“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."
The USS Eisenhower, an American aircraft carrier that holds eight fighter bomber squadrons and 8,000 men, arrived at the Syrian coast yesterday in the midst of a heavy storm, indicating US preparation for a potential ground intervention.
While the Obama administration has not announced any sort of American-led military intervention in the war-torn country, the US is now ready to launch such action “within days…”
…If the US decides to intervene militarily in Syria, it now has at its disposal 10,000 fighting men, 17 warships, 70 fighter-bombers, 10 destroyers and frigates and a guided military cruises. Some of the vessels are also equipped with Aegis missile interceptors to shoot down any missiles Syria might have at hand…
NATO moved forward Thursday with its plan to place Patriot missiles and troops along Syria’s border with Turkey to protect against potential attacks.
Assad’s regime blasted the move as “psychological warfare,” saying the new deployment would not deter it from seeking victory over rebels it views as terrorists.
Whether the threat is real or just another WMD psychological operation on the order of Iraq is very quickly becoming irrelevant.
In fact, we may be so close to another mid-eastern war that Syrian President Bashir Al-Assad is emphatically trying to find an exit:
In a regional tour conducted last week, Syrian Vice-Minister of the Exterior Faisal al-Miqdad delivered requests on behalf of al-Assad to Venezuelan, Cuban, and Ecuadorian authorities. The letters allegedly enquire into the possibility of asylum for al-Assad, his family, and a tightknit circle of advisors and collaborators.
Venezuelan authorities confirmed that President Hugo Chávez had received a letter from al-Assad before travelling to Cuba for continued cancer treatment.
And he’s not the only one trying to get out ahead of what is sure to be a massive bombardment should NATO forces decide to take preemptive action. With war raging between rebels and the Assad government, thousands of refugees have been getting out of harm’s way since November:
Thousands of Syrians fled their country on Friday in one of the biggest refugee exoduses of the 20-month civil war…
An estimated four million people will need humanitarian aid by early next year when the country is in the grip of winter.
War is coming.
The same “intelligence” used to persuade Americans to invade Iraq is being used once again to justify intervention in Syria.
Likewise, the media propaganda machine that warned Americans of the dangers of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction is blaring the sirens again.
Not much has changed, except that this time those who were against Bush’s war in 2003 are fully in support now that a democrat President says it’s the truth.
On December 14, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta signed a Pentagon order to deploy 400 US missile troops to Turkey. According to Washington, the security of Turkey, NATO’s heavyweight, is threatened. US military personnel will to be deployed to Turkey in the coming weeks to operate two US Patriot missile batteries.
According to the Pentagon’s spokesman, George Little:
“The United States has been supporting Turkey in its efforts to defend itself,… [against Syria]
“I’m not going to go into precise locations at this time, he added, “but I wanted to let you…know that we signed that order and that we are prepared in the context of NATO to support the defense of Turkey for an unspecified period of time.”
“The purpose of this deployment is to signal very strongly that the United States, working closely with our NATO allies, is going to support the defense of Turkey, especially with potential threats emanating from Syria,” US Air Force News, December 14, 2012)
The Patriot surface-to-air interceptors are deployed to deal “with threats that come out of Syria” According to U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. these threats “include Syrian strikes inside Turkey and fighting between the government and rebels that extends into Turkey” (CNN, December 14, 2012):
“We can’t spend a lot of time worrying about whether that pisses off Syria,” said Panetta [sic] after signing the order Friday. (Ibid, emphasis added)
In addition to the US missile deployment, Germany and the Netherlands have confirmed that they will also deploy Patriot missiles in Turkey directed against Syria.
Not mentioned in the official Pentagon statement, this buildup of patriot missile batteries is not only directed against Syria, it is intended to confront Russia’s military presence in Syria as well as its support to the development of Syria’s air defense system.
The US-NATO Led Insurgency
The Pentagon’s initiative in Turkey is part of the US-NATO-Israeli led insurgency against Syria. In recent months, this insurgency has evolved towards an unofficial (yet de facto) allied invasion characterized by the presence inside Syria of French, British, Turkish and Qatari Special Forces.
These Special Forces are “embedded” within rebel ranks. They are not only participating in the training of rebel forces, they are also involved in de facto paramilitary command and coordination, in liaison with NATO.
In other words, member states of the Atlantic Alliance through their Special Forces and intelligence operatives on the ground largely determines the nature and thrust of rebel activities. Of significance, the main fighting force directly recruited and trained by US-NATO, Saudi Arabia and Qatar is the Al Nusra Front, (see image right) an Al Qaeda affiliated militia involved in countless terrorist acts against civilians.
The Broader Middle East War
The US Patriot missile deployment in Turkey is part of a regional process of militarization which includes the establishment of US command posts and the stationing of American troops in Jordan and Israel. This regional military deployment also threatens Iran.
