Almuse Electric Coil Electric Mandolins and Mandolas

 

Who knew that Electric Coil Mandolins even existed?   We all know that Electric Coil Pickups are what make electric guitars sound so great.  Yes there are Electric Mandolins, and they have been around for a long time, but they use piezo electric pickups which, if you know about them, they just pick up the vibration of the instrument and send it on to an amplifier circuit.  The piezo pickups are generally placed either on or close to the bridge or somewhere on the body of the instrument where the sound is most pleasing.  Electric Violins also use piezo pickups.  I have an NS Design Viola that uses several piezo pickups and it has a good pre-amp with good sound qualities.  But a violin is a bowed instrument and is an animal all to itself.  I would not have wanted a piezo electric mandolin just as I would not want an acoustic guitar with piezo pickups, as they sound, well, so NOT rock and roll.  

 

Then something happened that would change my life.  Remember the Dixie Chicks?  Well, I was at the local Musical Instrument Store on the Island and they had a video going of one of some old Dixie Chick Concert, and the ‘Chick’ that plays violin and mandolin, Martie Maquire, well, she was playing what looked like an electric coil mandolin.  Wow!  I had no idea that such a thing even existed.  And right then and there I was determined to get one.  That was the middle of November last year.

 

I went home and started Web Searching for ‘Electric Coil Mandolins’.   There did not really seem to be much ‘top of the line’ stuff out there.  Amazon was then selling their Eastwood Telecaster Style Mandolin, which they would not ship to me, as I am not currently on American Mainland soil, but I was able to find a Morgan Monroe Telecaster style at the Mandolin Store, and they were glad to do International Shipping for me.  I got the Morgan Monroe, but in order to review it, I did the review at Amazon under the Eastwood item… you can still read that review… it was very favorable.  Yes, the instruments are not the best quality, but when one factors in the very low prices – from $250 to $350, then one has to consider what one is getting for one’s money, and these cheap things play relatively well, and are a lot of fun. One serious drawback, however, was the very noisy pickups, in regards to power line hum, especially in any room with florescent lighting… you really have to be careful about where you face the mandolin or the line hum can get seriously loud, that is between songs… one would have to be really fussy to pretend one can still hear line hum while in the middle of the song, but during pauses in the music, it can become an issue.  Now, in the Electric Guitar world, one can get what they call Humbucker pickups, that is pickups that are made of two coils, not just one, and each coil is wired in mirror image to the other, so that the noise in one pickup is exactly cancelled out by the noise in the other pickup, being 180 degrees phase opposed to each other.  Or like my Fender base, which has two pickups – a neck pickup and a bridge pickup – that mirror each other, and as long as you keep both pickups on and at the same volume, you don’t get line hum noise.  But my cheapy Morgan Monroe had two pickups but each was wired in the same polarity, and so both pickups gather up noise, and instead of cancelling each other out, they simply add to each other.

 

Doing a Web Search I found that the only people that had Mandolin Humbucker Pickups available were Almuse in the U.K.  (http://www.almuse.co.uk/mandolins.html), and Moongazer Music in Montana U.S.A., http://www.moongazermusic.com/info.html, who sold Almuse Pickups under some kind of licensing agreement with Almuse in England.

 

At first I was reluctant to look at Almuse in England because their Website shows a great many mandolins, but they are all marked “Sold”, and the website says that it takes about between 4 to 6 months for a Custom Order to be completed.  The prices seemed very reasonable (a two pickup instrument going for £465, or about $750), but I was worried about the add-ons, and I was still quite ignorant of what I should ask for.  Buying ‘off the rack’ is easy, but to buy Custom is a challenge I was nervous about taking.

 

But when my cheapy arrived and realized how much fun it was to play – so much Rock and Roll potential.  You know,  I should mention right now that you don’t have to play an Electric Mandolin like a regular Mandolin in that regular mandolin kind of style, that is, with that constant trilling of the strings with some bumble bee quick method of picking … think Rod Stewart’s “Maggie Mae” at the end of the song where we here perhaps the best or at least the most famous mandolin part in Rock and Roll History.  Well, no, that is not what these Electric Mandolins are really made for… not in my opinion anyway.  What I like about an Electric Coil Mandolin is that the String Pairs drone against each other, offering a full and complicated sound (oh, in case you don’t know,  a mandolin has 8 strings, tuned to GG DD AA EE, and a Mandola is tuned to CC GG DD AA… similar to how Violins and Violas are tuned).  Also the string pairs have a good feel when you are fingering the neck.  After playing a mandolin for a while, electric guitars feel strange with their six separate strings, and the sound,  while having a more ‘clear as a bell’ quality, still, loses out in not being as rich and full as the Mandolin with its droning string pairs. 

