...or something. I know everybody and their friends all had to post - again - "remember the victims, blah blah blah."
Fine.
Note that I didn't.
I'm commemorating September 12th, instead; the day America began its slide into becoming a police-state, as opposed to the beacon of freedom it had always been before.
The day we began abrogating Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms "for safety."
The day we began using terrorism as a hobgoblin to silence dissent, the day we began attacking our political leadership en masse based on lies - not from the leadership (they're stupid, not dishonest, or at best stupidly dishonest) but from the media - and the day we began ignoring the things we should have been keeping an eye on outside our borders.
Don't get me wrong.
Islamofascism is a horrifying threat, made worse by the fact that the religious text upon which Islam is based AGREES WITH IT.
But that's not the only thing we should have been paying attention to.
And now, we may have missed our window to stop an old threat from recurring.
Yesterday, Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, dissolved the Russian government, dismissed the Prime Minister and his cabinet, and replaced him with someone of Putin's choosing. Government by diktat has returned to Russia.
This comes after Russia protested the idea of placing missile-defense sites in Europe - why?
This comes after Russia resumes bomber patrols in the Atlantic, Arctic, and Pacific oceans - with nuclear bombers - why?
This comes after Russia rejects a conventional arms treaty with NATO - why?
This comes after Russia announces territorial claims to the Arctic - by sending a nuclear sub under the ice to PLANT A FLAG ON THE SEA BOTTOM - why?
And this comes after Russia announces that they have developed the most powerful non-nuclear bomb ever, as much as 4 times as powerful as the U.S. "Mother of all Bombs" - why?
Either one of two possible reasons, IMO - either Russia is preparing to renew the Cold War, which is possible, but really, really stupid, considering it's taken them 25 years to get their economy sufficiently restored from the last one to play with us again, or... they're "nuking the moon."
I will explain.
Russia is under the same threat from Islamofascism that the U.S. is, and they're geographically closer. I suspect that Putin has hit on a strategy FrankJ from IMAO.us came up with a while back. Nuke the moon - do stuff that seems so utterly crazy that other countries are terrified to do anything to piss you off, because you're batshit insane and have nuclear weapons. Frank's example was to make a world-wide announcement that Martians were trying to steal our green cheese supplies, and fire off a huge volley of nuclear missiles at the moon.
Other countries would absolutely shit themselves in terror - a nation with the power of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, gone raving, batshit crazy?
They'd cave on any diplomatic issue, no matter how important; hostilities would cease worldwide; they'd be running scared, and stay that way, as long as we "kept up the skeer," to quote a really hideous and shitty person who also happened to be a goddamn military genius. (Sad, really, because his personal reputation kept his contributions as a military officer from getting greater recognition; but that's what you get for founding the Ku Klux Klan, I guess.)
Or, at least, that's Frank's theory.
I suspect that Putin's trying it. And we seem, from the reports in the media, to be so completely caught up in "9/11, Terror, Terror, Everbody Panic" that we're missing the show.
That's a damn shame, because if he really IS crazy, and not just nuking the moon, we could be in hipdeep shit very quickly. Putin doesn't exactly have warm and fuzzies in his heart for the USA, and the move to take the Arctic is partcularly disturbing in light of the fact that the Arctic ice cap is the traditional route for Russian ICBMs targetting the USA. If it's owned by Russia - and we've done nothing to stop it - it might be a tad bit difficult to put any future missile defense systems on it, hmmm?
Just a thought.
