Standing Armies and Advanced Weapons

The Bible prohibits standing standing armies and advanced weapons systems, as we see in Deuteronomy 17:16.

But he shall not multiply horses to himself, nor cause the people to return to Egypt, to the end that he should multiply horses: forasmuch as the LORD hath said unto you, Ye shall henceforth return no more that way.

Here are Barnes notes on the Bible commentary:

The horse was not anciently used in the East for purposes of agriculture or traveling, but ordinarily for war only. He appears constantly in Scripture as the symbol and embodiment of fleshly strength and the might of the creature (compare Psalm 20:7; Psalm 33:16-17; Psalm 147:10; Job 39:19 ff), and is sometimes significantly spoken of simply as "the strong one" (compare Jeremiah 8:16). The spirit of the prohibition therefore is that the king of Israel must not, like other earthly potentates, put his trust in costly and formidable preparations for war (compare Hosea 1:7).

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Onward Christian Soldiers

Here are marching cadences taught to solders:

Children sucking on a mother's tit,
Wounded gooks down in a pit,
Dow Chemical doesn't give a shit,
Napalm sticks to kids.

Bombadiers don't care a bit,
Just as long as the pieces fit,
When you stuff the bodies in a pit,
Napalm sticks to kids.

Enjoy the entire rhyme here...

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Active Duty Suicide Rate

It's 48% higher than the general population.  I would imagine much of this has to do with the poverty draft.

Of those who committed suicide in 2013, 64.9 percent had been deployed to either Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), or Operation New Dawn (OND). 54.1 percent of those who committed suicide had been deployed to Afghanistan, 50.9 percent to Kuwait and 39 percent to Iraq.

Now, at Apple's Foxconn factories in China, the suicide rate is 1/10th the general population.  Hmmm... better to promote jobs than war?  I wonder.

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Defending Your Freedom To Lie

Seems the military has a problem:

“When pressed for specifics on how they managed, officers tended to dodge the issue with statements such as, ‘You gotta make priorities, we met the intent, or we got creative,’ ” the report said. “Eventually words and phrases such as ‘hand waving, fudging, massaging, or checking the box’ would surface to sugarcoat the hard reality that, in order to satisfy compliance with the surfeit of directed requirements from above, officers resort to evasion and deception.”
“In other words, in the routine performance of their duties as leaders and commanders, U.S. Army officers lie,” the paper concludes.

Thank you for your service?

There is a reason the founders forbid a standing army.

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James Garner, RIP

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Honoring Hitler's Assassin's

Here is the news, but there is one problem with this...

In a somber ceremony, President Joachim Gauck called the July 20, 1944, bombing of Hitler's Wolf's Lair headquarters in Eastern Prussia a "significant day in German history" for showing the world that there were Germans who opposed the Nazi regime.

As of July of 1944 the defeat of Germany was an inevitability.  Where were these people in 38, 29, 40, 41, 42? The reason for assassinating Hitler had to do with Germany losing rather the war than any particular dislike of Nazi-ism.  And as these things go, having survived the murder attempt, Hitler was convinced fate has preserved him to bring about total victory.  In fact, he brought about total defeat, and after the war was far harder ton Germans than the war itself, bad as it was.

Canaris early on hated Nazi-ism and plotted to murder Hitler, back in the late 30s, but held off expressly because Hitler was winning, and thus very popular.  Winning can be a very bad thing.

People say "Geo Bush is Hitler" or "Barack Obama is Hitler" but the problem is not whether some politician is any different from Hitler, but whether the American people are any different than the German people.  So far, no difference.

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Be All You Can Be...

Goes the USA Military advertising pitch...

A former member of SEAL Team 6 has become the poster girl for a Pentagon effort to include transgenders — people who have undergone sex-change operations — in the ranks.
Kristin Beck, formerly Senior Chief Petty Officer Christopher Beck, spoke recently at several high-profile events at intelligence agencies and the Pentagon to promote the integration of transgenders.

And this..

A legendary Special Forces commander was quietly forced to leave the U.S. Army after he admitted to a love affair with a Washington Post war correspondent, who quit her job to secretly live with him for almost a year in one of the most dangerous combat outposts in Afghanistan.
...
His commanders charged in confidential files that he had "indulged in a self-created fantasy world" of booze, pain pills and sex in a tribal village deep in Taliban and al Qaeda country with his "wife," journalist Ann Scott Tyson.

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Viet Nam and Iraq

Now that the adversaries of the USGovernnent are sweeping down from the North even, can anyone name a single way in which Iraq differs from Viet Nam in genesis, duration and denouement?

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Why Soldiers Kill Themselves

Did you know when the USA was formed, there was expectation there would be no standing army?

Did you know general officers must be nominated and approved by congress.  They are precisely political appointees?

When we have a "professional" military, we really have another welfare program for millions of people who would otherwise be productive in the free market.  A welfare program in which the Chairman of the Joints Chief of Staff is the same rank and purpose as Kate Sibelius over at the Health and Human Services.

Now about 40% of Americans will tell you HHS is far more important than War, and another 40% will tell you War is far more important than HHS, the scholarships v battleships debate.  A false dilemma since we need neither as government-provisioned, since we can have both without the waste, fraud and abuse of democracy.

