Archive for June, 2014

The United States Has Unfinished Business in Ukraine and Iraq

The United States Has Unfinished Business in Ukraine and Iraq is republished with permission of Stratfor.”

By George Friedman

In recent weeks, some of the international system’s unfinished business has revealed itself. We have seen that Ukraine’s fate is not yet settled, and with that, neither is Russia’s relationship with the European Peninsula. In Iraq we learned that the withdrawal of U.S. forces and the creation of a new Iraqi political system did not answer the question of how the three parts of Iraq can live together. Geopolitical situations rarely resolve themselves neatly or permanently.

These events, in the end, pose a difficult question for the United States. For the past 13 years, the United States has been engaged in extensive, multidivisional warfare in two major theaters — and several minor ones — in the Islamic world. The United States is large and powerful enough to endure such extended conflicts, but given that neither conflict ended satisfactorily, the desire to raise the threshold for military involvement makes logical sense. Read the rest of this entry »

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Jordan Could Be the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant’s Next Target

Jordan Could Be the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant’s Next Target is republished with permission of Stratfor.”

Summary

The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, buoyed by its recent successes in Iraq, wants to expand its regional reach. Reports that Iraq has withdrawn forces from western towns close to its 180-kilometer (110-mile) border with Jordan have left Amman feeling vulnerable, and the Hashemite kingdom, certainly a target of interest for the jihadist movement, has deployed additional security personnel along the border.

However, taking on Jordan would be tough for the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. The group has the ability to stage terrorist attacks in the country, but significant constraints will prevent it from operating on the levels seen in Iraq and Syria.

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Man Kills One, Wounds Another Who Took Daughter Hostage

From The Daily Caller:

A St. Louis couple is likely thankful to have guns in their home after they were forced to use them to defend their daughter against two men Monday night.

Cortez McClinton, 33, and Terrell Johnson, 31, held a gun to the girl’s head and used her as a shield as they entered the family home, where a five-year old child was also present.

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“The F-35 Is A Turkey” Says Designer Of The F-15

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What The Snowden Leaks Have Revealed

From the EFF:

It’s been one year since the Guardian first published the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order, leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, that demonstrated that the NSA was conducting dragnet surveillance on millions of innocent people. Since then, the onslaught of disturbing revelations, from disclosures, admissions from government officials, Freedom of Information Act requests, and lawsuits, has been nonstop. On the anniversary of that first leak, here are 65 things we know about NSA spying that we did not know a year ago:

1. We saw an example of the court orders that authorize the NSA to collect virtually every phone call record in the United States—that’s who you call, who calls you, when, for how long, and sometimes where.

2. We saw NSA Powerpoint slides documenting how the NSA conducts “upstream” collection, gathering intelligence information directly from the infrastructure of telecommunications providers.

Full Article

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Police Need To Know The Law, Same As Citizens

From The CATO Institute:

To execute any search or seizure, a police officer must reasonably suspect that a crime has been or is being committed based on the facts available to him at the time he executes the search or seizure. Under this standard, searches can be lawful even if the officer is mistaken in his understanding of the facts before him, as long as his understanding led him to reasonably suspect criminal activity. But what if the officer is mistaken about whether a particular activity is actually criminal?

Full post here

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Custom Deuce-and-a-Halfs

BigBugoutTrucks.com:

Boyce Equipment

C&C Equipment

 

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Why Benghazi Matters

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9×23 Winchester Pistol Cartridge

From Shooting Times:

In simplistic terms, the 9×23 Winchester is a stretched out 9mm Luger (pictured). Both are tapered cartridges with nearly identical neck, head and rim dimensions. The 9×23 case is 4mm longer, but more importantly the 9×23 operates at much higher pressure than the 9mm Luger. Winchester’s 9×23 brass has an extra-thick case wall that allows this cartridge to run at high pressure without concern of a case blowout in the unsupported region of a conventional, non-ramped barrel.

