Hillary Clinton's Lack of Legitimacy

It is claimed that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails leaked via Wikileaks where gathered by hackers for the Russian government. If so, the Russians have severely weakened Hillary Clinton if and when she is elected President. Not necessarily because the Russians may have compromising emails that can be used to blackmail Clinton, although those may exist, but because her election will be so tainted as to rob it of legitimacy. And because her election will be robbed of legitimacy, her presidency will also be robbed of legitimacy.

It was a stroke of genius. Fourth generation warfare revolves around government legitimacy and Hillary, should she win, will begin her term already crippled. This can already be seen in stories such as this one from Hot Air entitled "Why Bernie Sanders Never Had A Chance," which suggests that Hillary's nomination today was the result of a deal struck with Obama back in 2008. Sure it may be speculation, but as the author points out:

Speculation can run rampant, especially on a weekend after a political convention that was manipulated to make sure that the Bernie Sanders people got screwed over every which way possible. 

When you look back at this chain of events, post-DNC hacking scandal, it sure is a lot easier to understand why there was a thumb, a fist, hell, a side of beef, on the scale against Bernie Sanders and his supports in the 2016 primary cycle. 

Bernie voters, you sad saps, you never had a chance. Now, we can reasonably suspect that the chance you didn’t have goes back eight years. We can also deduce that the Democratic Party is a top-down organization, not a grassroots organization. They claim to be, of course, but the power at the top has nothing to do with the will of the people in its base. It’s a club where only the opinions of a couple of members count.

Worse, for Hillary, is that the revelation of DNC favoritism spurs others to dig into the DNC's and Hillary's dirty laundry. Stories that otherwise would never see the light of day are now going to be freely published. For instance, The Daily Kos reports that "Election Justice USA Study Finds that Without Election Fraud Sanders Would Have Won by Landslide." The authors of the study concluded:

Based on this work, Election Justice USA has established an upper estimate of 184 pledged delegates lost by Senator Bernie Sanders as a consequence of specific irregularities and instances of fraud. Adding these delegates to Senator Sanders’ pledged delegate total and subtracting the same number from Hillary Clinton’s total would more than erase the 359 pledged delegate gap between the two candidates. EJUSA established the upper estimate through exit polling data, statistical analysis by precinct size, and attention to the details of Democratic proportional awarding of national delegates. Even small changes in vote shares in critical states like Massachusetts and New York could have substantially changed the media narrative surrounding the primaries in ways that would likely have had far reaching consequences for Senator Sanders’ campaign.

The Daily Kos author finishes his article: " So, at the end of the day, Ralph Nader was right: She did win by dictatorship."

The result is incidents like that in Colorado Springs, where Trump supporters began chanting "lock her up," in reference to Clinton, and anti-Trump demonstrators joined in with the chant.

Southern Baptists Call for Civil Disobedience of Gay Marriage Laws

Via Fox News, the Southern Baptist convention released the following statement:

“We strongly encourage all Southern Baptist pastors, leaders, educators and churches to openly reject any mandated legal definition of marriage and to use their influence to affirm God’s design for life and relationships,” the statement declared.

While affirming their love for all people – regardless of sexual orientation, the former Southern Baptist presidents said the “cannot and will not affirm the moral acceptability of homosexual behavior or any behavior that deviates from God’s design for marriage.”

“Our first duty is to love and obey God, not man,” they emphatically stated.

As Lund has repeatedly stated in his statements concerning fourth generational warfare, the biggest challenge for the state system in the 21st Century will be a crises of legitimacy of the state.

There Is A Storm Coming

If you have ever watched a business blow up, you know that there are signs of impending doom. A slow decline in revenue and morale, gradually accelerating (this is when those in the know suddenly start leaving--the rats fleeing the sinking ship, so to speak), and then a sudden break up or collapse. As I've noted before, the collapse of Western Civilization began a century ago. We are, I believe, on the cusp of the sudden surge toward break up. The past weekend was full of news stories painting an outline of some of what is coming down the pike.

I'll start with the cultural war. Not the "abortion" or "gay marriage" topics, but something even more fundamental--the gender wars. Instapundit posted the following message from feminists to straight-white-men:

"Sit down & let us abolish you."