Moreover, US-NATO-Israeli war preparations with regard to Syria are coordinated with those pertaining to Iran. The command posts in Israel, which oversee some 1000 US troops, in coordination with Israel’s IDF, are under the jurisdiction of US European Command (EUCOM).
In a recent statement Iran’s chief of staff warned that the stationing of Patriot anti-missile batteries on Turkey’s border with Syria “was setting the stage for world war”
It is worth noting that in addition to the Patriot missiles in Turkey, Patriot batteries targeted at Iran have also been deployed to Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE and Bahrain (2010).
Russia’s Air Defense Systems in Syria
In response to the US-allied missile deployment, Russia delivered advanced Iskander missiles to Syria, which are now fully operational, not to mention the ground to air Russian defense system Pechora 2M.
The superior Iskander can travel at hypersonic speed of over 1.3 miles per second (Mach 6-7) and has a range of over 280 miles with pinpoint accuracy of destroying targets with its 1,500-pound warhead, a nightmare for any missile defense system.
Moreover, Syria is equipped with the modern Pechora-2M air defense system, which US military sources admit would constitute “a threat”, namely an obstacle, in the case “a no fly zone” were implemented in relation to Syria.
The Pechora-2M is a sophisticated multiple target system which can also be used against cruise missiles.
Ground to air defense Russian Pechora 2M deployed to Syria (above)
Russia Stands Firmly in Support of Syria
Contrary to recent reports, Russia is supporting the government of Bashar al Assad.
On December 14, the Russian Foreign Ministry dismissed rumors, largely instrumented by Western press agencies and the New York Times, that Moscow had changed its position with regard to Syria. The media hype plastered on news headlines was based on an unofficial off-the-cuff statement by Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Mikhail Bodganov;
“We must face the facts: the current tendency shows that the government is progressively losing control over an increasing part of the territory,” Bogdanov told the Public Chamber. “An opposition victory can’t be ruled out.”
The statement had nothing to do with Russia’s stance with regard to Syria. In fact quite the opposite, Moscow has increased its military cooperation with Damascus in response to Western threats.
“…We never changed our position, and will not do so in the future,” said Foreign Affairs spokesperson Lukashevich at a press briefing in Moscow.
Washington and its allies have consistently supported the various terrorist entities which are part of the “opposition” rebel forces.
In recent developments, the Free Syrian Army (FSA) is threatening to execute a Ukrainian journalist (see photo Below) and has also announced that they will “kill Russians and Ukrainians nationals” in Syria.
The Free Syria Army (FSA) are the foot-soldiers of the Western military alliance. Without Western support they would not be able to confront Syrian government forces.
The decision to threaten and target Russian nationals did not emanate from the “opposition” rebel forces, but directly from Washington.
These threats constitute a deliberate act of provocation against the Russian government which is providing military support to Syria. “Opposition” forces in consultation with US-NATO are now threatening Russia, which is an ally of Syria.
We are at a dangerous crossroads: while Patriot missiles are installed in Turkey, Russian Iskander missiles are deployed in Syria.
French, British, Turkish and Qatari special forces are involved in the recruitment and training of FSA rebels, which are in large part mercenaries. The FSA is now targeting Russian citizens in Syria on the orders of Washington, leading to a potential breakdown in international diplomacy.
Moscow considers these threats as “akin to a declaration of war” stating that “the armed insurgents in Syria [supported by the West] have been emboldened to a point that they have stepped into an area where they are beyond the law.”
Is the threat directed against Russian nationals in Syria the prelude towards a broader process of confrontation between US-NATO and Russia?
As the white flag rises above Republican redoubts, offering a surrender on taxes, the mind goes back to what seemed a worse time for conservatives: December 1964.
Barry Goldwater had suffered a defeat not seen since Alf Landon. Republicans held less than one-third of the House and Senate and only 17 governorships. The Warren Court was remaking America.
In the arts, academic and entertainment communities, and national press corps, conservatives were rarely seen or heard. It was Liberalism’s Hour, with America awash in misty memories of Camelot and great expectations of the Great Society to come in 1965.
That year, however, saw escalation in Vietnam, campus protests, and civil disobedience against the war. That August, there exploded the worst race riot in memory in the Watts section of Los Angeles, with arson, looting, the beating of whites, and sniper attacks on cops and firemen.
A year after LBJ’s triumph, black militants and white radicals were savaging the Liberal Establishment from the left, while Gov. George Wallace had come north in 1964 to win a third of the vote in the major Democratic primaries with an assault from the populist right.
Below the surface, the Democratic Party was disintegrating on ethnic, cultural and political lines. Law and order and Vietnam were the issues. Richard Nixon would see the opening and seize the opportunity to dismantle FDR’s coalition and cobble together his New Majority.