 

Now, to get back to what I was saying, when I realized I was not going to quit the Electric Mandolin, and that I wanted to pursue it further, I decided the only way to go ‘Up Scale’ was to contact Almuse in the U.K.   I sent my first inquiry off on the 24 of November of last year.   I just now went back over my email history to remind me of it all.  My worries about deciding on Custom details were misplaced.  It turns out that Almuse Company in the U.K. is for the most part incarnated in the person of Mr. Pete Mallinson, who quickly answered my email, and started a dialogue with me to figure out exactly what I was looking for, and what any of my special needs might be.    Because I wanted Humbucker Pickups, I wanted a mandolin that would look as though the humbucker style belonged to it, and this of course suggested a Fender Jazzmaster style.  I also told Mr. Mallinson that I had a problem with my real Fender Jazzmaster, that my energetic picking style would sometimes whip the strings clear off the bridge.  So Mr. Mallinson suggested that he could shorten the tail between the bridge and the string terminator bar that the strings thread into, which would help to keep the strings in place.  I then told Mr. Mallinson that because of an old nerve injury to my right hand, I was using a kind of ‘Pick Stick’ – pieces of trim wood glued together with picks in between, which I could grip with the fingers that still had decent muscle control and feeling.  But that I was often wild and crazy in the application of these Pick Sticks and had once gone outside the pick guard of a very good Fender Stratocaster and dug into the paint.  So Pete (I started calling him Pete very soon) suggested he could take his usual Jazzmaster Design and modify it to give a bit more pick guard coverage, and that I should use covered Humbuckers, and that he could reposition the switches further back from the ‘strike zone’ so I would not be accidentally changing my setting with that wild pick stick action.  Pete Mallinson was very thoughtful and engaged in the Custom Decision Process.   It did take a while.  Remember, my first inquiry was on 24 November, and it was not until the 23^rd of December that I got very detailed drawing plans, and once I approved these, I got pricing information on the 6^th of January this year.  $750 a piece (this is the base price… so he did not charge me for any of the little changes we agreed upon), and this price is quite reasonable, in fact, the cheapest I have ever heard of for any kind of custom electric guitar like thing on the Market.  Oh, during the deliberation and decision phase, I decided to place ANOTHER order – for a matching Mandola.  You see, as a former violin player that moved up to Viola, I suspected that I might want to do the same thing here, or to at least own a Mandola.  And since there was no place to just instantly buy a Mandola, the wisest course would be to place the order at the same time as the Mandolin order.  That has worked out to be one of the better day to day decisions I have ever made in my life.

 

Pete Mallinson kept me informed of the progress of the build.  On January 20^th he was already planning the Paint and Finish phase of the operation… he had found an Auto Body Shop that could scale down and do mandolin paint jobs.  But by March there had been reversals in Mr. Mallinson’s relations with this Auto Body Shop.  Apparently after having done a few good jobs for Mr. Mallinson, they decided to speed up their process and save on their costs, and so quality began to suffer.  You see the trick to very fine painting finishes is to have the finest atomized spray aerosol for the thinnest possible coats, and then to allow each coat to completely dry before adding more coats, taking as many as seven or eight color coats even before getting to the Clear Coats.   In that way the paint does not pool or blob up.  But to save time a lot of Car Paint shops use Paint Guns with large apertures, and use thick paint and globby paint mixtures with very little thinning solvent, and they just try to blast it all on in just one or two coats.  That is why in many car paint jobs, when you get up close to the car, you can see the pooling and blobbing… that the paint surface is not smooth with a uniform mirror finish.  A good example of this kind of paint job is a brand new $35000 American Motors Jeep – the paint jobs are so bad, up close, that one gasps in horror and disgust.

 

Anyway, to get back to our primary narrative, we can guess that the Auto Body Paint Shop had ruined a number of finishes for Mr. Mallinson and that he had to take a number of instrument all the way back ‘down to wood’ and then paint them all over again himself. 

 

 And this brings us to one of the Coldest and Dampest Winters (and Springs and Early Summers) in all of English Recorded History.   Yes, Global Climate Change is REAL.  You see, how this applies to us is that even a very thin coat of paint needs to dry relatively quickly, or stray particles of dust will land on the surface and stick… and that looks simply awful.  Some paints can be sanded, such as expensive dope finishes.  But most paints, well, you just need to keep them out of the dust while the paint dries.  Mr. Mallinson does have a clean room for painting and drying, but such rooms are extremely difficult to perfectly seal off.   Then with all the added cold and damp, the room would have to have been heated like a furnace to dry the paint coats in time to minimize the dust particle problem, and that would have doubled his Utility Bill, and he would have had to operate at a significant Loss.  So he kept begging off completing the job because of the Weather, and I agreed that it was indeed a problem and I understood and that I could wait.  Practice with the Cheapy Mandolin was still going well but I saw I still had some way to go, so why should I be in a hurry to get the best instruments, when the cheapy instrument I already has was still teaching me plenty of tricks practice session after practice session. 

