Occupy Wall Street: Can peaceful protests work anymore?

    I'm munching popcorn watching the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.

   Truth is though, I'm pretty skeptical on the efficacy of protest movements in our current sci fi dystopia. I'm talking protest movements that actually achieve their aims. For instance, according to Guinness and their world record book, the largest protests in human history were against the Iraq war when 36 million people took to the world's streets.  Still, the corporate oligarchy went ahead with their proxy resource war anyway even when a sizable portion of the global public called bullshit on the reasons behind it. Let's face it, entrenched power structures just don't give a shit what the plebs think anymore.

   Back in 2003, we were living in a world where the corporate oligarchy still at least felt a need to come up with a WMD cover story so they could stake a claim in the heart of Mesopotamia's energy reserves. China and Russia hated it but couldn't do anything to oppose that resource grab. Fast forward to Libya in 2011 and the plutocracy didn't even feel the need to bother with costly machinations in popular media and conducted that proxy resource war unmolested by popular dissent.

  Since when did asking the ruling elite nicely by peaceful protest ever work in human history? When you look at it, human history is just one long narrative of who killed who to take their shit. It is certainly not a story of who asked nicely for some shit and was given it because the enlightened rulers gave up power and control because they suddenly developed a new found respect for people with no shit. Us upright apes really only understand violence. When there's blood on the streets the Roman nobility bought property; these days the corporate oligarchy invade some desert shit hole and corner some new energy reserves. Nothing like a good war to clean out the streets of protesters anyway. Being a lazy hipster is unpatriotic in a time of national emergency.

   The oligarchy rolled out al-Qaeda, a bunch of desert idiots on monkey bars and made them out to be the new Reds; and carted off thousands to foreign deserts to go fight them. People are getting wise to the proxy wars designed to tell Russia and China to keep their filthy hands off America's desert. Then came the financial crisis and the masses were getting restless so they tossed the plebs Obama, a handsome black guy who got the suit job where you live in a nice house in Washington DC and get to read the oligarchy's script while the corporate media snap pictures. "Hope and change". Yeah, right. Being a voter these days is like being some teenage punk kid shopping at Hot Topic, buying the corporate made 'rebel' T-shirt and missing the irony completely. Truth is, there are no voter choices that haven't already been pre approved by the entities that run our 'democracy'.

   Sure, you're going to quote me Gandhi or Martin Luther King and say peaceful protest can work. Thing is, those movements had a little more bite than just a bunch of longhairs with conflicting ideas as to what's wrong with our sci fi dystopia. Sure, Gandhi shaved his head, spun his own cloth and never whipped out an AK, but his movement had an arsenal of weaponry that the Occupy Wall Street protesters simply don't have. At least not yet.

   First off, the Indian Independence movement had numbers. Gandhi could pass some gas and have a million people out on the street looking for a whiff of last night's vegetarian curry. The OWS crowd can only manage 30,000 on a good day. That could change but I won't be holding my breath. Another factor is that the Indians had a charismatic leader in Gandhi himself, a little bald brown guy dressed in a towel but a graduate of University College London and smart as hell. He knew how to hurt entrenched power structures in a way that could avoid high body counts. You hit them where it hurts, namely, their wallets. You order your followers not to do business with the oligarchy. For Indians, that meant weaving their own cloth and not importing British textiles. Next up, Gandhi led the Salt March where he encouraged his countrymen to stop paying taxes to the British on salt. Salt is a useful commodity in a country where you sweat a lot and soon the British were feeling some pain. They still locked up Gandhi but that just made him more of a symbol of resistance.

   Truth is, it's hard to see Occupy Wall Street managing to make similar inroads. One major problem with going up against the corporate oligarchy is that in many ways, you're biting the hand that feeds you. Sure, the bastards have bought the political system, attained person hood and own the Supreme Court but they also run the food system, provide Internet access and employ the masses. The "99%" can agitate for better terms but the "system" is so intertwined with every man's needs that it's impossible to affect change without destroying the whole thing. There is no Bastille to storm anymore because violent revolution just gives birth to Napoleons. There is no better system than capitalism because we're all greedy, self interested fucks and the commies lost. There are a lot of working stiffs out there fully invested in the status quo and the oligarchy will have no problems filling jobs in the national guard if a bunch of protesters start rocking the ship.

   I can agree with the spirit of the protests but then you've got the amorphous demands of every guy with a sign:

   No complaint with any of those demands right?

   Thing is, to get the masses on board, you're going to need something simpler. Something you can fit into a soundbite. Trouble is, the problems of the 21st century are so myriad they don't fit on a postage stamp. This leads to disintegration. Gandhi had a simple idea, Indian Independence. MLK, had an even simpler one, equality for all. Today, shit's more complicated.

   The problems run deep. There's this palpable sense that the world can't continue on its present track. This rock just crossed the seven billion population mark and there's a feeling out there that this cannot go on. Energy, food, farmland, water, minerals, all are becoming strategic materials rather than just things we take for granted. The polar ice is melting and already there's bickering between Russia, the US, Canada and the Scandinavian nations about who owns what bit of sea floor in the Arctic. We're in that time just before full on resource shortages and the rich, wise to this, are cashing their chips out of the global casino financial system. We're in the bumpy plateau at the top of the bell curve of peak everything. Every time there's a slight recovery this is matched by a rise in oil and food prices which kills that recovery.


    Rising commodity prices sparked revolutions across the Middle East this year, tossing out dictators and replacing them with democracy. The Egyptians ditched Mubarak and got for their efforts a military/police state and a whole set of new guys with tanks banking cash and unwilling to give up power. That's the problem with revolutions succeeding. You're liable to end up with a new boss just the same as the old boss only meaner. Syrians are getting gunned down on the streets but the global oligarchy couldn't give a shit because Syria has no oil or anything they want. Gaddafi was unlucky enough to be sitting on 10% of EU oil supply and so he got tomahawked.

   Western nations are still years away from Children of Men style chaos. It takes food shortages before the masses finally take up arms against those harvesting them for fun and profit but by then it'll be way too late. The plutocracy by that stage will be safely entrenched in their privately secured armed enclaves and eating cake funded on middle class despair.

   Don't get me wrong, there's nothing I'd like more than to see the Wall Street protests spread and gather strength. Hell, they might even achieve some of their aims. Even then, they'd just be buying a bit more time on the doomsday clock. Meanwhile, the oligarchy are casting hungry eyes around the Middle East and wondering what new war they can get going to clean the streets of filthy protesting hippies.

   I see the media floating the idea of "Iran" and their 'assassination' plot against some Saudi ambassador and I shudder.

   Are they really considering that move? The world's fourth largest oil reserve sitting there with 78 million pesky Persians making the geographical error of living on the top of it. China and Russia are not going to like that resource grab. If the US and Israel get any fancy ideas about bombing Natanz, I'll take that as confirmation that the oligarchy have run out of ideas on how to fix the global financial mess they've created.

   Unfortunately for the rest of us, war wipes slates clean, makes rich men richer and puts protesters in uniform.

  

The ME 262: The Luftwaffe's last dice roll.

I'm tired of 21st century proxy resource wars. Foreign deserts are pretty damn sleazy these days. So time for a history post. Something from the last "good war", WW II. The other night I was watching TV and stumbled upon the Biography Channel and learned that Tom Cruise owns and flys his very own P-51 Mustang. That sure pissed me off. Obviously, I got that pang of hopelessness that poor guys feel when they compare themselves to the super rich and I was stuck with coming to terms with my total lack of a legendary WWII fighter in my personal hangar. To offset this, I indulged in a little fantasy and started imagining what I'd buy if I won the lottery. Sure, buying lottery tickets is just a tax on stupid people but let's indulge in fantasy here, assume I hit the mother load and stumbled into some serious funny money.

I just bought myself an ME- 262.