Breitbart reported that "[a] Liberal Democrat activist who sits on two national party committees has been suspended from her regional party after a string of sexist comments on social media. The activist in question, Sarah Noble, made multiple tweets of a disturbingly hateful nature, including 'kill all men', 'fuck men', and 'die cis[gendered] scum'." Nothing new in all this, other than feminists are becoming more public and brazen about the topic. It is easy enough to write off the foregoing as some radical fringe, except the attitude infects society as a whole. Men are denigrated throughout our society. And the response is declining marriage rates. As this article points out, "men need marriage like a fish needs a bicycle." I think what we are going to see is an sudden, exponential decline in birth rates and social stability as more young men choose their X-Box over sex and marriage.

Iran. It is developing (if it has not already developed) a nuclear weapon. Obama's negotiations were nothing more than stalling tactics while Iran widened its proxy wars, hardened its military program, and upgraded its missile defenses. In fact, according to the Washington Free Beacon, Obama expressed surprise that Iran hadn't purchased air defense missiles from Russia earlier:

President Obama said that he was “not surprised” Russia sold an advanced missile system to Iran in the midst of his negotiations with the Ayatollah to prevent Iran’s nuclear facilities from making a bomb. He went even further to say that he expected the deal to happen a lot sooner than it did. 

“I’m frankly surprised that it held this long given that they were not prohibited by sanctions from selling these defensive weapons,” President Obama said on Friday.

"Defensive weapons," which will be used to shield Iran from any military action should it not abide by the not yet existing treaty to forestall its nuclear weapons program. Oh, but that is not all that has been happening during the kabuki theater of the negotiations. North Korea has been transferring missile components to Iran in violation of international sanctions--a fact that Obama kept secret from the U.N. agency responsible for enforcing the sanctions.  And don't worry about the convoy of ships from Iran to Yemen to openly resupply the Shia Houthi rebels. I mean, maybe you should worry, but Iran evidently does not need to. Even the Arab Gulf nations have begun to publicly question whether Obama secretly supports the Iranian regime specifically, and Shiite Islam in particular.

Last week, Judicial Watch reported on the existence of an ISIS base in northern Mexico, near the border with the United States. The Administration denies that there is any such base. In fact, the information is so baseless, that the FBI is now conducting an investigation into who leaked the information to Judicial Watch. I'm sure that this has nothing to do with the theft of radioactive material last week in Cardenas, Tabasco, Mexico. But some future theft will be for the radioactive material and not scrap metal.

I don't want to forget Ragnarok, which began as an armed uprising in Ukraine and now has the U.S. and Russia stumbling toward war:

COULD A U.S. response to Russia’s actions in Ukraine provoke a confrontation that leads to a U.S.-Russian war? Such a possibility seems almost inconceivable. But when judging something to be “inconceivable,” we should always remind ourselves that this is a statement not about what is possible in the world, but about what we can imagine. As Iraq, Libya and Syria demonstrate, political leaders often have difficulties envisioning events they find uncomfortable, disturbing or inconvenient.

Prevailing views of the current confrontation with Russia over Ukraine fit this pattern. Since removing Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein and Muammar el-Qaddafi from power had limited direct impact on most Americans, it is perhaps not surprising that most Washington policy makers and analysts assume that challenging Russia over Ukraine and seeking to isolate Moscow internationally and cripple it economically will not come at a significant cost, much less pose real dangers to America. After all, the most common refrain in Washington when the topic of Russia comes up is that “Russia doesn’t matter anymore.” No one in the capital enjoys attempting to humiliate Putin more than President Barack Obama, who repeatedly includes Russia in his list of current scourges alongside the Islamic State and Ebola. And there can be no question that as a petrostate, Russia is vulnerable economically and has very few, if any, genuine allies. Moreover, many among its business and intellectual elites are as enthusiastic as the Washington Post editorial page to see Putin leave office. Ukrainians with the same view of former Ukrainian president Viktor F. Yanukovych successfully ousted him with limited Western help, so, it is argued, perhaps Putin is vulnerable, too.

Nevertheless, Russia is very different from the other countries where the United States has supported regime change. First and most important, it has a nuclear arsenal capable of literally erasing the United States from the map. While many Americans have persuaded themselves that nuclear weapons are no longer relevant in international politics, officials and generals in Moscow feel differently. Second, regardless of how Americans view their country, Russians see it as a great power. Great powers are rarely content to serve simply as objects of other states’ policies. Where they have the power to do so, they take their destiny into their own hands, for good or ill.

