RoadDave

In this story the Syrian government has agreed to let some UN folks in to investigate the possibility of the armed forces using nerve gas to quell protests in a suburb of Damascus.  How nice of them.

The bones of story, if you haven’t followed it (and many have not) is that the Syrian Army of Bashar Assad gassed people with Sarin, killing either a dozen, several dozen or thousands, depending on what source you use.  Medecine Sans Frontieres  (Doctors Without Borders) has the smallest axe to grind in the region and have put the number around 355 deaths and 3,600 with symptoms of exposure to a nerve agent.  We’re inclined to go with their count as the closest to reality.

The UN has finally got weapons inspectors on the ground, looking at what evidence they can, aside from testimony of hundreds of eyewitnesses.  The UN folks have their hands tied however, they have to stay within the tight proscription of their mandate.  Find evidence of the munitions and tie that to the Syrian Government.  Unless they find an unexploded warhead, loaded with Sarin, with a shipping tag signed “Bobby Assad, Prop. Syria” with a photo of Assad and a copy of last week’s Daily Worker stuffed inside, like the classic Lee Harvey Oswald shot, that won’t be good enough to pass the nut of the UN.  They’ll come back with a suitably couched diplomatically-weasel-worded ‘Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t’

Here’s the problem.  Assuming the Syrian Government did fire off Sarin-loaded munitions and had them successfully detonate, gassing 350 or so ‘rebels’, what the hell can the UN do about it? 

The fast answer is absolutely nothing.  Even if the UN finds video of Bashar Assad loading the munitions himself, the UN can do absolutely nothing except complain.  They can’t even bring a motion of censure in front of the General Assembly because Russia and China, both members of the Security Council, have vetoes and have already promised to use them if the UN Weapons Inspectors find anything.

Why?  First off is money.  Russia sells a lot of military gear to Syria.  China sells the rest to them.  Secondly is money.  China needs oil.  Syria has oil.  Third, it will piss off the Americans, which is a sport in China and Russia.  They both know that American can’t do anything about Syria without incurring the wrath of the rest of the Middle East.  Fourth, they know the UN is nothing more than a Toyota Land Cruiser full of mentally constipated bureaucrats who can’t decide to take a dump without fifteen nations being involved in negotiations for the next six months, then a resolution to take a dump put before the Security Council, then the General Assembly. 

Then the UN would have to undertake a study of the paperwork involved, likely meeting in Berne, Delhi, Sao Paolo and Auckland to determine if they should wipe from the front to the back, or back to the front, with a certain kind of paper, or just a page from a newspaper. But which newspaper?  Is it Eco-friendly newsprint (+20% post-consumer recycled) with low-VOC inks from vegetable and sustainable sources?  Which hand?

So who’s left to do something?  The US can’t.  If they so much as take out an ad calling on the UN to do something, every nation in the Middle East will claim the US is but a puppet of Israel.  If Israel so much as coughs deeply, then the Jews are trying to take over Palestine and the rest of the Arab world with their nuclear warmongery trying to wipe the Arab nations off their rightful inheritance of all those maps coordinates that don’t actually get printed on Arab maps, as Israel doesn’t actually exist. 

The EU that counts (Britain, France and Germany) dare not so much as clear their throats for fear they get asked to actually cowboy up and do something.  The UK conceivably could, but knows it opens a can of pan-Arab whoopass.  It would start with bombings in London wrapped up with a side order of Palestine in 1947,  Besides, the UK Parliament said “Thanks, no”.  France couldn’t organize a two car funeral procession without endless protesting from the polar extremes of their five-dimensional political spectrum from the punctuation-phobic Social Democrats to the four guys in Lyon who can actually name the President and think his wife is a babe 

Germany is too busy trying keep the Greek, Italian, Hungarian and Spanish parts of the EU from being sold at a garage sale next week in Bonn.  Turkey, more or less next door, isn’t interested.  They’ve got enough refugees from Syria running across the border already.  Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Saudi, Jordan, or anyone else in neighbourhood with more than two shotguns and a guy in a camo vest won’t touch it.  They all know it’s a zero-win proposition and if they do step up to knock Assad down, then someone will look a little too closely at how they have kept their own house in order.

