Libya. The wholesale, full scale destruction of a country.

The wholesale destruction of the economy of Libya.  A country that 40 years ago was considered the poorest country on the face of the earth.

Libya and Mohamar Gadaffi reigned for 42 years.   He was not a nice man in many ways.   But I believe he gave his nation much more than we have today in 2015.

1951 Libya was officially the poorest country in the world.  By 1979 Libya had a per capita income and standard of living that exceeded that of Italy and the U.K.

They were enjoying a quality of life to be had greater than the us after the credit crisis.

No mayors senators or legislature.   Every Libyan had the same vote and power.

They enjoyed benefits that are only dreamed of in America.

Bank loans to all citizens at 0%

50% subsidy on cars.

Everyone had a house.   Because houses were considered by Gadaffi as a human right.

Each month every family received $400.00 from the sale of Libyan oil.

Education from kindergarten through post graduate school was free.  As was all healthcare.

If a graduate could not find a job after graduation, they were given unemployment compensation equal to the average salary of the person’s profession until employment could be found.

Literacy jumped from 25% in the pre-Gaddafi era to 83% today.

25% of Libyans had a university degree

If a Libyan would take up a career in farming, he would receive the farm, including land, house, equipment, seeds and livestock, all for free.  It was an incentive Gaddafi used to move the country toward agricultural independence.

The price of gasoline was 53 cents per gallon.

15 cents would buy 40 loaves of bread.

Electricity and water also considered human rights by Gadaffi and were also free.

At the time of Gadaffi’s death he had a 90% approval rating from the Libyan people.

Libya had no debt and boasted some of the largest surpluses of any county in the world, and enjoyed one of the very lowest crime rates.

The country was known regionally as the Switzerland of North Africa.

Gadaffi’s most ambitious project was the digging of hundreds of deep fresh water wells, and building an aqueduct system that was hailed by many as the 8^th Wonder of the world to reclaim 100’s of thousands of acres of Sahara dessert into production farmland.  Libya was thought to have enough fresh water underground to last 6,000 years even with agricultural use.

The government owned 144 tons ofgold which was the second largest amount of any nation in Africa. That’s about 20 times more per capita than the U.K.

Gadaffi successfully formed the African Union a political bloc of 54 nations with a combined population of nearly 900 million people.

Gadaffi was about to launch the first fully gold-backed currency to grace the globe in over 78 years.   And was proposing to trade oil in that currency and not the $$$$$.

I wonder why the U.S. was so intent on seeing him overthrown?

The Real Afghanistan view from a Marine

The Real Afghanistan

A Marine's View of what is really going on. This

young man is articulate and has a flare for colorful language, and

descriptive prose .....

Scorpions, Chiggers & Sand Fleas.

Great letter from a Recon Marine in Afghanistan.

From the Sand Pit:

It's freezing here. I'm sitting on hard cold dirt between rocks and shrubs
at the base of the Hindu Kush Mountains, along the Dar'yoi Pamir River, watching a hole that leads to a tunnel that leads to a cave.

Stake out, my friend, and no pizza delivery for thousands of miles.

I also glance at the area around my ass every ten to fifteen seconds to avoid another scorpion sting. I've actually given up battling the chiggers and sand fleas, but the scorpions give a jolt like a cattle prod. Hurts like a bastard. The antidote tastes like transmission fluid, but God bless the Marine Corps for the five vials of it in my pack. The one truth the Taliban cannot escape is that, believe it or not, they are human beings, which means they have to eat food and drink water. That requires couriers and that's where an old bounty hunter like me comes in handy.

I track the couriers, locate the tunnel entrances and storage facilities, type the info into the handheld, and shoot the coordinates up to the satellite link that tells the air commanders where to drop the hardware. We bash some heads for a while, and then I track and record the new movement.

It's all about intelligence. We haven't even brought in the snipers yet. These scurrying rats have no idea what they're in for. We are but days away from cutting off supply lines and allowing the eradication to begin. But you know me; I'm a romantic. I've said it before and I'll say it again: This country blows, man. It's not even a country.

There are no roads, there's no infrastructure, there's no government. This is an inhospitable, rock pit shit hole ruled by eleventh century warring tribes. There are no jobs here like we know jobs. Afghanistan offers two ways for a man to support his family, join the opium trade or join the army. That's it. Those are your options. Oh, I forgot, you can also live in a refugee camp and eat plum-sweetened, crushed beetle paste and squirt mud like a goose with stomach flu, if that's your idea of a party. But the smell alone of those 'tent cities of the walking dead' is enough to hurl you into the poppy fields to cheerfully scrape bulbs for eighteen hours a day.

I've been living with these Tajiks and Uzbeks, and Turkmen and even a couple of Pashtu's, for over a month-and-a-half now, and this much I can say for sure: These guys, are Huns....actual, living Huns. They LIVE to fight. It's what they do. It's ALL they do. They have no respect for anything, not for their families, nor for each other, nor for themselves.

They claw at one another as a way of life. They play polo with dead calves and force their five-year-old sons into human cockfights to defend the family honor. Huns, roaming packs of savage, heartless beasts who feed on each other's barbarism. Cavemen with AK-47's. Then again, maybe I'm just cranky young bastard.

I'm freezing my ass off on this stupid hill because my lap warmer is running out of juice, and I can't recharge it until the sun comes up in a few hours.