(You know, at the local Messerschmitt dealership just down the street. This is my fantasy world after all, where you can buy anything with imaginary money. To use a suitable analogy, its like Western economics since 1980)

Anyway, I'm laughing manically in my cockpit now, sweeping through cloud, twin Junkers Juno 004 turbojets hissing like cobras and looking to challenge that 'Maverick' pussy to a proper dogfight. The fun thing about the ME 262, despite the fact that it was the world's first operational jet fighter, is the fact that the airframe was designed before the war even got started.

The Versailles restrictions on Germany were in many ways a boon for German innovation. Glider design became a widespread hobby among the German public and was the proving ground where the likes of Kurt Tank and Willy Messerschmitt cut their teeth. Designated Projekt 1065 in April 1939, the 262's swept wing 'swallow' airframe was pretty close to the one that actually entered service in 1943 but the whole enterprise was held back by the technical challenge of getting the jet engines up to speed. And besides, in late 1939, the Nazi's were still in Ubermensch mode after rolling over Poland in just a month, still high on hubris pipe smoke and thinking they wouldn't need fancy jet technology to roll into France or give the RAF a chance at their finest hour.

Still, pride always comes just before things take a nosedive. But it sure is a fun diversion to speculate how the Battle of Britain would have played out if Goering hadn't say, plowed a whole load of cash into a bad idea like the ME-110 and in so doing drastically cut the number of engineers working on jet engines for the 262. The Germans figured they could beat the English by spamming ME 109s and Goering championed the addition of the 110 as a heavy, twin engined 'fighter' he figured could take on the RAF Hurricane. That plan was bad. A rear facing MG 42 just wasn't enough to overcome the 110's heavy unresponsive throttle and dough like handling. In a dogfight, it was like a seagoing destroyer fighting nimbler PT boats. RAF pilots even in much maligned Hurricanes (those solid warhorses that actually won the Battle of Britain and not press grabbing Spitfires) made mincemeat of the heavy 110s. The good old wood and fabric Hurricane could chip away at the 110 with impunity until it nosedived into the Channel. The 110 did work out as an effective night fighter later on but by then the Germans were on the back foot and RAF Lancaster night raids were the least of their worries until Dresden in '44 The fun 'what if' scenario in all this is what if the German's had ditched the whole Me 110 program and gotten the ME 262 into the fight earlier in the war?

The Me 110. Not a fighter, or a bomber...

Sure, the kind of speculation I'm indulging in here is a bit of a stretch, especially in 1940 or '41, but for the sake of argument lets play a game where the Germans managed to spam a decent number of ME 262s by say mid '43 to go up against the American daylight B-17 strategic bombing raids. We're talking those early raids before P-51 fighter escorts when USAAF bomber philosophy had this notion that flying in mass formation sporting 10 machine gun emplacements per bomber would be enough to keep German fighters at bay. By '43, Focke Wulf 190s were already displacing ME 109s as the default bomber interceptor (twin 20mm cannon firing through the nose propeller hurt bomber engines bad) but the prospect of the earlier introduction of the ME 262, jetting at 500mph through B-17 formations and sporting quad 30mm cannon firing unobstructed sure makes it interesting to speculate at what point Roosevelt or Eisenhower would have deemed daylight bombing too costly. That, in turn, would have meant more ball bearing production in the Ruhr (the reason why German tanks post '43 were 'squeaky'), more oil from the Ploiești oil fields and opens us up to more what ifs like if the Germans could have churned out more fantastically beautiful Tiger and Panther tanks, awesome machines that cost 5 times more than Allied tanks and were over reactions to the Russian T-34. German production would have had a better time if the Americans had to abandon daylight bombing due to heavy losses.

Yeah sure, everyone who is a WWII junkie likes to speculate on the 'what ifs' of the German uber weapons. And let's face it, those Nazis came up with some cool shit. Quite apart from Werner Von Braun, rocketry and the flying wing, the first operational jet fighter 262 was a nice addition to the distinguished pantheon of WW II German engineering. But let's not get carried away here admiring the bad guys. Awesome engineering got married with shitty philosophy and the result was worldwide devastation. Let's face it, the Nazi's were far from mainstream rationality even with their cool toys.

They wanted Lebensraum  and had eyes on gobbling up mainland Europe. Island Britain has always been a problem when any of the mainland Euro powers entertained plans of acquiring new real estate. Napoleon tried to isolate them with his Continental System. The Germans figured they could try a similar but  improved version in 1940 based on air superiority and an invasion fleet gathering at Dunkirk in a little operation called 'Sealion'. Goering and Messerschmitt himself agreed with the plan; so did the rest of the Nazi brass. Piston engined fighters it was to be. But that's always a weakness of governments getting into bed with the companies who manufacture the war material. You're liable to take the word of guys riding cash cows to the bank and miss something truly revolutionary. The 262 got placed on the back burner in favor of spamming more piston engined toys.

The first test flights of the ME 262 didn't go so well either.

Problem was, in April 1941, the jet engines weren't ready for prime time so flight engineers strapped a prop engine into the nose of a 262 to at least test the swept wing airframe. Initial results were good. Next up, the designers bolted two (still dodgy at this stage) prototype BMW 003 jets onto the wings and narrowly avoided disaster when the prop wash from the still installed nose propeller messed up the airflow to the jet intakes and caused the BMWs to fail catastrophically. The test the pilot dodged a bullet and limped home on the nose prop alone.

However, by July 1942, the Me 262 became a true jet when it flew by jet power alone using the semi reliable Junkers Jumo 004 engines which went on to become the standard engines. Remember, this was still a year before any of the other major powers had a working jet aircraft. It's main competitor, the British Gloucester Meteor never truly looked like a dog fighter in its own right and certainly didn't have the cool aerodynamic lines of the beautiful Me 262.

The Gloster Meteor. A little heavy, and let's face it, not very pretty

In truth though, none of the early jets were designed to be dogfighters per se. This was especially so for the 262. It was, first and foremost, a bomber killer. Something the Germans hoped could put a dent in the allies daylight bombing campaign on German industry. But let's face it, by 1944, that was a tall order. The first concerted Me 262 raid against USAAF B-17s came on March 18, 1945 (already too late) when 37 262s went up against a formation of 1,221 bombers and 632 escort fighters. You read that right. Odds like that meant the war was already lost. Still, the 262s made a good account of themselves, taking down twelve bombers for the loss of three aircraft. This was the 4:1 ratio the Luftwaffe needed to make the plane viable, but it was a ratio they'd needed since early 1943.

By 1944, the Germans truly had a ready game changer in the ME 262. It would still never be enough to reverse the tide of war but its still interesting to play with the idea of a functioning 262 from 1943 on. That may have been possible if they'd ditched the 110 and stayed focused on jet engine technology. Despite a shortage of strategic materials and the exotic metals required to handle the extreme heat jet engines produce and, not to mention, the strategic bombing of the industrial Ruhr valley, the Germans still managed to churn out ~100 262s in 1944. Sure it was too little too late but it's fun to wonder what might have been.



Above, a 262 takes off at an airshow in 2010. You can really see here why they nicknamed her "The Swallow'. She's like a flying Porsche but with cannons!

So now we come to the fun part.

Hitler.

Sure, he had oratory skills but when it came to military strategy the Reich would have done better if they could've found a way to leave him out of important military decisions. Especially on the design front. And that's when the classic decision was made by the increasingly methamphetamine dependent Fuhrer when he first saw the ME 262 sweep by at an airshow in late 43. Rather than see it as the 500mph heavy bomber interceptor that it was, Adolf in one of his 48hr tweaker binges somehow saw it as a fighter bomber. You see, at this late stage of the war, post Stalingrad, Hitler was still in 1940 mode. Every new plane he saw was a bomber that could "bring it" to the enemy. He was still thinking offense when reality begged for a cogent defensive strategy. He couldn't entertain the idea of a static point by point retreating defense (you know the kind that inflicts maximum damage on the attacking force). Such practicality would be to admit that the Reich was already losing.

