Russia

Bush & Beck Had Prophetic Words about Iraq (Palin & Romney on Russia)

Published by Papa Giorgio

“Some in Washington would like us to start leaving Iraq NOW. To begin withdrawing before our commanders tell us we are ready would be dangerous, for Iraq, for the region, and for the United States. It would mean surrendering the future of Iraq to Al Qaeda. It would mean we’d be risking mass killings on a horrific scale. It would mean we allow the terrorists to establish a safe haven in Iraq to replace the one they lost in Afghanistan. It would mean increasing the probability that American troops would have to return at some later date to confront an enemy that is even more dangerous.” ~ Bush

BUSH on Iraq

GLENN BECK on Iraq

PALIN and ROMNEY on Russia

VICE News Footage of MH17 Aftermath: Russian Roulette (GRAPHIC)

Published by Papa Giorgio

On Thursday, July 17, 2014, a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet carrying 298 people was shot down over eastern Ukraine — allegedly by pro-Russia separatists. Residents in the area described bodies falling from the sky and landing in their own backyards.

VICE News travels to the still-gruesome scene of the crash and speaks to residents who witnessed firsthand a tragedy that promises to dramatically alter the terms of the conflict.

Sarah Palin Talk with Two “Boisterous” Ladies At A Bar (Mantras)

Published by Papa Giorgio

“I can see Russia from my porch!”

 FYI, people travel to this spot to see Russia from Alaska.

Some ladies were very boisterous and making grandiose claims about many thing. one being that [and they even quoted the exact phrase that Snopes quotes below] that SNL soo popularized. When I finally had enough, I turned around, gave an example of the loss of insurance in my own work place: two people losing their insurance… one being able to pay more money (the business owner), and a young man who has lost his insurance because he cannot afford to pay for the higher costs under Obama-Care.

These women were previously going on about all sorts of things, people being entitled to social programs, them willing to pay more in taxes, etc. (overwhelming the young Republican gal with them surely). But I chose my battles well, with a personal story (noted above), and correcting them on a phrase attributed to Sarah Palin.

The phrase?

Yep, that one.

I politely corrected the phrase attributed to Sarah Palin (“I can see Russia from my house”) as not being said by Sarah Palin but by Tina Fey via SNL… but I actually got the Snopes response, which is: “I saw it in a debate.”

Snopes? You ask.

Yeah, that site you got to when friends (conservative or liberal) send you those “pass along” [forwarded] emails that make claims about politicians. Here is the Snopes claim:

  • Claim: During the 2008 presidential campaign, Sarah Palin said: “I can see Russia from my house.”False

Snopes then rates this as FALSE! Which really goes to show how many a persons make important decisions based on political [or religious for that matter — see bottom] misunderstandings by forgoing any serious introspection. The “bumper sticker mentality” is what I call it. But as Ex-Liberal’s Blog notes, even The Times misquoted the substance of the quote, that is how powerful pop-culture is.

I was honestly trying to help the women not announce their ignorance to the whole bar (although I doubt many know that SNL gave birth to the phrase, exclusively). Again, this woman told me — and I believe she believed it — that she heard it in a debate… to my face.

Here is a very recent example of this myth via PETA’s pop-culture followers:

Palin

Wild!

I didn’t press the issue too much, I just encouraged them to Google it. I then proceeded to hand my card over to the Republican gal at the table, whom, I hope becomes a fan of the blog.

Here is the real quote [BELOW], and she is both a) literally correct, as the photo at the top notes; as well as making b) a metaphorical/figurative statement basically saying (truthfully), “we are close.” But the left see’s things in black-and-white, and makes no room for small talk from their politicians… well… politicians from the side that disagrees with them.

