The evils of the day; accepting submissions for There Will Be War

Chaos Manor View, Friday, September 11, 2015

Photo celebrating anniversary of the attack on the United States removed by popular request.

Errands today including banking. Eric salvaged a couple of old machines which we can give away, and we are slowly cleaning up some of the clutter. One older Pentium 4 runs Windows 7, but is too old for Windows 10; Eric will have something to say on that shortly. We continue to back up to the RAID, now backing up everything on the machines we are retiring; all redundant, since everything on them was copied onto their replacement machines, but storage space is cheap and it costs nothing to have that redundancy. (Well, maybe a few gazillion electrons, but they aren’t complaining.)

Meanwhile it continues to be hot. It was 99 F in the bank parking structure (shade) when I returned to the car, so warmer in the sun.

Memorials to 911 have been subdued.

We invaded Iraq in retaliation for the 911 attacks; I have never been sure why. Osama bin Laden was not an Iraqi, nor was he an ally of Saddam Hussein. It made no sense to me at the time, and it makes none now; we killed a lot of Iraqis in retaliation for bin Laden, but not to much effect. At the time I proposed that we build monuments: square blocks of wreckage and wasteland in the city centers of those places where there had been dancing for joy in the streets in celebration of the murders of American citizens. It wasn’t really a serious proposal, but it would have been preferable to what we actually did, and a great deal cheaper.

We learned not to engage in land wars in Asia, but you would have thought we had learned that lesson previously. We had to make a deliberate exception in Viet Nam because it was critical to our grand strategy of containment; and we actually won that war, and got our land troops out, and defeated the next invasion from the North with air and naval support the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam. Saigon remained Saigon, South Viet Nam remained an ally – at least they thought so — and Communism remained contained. We didn’t have to occupy the North, it cost Russia funds they did not have to maintain the North, and ARVN with our naval and air support could have resisted invasions from the North forever and aye. That was containment, and the collapse of the Soviet Union would not have been delayed.

The Democrats would have none if it; they controlled Congress, and when North Vietnam invaded the South with armored divisions again, the Democrats voted our “allies” 20 cartridges and two grenades per man – and no air support. Saigon accordingly became Ho Chi Minh city, and the world received another lesson about trusting liberal democracy when the going gets tough. So it goes.

We seem to be hard of learning; but that makes sense because our schools are designed for this result. If they deviate from that, we send in federal interference. So it goes.

Forget the Alamo

I note with gratitude that on this 9/11, we have spared ourselves a defeat celebration. Nationalist masochism does not appeal to me.
Paradocter

Osama bin Laden got what he wanted: 9/11 and the birth of the national security state

Since the World Trade Center bombings, our democracy has come undone. The terrorists accomplished their mission

http://www.salon.com/2015/09/11/osama_bin_laden_got_what_he_wanted_911
_and_the_birth_of_the_national_security_state/

  There Will Be War  Volume Ten 

Accepting submissions for a new volume of the There Will Be War series. Send with cover note to submission@therewillbewar.net. Stories should preferably be 20,000 words or less.  Poetry encouraged, but see the previous series; it needs to make sense. Hard science fiction mainly; urban fantasy with a military theme possibly acceptable, but mostly we want hard, realistic stories.  They need not be action adventure; good command decision stories encouraged. Space opera always considered.  Again see the previous nine volumes.

Nonexclusive anthology rights only are purchased.  Payment on acceptance is $100 advance against pro rata share of 50% of the revenues received from the publisher. Given the sales of the previous volumes we expect this to be a respectable payment. Original works will be considered, but author is welcome to sell it elsewhere; we purchase only nonexclusive anthology rights.

There will be a hardbound print edition, paperback if the sales indicate it, and eBook publication. Contributors will receive an author’s copy. Each contribution will have an introduction by the editor. The work will contain non-fiction essays by invited contributors: again see the previous volumes. 

Germany Age structure – Demographics

Jerry;

There is a point where incompetence becomes so egregious that it is indistinguishable from malice.

The vast majority of the current wave of immigrants are young, adult males.

This is a population pyramid of Germany.

There are only a few million young, adult males. Many of them already are Muslim immigrants. Introducing hundreds of thousands of more male Muslims will tilt the gender balance, intensify sexual competition, and put the young, ethnic German males at a fatal disadvantage.

http://www.indexmundi.com/germany/age_structure.html

James Crawford=

If hundreds of thousands of migrants come demanding tribute, it is only a plea for compassion. They have no obligation to assimilate; get used to that.

Dr. Pournelle,
Since Czar Vlad the first will no doubt be involved, I’m not sure we can call it a European civil war — more likely might be the third phase of the European Imperial War, or the true WWIII (the first phase being roughly equivalent to that of the outset of the Russo-Japanese war through the armistice at Versailles).
Personally, I see Vlad I (actually Vlad III, but first Czar of the name) working to increase his influence in Greece and Turkey, and possibly Syria. Potentially, he could be adding East Ukraine and all or part of the other three to the empire. While Western Europe are involved with the influx of refugees created by their collective failure to intervene in the Middle East, Russia may get the opportunity to come to the rescue. It will depend entirely on how Russia can spin its relationship with conservative (as opposed to radical) Muslims.
Enablers for the potential scenario will be the E.U., Great Britain, and the U.S. to continue to treat the Greek economy, (East) Ukrainian Russian adventurism, South East Med unrest (with concurrent emigration), Iran, and Turkish political instability as separate problems.
I recognize and acknowledge that I’m not enough of an analyst to be able to make reliable predictions, but if any of the above is as much as 10% true, there will be war.
-d

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.