Today, the GOP strength in the House, Senate and governorships is far greater than anything Republicans had in the 1960s. The difference is that, then, we could visualize a new majority of centrist Republicans, Goldwater conservatives, Northern Catholic ethnics and Southern Protestant Democrats.
And we could see the issues that might bring them into the tent: a new Supreme Court, law and order, peace with honor in Vietnam.
When the Liberal Establishment collapsed during the 1960s, unable to end the war in Vietnam or the war in the streets, national leadership passed to the party of Nixon and Ronald Reagan. From 1968 to 1988, the GOP won five of six presidential elections, two of them in 49-state landslides.
The crisis of the GOP today is demographic, cultural and political.
Demographically, people of color are nearing 40 percent of the U.S. population and 30 percent of the electorate. These folks — 85 to 90 percent of all immigrants, legal and illegal — are growing in number. And in 2012, people of color voted for Obama 4 to 1.
The GOP trump card — we are the party of Reagan, who led us to victory in the Cold War — ceased to work 20 years ago. Then, George H.W. Bush, a war hero who had presided over the fall of the Berlin Wall and dissolution of the Soviet Empire, the victor of Desert Storm, won 38 percent of the vote against a draft-evader named Bill Clinton.
Culturally, the causes of the 1960s’ revolutions — no-fault divorce, legalized drugs, “reproductive rights,” teenage access to birth control, gay rights and gay marriage — have either been embraced or become acceptable to most of America’s young.
As a result of the sexual revolution promoted by the counterculture of the 1960s, the dominant culture today, 40 percent of all births in the United States are now to single moms.
With no husband, these women look to government to help feed, house, educate, medicate and provide income support for themselves and their children. For sustenance and the survival of their families, they depend on that same Big Government that Republicans denounce at their rallies.
As to the GOP’s strongest appeal — we are the party that will cut taxes — half the country does not pay income taxes, and the GOP is about to surrender to Obama even on the tax front.
Republicans stand for bringing entitlements under control. But the primary beneficiaries of the big entitlements, Social Security and Medicare, are seniors, the party’s most reliable voting bloc.
On foreign policy, the most visible Republican spokesmen are Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham. Both were unhappy with the withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan. Both want to intervene in Syria and Iran.
What does America want? To come home and do our nation-building here in the United States.
The bedrock values of Reagan — work, family, faith — still hold an appeal for tens of millions. But the faith of our fathers is dying, the family is crumbling, and work is less desirable when the social welfare state offers a cushioned existence for life.
Conservatives need to rediscover what they wish to conserve and how, in a climate every bit as hostile as 1964 — then await the moment when the country turns again to an alternative.
As it will. For our economic course is unsustainable. And our regnant elite are more arrogant than the establishment of the 1960s, though less able to satisfy the clamors of their bawling constituencies for more and more from a country that is approaching an end of its tolerance and an inevitable crash.
They are the perfect pair – the TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X satellites orbiting Earth in a tight formation 15 times a day.
The satellites, each slightly larger than a Volkswagen Golf, are circling 500 kilometers above the planet only a few hundred meters apart.
In tandem, they are examining the Earth's surface with radar pulses, each generating separate data that is later combined, explains Alberto Moreira, director at the Institute of Technology and Radar Systems at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Oberpfaffenhofen.
Tight flight formation
"We have developed a technology that allows two radar systems to fly in tight formation and produce a three-dimensional image of the Earth's surface," Moreira says
Never before have engineers been able to coordinate the trajectory of the satellites to keep them from being too close or too far away from each other to generate the targeted data.
Through different perspectives, the two satellites capture the Earth's terrain in 3-D, in much the same way our two eyes allow for spatial vision.
"The entire land mass of the Earth's surface - about 150 million square kilometres - is completely mapped twice," says Manfred Zink, TanDEM-X Project Manager at DLR in Oberpfaffenhofen.
Patchwork process
Each of the radar systems maps an area that is typically 20 by 40 kilometers in edge length, gradually covering the Earth's entire surface in a patchwork process.
The project is to be completed by the end of next year, according to Zink. "We need six more months to capture mountainous areas and steep terrain," he notes.
The TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X satellites, built by the Center for Air and Space travel at Astrium in Friedrichshafen, have been orbiting Earth since 2007 and 2010 respectively. "The advantage of using radar is simple - you aren't not restricted by cloud cover and lightning conditions," says Eckard Settelmeyer, Astrium's Director of Earth Observation and Science.
Whether light or dark, clear or cloudy, the satellites always have the Earth in perfect view. They keep working when other observation satellites are forced to cease operation due to darkness or fog.
Digital elevation model
The engineers are targeting a precision that no one dared dream of until now, according to Zink. "The goal of the TanDEM-X mission is a homogenous global digital elevation model," he says.