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PPSh

From FPSRussia:

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Are Mass Shootings More Common Or Is The News Reporting It More?

From The American Spectator:

Homicide in America is far more common than it ought to be. But mass shootings — defined as four or more murders in the same incident — constitute a minuscule share of the total, as I discuss in “The Shooting Cycle” in the most recent edition of the Connecticut Law Review

The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that from 2002-2011, 95 percent of total homicide incidents involved a single fatality, 4 percent involved two victims, 0.6 percent involved 3 victims, and only .02 percent involved four or more victims. Another study performed between 1976 and 2005 yields similar results — that less than one-fifth of 1 percent all murders in the United States involved four or more victims. In other words, the bottom line is that out of every 10,000 incidents of homicide, roughly two are mass killings.

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Iraqi Security Forces Routed By Islamists

From The Daily Mail:

The Iraqi government policemen and soldiers in Mosul abandoned their weapons and uniforms with barely a fight against the army of black-clad killers from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) terror group.

The gunmen quickly laid their hands on a mass of abandoned U.S. military equipment to add to their massive arsenal, ranging from Humvee vehicles to night-sights and body armour.

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Supreme Court: Any Gun Purchase For Someone Else Is A “Straw” Purchase

If you buy a gun for a friend as a present, that is now illegal.

From GOPUSA:

A divided Supreme Court sided with gun control groups and the Obama administration Monday, ruling that the federal ban on “straw” purchases of guns can be enforced even if the ultimate buyer is legally allowed to own a gun.

The justices ruled 5-4 that the law applied to a Virginia man who bought a gun with the intention of transferring it to a relative in Pennsylvania who was not prohibited from owning firearms.

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The Intrigue Lying Behind Iraq’s Jihadist Uprising

The Intrigue Lying Behind Iraq’s Jihadist Uprising is republished with permission of Stratfor.”

By Reva Bhalla

Events in Iraq over the past week were perhaps best crystallized in a series of photos produced by the jihadist group the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. Sensationally called The Destruction of Sykes-Picot, the pictures confirmed the group’s intent to upend nearly a century of history in the Middle East.

In a series of pictures set to a purring jihadist chant, the mouth of a bulldozer is shown bursting through an earthen berm forming Iraq’s northern border with Syria. Keffiyeh-wrapped rebels, drained by the hot sun, peer around the edges of the barrier to observe the results of their work. The breach they carved was just wide enough for the U.S.-made, Iraqi army-owned and now jihadist-purloined Humvees to pass through in single file. While a charter outlining an antiquated interpretation of Sharia was being disseminated in Mosul, #SykesPicotOver trended on jihadist Twitter feeds. From the point of view of Iraq’s jihadist celebrities, the 1916 borders drawn in secret by British and French imperialists represented by Sir Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot to divide up Mesopotamia are not only irrelevant, they are destructible.

Today, the most ardent defenders of those colonial borders sit in Baghdad, Damascus, Ankara, Tehran and Riyadh while the Europeans and Americans, already fatigued by a decade of war in this part of the world, are desperately trying to sit this crisis out. The burden is on the regional players to prevent a jihadist mini-emirate from forming, and beneath that common purpose lies ample room for intrigue. Read the rest of this entry »

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Borderlands: The View Beyond Ukraine

Borderlands: The View Beyond Ukraine is republished with permission of Stratfor.”

Editor’s Note: This is the final installment in George Friedman’s recent series written during his journey from the Baltics, through Central and Eastern Europe and then east to Turkey and Azerbaijan.
I traveled between Poland and Azerbaijan during a rare period when the forces that shape Europe appear to be in flux, and most of the countries I visited are re-evaluating their positions. The overwhelming sense was anxiety. Observers from countries such as Poland make little effort to hide it. Those from places such as Turkey, which is larger and not directly in the line of fire, look at Ukraine as an undercurrent rather than the dominant theme. But from Poland to Azerbaijan, I heard two questions: Are the Russians on the move? And what can these countries do to protect themselves?

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