One commentator on the YouTube account of the video below that goes well with the one directly above noted the CONTEXT in which Sarah Palin was talking about the close proximity of the U.S. to Russia:

…Palin was being interviewed and was discussing America’s Alaska based missile defense system, she was speaking of Russia and their proximity to Alaska. As an aside she stated that you van actually see Russia from parts of Alaska…which is true. Saturday Night Live then did a skit, using Tina Fey as Sarah Palin, and stating that she could see Alaska from her front porch. Because of that skit, which was intended to belittle Palin, many uninformed idiots believed that Palin did say that. (Emphasis added)

See a previous post where Palin is spot on on issues the “legacy” media and Democratic politicians railed her for: Democrats Now Admit Sarah Palin Was Right ~ Death Panels

I was trying to stop people in a public place from being LOUDLY “uninformed idiots.” But we all do this, we do not define meanings often times to words we use to refute ideas/ideals. For instance, defining properly the word “hypocrite” when stating “there are hypocrite’s in the church” when people give reasons why they reject “religion” (i.e., Christianity). Or rarely do they ferret out the opposite or logical conclusions of a statement, like, “I do not like organized religion.” The very next question to them should be, do you like disorganized religion? And if yes, which one?” History is rarely accessed to check up on one’s position. Another example of this would be that “the Bible has been changed throughout the years because it has been copied and copied over-and-over again (like the game of telephone).” As one can see from the first 11-and-a-quarter pages of my refutation of a professor at CSUN, and a chapter in my book, this is another false argument made ad-infinitum when I talk to people.

You see, people do not afford themselves the respect and dignity to know “that which they reject.” Instead, they cackle proudly about untruths in a public place creating straw-men arguments to be easily torn down by their own hands which just erected this untruth. This allows them to feel superior that they do not believe in such “dumb” people or ideas… all the while making fools of themselves. It is really sad.

What Real vs Faux Leadership Looks Like (UPDATED)

Published by Papa Giorgio

If you were President, would you not inform your State Department — at least! — to take this a bit more seriously??? What does a real President do during such an event? Lets see (Via HotAir):

What did our great and illustrious Obama do? Obama gives crash 40 seconds before telling jokes…

…At approximately 12:50 pm, the motorcade stopped at the Charcoal Pit, a popular, established restaurant just north of Wilmington, Del. Known for its burgers and sundaes. Obama shook hands and mingled with many of the diners, stopping at one point to pick up seven-month old Jaidyn Oates, and pose for a photo.

…He invoked Vice Presiident Biden’s name a few names, noting to some diners, “Me and Joe, we share shakes all the time,” and to others, “Biden told me the burgers are pretty good.”

….Just before hugging another young girl, whose mother lifted her across the booth to hug the president, Obama asked, “Do you give good hugs?”

….At 1:01 pm Obama declared, “I’m starving!” He sat down to eat with Tanei Benjamin, who wrote the president a year ago. The president ordered a 4-ounce “Pit special,” which is burger with fries. He asked for it to be done medium well, and to have lettuce and tomato. He also asked for a water with lemon.

(HotAir)

Even the State Department was soo feckless that even Shep Smith got frustrated:

HotAir noted the last Tweet from the State Dept. to end this eventful day:

For years, tweets from @BarackObama have popped up in my Twitter feed so often so very detached from the actual events of the day as to feel like some kind of non sequitur performance art. This outdoes all of them.

This tweet is from the official State Department account, from Jen Psaki, at 9:26 p.m.*, hours after two huge international stories have broken. Now, the administration perhaps can’t be expected to react to the actual events at issue seriously. Too much to ask. But what they do sometimes react to seriously is a p.r. issue, and they’ve had many hours to realize everyone thinks they’re muffing this. Would it be so much to ask to keep it relatively sober tonight?

And yet. And yet.

 

The Blaze has some great follow up Tweets on the above:

By the time of publication on Friday morning, Psaki sent out one more tweet, but it was about John Kerry’s trip to Afghanistan last weekend.

(H/T: Weasel Zippers)

McCain weighs in:

The “HAMMER” weighs in as well:

Russian Roulette: Troops In Ukraine-Not Just Crimea

Published by Papa Giorgio

See more at The Interpreter Magazine

(From Video Description) In dispatch six, VICE News correspondent Simon Ostrovsky travels to the Kherson region of mainland Ukraine to both the Ukrainian and Russian checkpoints. At the Ukrainian checkpoint, Simon goes inside one of their tanks, and speaks to the commander, who says that despite his Russian blood he will defend all invaders. But at the Russian checkpoint, the exchange isn’t quite as cordial.