WHILE MOST policy makers and commentators dismiss the possibility of a U.S.-Russian war, we are more concerned about the drift of events than at any point since the end of the Cold War. We say this having followed Soviet and Russian affairs throughout the Cold War and in the years since the Soviet Union’s implosion in 1991. And we say it after one of us recently spent a week in Moscow talking candidly with individuals in and around the Putin government, including with many influential Russian officials, and the other in China listening to views from Beijing. We base our assessment on these conversations as well as other public and private sources.

There are three key factors in considering how today’s conflict might escalate to war: Russia’s decision making, Russia’s politics and U.S.-Russian dynamics.

(Read the whole thing).

And nature can still deal some blows. ABC Australia reported over the weekend a mysterious deadly outbreak in Nigeria that killed its victims within 24 hours. Probably too deadly to spread very far, but that was what was thought about Ebola a couple years ago. And this article from the Seattle Times is ostensibly about how global warming is increasing the length of the growing season in more northern climes (at the same time as it brings colder winters and more precipitation to the same localities), but that California, the American Southwest, and the Rocky Mountain states are seeing declining rainfall. 

We live in interesting times.

(H/t Instapundit and Weasel Zippers)

South African Immigrants Form Militias

The title of the article says it all: "South Africa descends towards a new apartheid: Immigrants create armed gangs and patrol the streets in the face of violence from black locals aimed at foreigners." The story begins:

Immigrants wielding machetes have clashed with police as they hunt for locals that attacked foreign shop owners as violence continues to spread across South Africa. 

Police fired rubber bullets and a stun grenade today to disperse a gang of immigrants who had armed themselves with machetes in a run-down district in Johannesburg.  

The country has been hit by a wave of violence against immigrants in the past fortnight. 

The foreigners have complained about a lack of protection and some have started to arm themselves and fight back. 

Anti-Immigrant Riots in South Africa

Coming soon to a neighborhood near you. The Daily Mail reports that the riots have been ongoing for the past two weeks in Durban and spreading to Johannesburg, and have led to 6 deaths. According to the article, the riots are the result of high unemployment rates and a large number of immigrants. "In the past two weeks, shops and homes owned by Somalis, Ethiopians, Malawians and other immigrants in Durban and surrounding townships have been targeted, forcing families to flee to camps protected by armed guards."

The protests are not white versus blacks. Channel 4 News reports, for instance:

Reported comments by the Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini - that foreigners should "pack their bags" and leave - are thought to have stoked the fires of hatred. Many of those rioting were heard chanting "the king has spoken".

The International Business Times reports:

Police have stepped up their presence across the entire Alberta Park area of the city, home to many immigrants. The unrest is believed to have its source in a labour dispute at a local supermarket, which has escalated into random attacks on foreigners. 

"The employees were complaining about the employer employing foreign nationals," Police Minister Nathi Nhleko said, reports EWN. 

More than 1,000 foreigners - including Ethiopians, Malawians, Somalians and Pakistanis - have been forced to flee their homes in the KwaZulu-Natal province since the violence erupted days ago, after Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini said that foreigners should "pack their bags" and leave. 

Some locals accuse the immigrants, many of whom are from other African countries, of taking jobs and opportunities away from them.

Newsweek also relates: "'It is African-on-African. It is not on other nationalities,' said [Police Minister] Nhleko."

"Hybrid War: Old Concept, New Techniques"

An article at The Small Wars Journal. Although they don't acknowledge 4th generation war theory, the article does have this to say:

While the means by which state and non-state actors conduct hybrid war today have changed, the fundamental principle of utilizing a combination of conventional and irregular methods to achieve a political objective is consistent with older forms of conflict.  This blending has historic examples in the American Revolution with George Washington’s Continental Army and robust militia forces; the Napoleonic Wars where British regulars challenged French control of major Spanish cities, while Spanish guerrillas attacked their lines of communication; and the Arab Revolt where the British Army combined conventional operations in Palestine with irregular forces under British operational control.[i]  However, despite having its roots in history, modern hybrid war has the potential to transform the strategic calculations of potential belligerents due to the rise of non-state actors, information technology, and the proliferation of advanced weapons systems. 

