As IF Times

link Occupy Wall Street veteran gears up for Occupy Sacramento – KansasCity.com.

Nobody wants to miss out on a good street event.  At any given time, there is always some issue to protest somewhere in the world.  Sometimes it’s legitimate bread and butter issues, ie: they don’t have any, or it’s social issues such as gay or animal rights concerns.  In some parts of the world, it can even be about losing a hockey or soccer game.  Some are professional rioters who go from town to town looking to participate at the behest of organizers.  I’m sure there’s a Facebook page for protesters whereby participants can pick the ones that sound amusing.  Some just love a good riot and want to be part of the scene.  The clue is when some people bring their kids like it was the Macy’s parade.

The recent so called “Wall Street Occupation” is a prime example of a protest about nothing.  While ostensibly, it’s about lack of jobs and opportunity and the increasing gulf between regular people and the Wall Street fat cats, the actual message is lost on the majority of the participants.  They incoherently try to frame the issue as some kind of righteous entitlement protest, when in reality, they are a mob with nothing better to do.

When asked what they want, they essentially want those ‘fat cats’ at the top to share their wealth with them.  In other words, they want what someone else has.  How original.  Sometimes they claim that they want jobs.  That’s rather unlikely since if they needed jobs, they’d be out looking for them rather than standing around waving signs and causing public disruption.  Where are they staying?  How do they pay for lunch?  More importantly, where do they wash and pee?  There’s no denying that for years, “Wall Street” financial heads have reaped out-sized rewards for their dubious roles as captains of finance.  There’s no doubt that much of that stemmed from political influence bought and paid for, from both sides of the political fence.  Therefore the roots of the current malaise lie as much with politicians as with greedy bankers.

Unfortunately, the mob have no real endgame solutions other than just to cause disruption.  When you have an avowed communist like Van Jones exhorting the “people” to revolt and stand up for America, we know it’s a complete farce.  The kind of policies people like Jones are pushing are in fact blatantly anti-American.  They are completely at odds with the founding principles of the nation.  There is nothing in the founding tenets of the constitution that refer to any kind of statism, collectivism and certainly not socialism.  Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is clearly mentioned.  Nothing about being owed a job.  Or a minimum wage.  Or 4 paid weeks off every year.

In the old days, when people felt oppressed and deprived of opportunities, they left a country for greener pastures.  This factor is likely high on the list of reasons for why people emigrate.  How do you think America got started in the first place? Immigrants from all parts of the world converged on the U.S. precisely because its policies were diametrically opposite to the countries they were leaving.  From this immigrant pool was built indisputably, the greatest nation the world has ever seen.  Now, it seems, many don’t like the way things are.

If you go to a football game and you don’t like the product, is it logical to change the rules to more closely resemble those of soccer?  Why not just go to a soccer game?  This is the curious circumstance we see today.  “Thousands of protesters”, which actually means hundreds when you discount the media hyperbole, are protesting that the U.S. does not embrace policies that are essentially… socialist!  Breaking news, the U.S. is not a socialist nation, at least not by origin even though the neo socialists want to make it so.  There are plenty of high tax, socialist nations in existence today.   Think Sweden, or Denmark or Great Britain or France, although in France, the winds are a-changing.  These are nations that have embraced the socialist philosophy in their governing policies.  Why wouldn’t these nations be beacons of attraction for the oppressed masses here who are tired of that damn capitalism?

It’s one thing if the ‘mob’ were coherent about inequitable government policies; it’s another to say that the entire system of government sucks.  Strangely there aren’t long conga lines of people heading for Cuba or Venezuela.   These places have widely advertised their socialist/Marxist charms.  Plus, the weather is generally nicer than New York or Michigan.  Somebody should post that on Facebook.

link Taliban imposter: Senior Taliban leader was a fake, officials say – latimes.com.

Well duh! What was the first clue?  The guy was holding peace talks! Some may recall that the mission statement of the Taliban was to wipe out the Great Satan, kill all non believers etc etc.  The only logical reason to negotiate with the sworn enemy is either you’re out of bullets, out of suicide volunteers or in this case, if you were an impostor. It’s actually amazing no one else has gamed the system up to now, excluding Hamid Karzai of course.

If you are living in Afghanistan,  you likely spend your days watching the landscape transistion from one shade of khaki to another and nothing ever changes.  Why not pretend to represent the locals and get feted and fawned over by all the elite mucky mucks of the West?  It’s a fair bet the food is better and the beds they provide softer than the straw mat in a dusty corner of a cave that you’re accustomed to.  You get to shower and glad hand all the top officials sent to meet you.  It’s not as if it’s easy, even if you had a program, discerning the good guys from the bad over there; I mean come on, all bearded men look the same.  It could have been Cat Stevens for all anyone knew.   But you would think some cursory checks were made to verify that this guy was who he said he was. 

This has been a fairly dependable tactic on dealing with the West, supported by decades of precedence.  The root of this begins from early childhood.  As most public school teachers surely know, average decent and unassuming students don’t cause them any grief.  The really rotten kids, the misbehaving, class disrupting social misfits take up way more of the teacher’s time and attention than the well behaved kids.  It’s not lost on the little darlings that the more they misbehave, the more attention they get.

As they grow older and see that this tactic always brings about the desired response, they become even better at employing it.  In the West, they go on to Hollywood and become actors and entertainers, or they become lawyers, or they go into politics and become Democrats.  Recently there has been a new vocational direction for these folk, the area of environmental activism.  Whatever their chosen vocation, the common denominator is that the public is usually held ransom by their utterances and they themselves believe in the importance of their lives.  But I digress.

On a global scale, this tack is employed again and again by rogue nations looking for some kind of concession by the community at large, principally of course the West.  Think North Korea, think Iran, think Venezuela.  So in this particular case, the Akhtar Mohammad Mansourh impostor figures, why not dance with NATO a bit?  It’s likely that NATO was so keen on getting some discussions going, they didn’t even bother with the usual TSA style security groping.  The tip-off should have been that the impostor was sipping on a 12 year old Glenfiddich and watching Dancing With The Stars in his hotel room. This fiasco is a big red flag that the tactics being employed by our top people there mirrors the competence of  the idiotic TSA regime back here. But you cannot really blame the impostor for taking advantage of the red carpet being deployed for every nut who rattles sabres and wants attention.  The West calls it diplomacy.  The other side calls them Suckers.