Yay, multicolored expository dialogue! Take it from a writer: sometimes you can’t avoid it, and it’s best to just get it over with as fast as you can.
God. It’s late, and I’m tired, and so I won’t comment at length on the spate of atrocities committed this week worldwide, though I’m sure you’re used to my pattern on that. What can one say? Wars and rumors of war, I guess – innocent people shot out of the sky, people being rousted from their homes by fanatics, people trying desperately to live under threat of attack on all sides. This, too, will pass. It’s just a strange and often upsetting time to be alive. We think we’ve come so far, but still we find ourselves practicing new and subtler forms of the same old miseries. All this is a mystery to me. Maybe it’s my own jaded luxury of living in a relatively peaceful country that I think killing as a way of life is so incomprehensible to me, but it is. It’s all just a senseless waste, and I don’t get it.
All I can do is try to have faith that, in the end, God will vindicate the just.
Be safe, everyone.
Who’s in charge ? Well, Mike look like he’s the only one “reasonable” “person” left… not sure if that’s a good thing actually.
As for the rest, eye for an eye and the world goes blind…
Even if I live in a relatively peaceful country too, I’m ashamed to see people here reacting to these atrocities only by accusing others to be responsible and calling for a punishement, instead of trying to find a way to avoid those events to ever happen again…
Humanity never learn anything, I guess.
I’m with you on that. Finding a way to prevent recurrence of this and to settle the issue without resort to violence seems to me of paramount importance.
And yes, I have to agree that Mike DOES seem to be the one in charge. For the moment, anyway. 😉
At least it seems like the fighting inside Command Post Alpha has stopped.
At least, there’s no fighting in the medical ward.
Or the War Room. 😀
It appears Rucker will be stepping up to the plate and try to start draining the swamp, unless Hauley manages to get out from his one-on-one with Mike.
I agree that this week has not been a good one, one hopes it would improve but I personally am not holding my breath. All most of us can do is just hope for the best and plan for the worst.
Well, Mike seems to be rather on edge, so Col. Halley may be in for more than he bargained for. Have to see how that plays out, I guess. Says the guy who knows what happens next. 😉
And yes, it has been a lousy week for global violence and conflict. I hold out hope, though. My fear is that this becomes an opportunity for more posturing by politicians, rather than an opportunity to take a new approach based on nonviolence and reconciliation between the belligerent parties. But then, I’m an old stick in the mud when it comes to my hopes and dreams about international understanding.
Very good page, as usual. Let’s just hope Major Bronniford and Major Rucker, can, between them, clear up some of the internal clusterfuck that developed in Colonel Haulley’s absence…
In RL news, I just came back from a trip in which I had no internet access, so I was shocked to hear of all the goings on yesterday from some friends.
Unfortunately, even though the word has become more peaceful overall, I’m pretty sure we’ll never truly get rid of such things – even thousands of years into the future, when humanity has hopefully spread out far and wide throughout the cosmos, violence will still happen, because there will always be idiots in charge who think it’s an easy solution…
In what concerns Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, it simply illustrates what a spectacularly bad idea is to have weaponry fall in the hands of unskilled and/or improperly supported personnel (90% of the death-toll in the Romanian Revolution of 1989 comes from the same cause – random people got handed AK47s, so they shot at other similarly armed people in the mistaken assumption they were “terrorists”, or army units going against each other due to a lack of centralised control), as well as how easy it is to assume you know exactly what is going on, even though you don’t.
In my mind, the tragedy basically boils down to this: the pro-Russian rebels got hold of a SA-11 launcher from an Ukrainian military base they looted and then used it to bring down two Ukrainian AN-26 transport planes, so, being over-confident yet lacking in logistical support (some of them, at least, were obviously skilled AA rocketmen, because you can’t just walk in off the street and know how to operate a SA-11, but for AA operations you need another radar station to identify targets for you since you can’t do it with the mount’s rather simple-minded target acquisition radar), they *knew* this radar blip was *obviously* more of the same, even though it was flying 3000 meters higher than the service ceiling of their usual quarry, so they shot it.
It’s a textbook mistake which, so far, accounted for the all of the world’s deadliest airliner shootdown incidents, including the downing, in 1983, of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 by the Soviet Air Force (aircraft strayed into restricted Soviet airspace due to automatic pilot error at a time when US-USSR tensions were at an all time high due to repeated overflights of the same area by US spy planes, USSR high command *knew* the plane was *obviously* more of the same and ordered it shot down, overruling the intercepting pilot who had his doubts about the aircraft’s identity) and the shooting down of Iran Air Flight 655 by USS Vincennes (the ship was in Iranian territorial waters responding to an earlier incident in which an US helicopter was shot at by Iranian patrol boats, and it’s on-edge air defence crew *knew* the radar blip heading towards them was *obviously* an Iranian F14 trying to sink them so they brought it down, even though Iranian F14s at that time had no anti-ship weaponry and the plane’s IFF marked as civilian).
So, basically- “stop, look, think before you shoot”, that’s all there is to it. Sadly, it’s easy to get mired in routine or seduced by your own theories, so there will always be negligent or overconfident people in charge of powerful weapons to give birth to such tragedies as MH17.
Here’s a tip: Ban all news from your life. I did so many years ago and lived happily thereafter. No browsing news on the internet. No TV news (I don’t watch TV anyway). No news radio. Also banned all news apps from my BlackBerry.
Trust me: It’s worth it.
It is not about “ignorance is bliss”, but by managing your life and emotions. I really hate to get depressing news first thing in the morning. I can’t do too much (if anything at all) about them and so I don’t bother with getting them “on time”.