To maintain the "professional army" contrary to the design of our country, young people are encouraged to "join the fight for freedom" as if someone, somewhere, has the slightest interest in harming USA freedom.  Defend their countries against USA aggression, yes.  Curtail freedom in USA, no.

What happens is these people are sent out on missions in which they quickly realise the injustice of their work.  Decent people finding out they signed up for indecent work.

Suicide is at one end of a progression.  They are countless more people who are merely miserable, to some degree, depending on the degree they experienced the dissonance between promise and reality.

Bring the troops home, end the standing military.



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Standing Military

Angela Jolie wants to make war less horrible.

"I was 14 and living with my grandmother when the war began," she says.
"I was captured and spent three years in a prison camp, where we were forced to do manual labour. Later, I was separated from the rest of the prisoners along with three other women and taken to a house.Continue reading the main story 

"The soldiers would drink. We would have to serve them like slaves and they would rape us."

The radio version goes on to say they had knocked her teeth out too, and to this day she never had the money to get that fixed.  What a way to spend you teen years.  USA had a lot to do with what happened there.

Could it happen in USA?  Well, the USA military is already shot through with sexual abuse and criminality, which top people routinely escape any sanction.

The sentence was handed down days after Sinclair pleaded guilty to adultery and mistreating one of his accusers in a deal that saw the sexual assault and sodomy charges against him dropped, according to Sinclair's defense team.He had previously pleaded guilty to other charges in the court-martial, including committing adultery, engaging in inappropriate relationships with three women, conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman, and obstruction of justice.

Do you suppose he just had a bad day and made some mistakes, or was this a career long pattern?

A recent Pentagon report showed that there were estimated to be 26,000 incidents of sexual assault and unwanted sexual contact in 2012, and just over 10% of those were reported.

And this, from a case challenging soldiers disappearing citizens...

“The brief argues that the government reserves the right to use the military to detain and indefinitely hold journalists under this law, although the 2nd Circuit stated that the law did not apply to U.S. citizens,” Mayer told me Sunday. “We have already seen journalists such as [you] and Laura Poitras detained and denied access to a lawyer and due process. This law will make legal any such detentions. It will permit the military, on American soil, to throw journalists and activists in a military prison without trial or due process.”

 So if you disappear into a sex slave camp, hope it is not run by the USA military, where officers victimize their own troops.  Guess what would happen to you. You'll be lucky of it is only three years.

The USA was designed to have no standing military.  People had jobs and were otherwise productive.  We are not safe as long as we have a standing military.

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The USS Ronald Reagan & Fukushima

The Aircraft Carrier USS Ronald Reagan deployed for a humanitarian mission off Fukushima and the results are horrifying:

“We joked about it: ‘Hey, it’s radioactive snow!’ ” Cooper recalled. “I took pictures and video.”
But now “my thyroid is so out of whack that I can lose 60 to 70 pounds in one month and then gain it back the next,” said Cooper, fighting tears. “My menstrual cycle lasts for six months at a time, and I cannot get pregnant. It’s ruined me.”
The fallout of those four days spent off the Fukushima coast has been tragic to many of the 5,000 sailors who were there.

Compounded ironies: a nuclear power plant fails and a nuclear powered aircraft carrier with nuclear bombs sails to the rescue where no one thought to turn on the radiation detection systems.

Well, another Achille's heel has just been demonstrated on aircraft carriers, and that is the ocean water uptake systems for the on-board de-salinization systems.

1. Get the state out of nuclear power.  They exempt operators from liability, which means they are operated in dangerous ways.  "Cheap" is not the only factor in cost.

2. We have aircraft carriers in the Pacific to protect our markets for nuclear power in places such as Japan.  Bring all our forces home and we'd have a better economic balance.

3. End the poverty draft.  Return to where the wealthy pay for an army they themselves raise.

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The Hype vs Reality

Here is the kind of video meant to recruit kids into the military.



Here is closer to what is is like.



Whatever the French were doing in Vietnam, they found it worth giving up.

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Standing Military

The president nominates and congress confirms our generals and flag officers.  This was meant to prevent a standing military.  Now it just confirms the worst careerists into office.

Francis sought inside information on ship deployments and pressed at least one commander to steer aircraft carriers and other vessels to ports where his firm could easily overcharge the Navy for services, court documents allege.

So, if a pimp can direct where aircraft carriers dock, then no doubt that pimp might be induced by terrorists to put an aircraft carrier where the terrorists want it, when they want it there.

That this could go on a decade without the NSA, etc, figuring out, a decade where I was searched by my government at least 200 times, shows just how ridiculous the USA has become.

Time to disband the standing military.

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Poverty Draft

As is universally accepted, the people who came up with the "all volunteer army" knew exactly what they were doing.  No longer would the privileged be at risk in a draft, now there would be a poverty draft in which the poor would sign up as the path of least resistance out of their circumstances.  And welfare queens like Rush Limbaugh whose empire is built on state monopoly of radio can applaud these who are about to die, for their service.  Doggone right, they are human sacrifice so that Rush might be happily rotund.

