed at least reasonable at the time. But since it was obvious that Benghazi was an al-qaida op, that email was sufficient proof for impeachment.

4) Speaking of the dude that done made the video, I said:

Well, his parole from his conviction for bank fraud said “don’t use the Internet and don’t use false identities.” So a Federal judge decided that making movies on the Internet and using a false ID violated his parole and yanked same.

See, this is what bothers me about libertarians. They want “rule of law” except when it’s a rich white guy (Cliven Bundy, High Plains Welfare Queen) or somebody who pisses off Moslems. In that case, the hell with the law.

Does anybody wonder where a guy fresh out of jail gets $100,000 to pay actors and rent a studio? Is it even possible that some Al Qaida operative paid him to make a movie which they could use to start riots? Nah – that would never happen! /sarcasm/

Current Mood: amused

A bit of a target-rich environment today, so have a few links to shoot at:

A) So, Mitt Romney said that the 47% of Americans who don't pay income tax are parasites and dependent on government. They should "take personal responsibility" for themselves. Well, first off, most of those pay payroll taxes, and those that don't are mostly retired. Oh, and they mostly live in states that tend to vote Republican.

B) Lessons learned, or how paying for labor can be a good idea.

C) Paper books aren't dead yet, and soon you'll be able to get one hot off the press at your local drugstore.

D) From Charles Sheehan-Miles, an interesting article about why the US military is fighting with the NRA.

E) An economic analysis of the voter fraud fantasy.

F) Apropos of last night's entry, Jo Walton and Neil Gaiman's take on Russell's novel Wasp.

Current Mood: busy

Previously, I mentioned that I'd read and enjoyed Eric Frank Russell's novel Wasp. Not to give away too much of the plot, but in the book our hero, an Intrepid Earth-man, is dropped on an alien enemy-colonized planet and told to make trouble. The Intrepid Earth-man does this in part by hiring local criminals to assassinate people. The assassins neither know nor care why they are killing; they just want their money. Question - is Nakoula Basseley Nakoula being paid to cause trouble?

The scenario goes something like this - Nakoula is hired by a mysterious figure to make a movie. He, or somebody, later overdubs the thing, then translates it into Arabic. Our mysterious money-man then drops a dime on various hot-headed Muslim clerics who call attention to the movie. Whoever is calling the shots then uses the resulting rent-a-mob as cover to kill our ambassador.

Unfortunately for us, matters get worse. As I discussed earlier, any attempt to investigate the public front-man of this movie results in immediate protests from various Useful Idiots in the US. These protests are probably not enough to sway an election, but who knows? Stranger things have happened.

Current Mood: contemplative

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Private Mars Rocket II

From The Mind of Chris Gerrib

Entries tagged with have we been stung

"A Lie Gets Halfway Around The World..."

Benghazi is Not Watergate, Part Whatever

So Many Targets, I Don't Know Where To Shoot

Link Salad, Rotary Day Edition

Have We Been Stung?

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December 2025

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