Monday Post

(sigh)


Australia picks up Obama's slack commits to sending forces to fight ISIS:

Australia became the first country to detail troop numbers and aircraft for a U.S.-led coalition fighting Islamic State militants in Iraq, as Washington drums up support for global action to counter the terrorist threat.

Australia Prime Minister Tony Abbott said on Sunday a 600-strong force comprising some 400 airforce personnel and 200 special forces soldiers would be deployed to a U.S. military base in the United Arab Emirates. ...

Abbott said along with the troops, Australia would send eight super hornet fighter jets, an early warning and control aircraft and an aerial refueling aircraft. He said they would be deployed in the coming days.

A task group of military advisers to assist Iraqi and other security forces fighting the militants would form part of the deployment but Abbott said he had not yet made the decision to commit troops to combat action.

"I have to warn the Australian people that should this preparation and deployment extend into combat operations, that this could go on for quite some time," he told reporters in the northern city of Darwin.

Abbott said Australia did not intend to operate in Syria.

SHAZAM!

Meanwhile, Obama has a gut feeling:

President Barack Obama would seek to overthrow the regime of Bashar al-Assad if American planes were attacked upon entering Syrian air space, Peter Baker of The New York Times reports .

If Assad's troops fired at American planes entering Syrian airspace,  "Obama said he would order American forces to wipe out Syria’s air defense system," Baker reports. "He went on to say that such an action by Mr. Assad would lead to his overthrow, according to one account."

Is this because Assad is beheading children?

Obama: coward who takes easy shots at nearly-deposed dictators or a secret ISIS supporter?

You decide.

Trudeau is a moron but don't take my word for it:

The Liberal leader is loved and lauded, of course, by his own troops and their supporters and why not? Since he became leader in the middle of 2013, there have been more than 50 polls by several different firms using different methodologies. Except for two or three where the Liberals are in a statistical tie, Trudeau's Liberals lead in every single one.

Canadians keep telling pollsters they'll vote Liberal despite millions of dollars already spent by the Conservatives attacking Trudeau on radio, TV and the web, and despite Trudeau's propensity to say the darndest things sometimes.

Just last week, at Western University in London, Ont., Trudeau was explaining to students how he stood for a different kind of politics and, in the course of that explanation, had this puzzler: "We have to realize that the way of thinking that got us to this place no longer holds. We have to rethink elements as basic as space and time."

Canadians need to rethink the laws of physics?

While Harper can boast some significant achievements, Trudeau wants to bend time and space... or something.

Remember- there are people who want to put Trudeau (with his "irresponsible" sympathies) into the seat of power.

What was this guy thinking?

North Korea sentenced an American to six years of hard labor Sunday for allegedly entering the country illegally and trying to spy on the highly secretive state.

Matthew Miller, 24, of Bakersfield, Calif., has been held since April 10, when he entered North Korea as a tourist with a New Jersey-based tour company.

State news agency KCNA previously reported that Miller had torn up his tourist visa during his trip and said he wanted asylum.

At Sunday's 90-minute trial at the North Korean Supreme Court, the prosecution argued this was a ruse that Miller hoped would enable him to commit espionage against North Korea, the Associated Press reported from Pyongyang.

The court said Miller had admitted to having the "wild ambition" of experiencing prison life in order to carry out a secret investigation of North Korea's human rights situation, AP said. The prosecution alleged that Miller had claimed, falsely, that his iPad and iPod contained secret information about the U.S. military in South Korea.

Miller is the second of three U.S. citizens being detained in North Korea to be tried and jailed. 

Kenneth Bae, 45, a Korean-American missionary, is serving a 15-year sentence of hard labor in North Korea. Another U.S. tourist, Jeffrey Fowle, 56, a street repairs worker from Miamisburg, Ohio, still awaits trial for leaving a Bible at a seamen's club in May.

But then again, this information is coming from the North Koreans, so....

A very good point and a very compelling argument for dragging Kim Jong-Un through Sejong-no with a rusty meat hook:

There are compelling arguments from defectors that suggest it’s time to cut loose, no matter how Machiavellian that may seem. The growing suspicion is that food aid inhibits the population’s ability for self-determinism and profligates the regime’s control. In other words, while we pump $200,000,000 of food aid into the country, Kim Jong-un can spend the national budget on 4-D cinemas, water parks and, you guessed it, nuclear armament (though, that, too, is unfounded hearsay—the kind of scaremongering required to get people to take notice).

The detractors of aid argue that North Korea does not suffer from a lack of food because it can’t afford to import enough, rather, that it does so due to a systematic governmental plan of expenditure that excludes food. The government needs to adjust its own budgets before aid will be invigorated. This is almost certainly correct.

Worse still, the population suffers from dual mismanagement, first from the government and second by the WFP, whose hands are tied by the latter. There isn’t compelling evidence to suggest the aid even breaks the surface of the population. Due to the lack of transparency by the North Korean government, the vast majority of the money donated, for all we know, may have been thrown into a gigantic suitcase under Kim Jong-un’s bed. ...

In excess of 80% North Koreans do not eat enough. That’s 20 million people, or, to pick at random the major cities of countries that have provided very little food donations this past year, the populations of New York, London, Paris and Berlin combined.

(Kamsahamnida)

And now, non-recipe recipes. Enjoy.