Under an all volunteer army, these people may volunteer to put on the uniform, but they did not volunteer for the oppression that made the military their best option.

In the military, we are denied the good of their creativity, what they would do if they were free.  So the task at hand is reach a polity of maximum freedom.  Tolstoy is a good start.

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When Generals Are Politicians

The one lies to Congress and escapes prosecution, the other tells the world the truth and goes to prison for 35 years.

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Who Would Protect Our Shipping?

One argument for a standing military, at least a navy, is we need such to protect our shipping.  Really?  Don't you have that exactly backwards?  Read the constitution:

To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

See that term?  Letter of Marque?  Properly organized, national defense is left to private enterprise.

 This gave the state a naval force which could attack the commerce of the enemy at no cost to public funds. The ships captured had to be brought before an Admiralty Court and tried to ensure they were a legal prize, and not the property of a neutral state.

In anarchy, who is the cop?  You are.  In war, who defends industry?  Industry.  We have gotten so far off the track we do not even recognize out roots.

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Standing Army

One reason we have trouble in the economy etc is the USA was not designed to have a standing army.   And certainly not one as provincial as a small town.   When a mayor thinks he is not getting enough taxpayer money, he closes the libraries and parks, things people actually use, until they fork over the money for the useless and pointless.

Given that there may be a slight decrease in the rate of growth of USA military spending, a top general is threatening to keep USA soldiers in Afghanistan longer.

Rep. Howard "Buck" McKeon, the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said Friday that he expects the sequester to go into effect March 1, triggering $46 billion in automatic cuts to the overall Pentagon budget through September. "I think it's going to happen," McKeon told reporters. "We have just not been able to get past the politics of it to really focus in on the devastating effects."

Now, given that one prime reason for soldiers killing themselves in Afghanistan is the ennui and horror of being an occupation force, to use them as hostages for more money is pretty appalling.

We were not supposed to have a standing army.  With no standing army, picking a general by political process is fine.  But with a standing army, picking a general by a political process (president nominates, congress approves) just yields more politicians and cash-o-rama.

Time to sequester the money and cut the military back to purely defensive.  At least.

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Military Industrial Complex, Minor Leagues

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When You Should be Armed

When I grew up, guns were a part of just about every family.  My family went target shooting in the mountains, which was fun. As a kid at a friend's house you might see a gun on the table and you would no more touch it than you would mess with a wallet on the table.  It wasn't so much they were dangerous as they were personal.

I recall seeing people walk into banks armed, merchants depositing the days receipts.  And in the early seventies I saw rifle cases in classrooms at a small Jesuit College that had a competition shooters club.  Nobody thought twice about it, any more than they would a tennis racket or a pair of skis.

I am not armed because I am a conscientious objector, I am not armed because I am a klutz. The first victim in a gun fight with me would be my foot.  The commandment is "thou shalt not kill" not, "thou shalt not game-on."  Jesus sorted out merchants who should have known better, since merchants are the most blessed in society, but he did not kill them.  Malefactors warrant game-on, but not death.

If you have the time to train regularly and the skill to pick a target and hit it without collateral damage, and you are invincibly ignorant regarding the law against taking life, then you should be armed.  All of those conditions mean very few people would be armed. Those few randomly distributed gunners would be necessary and sufficient to deter the cowards who head straight to mandated no-gun zones to kill those who cannot by law defend themselves from these perfectly sane murderers, who rationally pick gun-free zones to conduct their murders.

Although I reasonably feel unsafe when I see "law enforcement" armed I never feel quite as safe as when I see private citizens armed.  There is nothing quite as heartwarming as dropping in on a friend who is cleaning his 1911 after time at the range.  Or interrupting a posse of hunters who are checking their rifles before heading out into the woods.  Armed citizens!  Heartwarming!

Last century 56 million people were killed by their governments in countries that had civilian gun bans.  Switzerland had zero, where civilians are obliged to be armed. Sauerkraut, brats, beer and a rifle and no cops for a hundred miles.  Ach, Gemutlichkeit!

If you believe there is a right to kill aggressors, then it is your responsibility to provide for the killing, and not by paying someone else to do it.  When seconds count, the police will be there in a few minutes.  Those people in the schools depended on the police and the federal gun-free zone law to protect them.  That is the lesson of the Sandy Hook shootings.

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John the Baptist to Soldiers

Luke 3:7-14

King James Version (KJV)

⁷ Then said he to the multitude that came forth to be baptized of him, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?

⁸ Bring forth therefore fruits worthy of repentance, and begin not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, That God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham.

⁹ And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: every tree therefore which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.

¹⁰ And the people asked him, saying, What shall we do then?

¹¹ He answereth and saith unto them, He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none; and he that hath meat, let him do likewise.

¹² Then came also publicans to be baptized, and said unto him, Master, what shall we do?

¹³ And he said unto them, Exact no more than that which is appointed you.

¹⁴ And the soldiers likewise demanded of him, saying, And what shall we do? And he said unto them, Do violence to no man, neither accuse any falsely; and be content with your wages.

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