NC Renegades

First it was wildfires, then it was unprecedented flooding, and now it is earthquakes.  In the past two weeks alone, more than 400 earthquakes have shaken San Ramon – a small city that sits approximately 45 miles east of San Francisco.  Never before have so many earthquakes been recorded in that area in such a short span of time.  Standing alone, that earthquake swarm may not mean that much.  But when you stand back and look at all of the unusual events that have been happening since late September, a very disturbing picture begins to emerge.

But first, let’s talk about this earthquake swarm.  All over the planet, seismic activity seems to be increasing.  According to Volcano Discovery, dozens of volcanoes around the world have recently erupted, and Afghanistan was just hit by a massive 7.5-magnitude quake.  It was one of the worst earthquakes that Afghanistan has ever seen, and it is going to take months to deal with all of the damage.  So that is why it is so alarming that right now there is record breaking earthquake activity just outside of San Francisco…

San Ramon, California, appears to have broken a new earthquake record over the last two weeks: A total of 408 small quakes have shaken the East Bay city, almost four times the record set in 2003 in half the amount of time.

“I’ve not felt so many tremors in decades,” Mark Stone said outside a San Ramon Starbucks on Tuesday morning. “My dog, Gimmel, she’s the first one to know a couple of seconds before.”

And his dog has been extra alert lately.

The state of California has been seeing a lot of disasters lately.  In late September, tremendous wildfires in the state were making headlines all over the planet.  In fact, Barack Obama formally declared the Valley Fire to be a “major disaster”, and federal funding was released to help fight it.  The following is from an NBC News article that was posted on September 23rd…

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A little over a week ago in “Full Metal Retard: US Launches ‘Performance-Based’ Ammo Paradrop Program For Make-Believe ‘Syrian Arabs’” we outlined what is perhaps the most hilarious Pentagon scheme designed to arm rebels in Syria to date (and that’s saying something).

Following the comical demise of the latest “train and equip” program, the US is out of options for supporting the opposition in Syria and so Washington decided to go back to Old Faithful: the Kurds.

But that presents a problem.

The US is now flying sorties from Incirlik and Turkish autocrat President Recep Tayyip Erdogan hates the Kurds and has gone out of his way to make it clear that Ankara doesn’t distinguish between the PKK and the YPG. For the uninitiated, here’s the problem broken down in bullet points:

• The US is flying from a Turkish airbase
• Access to that airbase came with NATO’s tacit approval of Erdogan’s move to crack down on the Kurdish PKK operating in Turkey (that crackdown is designed to bolster support for the government ahead of elections next month)
• Both the US and Turkey designate PKK as a “terrorist” group
• BUT while Ankara equates the PKK with the Kurdish rebels battling ISIS in Syria, Washington actually supports those same rebels, setting up a conflict of interest

Now clearly, this is beyond absurd. That is, Turkey only got NATOs support for the politically motivated crackdown on the PKK because Ankara agreed to bundle said crackdown with a military campaign against  ISIS. But the Syrian Kurds are the most effective ground force of them all when it comes to combating Islamic State.  Because those Syrian Kurds are aligned with the PKK, Turkey is effectively trying to say its army is fighting ISIS, the PKK, and YPG all at once even as both the PKK and the YPG are also fighting ISIS.

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UPDATE:

Based on the comments, I have added videos about this incident. It appears that many readers want to submit to a police state. Who would have thought it? I always thought that we were fighting to protect our children and restore their Liberty.

Sheriff: ‘I Want to Throw Up’ Watching Video

Russia could be developing plans to sever key internet communications during future wars, according to a report in the New York Times.

The article reports that various military sources are concerned about a spike in Russian naval activity near the locations of undersea cables.

Such cables are vital to the internet’s daily running and constantly ferry huge amounts of data between continents.

There are many thousands of miles of them, snaking under the world’s oceans.

But could Russian submarines really be investigating ways of cutting these crucial cords?

Russia watchers have long been aware of the threat, says Keir Giles, associate fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at think tank Chatham House.

However, he added that cutting the US off from the web would probably be impossible because of the number of connections going in and out of the country.

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Well, the USS Lassen sailed within 12-nautical miles of Subi Reef and surprisingly, World War III did not break out overnight.

(USS Lassen)

(Subi reef)

Nine months of tension between Washington and Beijing over the latter’s land reclamation efforts in The South China Sea culminated on Monday with President Obama’s decision to send a guided missile destroyer to China’s man-made military outposts on a “freedom of navigation” exercise. As we put it on Monday evening:

“The ball is now squarely in China’s court. The question now is whether Beijing will back down and concede that “sovereignty” somehow means something different with regard to the islands than it does with respect to the mainland or whether Xi will stick to his guns (no pun intended) and take a pot shot at a US destroyer.”

In short, some feared that based on recent rhetoric out of Beijing (e.g. the PLA will “stand up and use force”) that China might actually fire upon the US-flagged vessel or at least move to surround it in what might mark the first step on the road to war.

Ultimately, that didn’t happen as China apparently decided to take the high road for now and avoid an escalation that might have had far-reaching consequences.

That said, Beijing isn’t happy. Here’s more from Bloomberg:

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by Bill Gertz

The Russian government told the United States more than eight years ago that it wanted to abandon the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said at a Senate hearing last week.

“The Russian defense minister as early as 2007 approached me about doing away with the INF Treaty,” Gates said in Senate Armed Services Committee testimony Wednesday.

Gates said he was told by the Russian defense minister that the irony of the INF Freaty is that “the United States and Russia are the only countries that cannot have intermediate range missiles.”

The Russian minister told Gates that if Moscow abandoned the treaty it would not point its new medium-range missiles west, but would “put them in the south and in the east, meaning Iran and China,” he stated.

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