Stomping around in that rail carriage in Versailles when the French surrendered in 1940 was, for Hitler, a high point that paid back all that Weimar Republic hyperinflation. All the meth in the world wasn't going to release enough dopamine to relive that high. As the dream of a a thousand year Reich started to die, he saw every new weapon development as a means to fix a hole, a hole that couldn't really be fixed, and Hitler became like some demented toddler relentlessly bashing a square block into a triangle shaped hole in the play set; trying to make the wrong shapes fit.

Those 262s that did manage to fly did finally get put to use against allied bombers in 1944.

There's one other thing I should mention before we get to attacking bombers. The guns. The ME 262 had 4 MK 108 30mm cannon in its nose. Specifically designed by Rheinmetall Borsig in 1943 for the 262, these bitches spat out huge exploding shells that did massive damage. Testing showed it took just 4 to take down a four engined B-17 and a single shell was usually enough to take down a Mustang or Thunderbolt. That's serious firepower if you can get your guns on target.

The 30mm cannon. The ultimate way to say 'I don't like you'. (I can't read the fineprint either)

Attacking bomber formations was rather tricky even for the new jet and new tactics had to be devised. The usual Focke Wulf -190 head on type attack was not possible simply due to the insane closing speed. Even attacking from the rear didn't give pilots much time to train the 262s 30mm cannon on target. In fact the accuracy of the cannon was an issue. Not because it didn't shoot straight. It was a range issue for the heavy shells. Those quad cannons, though spitting out a lot of damage, were only accurate to about 600 metres. And since pilots had to break off an attack at 200 metres to avoid collision due to 'target fixation', that meant a 400m 'attack run' that lasted less than two seconds at 500mph+.

A typical attack pattern started 3 miles behind and 6000ft above the bomber formation. The 262s would throttle up to 500mph and descend through the Mustang bomber escort (leaving them for dust), dive to about 1500ft below the trailing bomber, then pull up (to bleed off speed) and put as much cannon fire on a B-17 as it could in the two second firing window that speed and gun range allowed. Usually, the B-17 turrets had difficulty tracking the 262s. Another attack pattern, although this was used just a few times before the war ended, involved a bunch of 262s using R4M Hurricane rockets and firing at the B-17 formation from a ninety degree angle where the bombers presented the fattest silhouette. Fired from beyond the range of the B-17's guns, one rocket was enough to take down a bomber and this method showed promise but again, it came too late in the war to affect the outcome.

How did the Me 262 fair as a dog fighter?

The leading 262 ace had 17 kills, 10 of them P-51s. That'd lead you to believe that the 262 was an amazing dog fighter but it wasn't invincible. Sure, it could come out of nowhere and a quick burst of cannon fire would blow a Mustang in half but in a typical turning and maneuver type battle (the classic dogfight), the 262 had problems. For one thing, it had a high wing loading which meant that it's turning radius at low speed was very wide for a 'fighter'. In a turning battle, any Mustang pilot worth his salt would be able to get the 262 in his sights. Another problem was the sheer speed of the 262. With no air brake, you didn't get much time to line up a kill before you either overshot or bled off too much speed, making you vulnerable to piston engined fighters.

So who wins in a dogfight, the P-51 or the ME 262?

The answer to that is of course up for debate.

It sure helps who spots who first. Let's suppose, I'm cruising at 20,000 ft in my fantasy lottery funded 262 and I spot Jerry Maguire and Cuba Gooding Jr below in P-51s. I immediately ease into a dive to take them from behind, coming out of the sun if I can manage it. Nice hiss of jet engines. I've got to be careful with the 262's throttle though, sudden changes in thrust can result in flame out of the engines and they're almost impossible to get started again while in flight. Gentle finesse on the throttle is key.

At 600 metres I open up on Cuba Gooding Jr's Mustang and it just explodes. No fancy nosedive trailing smoke. The thing is just gone in a hail of exploding 30mm cannon shells. Nobody will be 'showing him the money' anymore. Of course, my dive and insane jet speed means I overshoot Cruise who opens up with his Brownings, peppering me with hurt. I pull an Immelman maneuver to try to bleed off speed and gain height. Cruise follows, wrestling with his joystick. He'd like to get into a low speed turning battle with me where his tight turning radius would mean he'd get the heavy wing load 262 in his sights before long. At this point, the 262, depending on fuel, can always break off and use superior speed to get some distance on the Mustang before coming back around for another squabble on better terms.

Let's face it, I'm dog fighting the cast of Jerry Maguire here and have drifted way off baseline consensus. But this is still my fantasy right, a tax on me by the lottery as a poor guy juggling an alternate reality?


Still, a lot of 262s did die while landing, the only time they were truly vulnerable to piston engined fighters. Enterprising Allied pilots could loiter around the bases they operated from (total air superiority over the Reich by '44 sure had its advantages), drop fuel tanks when they spotted low on fuel 262s and ambush them on final approach. Sure it was a sleazy tactic but this was 1944/45 and any pretence of chivalry in this war had died in North Africa in '41.

And that's the trouble with dogfights these days. $350 million a piece stealth F-22 Raptors launching missiles at the enemy at 50k is boring as hell. Sure, it's effective. But these days the enemy is more likely to be some illiterate stooge with Semtex underwear that costs two grand at your local Jihad-R-Us. Wars these days are all asymmetrical manufactured bullshit. Oil grabs are just a prelude to the main event when the resource wars go live. But they're still a decade away if you don't already include Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.

They sure make me miss the 'good old days' of the Messerschmitt 262 when the bad guys were so much easier to define in this whole human mess.

The Libyan Rebels and their amazing variety of small arms.

    I was watching the "news" networks last night and found myself throwing up in my mouth a little every time some talking head mentioned the triumph of democracy in Libya over tyrant dictators. Sure, that kind of bullshit probably sells peanut butter and dick hard pills during commercial breaks and probably gives the 50 million plebs on food stamps in the US something to feel good about. Who needs government subsidized food anyway when your government just air dropped a few hundred million in ordinance on yet another desert oil producer? 'We' just 'won' another war! Fuck yeah!? Makes poor people feel part of something cool as they scour the 99c store for a good deal.

    Watching footage of the rebels driving past strategically placed cameras in Tripoli's Green Square the other night, I suddenly had some kind of fucked up epiphany that made the whole NATO "Odyssey Dawn" mission make some retarded sense. I saw a bunch of Libyan freedom fighters hitting a live fire zone in a god damned Toyota Prius. I shit you not! A hybrid vehicle in a fucking war zone. Now there's a first. Toyota should run ads for that shit. It seems some Libyan rebels are pretty savvy when it comes to gas mileage.

    One thing the rebels don't seem too savvy about though is conserving ammo.

   I swear, every vid I see of one of those happy exuberant guys has them firing off mag after mag of 7.62mm at the sky and not giving a single fuck. For hours. Everyday. And that got me thinking. How cheap is ammo in North Africa these days anyway? I mean, in a proper war, isn't ammo gold? Last time I checked, I can't remember seeing other 'freedom fighters' in other conflicts blasting the sky after victory. I don't recall the VietCong shooting down clouds when they finally captured Saigon in '75. Chechnyan rebels sure weren't gunning down the sun after they held back the mighty Russians for a while in the mid '90s . Maybe it's just an Arab thing to piss away ammo. One thing it does say is that the Libyan rebels sure don't seem to have supply or money worries when it comes to procuring more lead. Either that or they're a bunch of idiots with nothing left to shoot once the news cameras get turned off. Of course, they're now begging the US and UN to release some of Gaddafi's impounded billions. Wanna bet that cash will only be going to the strongman who can prove he can get the oil flowing again?

   Watching those celebrating in Tripoli or in any Libyan city in this whole messy excuse for a proper war is something I like to do these days, beer in hand, popcorn in the microwave and getting a free front row seat (if it's possible to have a front row seat in front of your own TV) and witnessing yet another proxy resource war.  Anyway, all that sweet Libyan crude has a low sulphur content and it only costs a dollar a barrel to refine. A lot like the Brent North Sea crude that's running out. The Euros sure love that spice. 10% of their supply may be back online in the near future.

