Delayed Reaction

Obama's moving kind of slow these days. I can't see how this man plays basketball.

US Army moves 2,500 tanks, trucks and military vehicles into Europe in the biggest troop transfer since the Cold War

Troops arrive to respond to Russian aggression in the region after annexation of Crimea in 2014

THOUSANDS of heavily armoured US military vehicles have arrived in Germany to respond to Russian aggression in Europe.

The military brigade of 3,500 troops is the largest to be deployed to the continent since the end of the Cold War.

The annexation took place in 2014 and now it's.... 2017?

Or maybe the UK Sun reporters need to take some vitamins or something.

Story here.

The New Russian Army Isn't The Old Russian Army

Putin has not been sitting on his hands when it comes to re-arming the Motherland.

With tensions rising again between Russia and Ukraine, there are fears of a renewed upsurge in the fighting.

Russia-watchers in the West are monitoring events carefully, not just in terms of the day-to-day crisis, but because Russia's military is worth watching.

Moscow's military's performance in Ukraine has provided a foretaste of a new kind of warfare; eastern Ukraine has provided a laboratory for ground combat in the 21st Century.

The Russians have deployed advanced weapons systems that are causing NATO commanders a great deal of concern. These are not proposed systems. These are systems that were used in the Crimea and Ukraine incursions.

• The use of drones to provide targeting information.
• New, long-range air defenses.
• Anti-access and area denial systems.
• Communications jamming.

But one item comes to the the forefront, particularly when viewed against the recent spate of emails that were hacked from the DNC.

But perhaps the most worrying element of Russia's new approach is what has been broadly termed "hybrid warfare" - a mix of semi-clandestine operations; propaganda and information warfare; computer hacking and so on.

This was seen in its seizure of Crimea with troops in unmarked uniforms (the so-called "little green men"); the closing down of independent news sources and so on.

What is fascinating from the Russian literature is the priority that Moscow gives to the whole cyber-domain, ranging from large-scale hacking to even the trolling of Western service personnel using their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

More here.

!!! BREXIT !!!

So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Au Revoir, Adios, Arrivederci!

God's Chosen

At least in one fashion, the Jews are one of God's gifts to man. No other ethnic/religious group has received as many Nobel prizes as the Jews. 

According to the Jewish Virtual Library, since the Nobel was first awarded in 1901 approximately 193 of the 855 honorees have been Jewish (22%). Jews make up less than 0.2% of the global population.

This year (2013) 6 of 12 laureates were Jewish. The 13th laureate, for the Nobel Peace Prize, was awarded to an organization and not an individual.

And the accolades continue to grow as new research is developed by the children of Abraham.
From the American Thinker:

One in six American men will develop prostate cancer. It is the most common cancer after skin cancer, and the second biggest cancer killer for men. Two Israeli scientists at the Weizmann Institute in Israel promise an almost miraculous cure, now in clinical trials at New York’s Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. It is the culmination of 20 years of basic research by plant scientist Avigdor Scherz and cancer researcher Yoram Saloman.

Several have speculated on why this is so.

Richard Dawkins:

Something about the cultural tradition of Jews is way, way more sympathetic to science and learning and intellectual pursuits than Islam.

American Thinker:

Jews undoubtedly have genetic gifts, but much of their cultural flowering is from Judaism itself, a religion that fosters reading, thinking, and debating – in other words, individualism and freedom.

And now the most intellectually productive component of western society is being hounded out of Europe by hordes of barbarians. Can you guess where they are headed?

And the Europeans ain't putting up much of a fuss.

God is gathering His own.
You can't see the End Times from here; no one can.
But you can smell them.

They Remember....

One of the best quotes regarding the Obama administration is this, culled from the Daily Timewaster:

...all we have to do is scrape this administration off our shoe in 2016 and return to doing good.

The story here is about the recent reactions of Europeans to the presence of US armed forces. Have a hanky available.

These are pictures of Polish citizens mobbing a US Army unit that transitioned across Poland this week. You'd think it was VE Day in 1945.

Story here and a lot more here.

How Then Should We Live?

I realized a long time ago that living for and by myself was not my cup of tea. I'm not saying that that it's a terrible way to live, but I'm just not built that way. After my first marriage crashed and burned I was gun shy; I was divorced by 24 and remarried at 32. Now after 30+ years my wife and I get along pretty well. There were rocky patches to be sure but the lug nuts of our marriage were tight thanks to our commitment to God and each other.

Now that the youngest is out of college we have more disposable income. We aren't rich, we aren't poor, but at last we're comfortable. Now comes the more intense preparations for living out the last of our years. During this time I have more and more opportunity to look back and evaluate what we've done and to thank God for His provision. And for our family.

Our oldest daughter and her husband and their four kids were over yesterday for a Sunday dinner of Grandma's pasta, sauce and meatballs. Their twentieth anniversary is next month. Our middle daughter and her husband (married now for 18 months) were also there as well as the youngest daughter just out of college and rarin' to move to NYC to make her mark in the fashion industry. Our Army girl Skyped in later in the afternoon and we spoke with her for a spell.

Listening to the uproar, the banter of my wife and daughters, the laughter, the silliness ... there's nothing that can replace it, there's no way to put a price on it, there's no way to grow it without years of commitment and sacrifice.

I talked my wife into quitting her job at the phone company after our second child was born (she made more than me on my police salary). I wanted her home with the kids. That was twenty-seven years ago - I remember praying that nothing would break because I couldn't afford to fix it. I grabbed all the extra overtime I could find and did construction/remodeling work on the side.  My Dad was a hard worker, that's how I was brought up and I just did what I was expected to do.

I'd do it again in a heart beat 'cause it's all worth it. And the older I get the more I appreciate the value of our family.

Cardigan over at iOTW posted something about the decisions people are making today about family. It's downright discouraging. People are abandoning the creation of families in order to please themselves. From the Jewish World Review:

[...]In Europe, the most rapidly growing type of family unit is the one-person household. Such households already make up one-third of the households in Western Europe and 45% in Denmark. Japanese demographers Miho Iwasaw and Ryuichi Kaneko project that twenty years from now over 50% of Japanese women will never have grandchildren. Already those born after 1990 have less than a fifty percent chance of marrying and staying married until age fifty. Nor are these trends confined to affluent educated societies. A similar flight from marriage and childbearing is taking place in the Arab world.

It was partly in order to replace a declining labor pool that Europe allowed the immigration of millions of Muslims, and thereby set the stage for violent social conflict in the not too distant future.

Finally, the conjunction of childlessness with increased longevity means that it will fall upon government to care for growing numbers of elderly suffering from dementia or otherwise unable to care for themselves and with no family members to do so. That development alone will fuel calls for healthcare rationing, the termination of life-support, and assisted suicide — in short, the rejection of the idea that human life itself is a value.

As the flight from family takes wing, however, the pattern of life satisfaction increasing with age will reverse. If life is based solely on the fulfillment of one's hedonistic desires, those desires are more easily attained in youth than in middle-age and beyond. Those who choose a life without commitment or encumbrance are likely to find themselves living an ever more lonely existence as they age.

So very, very sad.