Iranian Attack Boats Block U.S. Ship, Come Within 600 Yards

Image source: Wikimedia

WASHINGTON — The Iranian government continues to take provocative actions aimed at the United States and its allies.

The Iranian military tested ballistic missiles and sent four fast attack boats close to American and British warships over the weekend.

Four attack boats from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps intentionally blocked the path of the U.S. and British ships, coming within 600 words of them and forcing them to change their course, Fox News and CBS reported. The American ship was the USNS Invincible, a tracking ship which uses sonar to monitor submarines and missile tests. The incident took place in the Strait of Hormuz.

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The U.S. military labeled it “unsafe” and “unprofessional.”

This was the second time Iranian ships approached the Invincible; two days earlier a frigate from the Iranian Navy came within 150 yards of the surveillance vessel, CBS News reported. The Invincible was in the Gulf of Oman, south of Iran, when that incident occurred.

Missile Test

The Iranians also test fired two Fateh-110 Mod 3 short-range ballistic missiles, U.S. officials told Fox News. One the missiles destroyed a barge moored at sea 155 miles away.

“Between North Korea’s saber-rattling and Iran’s willful defiance, we certainly don’t lack for evidence of these rogue regime’s intentions,” U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, said in a statement. “This is why we need to develop a strong missile-defense system and to take a harder line toward these regimes. No amount of words, however clear or forceful, will prevent this kind of aggression; only firm action to defend America and our allies will stop them in their tracks.”

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What Is The Deep State?

Submitted by Jesse via Jesse"s Cafe Americain blog,

"... there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose.

My analysis of this phenomenon is not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day. Nor can this other government be accurately termed an "establishment."

All complex societies have an establishment, a social network committed to its own enrichment and perpetuation. In terms of its scope, financial resources and sheer global reach, the American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class by itself. That said, it is neither omniscient nor invincible. The institution is not so much sinister (although it has highly sinister aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched.

Far from being invincible, its failures, such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it is only the Deep State’s protectiveness towards its higher-ranking personnel that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent ineptitude."

Mike Lofgren, Anatomy of the Deep State

I do not think our time is all that different from those that have gone before it, insofar as the substance and types of our actions are concerned.  Every age has its thieves and hypocrites, in high and low places.

Rather, what is a little more distinctive of us is the numbers, the sheer number of people whose character, or a lack thereof, fits a common pattern— mean, petty, deceitful, and often willfully ignorant of moral constraints, lacking in civility and grace, and utterly unrepentant of it.

They are quite proud of their cleverness in gaming the system, in embracing the worst aspects of the human economy and abusing them, in the name of their unnatural virtues.  If they are liars, they strives to be among the most shameless and adept.  If they are thieves, they admire those who steal tirelessly and the most, while paying no consequences.

And above all, their perspective on life allows them to have no shame in it, any of it, in what other times would have been done in the darkness, and only behind closed doors, and carefully covered up.

We take our ill gotten gains, and place them in the spotlight with the high sounding names of wise-sounding and humanitarian organizations and foundations.

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“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn"t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”

Søren Kierkegaard