  The fun thing is, once the oil deals get renegotiated, every fucktard who fired an AK at the sky during this war is going to want a piece of that oil action. Revolutions always lead to a post high ugly period where old scores get settled. And usually not with a concerted letter writing campaign to a local politician. Forty two years of Gaddafi means there are a lot of tribal feuds to sort out. That's even if the rednecks in Benghazi don't decide all the oil in the eastern fields belongs to them. You know, historically. They're big on who owned what a bazillion years ago in the Middle East.

  Still, watching all that ammo getting fired needlessly into the air got me looking closely at the small arms that were actually firing it. And once my eyes got focused on that, I was met with one of those dizzying cornucopia's of choice that rivals eateries at a state fair. What an international cast! I mean, every guy with a beef against Gaddafi seems like he had a host of world gun suppliers on speed dial. The sheer variety of small arms available to the rebels might be sinister as far as foreign intervention is concerned but probably not. After all, Africa is a wash in weaponry the way it isn't in food. Or maybe a container load of sweet foreign pew pew just happened to wash up on a beach in Benghazi last February before this whole "revolution" got started. Who knows? Let's face it, foreign special forces have been operating on the ground in Libya since this mess got started. Would you trust a Libyan rebel to laser paint a Gaddafi tank with a sweet piece of $250k technology? Ahem, no. That shit's liable to be sold to Hezbollah for pennies on the dollar once the smoke clears and cause more problems on the global chessboard.

 In order of sightings (and this is by no means a scientific study), what kind of small arms where the rebels brandishing?

The AK-47: Okay, no particular surprise here. I mean, let's face it, it's the most ubiquitous weapon ever produced on the planet. Hardy, distinctive, this gun is everywhere and all over Africa. We often get footage of starving people in Africa and that sure sucks but you can be sure every journalist with a camera on his way to a starvation zone to post photos of skinny kids in the New York Times first passed a bunch of guys wielding AK-47s at the airstrip. Seems like food is getting expensive these days and that's bad for Africa where people tend to fuck for entertainment and that just results in more mouths to feed. Sure, condoms and contraceptives would be nice but distributing those never works out does it? Bono sure missed the boat on that one.

   And, let's face it, the result of all that rampant sport fucking usually gets resolved by an AK-47. It's like the AK is Africa's post birth abortion kit. From heroin addicted child soldiers in Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and the Republic of Congo to the current famine in Somalia and Darfur, the AK-47 is the number one means of African population control that is both cheap and effective. The market in Africa is flooded with this Russian banger. Hell, in Yemen, you can buy a third hand AK-47 from your uncle's cousin's brother-in-law for the price of a Big Mac. That is of course, if you can find a quality eatery like McDonalds in a desert shithole with no significant oil. No surprise then that Libya would be full of Kalashnikov's babies. And 7.62mm ammo is probably more common than ham sandwiches in Africa. So yeah, I suppose that explains a lot of rebel sky shooting. Still doesn't make me feel like quitting alcohol anytime soon though.

.

The AK-74:  Yeah, it might seem like superfluous not to bunch the '74 in with the '47 but we're talking a totally different animal here. The '74 was developed in the 1970s when the Soviets wanted to improve on Kalashnikov's original design and ditched the heavy, penetrating, barrel shaking long range inaccuracy of the 7.62 round. It fires the smaller 5.45x39mm round and was a response to the American M-16 in Vietnam. The Russians had caught on to the effectiveness of the smaller 5.56 NATO ammo after they'd seen it tumbling through Gook flesh in 'Nam. The smaller round with an air pocket in the nose makes it dance around in the body when it hits bone and makes a kill extra messy. Aren't we humans awesome when it comes to killing each other? Porn is obscene yet action movies with a fifty+ body count are PG entertainment you go see with the kids. Fuck yeah! Anyway, the 5.45mm ammo can't be that cheap over there. Somewhat pocket hurting when you're firing rounds at the sky and warbling like an ape every time someone says Gaddafi is dead again.

The G3 (and variants): Probably the next most ubiquitous gun I've seen in Libya outside of the AK family. Designed by good old German arms manufacturer Heckler & Koch after World War II when every iron foundry in Germany was wondering where the next contract was going to come from after the Wehrmacht went belly up. The G3 comes in a dizzying variety of variants and it's no surprise that it should show up in Libya.  Heavy and stable and firing the same 7.62x51mm NATO round (see FN below), the G3 uses a "delayed action blowback" mechanism, which is gun speak for "I can put a heavy round on target at 400 meters and fuck you". If I weren't such an armchair pussy and somehow got teleported into a war zone and could chose a fat gun, I'd go with a G3. Accuracy and stopping power trumps the bitch ass hassle of having to lug that heavy 7.62 ammo around. But I'm a stickler for an assault rifle than can be used for long range sniping. Of course, the only long range sniping I've done lately is screaming for a cab from a bar stool on Santa Monica Boulevard.

The FN-FAL: Probably the only good thing ever to come out of Belgium apart from chocolate is the FN. These fuckers are all over Africa having made their debut in Rhodesia in the 1960s. In Rwanda in the 90s, they were widely available but those savages found it cheaper to chalk up a decent kill streak with machetes. No firing in the sky for those animals. These Belgian shooters are in the arsenal of just about every sleazy African war lord especially those from the former Belgian colony of Congo. So yeah, these fucks are everywhere. Probably the leading cause of death of the mountain gorilla too, this gatt fires the NATO 7.62x51mm round. That round was agreed upon by NATO in the '50s during the good old post WWII period when Western countries needed a decent bullet after the Reds decided to hold on to all that Eastern Euro real estate they'd chalked up on the backside of Barbarossa.

   Let's face it, it's a very nice gun. It's got a nice gas operated design (for recoil) and can be adjusted according to environmental conditions (code speak for you're dead when I pull the trigger in the desert or the Arctic tundra). The recoil is low in single shot but once you go full auto we're talking painting Banksy modern art all over the target zone. Still, as with most assault rifles, three shot bursts are your friend. Except, of course, if you're a Libyan rebel. Then it's full auto at the sky bitches!

The AK-103 (100 series): Okay, you think I'm cheating here by introducing another AK variant into the mix. But I'm not. The 100 series AK was designed by the Russians in 1994 after they caught on to fact that Kalashnikov and his fancy assault rifle had become an international celebrity. Good old capitalism after the fall of the Soviet Union meant there was money to be made on the international 'free' market so the Russians compromised their principles for cash money and made a gun that could chamber the standard 5.56x45 NATO round. Pricey, and made with composite materials and plastics that the US introduced into the mix in the 60s with the M-16, this gun capitalizes on the Kalashnikov name and was made for the export market. Again, the NATO round is yet another type of ammo fired at the sun by Libyan rebels. That ammo is not exactly hard to come by on the world stage, but still, you'd think beyond the pay grade of the average Benghazi shop keeper with a beef against Gaddafi.

The RPG-7: In my opinion, not exactly a "small arm". But I suppose it must be included since everyone and their mother in the Middle East and Africa seems to have access to one. Again, we can thank the Russians for this limb separator. Used against armored vehicles (some pretty good foils have been developed by the US to stop that shaped warhead frying everyone inside a Hummer) but equally effective against infantry bunched behind a wall, this cheap mass produced fucker is like some modern day equalizer versus professional armies. 60% of British and American casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan are due to this gatt with IEDs claiming the rest of the human toll. Yeah, calling in an A-10 strike and laying down a spread of depleted uranium hurts more, but let's face it, it's the default gun of every 'terrorist' who has a problem with foreigners stomping around his bit of desert.

  So yeah, that's pretty much it for me as far as Libya is concerned. I've mind dumped all I've got on this shitty war, unless of course Gaddafi shows up heading a Market Garden type XXX Corps tank rush on Tripoli. I won't be holding my breath. Fortunately for this blog, that in no way means there's a shortage of resource wars in the near future or any kind of shortage of stuff to write about.