Oh yeah! You like to write letters, right? Do me a favor, Bizarre. Write a letter to CNN and tell Wolf and Anderson and that awful, sneering, pompous Aaron Brown to stop calling the Taliban 'smart.' They are not smart. I suggest CNN invest in a dictionary because the word they are looking for is 'cunning.' The Taliban are cunning, like jackals and hyenas and wolverines. They are sneaky and ruthless, and when confronted, cowardly. They are hateful, malevolent parasites who create nothing and destroy everything else. Smart! Bullshit! Yeah, they're real smart, they've spent their entire lives reading only one book (and not a very good one, as books go) and consider hygiene and indoor plumbing to be products of the devil. They're still figuring out how to work a Bic lighter. Talking to a Taliban warrior about improving his quality of life is like trying to teach an ape how to hold a pen, eventually he just gets frustrated and sticks you in the eye with it.

OK, enough. Snuffle will be up soon, so I have to get back to my hole. Covering my tracks in the snow takes a lot of practice, but I'm good at it.

Please, I tell you and my fellow Americans to turn off the TV sets and move on with your lives. The story line you are getting from CNN and other news agencies is utter bullshit and designed not to deliver truth but rather to keep you glued to the screen so you will watch the commercials. We've got this one under control. The worst thing you guys can do right now is sit around analyzing what we're doing over here, because you have no idea what we're doing, and really, you don't want to know. We are your military, and we are only doing what you sent us here to do.

From a Jack Recon Marine in Afghanistan. Semper Fi.
"Freedom is not free, but the U.S. Marine Corps will pay most of your share".

Famous Yogi Berra sayings.

Yogi Berra died today.  A great catcher for many years for the New York Yankees and later a great coach.  A funny guy too.

When you come to a fork in the road, take it.
2. You can observe a lot by just watching.
3. It ain’t over till it’s over
4. It’s like déjà vu all over again.
5. No one goes there nowadays, it’s too crowded.
6. Baseball is ninety percent mental and the other half is physical.
7. A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.
8. Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours.
9. We made too many wrong mistakes.
10. Congratulations. I knew the record would stand until it was broken.
11. You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six.
12. You wouldn’t have won if we’d beaten you.
13. I usually take a two-hour nap from one to four.
14. Never answer an anonymous letter..
15. The future ain’t what it used to be.
16. It gets late early out here.
17. If the people don’t want to come out to the ballpark, nobody’s going to stop them.
18. We have deep depth.
19. Pair up in threes.
20. Why buy good luggage, you only use it when you travel.
21. You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going, because you might not get there.
22. All pitchers are liars or crybabies.
23. Even Napoleon had his Watergate.
24. Bill Dickey is learning me his experience.
25. He hits from both sides of the plate. He’s amphibious.
26. It was impossible to get a conversation going, everybody was talking too much.
27. I can see how he (Sandy Koufax) won twenty-five games. What I don’t understand is how he lost five.
28. I don’t know (if they were men or women fans running naked across the field). They had bags over their heads.
29. I’m not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did.
30. I never blame myself when I’m not hitting. I just blame the bat and if it keeps up, I change bats. After all, if I know it isn’t  my fault that I’m not hitting, how can I get mad at myself?
31. I never said most of the things I said.
32. It ain’t the heat, it’s the humility.
33. If you ask me anything I don’t know, I’m not going to answer.
34. I wish everybody had the drive he (Joe DiMaggio) had. He never did anything wrong on the field. I’d never seen him dive for a ball, everything was a chest-high catch, and he never walked off the field.
35. So I’m ugly. I never saw anyone hit with his face.
36. Take it with a grin of salt.
37. (On the 1973 Mets) We were overwhelming underdogs.
38. The towels were so thick there I could hardly close my suitcase.
39. Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps the parents off the streets.
40. I’m lucky. Usually you’re dead to get your own museum, but I’m still alive to see mine.

The Irrelevance of the Peaceful Majority

Very few Germans were true Nazis, many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care. Many just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat
back and let it all happen. Then, before they knew it, they owned the country, and the silent, peaceful majority had lost control, and the end of the world had come.’

The people are told again and again by 'experts' and 'talking heads' that Islam is a religion of peace and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the specter of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam.’

The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It
is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50
shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor-kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. It is the fanatics who teach their young to kill and to become suicide bombers.’

The hard, quantifiable fact is that the peaceful majority, the 'silent
majority,' is cowed and extraneous. Communist Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. China 's huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people.’

The average Japanese individual prior to World War II was not a
warmongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia in an orgy of killing that included the systematic murder of 12 million Chinese civilians; most killed by sword, shovel, and bayonet. And who can forget Rwanda , which collapsed into butchery? Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were 'peace loving'?

History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our
powers of reason, we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points:
Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence.
Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don't speak up, because like Germany, they will awaken one day and find that the
fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun.

Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Serbs, Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late.’

Now Islamic prayers have been introduced in Toronto and other public schools in Ontario too, while the Lord's Prayer was removed (due to being so offensive?). The Islamic way may be peaceful
for the time being in our country until the fanatics move in.’

In Australia , and indeed in many countries around the world, many of the most commonly consumed food items have the halal emblem on them. Just look at the back of some of the most popular chocolate bars, and at other food items in your local supermarket. Food on aircraft have the halal emblem just to appease the privileged minority who are now rapidly expanding within
the nation's shores.

In the U.K, the Muslim communities refuse to integrate and there are now dozens of "no-go" zones within major cities across the country that the police force dare not intrude upon. Sharia law prevails there, because the Muslim community in those areas refuse to acknowledge British law.’

As for us who watch it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only
group that counts - the fanatics who threaten our way of life.

Crushed by misfortune?

quote from Seneca