The War in Afghanistan - Let's Cut the Crap, Shall We?

A police constable from Milton, Ontario allows an Afghan police trainee to admire a Canadian manufactured assault rifle. Mr. Harper has decided to extend "the Mission" past 2011, but he assures us Canadian personnel will only be ...heh, heh, training the Afghanis. No more combat pay for the Mounties. No more risk of suicides in barracks and lawyers engorging themselves on PTSD claims.

James Fergusson recently put his balls in the cross-hairs of the Americans who control the orbiting PREDATOR and REAPER drone aircraft which target and eliminate Taliban guerrillas. He visited Chak, a town "just 40 miles" southwest of Kabul which is garrisoned, taxed and administered by the Taliban - less than an hour jeep drive to where Canadians have been training the other Afghanis to march and salute their national flag. In his exclusive report published in the British newspaper THE INDEPENDENT he has plenty to reveal and it will only take five minutes of your time to read. My favorite anecdote records the personal best of a Taliban commander who destroyed 81 NATO gasoline tanker trucks in a single night ambush.

The Chinese are plenty busy in Afghanistan.... busy scooping up the rights to natural resources. Selling small arms ammunition, grenades and unguided rockets to the Taliban is just a sideline for Beijing. The real money is in metals and minerals. The Associated Press has an interesting story this week of an ancient site which archaeologists are rushing to excavate, because its sitting on six million tons of copper, and the Chinese have the exclusive right to scoop and run. It will only take you another five minutes to read CHINESE MINE IN AFGHANISTAN . Mes Aynak is only 20 miles south of Kabul. The Afghani National government has deployed 1,500 police to guard the Chinese mine site, as heavy equipment is starting to arrive. That is 1,500 cops trained at the $$ expense of Canadian taxpayers, folks. A regiment of cops has been mobilized to protect a Chinese government investment in strategic metals. Why, you may wonder, don't the Chinese deploy their own security force in Mes Aynak, as many Western resource companies do worldwide? Why should we Canadian taxpayers train, arm and fund the weekly payroll for the security zone around the Chinese mine? Because we are suckers, and always have been. The Copper King and the Crocodile. 1,500 Afghan police are deployed to patrol a security zone around a single Chinese mine site in Afghanistan.

Ottawa dubs KABUL "a calmer area" - and silly media parrots the sticky ministerial handout.

Canadian reporters are desperately scrambling to fall into step with the latest iteration of a Tory Afghanistan policy. The snippet exhibited in yellow above, is taken from a CBC web site. (The story is developing so fast today, that a link is worthless here.) Mr. Harper's plan for an orderly retreat is shredded.... literally. Establishment historians (UC and UT careerists) - thirty years from now, will find that very sensitive file heavily "weeded". Mr. Harper has decided to employ a variant of America's early Vietnam War strategy, which saw the American MACV posturing as an advisory force, but in actuality "kicking Charlie's ass" when the CBS camera boys were not looking. Yesterday a Harper henchman, termed "an official spokesman" by gullible reporters, was sucking and blowing about the new "Mission" plan - to reduce the Canadian Expeditionary Force to 950 uniformed bodies - 750 cops, and 200 clerk typists, cooks, etc. I guess that means the "iconic" Tim Horton trailer and coffee mama's will have to fall back to Kabul.

Colonel Geoff Parker was blown up in Kabul earlier this year. Not only was he Canada's highest ranking officer killed by Afghan guerrillas, he was Canada's 145th death in this WAR. How much armour will we transfer from Kandahar to Kabul to protect the "training" mission? No fricking way is Renfrew of the Mounted going to sport around a kill zone like Kabul in a Toyota RAV.

So let's get this straight... when our boys were getting their asses chewed off a few years back, the public was, with good reason, outraged. So to reduce the mauling, our government placed a RUSH order (cost plus bribes) for South African armoured vehicles, and hired Ukrainian Antonov aircraft to lift our Leopard tanks into A-Stan, for a whopping $$$1,000,000 per flight - so that "our troops have everything they need to get the mission done". Now we are pulling out the infantry, the armour and the drones... and we are going to leave our boys and girls naked in Indian country???!!! Not a fricking chance. Mr. Harper, you can lie to your Tory Faithful but don't lie to us. You are offering this stuff up out of political desperation, and the pity is we don't have a patriot like Stauffenberg joining you at the map table. Everything about this war, oops "MISSION," has been kept SECRET. The number of Canadian wounded and maimed, the number of Canadians who gave up army careers (1000 plus) rather than be sent to Afghanistan, the number of enemy we have have killed and wounded, and the true dollar cost of this, the greatest federal boondoggle.

