RETIREMENT

One day a man decided to retire . . .

He booked himself on a Caribbean cruise and proceeded to have the time of his life, that is, until the ship sank.

He soon found himself on an island with no other people, no supplies, nothing, only bananas and coconuts.

After about four months, he is lying on the beach one day when the most gorgeous woman he has ever seen rows up to the shore.

In disbelief, he asks, "Where did you come from? How did you get here?"

She replies, "I rowed over from the other side of the island where I landed when my cruise ship sank."

"Amazing," he notes. "You were really lucky to have a row boat wash up with you."

"Oh, this thing?" explains the woman. "I made the boat out of some raw material I found on the island.

The oars were whittled from gum tree branches. I wove the bottom from palm tree branches, and the sides from a Eucalyptus tree."

"But, where did you get the tools?"

"Oh, that was no problem," replied the woman. "On the southside of the island, a very unusual stratum of alluvial rock is exposed. I found that if I fired it to a certain temperature in my kiln, it melted into ductile iron. I used that to make tools and used the tools to make the hardware."

The guy is stunned.

"Let's row over to my place," she says.

So, after a short time of rowing, she soon docks the boat at a small wharf.

As the man looks to shore, he nearly falls off the boat. Before him is a long stone walk leading to a log cabin tree house.

While the woman ties up the rowboat with an expertly woven hemp rope, the man can only stare ahead, dumb struck. As they walk into the house, she says casually,

"It's not much, but I call it home. Sit down, please."

"Would you like a drink?"

"No! No thank you," the man blurts out, still dazed. "I can't take another drop of coconut juice."

"It's not coconut juice," winks the woman. "I have a still. How would you like a Tropical Spritz?"

Trying to hide his continued amazement, the man accepts, and they sit down on her couch to talk.

After they exchange their individual survival stories, the woman announces,

"I'm going to slip into something more comfortable. Would you like to take a shower and shave? There's a razor in the bathroom cabinet upstairs."

No longer questioning anything, the man goes upstairs into the bathroom. There, in the cabinet is a razor made from a piece of tortoise bone. Two shells honed to a hollow ground edge are fastened on to its end inside a swivel mechanism.

"This woman is amazing," he muses. "What's next?"

When he returns, she greets him wearing nothing but some small flowers on tiny vines, each strategically positioned, she smelled faintly of gardenias.

She then beckons for him to sit down next to her.

"Tell me," she begins suggestively, slithering closer to him,

"We've both been out here for many months.

You must have been lonely. There's something I'm certain you feel like doing right now, something you've been longing for, right?"

She looks deep into his eyes.


He can't believe what he's hearing . . . "You mean . . ." he swallows excitedly as tears start to form in his eyes,


"You've built a GOLF COURSE ?"




Today's Bird HERE

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IT's NOT WHERE YOU DIE, BUT FOR WHAT . . .

Consider the pathetic meaninglessness of our current military engagement over Libya.

Three of the world's mightiest military powers - countries with legitimate axes to grind against Moammar the Mad - instead quibbled and dithered for years - decades even - before the spectacle of a popular uprising being brutally crushed at last shamed us into doing something, anything . . . and even then we approach it half-heartedly.

It's not as if the self-proclaimed Modern-Day Hannibal hasn't given us enough reason already; the bombing of the LaBelle Disco and Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie were but his most visible crimes.

In December 1988, the wreckage of Pan Am Flight 103 was strewn across fields near Lockerbie, Scotland, after a Libyan-supplied bomb exploded on board killing 270 people.

Gaddafi is a legitimate sponsor of international terrorism, and he's a total nutjob on top of it all. ODDYSEY DAWN could also be known as "Operation Long Over-Due".

Our President had to be coerced into committing by an openly mutinous Secretary of State, and on Day Three of combat operations objectives anything resembling a plan, stated objectives, or an exit strategy have yet to be described.

And yet this miniscule engagement over the Gulf of Sidra is enough to fascinate the world, and to pull the media off a truly significant event; an earthquake and tsunami of epic, biblical proportions, and a subsequent nuclear accident involving six reactors.

