Philippines

USS WASP Training In South China Sea

Published by Papa Giorgio

The JAPAN TIMES writes about the significance of such a move:

…Contacted by The Japan Times, a U.S. military spokeswoman would not confirm or deny the Wasp’s presence near the collection of outcroppings that barely jut out above water at high tide, citing “force protection and security.” However, the spokeswoman did confirm that the Wasp “has been training with Philippine Navy ships in Subic Bay and in international waters of the South China Sea … for several days.”

Scarborough Shoal, which is also claimed by Taiwan, is regarded as a potential powder keg in the strategic waterway. It was seized by Beijing in 2012 after an extended standoff with Manila. China later effectively blockaded the lagoon, which is rich in fish stocks, and routinely dispatches scores of fishing vessels and government-backed “maritime militia” ships to the area to continue its de facto blockade.

The Wasp was taking part in the annual Balikatan U.S.-Philippine military training exercise “that focuses on maritime security and amphibious capabilities, as well as multinational interoperability through military exchanges,” said U.S. Marine Corps Second Lt. Tori Sharpe, a spokeswoman for the exercises, adding that the exercises were “unrelated to current events.”

Still, beyond the location of the exercises, the Wasp’s presence alone in the South China Sea was likely to draw Beijing’s attention since this year’s Balikatan exercise was the first to incorporate the Wasp paired with the U.S. Marines Corps’ cutting-edge F-35B Lightning II stealth aircraft. The F-35B is the short takeoff and vertical landing variant of the aircraft.

“TOGETHER THEY REPRESENT AN INCREASE IN MILITARY CAPABILITY COMMITTED TO A FREE AND OPEN INDO-PACIFIC,” SHARPE SAID….

Some WASP Porn:

Some Islamo-Fascist News from the Philippines

Published by Papa Giorgio

I came across this interesting story via FireArm Blog. Some Geo-Political News worth reading about:

One of my most valued correspondents from the Philippines is a resident of the city of Zamboanga, Philippines. He sent me the above photo. He and his family have been living with the noise of gun fire, military imposed curfew, closed shops, closed businesses, closed roads and a ban on air travel for the past two weeks.

Two weeks ago hundreds of Moro National Liberation Front fighters sailed into the southern Filipino city. Armed to the teeth they attempted to capture the city and declare it independent. The leader of the MNLF was no where to be seen. He had promised the troops that if they were successful the United Nations would reinforce them and each fighter would receive P10,000 ($230 USD) and a gun. I am told that the real purpose of this attack was simply to get media attention for the organization which has been losing support from the local population.

The rebels proceeded to murder and rape scores of the cities residents and take hundreds of hostages. Ironically these hostages were taken from the Muslim communities who they claim to be fighting for (and who hate them as much as anyone else I am told). A historical Catholic religious shrine left untouched by the Japanese WWII occupation was shot up by the rebels. The Philippines Army moved in to take control of the city and have since killed or captured most of the rebels but a small group of 30 – 40 fighters are still holed up with 20 hostages. A number of police and military were killed in action.

The locals suspect that the rebels have been armed with firearms sent by Libyan rebels. Below is a photo of the rebel commander (who has since been arrested) carrying an FN FAL….

…read more…

Agents At Our Presidents Ear ~ Diana West

Published by Papa Giorgio

Just read an amazing article by Diana West, author of, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character. The article is the first of 5, and is over at Breitbart, here is just a small snippet:

…According to Soviet intelligence reports, we now know that one of FDR’s top officials, the Treasury Department’s Harry Dexter White, was a Soviet agent, who, among many other deceptions, subverted relations between the US and Japan by inserting “ultimatum” language into the cable flow that actually spurred the Japanese attack. This was language written in Moscow, passed to White by a Soviet handler in Washington, D.C., and dropped into a State Department communiqué sent to Japan.

This brilliantly executed influence operation doesn’t live in infamy – at least not yet.

[….]

For the first 24 hours after Japan attacked, US military officials did reverse the flow of arms, aircraft and ammunition heading for England and the USSR for re-shipment to Hawaii and the Philippines – the patriotic reaction, the natural reaction. This, however, would be overruled from the top, as Lend Lease historian George C. Herring has noted.

Why? Why wasn’t supplying US forces fighting Japanese in the Philippines taking immediate precedent over supplying Soviet forces fighting Germans in the USSR?

[….]

Could the decision to abandon US forces to death or the horrors of Japanese POW camps by giving uninterrupted priority to the Red Army have had anything to do with the influence of the scores of Soviet agents and assets within reach of the levers of power inside the US government? How about the man driving military supply policy, the man behind Lend Lease?

That man was Harry Hopkins and he was without question FDR’s top wartime advisor. As George Marshall would state in 1957 to his official biographer Forrest Pogue: “Hopkins’s job with the president was to represent the Russian interests. My job was to represent the American interests.”

Was Hopkins representing Russian interests at a time of American need?

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It is of interest to me that Harry Dexter White worked against John Maynard Keynes to soo influence our nations outlook on economics in setting up a false choice between two sets of bad ideas which were not all that different… both allowed for forces to work against the free-market. Remember, Keynes himself said:

John Maynard Keynes hailed the Soviet Union in a 1936 radio interview as,

“engaged in a vast administrative task of making a completely new set of social and economic institutions work smoothly and successfully.”

And in a preface he wrote to the 1936 German edition of his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, Keynes stated that his economic theory,

“is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state” than to “conditions of free competition and a large measure of laissez-faire.”

