pow & nc's

POW & NC'S
Before starting once again of divine drivel, a very hearty thanks to all those that recently bought through my Amazon Affiliate pages over yonder at www.bisonpress.com . My commission was at a near record $40 and with it I treated myself to "Peak Everything" and "Your World Is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller". Looking forward to those. And, my Google ads payments are coming in at $50 a month instead of the old $35 ( average, of course ). My e-book sales have also risen from their old lows. Keep being generous with those rapidly depreciating Greenbacks and I'll keep vomiting out my nuggets of wisdom. A bargain at twice the price. And I keep forgetting to recommend www.backwoodssurvivalblog.com . He gives you a short run down of flagged articles, which is a great time saver.
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All this recent talk about forming a new federal super agency for torture has gotten me thinking about the bad old times just down the turnpike. Not only has our propaganda gotten more like the old Soviet Union, our torture methods are better resembling the KGB also. If you don't call it torture, it can't be torture. I recently was exposed to a program on an old WWII fellow on our side. He was fondly remembered by the Germans for his use on totally non violent interrogation. It was all psychological. Merely clever questioning. But that is now viewed as totally old school. TV constantly shows us violent interrogation, justifying it because the crooks are bad. Innocent until proven guilty? What Constitution? And the feds have lawyers arguing over the definition of sex, er, I mean torture. Well, perhaps torture by sex. Sorry, bad Clinton joke. No offense Hillary, honest. If I don't post on Monday, you know she eliminated me. They'll say it was a traffic accident... Anyway, even forgetting about morals and scruples and being a decent human being, it seems someone has forgotten that your behavior comes back on you. Good or bad. Which means that by its brutal behavior, the government is condoning its troops and citizens to retaliation. That's how much they care. Risking your life to safeguard our fortunes? As thanks, we'll let you be abducted and tortured. God Bless America.
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After the collapse, when universal bad behavior abounds, you need to be on the side that rises above that. Not only is it the right thing to do, it will come back on you. If you behead civilians and burn fields so the peasants will starve, you will invite the same sort of thing. If you spare non combatants and treat prisoners decently, the other side will at first treat your troops and citizens poorly as usual. But in time you will still be paid back in other ways. Skilled people will want to immigrate and work for you. Soldiers will willingly surrender rather than bitterly fight to the last man, saving casualties on your side. Citizens will help you out to overthrow their evil overlords. You are doing the right thing morally, and being rewarded for it. It is a win/win. I think this shows how desperate our leaders are, that torture is allowed ( funny how your hero Obammy condoned Baby Bush for torture at first, but now wants to make it a cabinet level activity ). We don't have the resources to bribe other countries, but must simply steal what we need.
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When you take POW's, it is okay to put them to work to earn their keep. It isn't okay to feed them less calories than they are using so you eventually kill them. You can't torture them, regardless of how valuable the information they have is. Once you cross that line, there is no turning back. Mistreating prisoners should be a punishable offense. Remember, you want willing surrender to save on your own casualties. You might even consider a program where they join your side. Prisoner trades should be encouraged. Rather than having each side suffer under too many prisoners ( not enough food to spare, for instance ), you swap them out to relieve the burden. Then there is the issue of retribution. If your civilians are killed, don't do the same. If their side won't pay restitution, at the worst you might execute some POW's. That one might be dangerous, but at least you are keeping the casualties military. Don't be arbitrary about it, don't just shoot them all in anger. Give the other side plenty of warning and chances to comply with your demands. Money doesn't make up for death, but it is preferable to further innocents dying.
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NC's, non-combatants, should not be treated as badly as we are used to. We fire bombed Japanese and German cities under the assumption that civilians created war material and thus had to be killed. But what that also did was make the civilians buy into their leaders propaganda. We were slaughtering them all, so give your all fighting back, even if it is only in a factory. I'm not excusing the leadership, I'm saying that civilians can't be targets if you want them to sabotage their own leaders efforts. If the SS hadn't been killing civilians when the Russian invasion started, the civilians would have looked at them as liberators. We bomb the heck out of Iraq after a ten year embargo which denied critical food and medicine to innocents, and we wonder why there is guerrilla warfare. I understand it is a bit more complex than that, but we certainly are not liberators. It is as simple as reaping what you sow. It is pretty black and white. You start creating shapes of grey and you are going down a slippery slope.
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Isn't the concept of consequences pretty simple? Is it just me, is it actually more like rocket science? I weep at the sea of stupidity.
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