The unipolar moment that has persisted since the fall of the Soviet Union has given rise to an international system in which unconventional challenges to the idea of traditional state-on-state war are increasingly prevalent.  The preponderance of American military power has tempered conflicts in Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and the South China Sea, but has given rise to a method of war that attempts to leverage the weaknesses of conventional military structure.  Where wars traditionally have regular and irregular components in different areas of operation, modern hybrid war has the tendency to combine these aspects.  Modern hybrid war practitioners apply “conventional capabilities, irregular tactics and formations, and terrorist acts including indiscriminate violence, coercion, and criminal activity” simultaneously.[ii]  Under this model, war takes place in a variety of operating environments, has synchronous effects across multiple battlefields, and is marked by asymmetric tactics and techniques.[iii]  These tactics are difficult to defeat for militaries that lack the flexibility to shift mindsets on a constant basis, especially since the interconnected nature of modern society is such that hybrid war takes place on three distinct battlefields:  the conventional battlefield, the indigenous population of the conflict zone, and the international community.[iv] 

Major powers have historically sponsored irregular fighters and non-state actors in the execution of broader military campaigns, and modern examples such as Iranian support to Hezbollah and other Shia militant groups are continuations of these policies.  The Israel-Hezbollah War of 2006 showed that although the concept of hybrid war in this fashion is not novel, some of the sophistication and lethality of non-state actors, along with their ability to persist within the modern state system, is a new occurrence.

Underlines added.

Arizona Suffers Internet Blackout

The Daily Mail reports:

Tens of thousands of people were cut off from phone and Internet for more than 12 hours in Arizona on Wednesday.  

Vandals cut a fiber-optic line located in a desert north of Phoenix that provides internet and phone services to tens of thousands of people throughout the state. 

Although most communication services were restored after being down for six and a half hours, some people were not connected until early on Thursday morning. 

A Phoenix Police Department officer said vandals had completely cut through the cable, which is located in the desert north of the capital in an area inaccessible to vehicles. 

Meanwhile, even in cities 100 miles away from Phoenix, ATM machines stopped working, businesses couldn't process credit cards and residents said they felt lost without the internet.  

Emergency services were also affected in a number of cities.  

Prescott Valley had to supplement 911 service with 'handheld radios and alternate phone numbers'.  

Water and sewer facilities in the region also had to switch to manual operations.
Emergency lines were also limited in Yavapai County and authorities were unable to access law enforcement databases.  

Read the whole thing.

Battles On the Border

(Source)

          The drug wars recently heated up on the Texas-Mexican border. An early report from Borderland Beat related:

Beginning in the evening of Sunday, February 1, reports of blockades and shootouts in northern Tamaulipas has spread online.  It appears that the first reports were of blockades and spikes being dropped on the highway between Anahuac and Valle Hermoso. 

Later that night word spread of a shootout in Nuevo Progreso, followed by the highway between Rio Bravo and Reynosa being completely blocked.  Convoys of vehicles apparently carrying cartel members were also reported in Rio Bravo. 

Around the same time began reports of shootouts in Reynosa.  The largest of the shootouts, occurring near the Las Fuentes traffic circle, began around 4:20 AM on February 2 and lasted over an hour and a half.  Eyewitnesses claimed multiple dead bodies in the area.  As of 7:30 PM Central Time reports of shootings in Reynosa continue.

The conflict is apparently between two factions of the Gulf Cartel--Matamoros and Los Metros of Reynosa--as evidenced  by the movement of vehicles with Escorpión, M3, XX, or 900 marked or painted on the vehicles.

          By February 4, 2015, Breitbart was reporting at least 14 dead, and indicated that "both the U.S. Consulate in Matamoros and that city’s Mayor Leticia Salazar issued warnings to the public giving some of the locations of the fighting and advising residents to stay indoors." By the next day, the US Consulate in Matamoros suspended its operations and advised consulate employees to stay home. Mexican Federal Police have also been involved in shootouts, killing several cartel members and seizing military grade weapons such as automatic rifles and grenade launchers. Clashes continued between police and cartel members this past weekend and earlier this week, bringing the confirmed death toll up to 21. Borderland Beat provides more background on the conflict, as well as some theories as to what set off the violence, here.

         This February 5, 2015, article from Borderland Beat described the seizure of 14 vehicles, 8 of which were being armored. According to the article, the armored vehicles "are utilised [sic] by criminal groups to escort drugs shipments through the Tamaulipas breaches, and avoid robbery of loads by rival groups." The seized vehicles were being taken to a storage facility where approximately 50 previously captured vehicles are being stored. The article also mentioned that the same facility yielded ammunition and radios tuned to military frequencies. (Here is a PDF monograph on Narco armored vehicles, and a 2011 article from In Sight Crime on the vehicles when they first were appearing).