That leaves Chad, Burkina Faso, Bermuda, Afghanistan, Iceland and, wait for it, Canada.  Unfortunately out airplane is up on cinder blocks right now.  The batteries for the starter are back ordered at Canadian Tire and nobody has jumper cables.  Oh, and our helicopters fall out of the sky if you try to make them fly against their will.

Short form?  Assad has gotten away with it.  Nobody is going to do anything.  Nobody can do anything about it. 

It has been a while, what with life intruding, but we’re back at it, hopefully on a more regular basis.  Thank you for your patience.

First off, Today’s Outrage:  An anonymous person in Newcastle, Ontario decided it would be acceptable to drop off a letter at a house.  The story is that the letter describes the noises the recipient’s grandson makes are “noise polluting whailing (sic)” scared the author’s “normal children”.  A reasonable gripe, kids are loud. 

The line was crossed at this point: “he is a hindrance to everyone and will always be that” and “do the right thing and move or euthanize him”  Said kid, is 13 years old and autistic, which the anonymous author recognizes up front in the first ‘graph. 

Now, aside from being a gutless birth canal, the anonymous author has managed to get a lot of righteous international support for the family of the child.  This kind of behaviour is never acceptable, under any of the tests of reasonableness, however, the local Durham region cops, after conferring with the local Crown Attorney, has decided that the test of “hate crime” has not been met.  Hateful, certainly, extraordinarily and very deliberately cruel, of course, but not exactly a ‘hate crime’. 

To illustrate a different reaction to excessive noise, we give you our own circumstance.  Last week some lads were delivering flyers in our modest neighbourhood.  They rolled the car up, bounced out and went door to door, dropping flyers.  Except they left the radio on, at a very loud level.  This we can tolerate for the couple of three minutes it takes until they move on, an annoyance, but not really an issue.

Except the lyrics of the particular song, which was very easily heard inside our house, started with “I’m gonna fuck me some niggah bitches right up the ass…” and went down hill from there.  Not exactly my taste in musical expression and I would suspect not exactly the most appropriate lyrics for anywhere outside of an after-hours club.

I took a few seconds to pull on some shoes and went outside.  Hailing down the driver of the vehicle, very calmly and very firmly said that, “I appreciate your taste in music, but please, I don’t need to hear it inside my house.  Could you please turn it down?”  The fellow reacted quizzically and asked if it was too loud?  I said it was and the lyrics weren’t really appropriate.  He very quickly turned it off and apologized.  I said thanks and that was it.  No threats, no offers to euthanize, violate, or chop up into small pieces and feed to the fishes.  Just a simple transaction of asking for a little discretion, courtesy and mutual respect from both sides.

Now back to this gutless birth canal in Newcastle.  If she had tried on several occasions to let her feelings about the autistic kid be known, or at least had tried to open a dialogue with the family, to understand the why or wherefore of the situation, then that should have been the end of it.  Perhaps a few hurt feelings, or a bit of a miffed attitude, certainly, but not this explosion of needless cruelty that has now gone very public and very viral. 

We know that someone, somewhere will find out who wrote this letter and delivered it, then someone else will decide that something equally as vile is a fair response, escalating until the Fully Stupid line is crossed involving pets, random damage and violence. 

It doesn’t have to be that way.  Ideally the author will approach the family, apologize, then the family will let us know that everything is now cool and there is no need to take it any further.  Equally hatful trolls will chill out and a very ugly scene will be averted.  Ideally.

Except that what we’re talking about is grownups behaving like grownups, taking responsibilities for their own actions and ensuring that things don’t escalate into Fully Stupid. 

We can only hope  

We’ve held off on writing about Boston for a reason.  The situation was so fluid and unpredictable that anything we wrote would be null and void a half-hour later.  Now that things have resolved we can comment with some certainty of reflection.

First off, the bombings have nothing to do with ObamaCare, Gun Control, Foreign Policy towards Syria, drilling for oil in Alaska or Obama’s birth certificate.  If the right wing nuts would be so kind as to shut the front door, we can go about our analysis with a semblance of intellectual rigour.

What we’re probably looking at are two disaffected young men with a wobbly set of beliefs.  There could be some religious overtones there, but nothing along the lines of Al-Qaeda jihadist cement heads that we know about yet.  Disaffected and unconnected to their society, yes, very much so, but we will find out more as the investigation progresses as to the motivations involved.