I do keep updated in a civilised and non-histerical fashion instead: By reading the local newspaper every morning and a weekly national newspaper (the kind of newspaper which takes several hours to read, you get the idea).
That way I can keep track with what is going on without all the confusion of hourly news influx.
My life has become quite less hectic that way. My peace of mind was never better. Same goes for my attitude.
It isn’t too hard. Give it a try.
Good tip, but a tad late in my case, because I’ve been doing exactly that from 2006 onwards. I don’t have a tv, I never listened to radio and don’t read newspapers either – I get all my news from Tumblr and FB, because if something noteworthy happens people will start talking about it.
I also expect horrible things to happen, if not daily, at least on a weekly basis, because this is pretty much the world we are living in, so I’m not terribly surprised when they do – it’s just that in this case, this was a major tragedy happening pretty close to where I live that I somehow managed to miss for a full week.
Imagine if you lived in Texas in 1963 and missed news of the Kennedy assassination for a full week, wouldn’t it shock you when you finally found out?
Also, my life is hectic, but its hardly because of news – it’s because I have so many things to do and so many people to meet. But then again, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Out of curiosity though, what in my post made you think I was a news junkie in sore need of conversion, because for the love of me I can’t figure that out… XD
I didn’t think of you as a news junkie.
I think we’re alike on this one: Interested on what is going on, but we can do without the news and unclear headlines. We’d rather sit back and wait for the facts once the dust has settled.
🙂
In all honesty, WoW, I think you’ve probably hit upon the truth. Sophisticated weapons on a hair trigger in the hands of people who aren’t properly trained or disciplined enough to know how to use them with restraint. It goes hand in hand with this kind of irregular warfare, and the result is tragedy. I do want to be very careful not to seem to assign blame, naturally – I’m not a knee-jerk type, and I try very hard to see this from all sides, given that I have personal friends and colleagues on all sides with whom I try very hard to identify. It’s a very complex and difficult situation, relations between countries, even at the best of times. And with the political and diplomatic environment being what it is, this sort of thing has the potential to spin wildly out of control – and has, in the past. Call me a cynic, but I have my doubts about cooler heads prevailing. It seems strange to say it, but the thing that’s saving us at the moment is the vast amount that each side has to lose in a major confrontation. But in the end we may never really know what happened – the whole thing is already disappearing into the fog of war.
The best thing I could hope for (although I know it’s a conceit, I consider it a healthy one), would be for the responsible parties to come forward and admit their error, and submit to justice. Wouldn’t that be a remarkable gesture? If it had been a plane shot down over the United States, that is what I’d want, and expect, of our own soldiers. It would never happen, naturally – the typical response when a thing like this happens is to close ranks and cover up – nor is it going to happen here. But one can still hope.
Indeed, this has the potential to spin out of control, but I doubt it will actually turn out this way, because I don’t think the major parties see this “incident” as “important” enough to be worth going to war over (by way of contrast, when you really want to go to war, any excuse will do, no matter how threadbare). To them, it’s just the cost of doing business – some eggshells might get broken, but it doesn’t matter unless you’re an egg.
The thing that I find truly disgraceful is how the EU and the US are busy with a high-stakes game of finger pointing that won’t do anyone any good by trying to pin the blame personally on Putin, which is a really futile gesture, because, this time, at least, he’s not the one to blame, since he has absolutely no control over the trigger happy idiots who actually brought the plane down.
Of course, Putin is busy pointing the finger at the Ukrainians in retaliation, because what else can he do? All the while, the actually guilty parties are allowed to just slip away unnoticed, without as much as a slap on the wrist, and the families of the victims are left inconsolable, because they “don’t matter in the grand scheme of things”.
In the end, I’m sure this will simply end up the same as the KAL007 and IR655 airliner shoot-downs – in those particular cases, neither the USSR nor the US ever admitted any responsibility for bringing down the planes, the US paid only desultory compensation to the families of the victims, while the USSR paid nothing.
When it comes to the sanctions imposed on Russia by the US and EU I’m also pretty sure they won’t amount to much to the people they’re actually targeting, Russia’s “economic elite”, because, shit, after all, flows downhill… There’s a very appropriate Romanian expression for this kind of thing: “frectie la piciorul de lemn”, literally “massaging a wooden leg”.
What it’ll do though is simply fuel anti-western sentiments in the “common people” even further, all while hurting the EU’s own economy through curtailing access to markets in Russia, which is the exact opposite result to what the West wants.
I know it’s an untenable position for the western leaders, because it’s like being trapped in a rowboat with a bear. You’re trying to whack it over the nose with a rolled up newspaper to stop it from eating all the supplies or taking a dump in the boat while not capsizing the whole thing, but in the end, the bear will simply do what bears naturally do…
Exactly my question from a few posts ago!
One question though: how and when did “suraynos” become the slang for the CONASUR troops? Is that some kind of reference to the U.S.-based Mexican Mafia “sureños” gangs, or is it something else?
😉 Well, I couldn’t very well admit it then, but you did foresee this.
“Surayno” is in fact an anglicization of “sureño” or “southerner,” and it’s only arising now because it’s the first time anyone has actually used a slang term in direct reference to the CONASUR forces. Col. Haulley referred to them as “Southern” before but it was really awkward and staccato and I’m ultimately going to retcon it out.
It wasn’t intended as a reference to the Mexican street gang, but there you are.
the shit has hit the fan
Send lawyers, guns and money!
they got guns why send more