And it is miniscule; we're going to crush this guy and blow his forces to smithereens - more than likely within the space of a fortnight. And yet the so-called "experts" in the media dish up comparison after comparison to Iraq & Afghanistan; as if huge land engagements involving hundreds of thousands of forces against countries that harbored legitimate physical threats against the people of the Free World can be compared to this maritime adventure. I say adventure for this is hardly a war.

Of course, by historic standards, Iraq itself was a microscopic war.

Consider - in the first eight years of Iraq, we lost as many people as we lost in a single day at Normandy.

By the same standards, Vietnam was a low-intensity conflict. Over the course of ten years we lost just under fifty thousand; we lost that many in three years in Korea, and in three days at Gettysburg.

This is the illusion of body count math, of course - to the single soldier who is killed, wounded, maimed or taken captive, what he is involved in is very real, very legitimate war - even if it only lasts for fifteen minutes.

Nowadays the sheer lethality of modern weapons preclude the requirement for clashes between huge armies a la Waterloo or the Somme; an Infantryman with a shoulder-fired weapon negates a 55-ton tank.

A shoulder-fired, man-portable anti-aircraft defense (MANPAD) missiles allowed a bunch of religious zealots of a 13th century society - the Mujahadeen - to defeat one of the largest, most powerful militaries in the world - the Soviet Union. While at the same time the amplifying effect of the modern media allows tiny symbolic conflicts - such as we are witnessing now - to gain great meaning.

Endless war? Yes, of course. Meaningful significance of these wars? Less and less. Consider this Libya thing - he's a tin horn dictator sitting on top of a huge puddle of oil. Yet nobody even pretends its about the oil - because it really isn't. For more than a decade we chose not to buy our oil from Gaddafi, at cost and sacrifice to ourselves. Now, we can buy from him or we can go through this unpleasant business, expend huge amounts of treasure (which we haven't got), shed the precious blood of our best and our brightest (for what? for whom?) to buy it from the next crowd who take over. We don't even know if we LIKE them or not - for all we know, they're WORSE than the current management - if such a thing is imaginable.

Let it be shown for the record: since that September morning in Tokyo Harbor 67 years ago, on the deck of the USS Missouri . . .

. . . there hasn't been a single day on this Earth without a war going on somewhere, not a single day of total, complete peace anywhere on Earth . . . the shooting never stopped.

- SEAN LINNANE SENDS



Today's Bird HERE



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UTAH DESIGNATES STATE GUN

And guess what they chose?


UTAH BECOMES FIRST IN U.S. TO DESIGNATE OFFICIAL STATE GUN

By James Nelson

SALT LAKE CITY Thu Mar 17, 2011 (Reuters) - Utah has become the first U.S. state to name an official firearm, placing an automatic pistol on a list of designated symbols, right along with the honeybee and the cutthroat trout.

Utah Governor Gary Herbert signed the bill into law this week, designating the Browning model M1911 automatic pistol as the official state firearm.

The gun, which turns 100 years-old this year, is manufactured in Ogden, Utah.

"It does capture a portion of Utah's history," Utah State Representative Carl Wimmer, a Republican who sponsored the bill, told Reuters.

"Even bigger than that, it captures a portion of American history," Wimmer said.

The late John M. Browning, who founded the company that makes the gun, was born in Ogden, Utah, in 1855 and he lived until 1926. He designed the automatic pistol for the U.S. Army, which was bogged down in sporadic battles with guerrilla fighters in the Philippines and needed a quick-firing weapon.


Read the rest of it HERE.




Today's Bird HERE.


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ALL HELL BREAKING LOOSE

Earthquakes . . .

. . . tsunamis . . .

. . . nuclear meltdowns releasing clouds of 

RADIOACTIVE GAS AND STEAM ! ! !

. . . spit-feckle-faced frothing-at-the-mouth Union thugs on the rampage in Wisconsin . . .

. . . insane Satanic America-hating ruthless dictator spinning dangerously out of control in North Africa . . .

. . . PLAGUE OF FROGS ! ! !

Not to worry . . .

STORMBRINGER is here !

. . . and today's Bird is HERE.

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WAR BY OTHER MEANS

- Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments

"War is diplomacy by other means." - Clauzwitz


The first strikes of the British-French-US coalition have at last taken place against the Gaddafi regime. Given the intensity of the attacks and the hardware involved, it is predictable the situation be proclaimed "War #3".