   On the proxy resource war front, the 21st Century is just getting started.

.

Libya: Epic rebel party in Tripoli

   I'm sitting beer in hand on a Sunday afternoon watching footage of the celebrations in Tripoli.

   NATO can finally take a sigh of relief. Odyssey Dawn just ended. Sure it took longer than expected but this outcome was always coming. In the end, the rebels basically just drove into Tripoli in their Toyota Tundra pick up trucks, parked in Green Square and declared victory. Seems Gaddafi's army had had enough. The fun thing about being in the Libyan Army is that you can just toss your uniform, grab your AK and run out on the street and celebrate the end of Gaddafi along with all the other idiots.

   The BBC are reporting that Gaddafi has bailed to Algeria, a country like the US that hasn't yet ratified the International Criminal Court treaty. So that beachfront condo still might be in Gaddafi's future but probably not. They'll probably keep him in quarantine there (if that's where he is) until things settle in Libya. You never know, he might still be needed if Libya goes belly up and the rebels start massacring each other for a cut of the oil money that's going to start rolling in over the next few weeks.

    Foreign power players in all this will be watching closely to see how this pans out. There are a bunch of old scores  that need to be settled and the rebels aren't exactly a unified force with a unified ideology. The murder of rebel leader Younis  two weeks ago hinted at the fact that there is a lot of simmering tension under the surface.

   As I watch the crowds celebrate, there's a lot of 'democracy' talk on TV right now which is pretty funny.

   Democracy is always liable to end up with unpredictable results. Especially in the Middle East.

   When you give the average fucktard on the street a say in how countries get run, bad shit happens for rich people. That's pretty much why there are no real democracies left on the planet anymore. The only time true democracy showed up it was Athens in 461 BC and good old Pericles was initiating a golden age. US style democracy is all about providing the plebs with the illusion that their vote matters whilst the corporate oligarchy feeds them the information on who to vote for whilst also controlling the candidate list. Pretty fucking genius really.

   Once an idea like that takes hold and becomes viral it's hard to suppress. That's why you've got protests still going on right now in Syria and Bahrain, places where protests are 'illegal'. Still, you've gotta love the idea that protesting is illegal. It's like saying the storming of the Bastille in 1789 was illegal. Of course it was. When you're at the top of the food chain everything is illegal for those lower down on the pyramid when they start rocking the boat. I wonder if Louis XVI tried to funnel the French revolution into designated 'free speech zones' a few miles from the epicenter of the Estates-General.

   All hail the 'Arab Spring' right? Problem is, Egypt, despite all the hype and democracy talk is under defacto military lockdown... not exactly what all those wide eyed protesters imagined when they dumped Mubarak. So what happens next for Libya? Nothing good. Sure they get a bunch of global corporations moving in and the benefits of a McDonalds in Tripoli, but even if the country doesn't devolve into messy internecine war for resource control (NATO will back whoever has the muscle to keep the oil flowing), one wonders, say ten years out, how many Libyans will be better off than they were under Gaddafi. Sure that guy was an asshole but free healthcare, free education and the highest living standards in Africa were something a lot of Libyans had gotten used to despite the bad guy in charge.

   Rebel leaders of the 'National Transition Council' boasted yesterday just before they parked in Green Square that they will have 1.6 million barrels of Libyan oil back on the market next week. Seems way exaggerated but I'm sure it makes the Euros breathe a sigh of relief. 10% of their supply is back online so it's mission accomplished for NATO even if they emerge from this thing looking not exactly convincing as a fighting force. War by commitee is always bad and taking six months to dislodge a third rate army without a modern air defense system is worse. In the end, NATO comes out of this looking weak which sure makes the Chinese and Russians take note.

   One wonders now what 'democracy' will bring.

   Every rebel who picked up an AK in this uprising is going to believe he deserves a piece of the oil pie. There are some real faultlines there. The Eastern rebels, those centered in Benghazi and currently sitting on all the oil refineries in Brega and Ras Lanuf are not going to let go of those without a big slice of the profits. Those eastern rebels which include all kinds of NATO undesireables like the Islamists and wild desert tribes who fought the US in Iraq and Afghanistan won't be moving anytime soon.

   The Western rebels are the ones who actually drove into Tripoli and shed blood in the real battle of this war, the Stalingrad style battle of Misrata; all while the Eastern guys sat polishing the nozzles on the captured oil pipelines in Brega. They won't be so happy if the Benghazi rednecks try to hold on to those terminals for themselves. Each oil tanker that leaves port is ~$150 million in raw cash and every rebel who ever shot an AK in the air is going to want a taste of that action. It's the kind of shit people kill each other for. No real surprise there. So foreign corporate fucks and their economic hitmen will have to wait until the smoke clears in Tripoli to see if things get ugly in the post Gaddafi clusterfuck. With much of Libya's infrastructure destroyed, everyone is going to wake up in the morning with a massive hangover and hungry for a proper breakfast. With food shortages in Tripoli, NATO better hope the situation doesn't devolve into some kind of humanitarian crisis. That'd be pretty ironic wouldn't it? Bombing people to prevent death by starvation is always a little confusing so right now NATO officials must be wondering how much food can be distributed once the revenge killings get started. Or everything could go better than expected and I could just be a miserable cynical fuck. Who knows what this ugly mess will deliver? Not me.

   Still, looking at brown people celebrating victory in some foreign desert seems to be popular in 2011 so I'll smile and have another beer.

   One hopes there's something still worth celebrating a few years from now.

  

Benghazi: Postcards from the edge of civilization.

    Benghazi sure is a 'fun' zone these days if you enjoy a front row seat for how 21st century resource wars are going to play out. I think it's pretty obvious right now that proxy resource wars are in our future. Hell, they're here right now. Proxy bullshit wars are the new 'Domino theory' but with no Kissinger or McNamara to sell the idea to the plebs. And, let's face it, things are easier these days if governments bypass the idiots who elect them and keep their intentions on the down low. All you really need today is some semi plausible story about a bad guy in some foreign desert where there's oil and people will believe he's a bad guy so long as a compliant media rolls out that stock footage of the 'terrorists' on monkey bars.

   But the NATO mission in Libya is getting harder to explain.

   Libya is just another place, along with Detroit, Baghdad and Fukishima, where we all get a front row seat to preview all the shit that's going to make the 21st century the worst century in human history. We humans are screwed. And yeah, I'm a major pessimist on long term human survival. Military history will do that to you I guess. But the sad truth is that there are no 'good' wars like WWII left to fight anymore. The future of war is just lots of pesky details. Details that won't make for good TV. There are no more obviously evil Nazis to rail against. Just lots of sleazy guys on all sides whose sleaziness is proportional to the energy reserves sleazy guys happen to be sitting on that other sleazy guys want.

   The West needs energy but so do the Chinese and the other BRIC economies. The market for cool stuff is getting crowded now. The future is lots of land grabs that are getting harder and harder to explain to the public. Especially in Western 'democracies'.  It's going to be shady resource squabbles up until the point when China or Russia or the US get sick of proxy wars and finally need that oil or freshwater or farmland more than they are prepared to allow rival powers to grab it. That's when shit will get real interesting. Ultimately, our Facebooky, Twitterized post modern feel good consumerist utopia runs up against the hard wall of finite resources and depleting energy. And that's when the fun starts and the 'real' wars get greenlit.

   Benghazi today is ground zero for this new proxy war paradigm

   Right now it's a latter day 70s Saigon, full of the usual free for all characters and rapine that makes any big city in a warzone really shitty for the local population but exciting as hell if you're an insurgent, rebel, CIA operative, Islamic religious freak, Bedouin heroin addict, foreign economic hitman, arms dealer, renegade journalist or just some guy trying to make a quick buck off the fall of yet another desert oil producer. It's like Casablanca in 1941 but with no Bogart to make it all sensible to a foreign public who don't give a shit anymore because they're too busy applying for foodstamps.