The New York Times points to the amassing of troops on the border as counter to earlier Russian press releases:

MOSCOW — Russia’s Defense Ministry announced new military operations in several regions near the Ukrainian border on Thursday, even as Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany warned the Kremlin to abandon the politics of the 19th and 20th centuries or face diplomatic and economic retaliation from a united Europe.

In Moscow, the military acknowledged significant operations involving armored and airborne troops in the Belgorod, Kursk and Rostov regions abutting eastern Ukraine, where many ethnic Russians have protested against the new interim government in Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, and appealed to Moscow for protection.

A day after a deputy minister denied any military buildup on the border, the Defense Ministry released a series of statements beginning early Thursday that appeared to contradict that. They outlined what was described as intensive training of units involving artillery batteries, assault helicopters and at least 10,000 soldiers….

…read more…

Sun Dog

Published by Papa Giorgio


Video Description

Today (19 Jan 2014 in the morning), when I came to subway I saw strange effect around The Sun and decided to record that optical phenomenon on my videocamera. Temperature in the street is -20 degrees Celsius.

SUN DOG (WIKI): A sun dog (or sundog), mock sun or phantom sun, scientific name parhelion (plural parhelia), is an atmospheric phenomenon that creates bright spots of light in the sky, often on a luminous ring or halo on either side of the sun.

Sundogs may appear as a colored patch of light to the left or right of the sun, 22° distant and at the same distance above the horizon as the sun, and in ice halos. They can be seen anywhere in the world during any season, but they are not always obvious or bright. Sundogs are best seen and are most conspicuous when the sun is low….

Black Widow and the Winter Olympics ~ Russia

Published by Papa Giorgio

The above video is with thanks to Vlad! There is more on this “black widow” at The Telegraph:

Russian security forces are searching Sochi for a suspected terrorist who is feared to be planning to target the Olympic Games, according to a notice distributed throughout the city.

A description distributed to hotels in the area says that the FSB, Russia’s internal security service, has received information that Ruzanna Ibragimova, the widow of an insurgent “neutralised” by security forces, may have travelled from Dagestan to the Sochi area on January 11 or 12.

“According to our information Ms Ibragimova may be used by the ring leaders of illegal armed groups for the organisation of terrorist acts in the zone of the 2014 Olympics,” the notice says.

While the notice does not mention the term, the widows of fighters killed in the on-going conflict between Islamist separatists and Russian forces in the North Caucasus have been used in the past as suicide bombers.

Russia has deployed 40,000 police and security personnel in a “ring of steel” around Sochi to deter attacks by Islamist militants from the nearby North Caucasus republics.

…read more…

Another Bailout Around the Corner ~ `The Hammer` Was Right!

Published by Papa Giorgio
Economic Laws

✿ “A fundamental principle of information theory is that you can’t guarantee outcomes… in order for an experiment to yield knowledge, it has to be able to fail. If you have guaranteed experiments, you have zero knowledge”

{Editors note: this is how the USSR ended up with warehouses FULL of “widgets” (things made that it could not use or people did not want) no one needed in the real world. This “insurers won’t be losing a lot of sleep over it” (see below) enforcers George Gilders contention that when government supports a venture from failing, no information is gained in knowing if the program actually works.}

Via Gateway Pundit:

This come via the Weekly Standard, but note that Charles “the Hammer” Krauthammer predicted this at the end of last year:

Bailing Out Health Insurers and Helping Obamacare

Robert Laszewski—a prominent consultant to health insurance companies—recently wrote in a remarkably candid blog post that, while Obamacare is almost certain to cause insurance costs to skyrocket even higher than it already has, “insurers won’t be losing a lot of sleep over it.” How can this be? Because insurance companies won’t bear the cost of their own losses—at least not more than about a quarter of them. The other three-quarters will be borne by American taxpayers.
Obamacare

For some reason, President Obama hasn’t talked about this particular feature of his signature legislation. Indeed, it’s bad enough that Obamacare is projected by the Congressional Budget Office to funnel $1,071,000,000,000.00 (that’s $1.071 trillion) over the next decade (2014 to 2023) from American taxpayers, through Washington, to health insurance companies. It’s even worse that Obamacare is trying to coerce Americans into buying those same insurers’ product (although there are escape routes). It’s almost unbelievable that it will also subsidize those same insurers’ losses.