That means plenty of work for the scientists and engineers. The analysis of the radar's data is extremely complex. In addition, the satellites' trajectories must be accurate, to the millimeter, while calculated at a speed of more than 27,000 kilometers per hour.
But the work, the team members agree, is well worth the effort: they're producing the first high-precision 3-D globe.
The collected data can be used in many ways, such as urban and landscape planning, navigation, construction of transmission lines for electricity, oil and gas or operational planning in disaster areas.
New perspective of Earth
It will also enable scientists to explore glaciers, earthquakes and volcanic areas, among others, and is of particular interest to the military.
The orbiting "eyes" give Zink and his team an entirely new perspective of the Earth. "TanDEM-X is a unique combination of scientific and technical challenges and a product that is going to affect all of humanity," he says.
Because of its commercial potential, the TanDEM-X mission was launched from the start as a public-private partnership. The aerospace company Astrium funded a quarter of the 200-million-euro project in return for the commercial rights to the radar data.
Given the huge interest in the data, the TanDEM-X team is already considering a new mission.
A disturbing YouTube video shows Syrian rebels making a child behead an unarmed prisoner – another shocking example of how many of the militants the Obama administration is backing in Syria are Islamic extremists and terrorists.
The clip shows a child hacking away at the head of a bound prisoner with a machete. The video then cuts to militants displaying the man’s severed head while chanting “Allahu Akbar”. Other beheaded prisoners can also be seen in the footage.
The video once again illustrates how the “Syrian rebels” who have been backed by the Obama administration to the tune of over $200 million dollars are committing atrocities on a routine basis on a par with anything the Assad regime has been accused of, and again emphasizes that they are not democratic freedom fighters but jihadist extremists who will stop at nothing to achieve their goals, even to the point of making children do their dirty work for them.
After first denying the presence of Al-Qaeda militants in Syria, the mainstream media now admits that they are the primary front line fighters in all the major battles. In a report yesterday, the New York Times concedes that the Nusra Front, “a direct offshoot of Al Qaeda in Iraq,” “has become one of the uprising’s most effective fighting forces” and whose ally, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, has “killed numerous American troops in Iraq.”
A recent McClatchy Newspapers report also documented how the same group “has become essential to the frontline operations of the rebels fighting to topple Assad,” that the group is “critical to the rebels’ military advance” and how it conducts the “heaviest frontline fighting” in “battle after battle across the country.”
A recent Lebanon Daily Star report also highlighted the fact that “Many of the fighters are non-Syrian,” and that the FSA rebels are not even being allowed to take part in some battles by the Al-Qaeda commanders.
They have also made brazen threats to carry out ethnic cleansing against other Syrians who refuse to accept their rule by means of chemical weapons.
There are also innumerable You Tube videos that show opposition forces flying the Al-Qaeda flag – the same distinctive black flag with white Arabic lettering that was flown by rioters during anti-U.S. demonstrations in numerous countries earlier this year.
Given recent events in both Libya and Egypt, where chaos and bloodshed has ensued as a consequence of extremist factions backed by the Obama administration seizing power, the White House’s support for Jihadist rebels in Syria is leading down the same path, only with a far graver potential outcome given the fact that rebel militants have openly espoused their desire to ethnically cleanse Syria’s minority Alawite population.
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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a host for Infowars Nightly News.
This article was posted: Monday, December 10, 2012 at 5:53 am
THIS IS NOT PRETTY, BUT THIS IS WHAT CURRENT US POLICY, UNDER NOBEL PEACE PRIZE WINNER, BARACK OBAMA AND NOBEL PEACE PRIZE WINNER, THE EU, IS SUPPORTING:
Physicists have long treated time as a variable, yet they have failed to realize the full implications of that fact. If these age estimates are to be taken seriously one cannot escape the conclusion that as time goes on the age of universe not only increases, but does so at an accelerating rate.
Since these results are, at present, based entirely on data from the past, this age increase must be happening in the past. Therefore that point in time representing the birth of the universe, the "Big Bang", may be moving backward in time at an ever-increasing rate.
The rapidly rising trend of the age curve (Fig. 1) strongly suggests that at some finite time in the future the universe's calculated age will be infinite. This will have several important consequences:
(1) All questions relating to the circumstances in place at the time of the beginning of the universe (the Big Bang) will be relegated to history.
(2) All speculation about what was before the Big Bang will likewise be seen as obviously meaningless.
A few theorists suggest an alternate conclusion. They say that the trend of age estimates is due to a fault of time itself. Perhaps the universal expansion of space is accompanied by a universal expansion of the time frame in which all of this happens. Or perhaps the space expansion is only an illusion caused by the time expansion. Their critics say that these theorists just have too much time on their hands.