   The NATO air campaign is not following the script, you know, the script some pencil pusher in the Pentagon or Whitehall scribbled together just as Gaddafi was about to punish Benghazi for its 40 year history of hating his guts. The NATO script hoped Gaddafi would die quickly by Tomahawk (the British bombed his compound on night one of Odyssey Dawn but missed) and all the evils of the pesky Middle East dictator would go away after the Western corpotocracy stepped into the rubble and rewrote the oil deals and dumped 'democracy' on the unwitting citizen victims of Libya who were supposed to be happy with all the benefits of globalization via a McDonald's dollar menu in Tripoli.

   The problem with wars these days is that they have a nasty habit of not following the pleb fed script.

   In the future dystopian corpo sci fi novel that we're all living in, food is still relatively cheap, oil is still available and there are no ration tickets yet. We're living in that time just before things start to get real ugly, where the contents of the plastic Coca Cola bottle are still worth more than the wondrous plastic container itself; the dream of every ancient warrior, a capable, durable, refillable water carrier that you'd pass down to your son but which we toss idly in the trash because it looks ugly on the floor of our 'Prius'.  Our throwaway dystopia relegates foreign wars that any rich country gets engaged in to just one more event on TV, competing for viewers along with shitty reality shows, singing competitions, home improvement bullshit and that show about some guy who can tell you what your dog really meant when he took a shit on your Blu Ray collection.

   Benghazi is the dirty underbelly of all our lives right now. Sure, the Libyan debacle is a sideshow when compared to big global chessmoves like Iraq or Afghanistan but it's got a certain naked land grab feel about it that works as the perfect metaphor for how big powers are going to gobble up all the low hanging fruit in the increasingly shitty 21st century. And eventually they'll come into conflict over some Arctic oil puddle the melting ice makes extractable. That's where this is all headed. All the world's capitals will soon know the free for all global squabble that Benghazi is right now.

   Eastern Libya and its capital Benghazi have always been redneck country and the part of Libya that sophisticates in Tripoli like to look down on while sipping their fancy coffees in upscale cafes. Benghazi is the city where the supporters of the former king that Gaddafi deposed in the '60s got to lay low while watching helplessly as Gaddafi funneled the oil wealth out from under their feet. They've been itching for a shot at revenge for decades. It's also home to the Islamists and the wilder desert tribes and proved fervent recruiting ground for volunteers for Iraq and Afghanistan to fight the "Yankee imperialists". Those are the rebels best fighters and also the last guys you'd expect NATO to be assisting but such is the complex web of forces that guide geopolitics these days. In truth, oil makes everyone a bitch, loyalties cheap and alliances tend to shift like desert sands all so long as the proles in the US and Europe get to fill up their tanks on the cheap to make that commute from surburbia to their cubicle in Wageslavistan affordable.

   In the revolutionary 60s, Gaddafi rode to power on the idea of crumbling aristocracies in the 'Age of Aquarius' and set up Libya as a one stop shop for anyone with a beef against Western governments. In the 80s, he'd sell anyone with a business plan for mayhem some semtex or an AK and giggle as the pasty white men imperialists in the US and Europe recoiled in horror as a 747 crumbled over Scotland or the IRA blew up an office building in London. Gaddafi is an asshole. But he's the kind of asshole you'd like if he were a bad guy in a movie. Like a Darth Vader but in sunglasses and dressed in 70s porno curtains.

   
   Benghazi right now is the Mos Eisley in our Star Wars universe. A 'hive of scum and villainy' if you will. An international cast is waiting to feed off the flesh of Gaddafi's fallen regieme. It's the awesome new template for war towns where the global corporate oligarchy, with special forces and intelligence agencies sent in as vanguard are followed soon after by corporate journalists, money men, dealmakers and various shady fucks. The rebels in Toyota Tundra trucks are too dumb to know when they're being used. And they're not even good enough fighters to close the war they were scripted to win. Sure it's only a matter of time before the oil changes hands and the rebels stomp into Tripoli but using a bunch of malcontents as a cheap ground army smacks of discount war.

  The thing is, as the world gets increasingly deranged, because of failing financial systems, energy and food price spikes and all kinds of growing religious and ethnic tensions on an overcrowded planet, Benghazi is the new template for a frontier town at the edge of civilization. Wars started and unfinished because everyones too broke to fight on borrowed capital. Sleazy wars with hard to define goals (because the public is getting wise to bullshit). The problem for the corpo oligarchy is that unless we go to 'total war' and Clauswitz' ghost gets to witness the 21st century's end by way of his 19th century paradigm; 'total war' where the generals finally get to press the 'big red button of win' on their Strangelove desks. But then nobody wins. Nations are still toying with the idea that there's a victory to be had somewhere. Right now, total war is still bad for business.

   Soon, if not already, Washington DC, London, Rome, Madrid, Athens, Paris, Moscow and maybe even Beijing are going to start to look like war towns, places turned into siege enclaves by debt, riots and diminishing energy reserves. We've still got a decade left before things get really ugly. But we will get a front row seat to the growing 21st century sleaziness and Benghazi is the fringe model for how the world plays out. It's always ugly watching vultures stick their hairless necks into dead flesh.

   The one constant in human military history is that war is always a way to burn the mistakes of the past and wipe slates clean. War is catharsis. And it's always really ugly. But war has a habit of bringing people back to some baseline reality, a reality where those trashed plastic bottles are worth something again. New generations are doomed to keep on relearning how much of a failure war is because we upright apes are too dumb to learn from our own history books. But war is written into our DNA. Fuck the other guy, I need his shit. The world right now reminds me of the situation exactly one hundred years ago. The heady Edwardian days of the gilded age before the Great War cleansed all that animosity out of the old system. 1911 was a year when major powers were entrenching and everyone was getting pissed off.  There was a lot of positioning by nation states then who were gearing themselves up to test how conflict would work out in an industrial age. It took two World Wars to wipe that slate clean and hundreds of millions died. And that was without nukes in the equation. We're in a similar age, the final squabble for what's left after the 20th century boom, this time with 7 billion people to throw into trenches both metaphorical and real.

   The problem today for Western economies is that there is no room for anymore 'growth'. The whole financial casino is based on the idea that we keep expanding into new territory, shitting out more babies and building new markets for iPads. The new reality is that can't happen anymore and that's going to piss off a lot of people. It's the hard wall all our consumerist dreams must crash into on a finite planet. Moon Base Alpha is not going to happen anytime soon because we can't afford it anymore. We spent all the cash importing Italian marble for our countertops. So we're stuck on this rock. Caged apes tend to bash skulls for extra rations. That's us on planet earth right now.

   Stockpile popcorn. It's still cheap.

   And yeah, I'm a depressing fuck. I'd hang outside a supermarket with one of those "The End is Nigh" signs if I wasn't such a pussy.

  

Norway: It's not terrorism if you're a photogenic white guy who hates the government?

   Like most people, when I first heard of the bombing in Oslo, I started group-thinking along with everybody else that al-Qaeda were behind it and had chalked up some opportunistic infidel deaths to buy some longevity in global media now that their dear leader got air dumped in the Indian Ocean. I presumed headlines and a media frenzy were the motivation for the bombing. You're nobody these days without column inches. Al-Qaeda, being mainly a media phenomena anyhow, with no command and control structure, no real logistics operation and no more chips to play on the global stage except media infamy for 9/11 and some amorphous rallying call to angry Muslim youth to use 'terror' against the Western oligarchy; I figured this was just a cheap way to blast a soft target and remind us all that al-Qaeda are still here. Muslim populations in the Middle East sure have a legitimate beef with us Westerners for meddling in their desert shitholes just so we can keep the petro dollar Christmas tree lights on.

   Still, I grabbed popcorn.  Nothing starts a whole new war like dead white people.