Here, US-RUSSIA talks about some of the key differences between the Russia of today and the USSR of yesteryear:

…But what Russia does not suffer from is what the Soviet Union suffered from: massive economic distortion through state subsidies and outright fiat. The Soviet Union’s policy to contain inflation was not to raise interest rates or limit bank lending but to make inflation illegal. Inflation was banned and prices on a host of important goods were frozen (consumers, of course, paid the increased cost through ever-more-pervasive shortages). The Soviet treatment of unemployment was similar. The Soviet Union sought to lower unemployment not through tax credits or through loose monetary policy but by making unemployment a crime and forcing enterprises to boost their payrolls. Stories abound of Soviet grocery stores that had  four different ticketing systems and ten different cashiers. This sort of inefficiency wasn’t some mysterious manifestation of eastern barbarism, it was an entirely predictable result of Soviet economic policy…

The question is, what is the healthiest direction/pulse of the nation to go? Making market “realities” a fiction, and artificially insulated from what the public wants… thus increasing the government’s involvement (increasing it’s growth and stripping away freedoms in order to artificially prop-up parts of the market) in our personal lives and restricting of choices? Or a free’er market which increases our freedoms and allows products and reforms to be MOST affected and guided by the people?

One last point, the most important. Unlike big business when it makes mistakes, big government cannot go out of business. Unlike corrupt government, corrupt business cannot print money and thereby devalue a nation’s currency. Businesses cannot coerce you by force (tax liens, garnishing of wages, or armed IRS officials, etc) into an action. So the “greed” of the corporation pales in comparison to the greed of government.[6] Which is why our Founders stated that, “The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government” (Patrick Henry); “Government is not reason; it is not eloquence. It is force. And force, like fire, is a dangerous servant and a fearful master” (George Washington). (Read More)

Geo-Political News: Israeli Air Force Attacks Russian Missiles in Syria (Obama Admin Leaks Info)

Published by Papa Giorgio

Via Gateway Pundit. ABC reported:

Israeli warplanes conducted an airstrike early today on a Syrian military facility near the northern Syrian port city of Latakia along the Mediterranean coast, a U.S. official confirms to ABC News.

The attack is believed to be the fifth airstrike conducted by Israel inside Syria this year. Like the earlier airstrikes, the official said the latest attack presumably targeted advanced Russian missile weapons systems headed to the extremist group Hezbollah based in Lebanon.

An Israeli source also confirmed the attack to ABC News which like the four previous attacks this year has not been acknowledged by the Israeli government.

The air strike was first reported in Israeli newspapers which cited explosions at a missile storage facility near Latakia. The accounts differed as to what types of air defense missile systems may have been targeted by Israeli warplanes.

No Tech for Terror

Russian-made SA-8 missiles stopped from reaching Hizballa

Also, this from Debka File, Obama Admin. sticks knife in our allies back:

…debkafile’s military sources disclose that the US media reports of Israeli Air Force attacks in Syria that quoted US officials aroused indignation in government circles in Jerusalem and military headquarters in Tel Aviv.

They accused the Obama government of leaking this information in breach of the understandings and agreements reached between Israel and the White House on Syria. It was clearly understood that the two governments would cooperate in the effort to prevent advanced weapons reaching the Hizballah terrorist organization in Lebanon from Syria.

debkafile’s Washington sources explained that because the administration is immersed in a complicated joint diplomatic maneuver with Moscow on Syria, it can’t afford to leave the impression of US involvement in the Israeli attack or its approval.

A senior US official stressed that the leak was aimed at absolving the administration of such involvement. Washington also suspected Israel of timing its attacks to follow straight after the OPCW’s announcement earlier Thursday that Syria’s “declared equipment for producing, mixing and filling chemical weapons” had been entirely destroyed by the Nov. 1 deadline set by the two powers and the UN.