THE U.N. GRAPHIC WHICH EMBOLDENED THE HARPER GOVERNMENT : UPDATE DEC. 27, 2010

This is the confidential UNITED NATIONS graphic which helped convince Prime Minister Steven Harper to commit nearly 1000 Canadian cops to an extended "mission" in Afghanistan. The map purports to show the national capital Kabul in a "low risk" area. As my article points out, with examples, Kabul is not a low risk zone, and some Canadians federal cops are going to be sent home in plastic bags as the "incidents" accumulated in 2011- 2013. The WALL STREET JOURNAL which published this map today, has a full explanation on why this graphic is so deceptive. - WSJ Story.

Famous Guns of Filmland No.1

"Mac" lets rip with an M134 mini-gun in PREDATOR

Americans do have their obsessions, but then don’t we all? Sports and movies are right up there, but so are guns. And why the hell not? They’re lots of fun and in the movies, as with real life, people do pay attention when you point a gun. When a movie Director frames his shot of an athletic looking hunk pointing a powerful weapon, and then has the character brave what seem to us impossible odds … well, then you have movie magic! It is a fact that the availability of a new type of exotic firearm can excite the interest of a Producer every bit as much as a perfect new face or a sexy body. Gun designers and brokers clued into that addiction for cinematic firepower decades ago. There have been dozens of movies in which a kick-ass gun is actually a leading character. If you don’t have the Collector’s Edition of JACKIE BROWN, which includes Quentin’s bonus movie “Chicks With Guns”, brother you’re missing out ! Every so often I will choose a “personality gun” from one of the great action movies, and profile it here.

This color still is from an unforgettable scene in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s PREDATOR (1987). Now many of your friends will tell you that Jesse Ventura tore up the screen with a mini-gun in that picture, but it was actually “Mac” played by actor Bill Duke, who ripped up the jungle. Jesse usually posed with one of the two mockup guns, while lucky Bill got to light up “Ole Painless”, a genuine General Electric M134 mini-gun manufactured in the 1960s. The beast was purchased by Stembridge Gun Rentals in 1984 and earned starring roles in several of Arnie’s pictures. Stembridge maintained a vast arsenal because the studios require multiples of key guns be kept on the set. They cannot allow a costly crew to sit around waiting for the techs to repair a gun needed for a scene. This weapon, Serial N313, has been cast in many big films in addition to Predator, including Terminator 11, The Last Action Hero, Iron Eagle 111, The Matrix, and Broken Arrow.

It’s ‘real’ all right, but still a tricked out movie prop. M134s were designed for fixed mounting and are operated by a powerful electric motor which uses mucho juice, so a movie armourer installed a “slower” motor, rated at 1700 rpm. This would produce less torque. At full throttle of an issue M134 the actor wouldn’t be able to hold the weapon steady. The configuration you see in the photo includes a battery carried in the backpack and a prop set of blank firing rotating barrels. Muzzle blast was supplemented with a burning gas source. The weapon was further modified with a vertical pistol grip and an M60 fore stock. While incredibly interesting to look at, the Predator mini-gun would be tactically useless. For example, the length of linked ammunition which seemed to fill the backpack, would only sustain a burst of 3-4 seconds.

This M134 was offered for sale in 1999 for US$125,000. when Stembridge decided to close the gun rental side of their business. California was leading the nation in restrictive gun legislation, and the paperwork and security costs required to move such irreplaceable props around to movie locations became daunting. The display Ad noted “This gun has blank firing barrels restricted to make a nice flash. Included in the package are the electrics, a spare motor, several boxes of parts, a set of new barrels that are live, and some movie prop mounting equipment.” This tiger is now in a museum, but the mockup guns used in Predator are still in rental.

Stembridge Gun Rentals was older than many existing Hollywood studios. The company was formed in 1920 by James Stembridge and Cecil B. DeMille, to supply guns and blank ammunition to the movie industry. For decades its offices and warehouse were on the Paramount Lot. Then in 1999 the decision was made to auction off its inventory of thousands of valuable firearms, many of which were personality pieces used by the biggest Stars. Stembridge had kept records so detailed that in many cases guns could be traced to an actor, scene by scene. They are still "in the business", based in Glendale, California. Up here in Canada we can only look at photographs of such exotic technology and sigh. Tamer memorabilia from Stembridge’s glory days in Hollywood does turn up on EBay, such as empty cartons which once contained blank rounds. Hey, it's something!

Oh yes. Happy New Year!