   But then I started thinking about it. Norway? Why the hell would, and I'm using the terminology of Western countries here, why would the "terrorists" strike Norway of all places? I mean, they aren't exactly enemy number one or close to first on the list of "countries a young pissed off Muslim extremist with no girlfriend" is likely to want to murder children in. Sure, it's a NATO member and a soft target with no TSA and Patriot Act keeping them all safe. But when you're a young Muslim donning a suicide vest to make a point by chalking up a respectable civilian body count, Norway is by no means the first place you'd choose to make that point. Then I thought of Gaddafi and that threat he made two weeks ago about bombing the Euros and NATO capitals. If some young Libyan pulled this shit, then the much derided NATO ground assault on Tripoli that I fantasized about last week was suddenly in play.

   Hell, if the whole "war on terror" is really real I thought, as I switched from popcorn to beer, then why didn't some sexually repressed but horny young Muslim or Gaddafi 'Manchurian Candidate' plant a bomb in say, Times Square, or blow up an airliner with a Calvin Klein underwear bomb? Oh shit, yeah, 'they' already tried that and I've already been duly 'terrified' by what the desert brown people want to do to me. Okay, I thought, maybe Norway is a legitimate target, what with their fancy socialist democracy, high taxes and top rating on 'best countries in the world to live in' index. Perhaps one of those young Muslims living in a segregated Muslim district in Oslo wanted to draw attention to the fact that they're highly pissed off with their living situation. And, let's face it, no letter writing campaign is ever going to change public awareness like a bunch of dead people.

   That's when breaking news told me that a "suspect had been apprehended by Norwegian police". And right then I knew this guy wasn't al-Qaeda. Any decent fundamentalist would have saved the last bullet in the mag for himself. And not for that 72 virgin bullshit they like to promulgate on CNN or Fox. Proper religious fundamentalists die by their sword along with their victims and let god sort out the moral dilemma of heaven and hell allocation. It's how you prove you truly believe in an afterlife right? By dying and going to a better place? It's why I wonder why all these religious fundamentalists on all sides don't just kill themselves by default and board the short train to paradise. Why waste time dealing with the nuance of the human world when you can take the fast track to everlasting bliss?

   Turned out, by my third beer, the shooter had been identified. Pictures of him surfaced.

   Holy shit, I thought, he might be the best looking Muslim 'terrorist' I'd ever seen!

  Brad Pitt could play that guy in a movie. He's the most photogenic blonde Euro terrorist since the baddies in 'Die Hard'. Aren't terrorists supposed to be bearded brown desert people with funny headgear? And that's when I noticed that the "Terror Attack in Oslo" headlines started shifting editorially to "Extremist Attacks in Oslo". Suddenly, terrorism was off the table now that a blond photogenic white Norwegian guy did it.

   This subtle editorial shift sums up the whole "War on Terror" thing in one neat little pistachio shell. Terrorism since 9/11 has been purely the domain of brown people in foreign deserts where the oil is. It's the kind of subtle editorial shift that goes unnoticed but it's there, full on and in your face, that is if you've got the time or inclination to pay attention to the conglomerated bullshit excuse for news reporting we get these days. Chances are, most people in Western countries are too busy holding down their jobs or looking for a decent paying one in the economic crisis to pay too much attention to what goes down in Norway. Especially if it's not an al-Qaeda operation with any likelihood of bombing them while they ride public transport  to get to that job. Truth is, the lone crusade of an extremist with some beef with his government isn't really a priority except for a quick empathetic fear of what it might be like to be hunted like game for twenty minutes in a forest/lake setting in Norway. World events these days are supposed to fit a narrative. When they don't, the story must shift to something far more confusing and people are left to figure out our crazy times and the madness of fellow humans all by themselves.

   The reality is that Anders Behring Breivik is a terrorist. Pure and simple. He used 'terror' to  make a point to the Norwegian government for what he saw as its Marxist Socialist agenda leading Norway down the wrong path and letting in too many desert people who have no interest in assimilating into Norwegian culture. Or something. It's an argument you can make. And, I suppose, a fair point to put on the discussion table if you believe in democracy. Let the people decide in the proper forum right? After all, isn't democracy the sneaking suspicion that more than 50% of the people are right more than 50% of the time? But I suppose, if we are to learn anything from history, it's that war and mass murder are the fast track to making your point heard. So break out the automatic weaponry, head to the local mosque at prayer time and start hosing all those evil Muslim children with 7.62mm hollow points to make that point, right?

  Wait, what?

   Scratch that. No, instead, this guy headed to a Norwegian Youth Camp and mowed down 85 white teenagers to prove a point about how bad Muslims are. Okay, let me check my notes. Maybe I skipped the chapter in world military history where murdering your own racial group makes you a hero among them because you wanted to prove to them and the government how 'bad' the enemy racial group are. That's when I stopped trying to piece together the psychology of this guy. He doesn't even deserve the mental energy. Call me radical, but I like my terrorists to at least have a proper point. You know, something like freeing oppressed people from tyranny or blowing up a hotel full of enemy personnel because they're occupying your country or something. At the very least, a cogent ideology you can disagree with on a human level but understand if you were to put yourself in the shooter's shoes and experience his shitty life from childhood.

   But this fucking millionaire?

   Growing up in one of the richest countries on the planet with all kinds of social services and free education and healthcare and unemployment insurance, this fuck up started two businesses that tanked so at 32, he went to live on a farm outside Oslo. Yeah, it was all part of his plan. It's a hard life being a fuck up but a lot easier if you own a farm. How can you hate people if you live on a farm in Norway anyway? You've already scored huge in the life lottery and got incarnated in the first world in the 21st century where life is golden. It made me think of that scene in 12 Monkey's when Bruce Willis time travels back from the post apocalyptic virus future and stumbles across a shitty stream in a nondescript forest and cries with joy, raving that this is all anyone ever needs, fresh water, sky, clean air, a wood supply with fish and wild game to hunt.

   But that's me being all idealistic.

   We humans are pretty simple when it comes down to it. But in the celebrity fap zone sci fi dystopia that we've created for ourselves, where you're nobody if you're not on TV or on some shitty reality show, there are plenty of sick fucks out there who can't see the wood from the trees in the '12 Monkey' forest. This fame whore just wanted headlines and the inevitable media frenzy that makes mass murder an instant ticket to fame. Blame whoever. The media business itself or the insatiable human nature that consumes it. But Anders Behring Breivik is on the front page of every media outlet on the planet today. And that's mission accomplished for him. And yeah, I'm aware of the meta post modern irony of me writing about it.

   We're going to hear a lot of of bullshit in the media over the next week about this guy and the reasons why he did what he did. It'll probably lead to debates about multiculturalism, Muslim integration in free societies, curbs on civil liberties to prevent it from happening again and mountains of other things. But at the end of the day, this fame whore succeeded, just like 'al-Qaeda' did, in making fools of us all. Violence works as do body counts and war. War is the only thing that ever changed anything in human history. Sad fact. And don't quote me Gandhi, that was just war by peaceful means. 

   What a waste of a good farm.

  

  

Libya: Does NATO have the balls for a ground assault on Tripoli?

    There's no doubt that NATO needs Operation "Odyssey Dawn" to just go away now. Shuffle off into the pages of some history book that nobody will read. That's a pretty good bet these days too. With the collective memory of the public in our dystopian sci fi future bordering on goldfish territory, it's safe to assume that the sleazy corporations and oligarchies that run Western foreign policy could hide behind the curtain and watch this mess go away just by the inexorable force of inertia alone. Or at least until the X Factor comes on TV. 

   For one thing, this war is making everyone involved look bad. The French and British are just looking ineffectual with their hamfisted air strikes and with the US Congress voting to censure Obama for going to war in Libya without Congressional approval (laugh out loud funny when you consider Bush era foreign policy), everyone involved here is looking like the proverbial 8th grader school trippers at the local zoo who come across the chimpanzee enclosure. Those apes are so cute on the monkey bars until they get bored and start flinging freshly minted shit at the children behind the Plexiglas.