The technology involved in the bombings were crude, home made and very effective at doing exactly what these guys wanted to do: Spread panic and terror.  The objective was to maim and kill as many as possible, but without access to legit explosives and detonators, they resorted to some basement-built improvised explosive devices that worked fine, thank you very much.

The bigger questions, still unanswered, are why and who else?

Was there some mentorship, leadership or technical assistance from elsewhere to bring these two to a Monday afternoon last week?

Understandably the police, FBI and HomeBoy Security are not being particularly forthcoming with the information.  They should keep their collective pie-holes shut until they come up with answers that pass a rudimentary logic test.  We will find out more as this unwraps. 

Where this all goes to hell is with our media.  They’ve got a news cycle to fill and if you haven’t got anything to say, then they will speculate and surmise and guess, then bring in the ‘experts’ to add their noise to the news hour.  Oh and make sure you put a four-second clip of two guys walking around, on permanent repeat for at least a dozen hours along with the graphic crawl, along with the spinning animated ‘bug’ in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. 

Shampoo, rinse, repeat, endlessly, until we turn off the television.

Back in July 2006 we published the Official Nuclear War Program for the Sea of Japan, if only so we could keep the players straight.  It hasn’t changed much.  The reason we published it on RoadDave was it is important to know the players, with any sport and planet-destroying nuclear war is certainly a sport.  Perhaps one with more importance than the NCAA Finals.  So here’s the players and a description of the field:

China:  Has missiles, has nukes, has a big army that can kick ass and take names and submarines prowling the Sea of Japan.  Most of their stuff is pointed at Taiwan.

Taiwan:  Has mostly ground to air and anti-ship missiles along with a decent air force to protect it from invasion by China.  The US has been the purveyor of fine weaponry of choice to Taiwan since 1948, so they have a lot of the good stuff.  They don’t have nukes, but they do have submarines.

South Korea:  Some of their own, but mostly US provided missiles for self-defense and a lot of effective artillery all aimed at North Korea.  There is a sizable US military presence in South Korea, continuing the ‘police action’ along the 38th parallel with the South Korean army that ain’t too shabby.  South Korea doesn’t have nukes, but there are couple of nuclear power reactors at Ulsan.  South Korea also has submarines.

Russia:  Has missiles, mostly aimed at China as well as an army that can kick ass and take names.  Russia has nukes and submarines but we don’t talk about that.

Japan:  Has missiles, but mostly shorter range air defense or anti-shipping missiles.  They do have a 240,000 person self-defense force that has the A-List US gear.  There are nuclear power reactors in Japan, but no nuclear weapons.  Japan has submarines.

North Korea has missiles that work well enough.  You don’t have to be terrifically accurate with nukes.  North Korea has a massive standing army, with hundreds of artillery pieces pointed at South Korea.  North Korea also has submarines.

United States:  Has missiles that can deliver rounds into Kim Jong-un’s second floor bathroom window in Pyongyang from Aegis guided missile cruisers stationed in the Sea of Japan.  The US has nuclear-powered submarines, with or without nukes, in the area.  Rule of Thumb?  If there’s an aircraft carrier, there is a battle group with it and CVN-74 (John C. Stennis) is at Changi Naval Base, Singapore while CVN-73 (George Washington) is at Yokosuka, a bit south of Yokohama, Japan.

Here’s the real danger, aside from all these people being armed.  The Sea of Japan is not that big.  You’ve got seven nations rolling around in an area of 997,980 square kilometers.  By contrast, Lake Superior is 82,100 square kilometers and the Pacific Ocean is 165,200,000 square kilometers to put some perspective on it.  Seven nations, rolling around with ships, submarines and aircraft, all with itchy trigger fingers, looking to get something going.

With that much gear bouncing around out there, the potential for a simple dumb accident is very high.  Will a submarine driver for any of the interested parties make a mistake and bump into someone else’s submarine?  Would the various governments manipulate that into a “provocative, unwarranted attack on a sovereign nation in the free and open sea.”?

Would that be enough justification to set off North Korea?  China is twitchy at the best of times.  The US is wound a little tight right now.  North Korea might go off just so Kim Jong-un can say he’s not a Daddy’s Boy.  Taiwan has their colour-code terror-threat Pez-dispenser pinned on red since 1948. 

It won’t take much.