(This quote and the above is from James Bovard’s book Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen, pp. 14,20,21)

Sick, and to think the Left still loves this economic outlook! One commentator of the book mentioned in the afore mentioned comment points out the economic place America had come to near the end of WWII:

“The Battle of Bretton Woods” was a scholarly work [and] well worth the effort to read. I can’t believe the incredible ego of J.M. Keynes, whose main purpose in life was to “stay relevant” and remain in the limelight. As for Harry Dexter White, on the American side, he was a big fan of a centrally-planned economy as done by the former Soviet Union. He was the quintessential big government tyrant and a perfect example of what the progressives in America really want. That is, they want to govern every aspect of Americans’ lives, be it what we eat, cars we drive, or what lightbulbs we use! Also, White, for decades, secretly worked as a spy for the Stalin’s intelligence services. Too bad White died before he could be prosecuted for his spying! (emphasis added)

Diana West @ Heritage

In “American Betrayal”, Diana West argues that — current policies today notwithstanding — America began to abandon its core ideals and march toward Socialism nearly 75 years ago. Starting in the late 1930s, at the time of FDR, the Soviets were already in a position to take advantage of the many communist sympathizers in the U.S. Not only FDR, but also Presidents Truman and Eisenhower and those in their inner circles played roles in enabling the U.S.S.R. as well as concealing the massive Moscow-directed penetration of American society. West shows that the system of spies designed to denigrate the American way of life was deep and extensive.

Golden Rice and Common Sense | Blood on Their Hands

Published by Papa Giorgio

Vitamin A Deficiency

Look at it … look at it! Ideas have consequences.

From video description:

Dennis Prager reads from the Lancet an article written by Bjorn Lomborg about Golden Rice, a genetically modified rice that has increased vitamin A in it (article: PROJECT SYNDICATE). Reason.com also quotes from it but also has a photo of one of the kids talked about for a reference to what is otherwise just talked about (REASON.ORG). Many deaths are on the heads of these eco-fascists, and even well-meaning people who get stuck in a rut of thinking one-way. 

From the PROJECT SYNDICATE article:

Three billion people depend on rice as their staple food, with 10% at risk for vitamin A deficiency, which, according to the World Health Organization, causes 250,000-500,000 children to go blind each year. Of these, half die within a year. A study from the British medical journal The Lancet estimates that, in total, vitamin A deficiency kills 668,000 children under the age of five each year.

Yet, despite the cost in human lives, anti-GM campaigners – from Greenpeace to Naomi Klein – have derided efforts to use golden rice to avoid vitamin A deficiency. In India, Vandana Shiva, an environmental activist and adviser to the government, called golden rice “a hoax” that is “creating hunger and malnutrition, not solving it.”…

To be sure, handing out vitamin pills or adding vitamin A to staple products can make a difference. But it is not a sustainable solution to vitamin A deficiency. And, while it is cost-effective, recent published estimates indicate that golden rice is much more so.

Supplementation programs costs $4,300 for every life they save in India, whereas fortification programs cost about $2,700 for each life saved. Both are great deals. But golden rice would cost just $100 for every life saved from vitamin A deficiency…

Now, finally, golden rice will come to the Philippines; after that, it is expected in Bangladesh and Indonesia. But, for eight million kids, the wait was too long.

“If you plan to destroy test fields to prevent responsible testing and development of Golden Rice for humanitarian purposes, you will be accused of contributing to a crime against humanity. Your actions will be carefully registered and you will, hopefully, have the opportunity to defend your illegal and immoral actions in front of an international court.” — Dr. Ingo Potrykus to Greenpeace, February 2001

CLIMATE DEPOT has this:

….According to the World Health Organization between 250,000 to 500,000 children become blind every year due to vitamin A deficiency, half of whom die within a year of becoming blind. Millions of other people suffer from various debilitating conditions due to the lack of this essential nutrient.

Golden Rice is a genetically modified form of rice that, unlike conventional rice, contains beta-Carotene in the rice kernel. Beta-Carotene is converted to vitamin A in humans and is important for eyesight, the immune system, and general good health. Swiss scientist and humanitarian Dr. Ingo Potrykus and his colleagues developed Golden Rice in 1998. It has been demonstrated in numerous studies that golden rice can eliminate vitamin A deficiency.

Greenpeace and its allies have successfully blocked the introduction of golden rice for over a decade, claiming it may have “environmental and health risks” without ever elaborating on what those risks might be. After years of effort the Golden Rice Humanitarian Project, led by Dr. Potrykus, The Rockefeller Foundation and others were unable to break through the political opposition to golden rice that was generated directly by Greenpeace and its followers.

Recently the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has taken a lead role, in collaboration with the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, in breaking through these barriers and bringing Golden Rice to market. Field trials are now underway in the Philippines and Bangladesh with the hope of introducing it to the market by 2015. Since the invention of Golden Rice in 1998 between four million and 8 million additional children have become blind, nearly half of whom have already died. Surely this constitutes “great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.” Greenpeace continues to oppose these field trials.

Greenpeace has openly and aggressively spread misinformation about Golden Rice since it was first invented and has continued to do so at every opportunity. They claim that there are better ways to alleviate vitamin A deficiency, such as vitamin pills and “home gardening”. Yet Greenpeace is doing nothing to implement alternative programs for the millions of victims, claiming the cause of vitamin A deficiency is “poverty”. One might ask if purposefully condemning millions of children to blindness and early death perpetuates poverty rather than alleviating it. Academies of Science around the world endorse the use of biotechnology, including genetic modification, to improve the nutrition and productivity of our food crops. There is zero evidence of any possible harm from these improvements….

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