   The NATO mission in Libya is a lot like that. The trip sure seemed like a good idea if you didn't stop and think about it. And NATO didn't. Making sure that the supplier of 10% of the EU's oil didn't self destruct and flood the Euros with Muslim refugees in the process sure seemed like a good idea when NATO first started dropping precision ordinance on Gaddafi's tanks outside Benghazi. And barring some lucky Tomahawk strike on Gaddafi's tent (and that's always a possibility given the right intel), the NATO mission in Libya went wrong fast. That's not to say there was ever a definition of what the mission going "right" meant either.  Like Gaddafi predicted, it's already gone on longer than NATO bargained for and now they're left without a convincing exit strategy. That's always been the problem with starting small wars when you're the big guy on the block. Once you start them, you can't walk away without a win. Otherwise you just look weak. That's playground logic that every bully who preys on lunch money knows. With Gaddafi's lunch money proving harder to grab than anticipated and him entrenched in fortress Tripoli that no air campaign is ever going to break, it looks like NATO get to be the kids stuck behind the Plexiglas watching incoming turds.

   And this is where it's fun to entertain the possibility of a ground assault.

   Sure, it's never going to happen right? But let's engage in fantasy here for a few minutes, grab some popcorn and play around with the idea that the Euros have balls and how a ''boots on the ground strategy" might play out. This war was never supposed to go the distance. In the minds of politicians in Western countries, they've got this awesome military at their disposal with the latest multi million dollar combat aircraft to push around on the global chess board and anything that doesn't equal an automatic military win means there must be a glitch in the Matrix.

   Gaddafi, for his part, engaged in some high level trolling of the Euros last week. Just the other day, he threatened them with the prospect of hundreds of fools willing to martyr themselves on the streets of Paris and London if NATO didn't stop the bombing. Threats like that tend to piss people off and make the media jizz at the prospect of all the advertising revenue they'll bag while reporting it. If there's one thing the IRA proved when they started bombing economic targets in London, like say Canary Wharf in 1996, is that 'terrorism' tends to bring the politicians to the negotiating table. The dirty little secret of modern warfare despite the hype is that 'terrorism' works. Hell, it has always worked. It just comes down to what you define as terrorism. Carpet bombing cities sure counts. The London blitz, Dresden and Hiroshima were all pretty damn terrifying. If you're gonna bomb Tripoli with Rafales and Tornados, no matter how you dress it up with fancy talk about 'strategic aims' and formal apologies, when that GBU blows up in the wrong place and kills a bunch of fruitsellers it's media time and the chimpanzee shit goes airborne. Truth is, intent doesn't really matter as the smoke clears. Dead bodies are dead bodies. That's war. And it's pretty damn terrifying.

The Libyan rebels: Cool as fuck, yes. But not someone you're going to trust with artillery.

   So the real question, in our little fantasy war, is how does NATO conduct this ground campaign that'll have us grabbing the popcorn and that'll probably never happen. First off, let's take it for granted that the US, the Brits and the Frogs already have ground forces in theater. You think they could trust a bunch of those illiterate rebels in Toyota Tundras to target paint Gaddafi's tanks all by themselves? Foreign special forces have been running around Benghazi since this thing started.

  Could the French and British pull off a balls to the wall amphibious assault on Tripoli? Truth is, they probably wouldn't need to. The British would have HMS Ocean to throw at the job and the French have three Mistral class amphibious assault ships already linked up in the Mediterranean. But it'd be far easier to just unload the armor from cargo ships in Benghazi and push across the desert Eight Army style, rolling up strategic oil towns like Brega and Ras Lanuf along the way. That'd be a bit of a buzzkill on the amphibious landing front though. We haven't had a cool one in war since Inchon back in 1950.

   Still, the armor drive would be fun. 1941 all over again with British armor pushing across Libya and no Rommel to contend with. Just Gaddafi dressed in his 70s porno curtains. Of course, there's no public support for any of this right now, but let's say for the sake of argument that Gaddafi pulls off that threat of martyr bombs in Paris and London. All it'd take is a stack of bodies in your capital and an external enemy to blame it on to have the public crying for blood.

     For more wargasm, let's assume the British break out some Challengers IIs to do the job. You know I've always wondered how that classified ceramic "Chobham" armor of theirs would stand up to relentless RPG fire. Sure Iraq was a test case but Basra was no Fallujah. The French too have their own Main Battle Tank to throw at Gaddafi, the 'Leclerc', which unfortunately for the Frogs, sounds as threatening as some guy who works in a bank. When was the last time the French were involved in proper tank battle anyway? Oh yeah, summer 1940. Ooops.

   Once the NATO armored column got to Tripoli they'd probably head straight to the airport and set up a FOB right there and resupply themselves by air. That strategy worked out pretty well for the US marines when they took Baghdad in 2003. Occupying some real estate in the heart of the enemy camp is a pretty good bet when you're up against a teetering dictator with wavering support and an army who could ditch their uniforms and walk away when things get difficult. Occupying enemy real estate is also a handy way of testing what kind of fight the natives want to bring to the table. And with total air superiority, it'd be hard to see this working out bad for NATO. Of course, it's not the kind of strategy you'd employ anywhere else but in a fading dictators desert capital. But winning might still be tricky, especially if Gaddafi's forces were to prove resilient and everyone and their mother started grabbing an AK from the local armory. Unlikely, but then again, there's always the unexpected in war. My guess is Tripoli would fold in a week with a few small enclaves of die hards holding out a while longer.

  The question is, do the Euros have the balls to put their military on the world stage? Or the cash? The Russians and Chinese would sure like to know. This Libyan mission, like all small wars greater powers get mixed up in, always work out as test cases for bigger 'proper' wars. When the Russians handed the Georgians their ass in the NATO proxy war in South Ossetia in 2008 we all learned that the Warsaw Pact tank divisions hadn't really gone away. The Libyan debacle, no matter who says what, is an interesting test case for NATO as an effective fighting force. Right now a barely passing grade doesn't inspire much confidence.

   But this war still comes down to economics. With all kinds of embargoes, Gaddafi is running out of money and the situation in Tripoli is worsening. Tripoli has always been the place Libyan sophisticates hang out drinking lattes, sucking sweet smoke from fragrant hookahs and discussing how bad the western imperialists are. Truth is, a lot of them had it pretty good under Gaddafi. Free health care and free education right on up through university. Once those illiterate rebels from Benghazi take over who knows what'll be left for the coffee drinkers. Half those fools are Islamic hardliners from the desert who signed up to fight the Yankee imperialists in Iraq and Afghanistan. They don't do Starbucks culture very well. That's why the sophisticates sided with Gaddafi in the first place. Now coffee supplies are getting leaner and bread is being baked by female volunteers. Stuff like that tends to make cafe dwellers reassess their priorities.

   Paradoxically, NATO broke a cardinal rule and bombed the oil facilities at Brega last week. That's like the bully spitting in his victim's lunch before actually taking it and smacks of NATO desperation to get this thing over with. They claimed Gaddafi was using it to fuel his army. But the useless rebels held it a month before and managed to fill a tanker and collect $100 million before they passed "Go". That at least proved to the western corporatocracy that these fucktard rebels can at least play ball on the oil front.

   Gaddafi himself sees the writing on the wall. There's no win for him here long term and like all old men, he doesn't want to die penniless and locked up in some Euro jail. He's shrewd enough to see NATO's predicament and can give them the "victory" they need in exchange for a transfer of power to his son Saif, some kind of immunity from a war crimes trial in The Hague and, most critical of all, getting to keep some of that money he's stashed away in myriad offshore bank accounts. Beachfront property and a comfortable retirement sure seems like a good deal now and he's softening on the 'fight to the death' bullshit he was spouting when this war got started. If he's to cut a deal, he'd better do it quick before the rest of his generals defect and his troops chuck their uniforms, go home and act like they know nothing about rape and pillage.

   In respect to that NATO ground assault fantasy of mine, it looks like my popcorn supply is safe.