To proclaim this a 'war' is premature, however. What we are engaged in over Libya is to War what driving your daily highway commute is to NASCAR. I will explain this analogy:

In his announcement approving US missile strikes on Libya, President Obama warned Muammar Gaddafi that "actions have consequences", while at the same time stressing that no US ground troops would deploy to the region. This self-imposed constraint tells the world that the United States has limited objectives in the current military actions. More significantly, this encourages Gaddafi to hang in there; we're not coming after him.

This is not War; there is no causal series of events, no clear objective. This is your typical United Nations episode choreographed by committee with the intent on freezing events at a single historic period of time - now - like every other United Nations success story around the world; Korea, Cyprus, Iraq . . . no, wait; the UN bolted out of Iraq and then and only then did any progress occur toward defeating Evil and liberating the population.

Again, Clauswitz: "War . . . is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will."

Unless our will is to allow Gaddafi to remain in power and to continue his reign of terror, there is no evidence yet that we have committed ourselves to war in North Africa. Instead, what is taking place are war-like actions; the international military version of a SWAT team. In other words, a police action.

Critics of my analysis will say that Libya is sparsely populated, there are few targets - we will bomb the tyrant to smithereens within a few weeks. In professional military circles, this is referred to as "underestimating your enemy".


"You are a professional, but the world is full of dangerous amateurs." - Murphy's Law of Combat


Consider Vietnam. We dropped more ordinance on that tiny country than we did over the entire European Theater of Operations during World War II, so much so that we ran out of targets to bomb. And yet the Communist leadership knew that unless we were willing to invade and occupy the North, all they had to do was hang in there and sooner or later we'd tire of the effort, take our bat and ball and go home.

But Vietnam had a worldwide Communist Bloc backing it up, with direct lines of supply from Red China straight down to the southern battlefields; Libya does not have this. Au contraire - Libya is backed by the entire continent of Africa - an amazing continent of unfounded natural resources and almost limitless manpower - and Gaddafi has spent forty years investing in those assets.

It will be interesting to see how and when mission creep evolves toward assisting the rebel forces toward a genuine war of movement, and what other players appear on the battlefield. Reminder - the Muslim Brotherhood holds tenuous sway over the street mobs of Cairo, a day's drive across the desert to the East. A principle of war is Momentum. Will a power vacuum develop, such as took place in Iraq in the spring of '03?

Whether or not this is how it plays out in Libya, today Gaddafi listens to Obama's words and what he hears is that he's been given breathing room. Consider Gaddafi's actions of the past week - the man has nothing to lose. He realizes there is no villa waiting for him in the south of France; this is it - all or nothing. If Gaddafi has to pack his bags and go, his next stop is a cell in the Hague. To Hell with that - Gaddafi is a Satanic bazillionaire with an evil army and air force at his disposal. From his point of view, all Gaddafi had to do was give the UN a little lip service and keep on slaying his opponents; the rat infestation in his barn had gotten so out of hand the only way to control it was with a flamethrower.


- SEAN LINNANE SENDS



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LIBYAN NO FLY ZONE MAY BE FIRST TIME TYPHOON, RAFALE & RAPTOR FIRE SHOTS IN ANGER TOGETHER

Typhoon Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (United Kingdom)

Dassault Rafale Multi-Role Fighter Aircraft (France)

F22A RAPTOR Advanced Tactical Fighter Aircraft (United States)

US and French aircraft may operate off carriers; UK Typhoons are likely to use bases in nearby Malta or Cyprus . . . if it isn't over by the time we get there that is . . .


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ZE PLANE BOSS ! ZE PLANE ! ! !

Dramatic footage of what appears to be a MIG-25 FOXBAT being shot down by rebel groundpounder MANPAD over Benghazi:

In an episode earlier in the month, the future Defense Minister of the Libyan New People's Republic explains how he scored a lethal hit on a Gaddafi's SU 24 FENCER with a defective ZSU-25-2:

MIG-25 FOXBAT supersonic interceptor and reconnaissance-bomber.

SU 24 FENCER Variable-wing ground attack bomber.



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