A Better Description of 4GW Could Not Have Been Written

The American Conservative has an article entitled "A Blackwater World Order" which discusses the impact of the privatization of war. From the article:

“Now that the United States has opened the Pandora’s Box of mercenarianism,” McFate writes in The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What they Mean for World Order, “private warriors of all stripes are coming out of the shadows to engage in for-profit warfare.” 

It is a menacing thought. McFate said this coincides with what he and others have called a current shift from global dominance by nation-state power to a “polycentric” environment in which state authority competes with transnational corporations, global governing bodies, non-governmental organizations (NGO’s), regional and ethnic interests, and terror organizations in the chess game of international relations. New access to professional private arms, McFate further argues, has cut into the traditional states’ monopoly on force, and hastened the dawn of this new era. 

McFate calls it neomedievalism, the “non-state-centric and multipolar world order characterized by overlapping authorities and allegiances.” States will not disappear, “but they will matter less than they did a century ago.” He compares this coming environment to the order that prevailed in Europe before the domination of nation-states with their requisite standing armies [i.e., before the Peace of Westphalia].

Drug cartels, gangs and activist organizations will be able to participate as well, to some extent or another. As I observed yesterday, the hacking group Anonymous is engaging in cyber warfare with ISIS, and the conflicts between the Mexican drug cartels are well beyond simple inter-gang conflict.

Hooded Gunmen with AK's ...

... opened fire on a police vehicle in the French city of Marseilles. However, the police are saying it was gang related (Asian gang?) and not a terrorist attack. (Wink, wink, nudge, nudge).

The Border War Bumps Up a Notch

We are still losing the war with the Mexican insurgents. The latest news is that the insurgents have resorted to using drones to gather intelligence on the movements of the Border Patrol. 

Special Agent Matt Barden of the Drug Enforcement Agency says the DEA does not take the proliferation of drones lightly; along with its counterparts in Mexico, the agency is studying the crashed-drone incident. However, Barden adds that this is not the first time the DEA has discovered that drones have been used to move drugs undetected. “This is something that’s not new,” he explains. “We’ve heard about this, but more prominently with people trying to get a small amount of drugs or contraband into a prison or some confines of a locked or guarded facility — trying to get stuff in or out.” 

The biggest concerns about cartel-operated drones, Barden says, have nothing to do with the actual movements of drugs. “Is it a good way to get some dope out of the woods or out of the jungle to a waiting car or vehicle? Yeah,” Barden says. “Better yet, to me personally, is it a better way to perform surveillance on law enforcement? Absolutely. That scares me a whole lot more than does the smuggling aspect of it.” He adds that if DEA agents encountered drones that could expose a confidential mission or jeopardize their safety, the agents would use discretion but would bring the drones down as swiftly as possible. 

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, on the other hand, is downplaying concerns about the potential for growing use of unmanned aircraft at the border. “To date, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has not intercepted any drones smuggling narcotics across the borders into the United States,” CBP spokesman Carlos Lazo said in a statement. “In collaboration with our federal, state, local and international law enforcement partners, CBP remains vigilant against emerging trends and ever-changing tactics employed by transnational criminal organizations behind illegal attempts to smuggle narcotics into the U.S.” 

Outwardly, the Border Patrol appears to be ready for drone-powered drug smugglers. Border Patrol agents would not comment on the counter-measures the agency might employ to combat drones that are threatening its agents or being used in the commission of crimes. But the Border Patrol has an arsenal of drones of its own. The agency’s Unmanned Aircraft System has a fleet of nine Predator B drones that can fly for 20 hours straight and travel at speeds up to 276 miles per hour to help secure the nation’s border. Predator B drones, which are also used by the military, are much more sophisticated and powerful than the drone that crashed in Mexico. The drug-smuggling drone was much smaller, slower, and less durable than the top-dollar equipment paid for by American taxpayers. 

But while, on its face, the Border Patrol’s drone program gives the agency a firm technological advantage over the cartels, DHS’s inspector general recently concluded that the program has been poorly managed for several years. Near the end of last year, the IG issued a report saying that the Border Patrol could not prove that its program was effective, because the agency had failed over the last eight years to develop performance measures. The report revealed that the program cost nearly $10,000 more per hour of flying time than DHS claimed and that, while the Predator B drones were expected to fly over the border 16 hours a day, 365 days a year, the aircraft were actually airborne just over 3.5 hours a day on average. The Border Patrol agreed with the IG’s conclusions and recommendations in principle, but then issued its own report disagreeing with the findings.