Thomas Wictor

“Gloom, Despair, and Agony.”

Gloom, despair, and agony on me
Deep dark depression, excessive misery
If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all
Gloom, despair, and agony on me

Some people are just not happy unless they’re unhappy. This mindset will never change.

Let’s say that every alarmist claim you read is true: The Islamic State will soon acquire nuclear weapons!

What can you do about it?

NOTHING AT ALL.

So why spend even a nanosecond of your life worrying about this particular issue?

The hunt for gloom

People send me links to absurd end-of-the-world hysteria and ask, “IS THIS TRUE?”

It’s never true. Never. Literally none of the predictions of disaster ever come true. The Islamic State is having its head handed to it by professional Arab and allied strategic special operators who’ve been training for this war since 2008.

Have you heard of Oak Island?

For more than a century and a half, there have been investigations and excavations on Oak Island. There are a large number of theories about what might be buried or concealed on the Island. Areas of interest on the island include a location known as the Money Pit, a formation of boulders called “Nolan’s Cross”, the beach at “Smith’s Cove”, and a triangle-shaped “Swamp.” The Money Pit area has been repeatedly excavated. Critics argue that there is no treasure and that the Money Pit is a natural phenomenon.

Nobody can agree if there is indeed a buried treasure on Oak Island, and nobody has been able to successfully excavate anything.

Massive sums of money have been wasted, incredible effort has yielded no results, critics insult everyone involved, mystic lore is the order of the day, historical accuracy is not a consideration, emotion and greed are the main motivating factors, lunatics and fanatics mess everything up, delusion leads to disaster over and over, rigidity destroys whatever gains are made, and endless lies and wish-casting prevent us from knowing the real story.

Oak Island is the Middle East in microcosm.

But.

The Middle East has a real treasure, and the hunters have found it. Anyone who denies that is misinformed. Your gloom is wildly misplaced. I don’t expect people to change overnight, but please stop looking for new emergencies.

Gloom of good news

I’ve known several people who fell into depression after they learned that they weren’t critically ill. The same phenomenon is happening in regard to the Middle East. The region has been told that it doesn’t have terminal cancer, and this is making some people upset.

One of the dangers of life is that you can wear a groove for yourself. When circumstances change—even for the better—you can’t pull yourself out of the groove. You’re trapped.

What I do every day is look for hashtags on Twitter: #Manbij, #YPG, #Syria, #Azaz, and so on. Usually every single statement from all sides is factually incorrect, but there are often links to information that I use to bolster my own various theories.

Here’s a typical example.

This is the video showing the incident.

The Kurdish Peoples’ Protection Units (YPG) of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) in Syria are said to be ready to take the city of Azaz from Islamist factions of the Free Syrian Army (FSA).

This would create a contiguous Syrian Kurdistan called Rojava, under the control of the PYD.

Turkey has said that this won’t happen. My own theory is that the Arab League, Turkey, and the Kurds have worked out a solution. Kurds fighting under the name Grandsons of Salahadin and Arabs of the Syrian Democratic Forces will defeat the Islamists in Azaz. The video above shows that I was right. Arab and allied strategic special operators have already infiltrated Azaz and are sowing massive confusion.

The only reason that I’m talking about this is that the video has been published. Therefore the people who made it knew that others would dissect it.

Jihadist gloom

First, we have the name of the FSA unit: Suqour al-Jabal. “Mountain Falcons.” They’re also known as Liwa Suquor Jabal al-Zawiya, or the Falcons of Mount Zawiya Brigade. No two stories about them are the same. They also don’t use consistent logos.

The Falcons are credited with destroying a YPG T-55 or T-72 main battle tank using an American BGM-71 TOW antitank guided missile (ATGM) on March 29, 2016. This tank was said to have been knocked out during a “major assault by the YPG.”

Russians are all over the Internet, posting disinformation such as this.

Here’s the alleged flight of the missile.

It’s bogus. According to Google Maps, the tank was 12,000 feet (3658 meters) from the National Hospital. All BGM-71 TOW missiles fly at 1000 feet (300 meters) per second. It took twenty seconds for the missile to hit the tank, making the target 20,000 feet (6096 meters) away.

The terrain in the video doesn’t match the landscape in Google Maps. There’s a freeway with electricity transmission towers only two plots way from the open patch of ground.

That freeway should be here.

If it was a “major YPG assault,” why was there only one tank?

The maximum known range of a TOW missile is 14,800 feet (4500 meters), but videos from Syria routinely show that twice that distance is being achieved. These have to be new weapons being used by professionals.

And the firing of the missile in the video above was censored. The people who posted this video expected it to be downloaded and examined frame by frame, the way I do. You can see the shadow (red arrow), but the missile itself has been removed.

Another video from the Falcons.

They say they’re destroying an S-60 57mm artillery piece.

The guy is about to fire.

What’s that yellow light on the walls? He hasn’t fired yet.

The back-blast. Note the round, silver nose of the missile emerging from the launcher.

And the missile itself. We can identify it.

That’s a BGM-71F TOW 2B (foreground).

It’s used specifically against tanks. Two explosively formed penetrators are fired downward from the missile as it passes over the tank. You don’t use them on artillery pieces.

Nothing in Syria is as it seems.

Consume your gloom

Soldiers of the United Arab Emirates have fought in Somalia, Kosovo, Iraq, Lebanon, and Afghanistan. Trust me: You’ll find almost no photos of deployed UAE troops. Syria is completely under the control of men who materialize when they choose, sparing or taking lives as necessary. For the most part, they destroy equipment, not people. They have nothing to prove.

I studied Japanese Shotokan karate for three years. My teacher had a Third Degree Black Belt. One night I ran into him in the downtown area of the Hague. As we stood there, a Dutchman heard us speaking English. He sneeringly imitated us, said he hated Americans, and challenged us to a fight. My karate teacher took me by the arm and guided me away while the Dutchman laughed at our cowardice.

He was the luckiest man in the Netherlands, and he never knew it.

There are real ninjas; there are also many, many fake ninjas.

Be grateful that the real ninjas are philanthropists.

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