 

Oh, but I was not just trusting what Mr. Mallinson was telling me… I even started going to BBC Weather to get the Monthly Forecasts for the entire British Isles, and, yes, Mr. Mallinson was telling the complete truth.  It had never been colder or damper.  It would have even discouraged Winston Churchill – weather that could break even his most famous Will and make him grovel in abject surrender before  the Elements.   Yes, I would have to wait.

 

Oh, in May, after having steadily practiced with the cheapy Morgan Monroe Mandolin since November, as well as keeping up on my Bass and guitars, I had worked myself into another one of my Repetitive Motion Injuries, and would have to lay off of my stringed instruments for a while and go to just the Keyboard and Harmonicas which require different muscles, tendons, and joints to punish, while the other muscles, tendons, and joints have a chance to recuperate .  So I wrote to Pete and told him that I expected to need about six weeks to recover, and so if he was backed up with other clients as well as myself, that he had my leave to put others in line ahead of me.

 

But the dampness continued into the summer and I began to wonder if these Instruments could ever be finished, at their present price point… that perhaps Mr. Mallinson would need to find a quality paint-shop in Southern Italy, in arid Spain in even in North Africa, where it could reliably be supposed that the weather would be reasonably dry and warm.   Or he would have to set up a Dust Free Dry Climate Controlled Oven Paint Room of his own.  But the added expense would have to be taken up by somebody – we would no longer enjoy such affordable prices.  But I kept these thoughts to myself and simply waited.  I came up with a cute pun to express my concern… I would say to myself that that my mandolins were ‘Almuse finished’… get it? Like ‘almost finished’…

 

Then there was an ‘Oooops Email’.  Somehow one of my instruments got ‘nicked’ and so it had to be taken ‘down to the wood’ and re-finished.   I had thought so or something like it.  Checking the English weather, it had been warm and dry for several weeks in a row.  What could be the hold-up, I thought.  I imagined in my mind’s eye that he must have found a rat in his workshop and had thrown a rasp file or something at it, but the ad hoc weapon had missed the rat, bounced off the floor, hit a corner, and ricocheted into my poor defenseless Mandola.  Well, I admired Pete’s honesty.  What can one say… “rats happen”.

 

But then in July there was word that photos would soon be taken, and then in August there were emails asking me to clarify string sizes and tuning, and tips on setting up a Pay Pal account so I could pay across International Exchanges.  The mandolins were not just ‘Almuse finished’… they were READY!  

 

DHL shipping added to the cost, but they were here in just over the weekend.  They arrived on August 24^th, nine months to the day I had sent in my first inquiry… like having a Baby!  Two Babies!   In Pete’s emails he was calling them Little and Larger.  

 

Wow!  They are Beautiful.  Superb quality.  Excellent perceived value.  One improvement could be with the large screws that fasten down the String Termination Bar under the tail of the bridge – they are not chromed.  I could not get perfect intonation at first, on the larger Mandola, and I am so happy that I did not jump in and do Truss Bar adjustments right away (yes, the Mandola has a truss bar, just like a real quality electric guitar), because, after a few days of  being tuned up and practiced with, I noticed the intonation kept getting better and better until the intonation, without any intervention from myself, simply LOCKED ON.  This made me realize that Custom Instruments are not just New, but VERY VERY VERY New.  They need to settle in for a bit.  When I wrote to Pete about it, he said “Of Course! From dreary England to the lush tropics, my poor babies (yes, he called them his “babies” ) would have to settle in for a while before they could fully realize their great good fortune and slap into perfect intonation (oh, Intonation is determined by how well the Open Tuning of the instrument agrees to the tuning once you start pushing down on the separate frets.  Usually if the Open Tuning agrees with the Double Dot tuning, being exactly one octave higher, then it passes the test.   You know, pressing down on strings naturally sharpens the pitch, and so if I find an incurable case of bad intonation on the sharp side, then I resolve it by instead of tuning on the Open I tune at the 5^th fret (guitar) or 7^th fret (mandolin) so that every fretted note will agree.  But then, while actually playing, I have to seriously hesitate before playing any open note (it will be flat in whatever degree the intonation was off), preferring to play the same note down on the neck of the next lower string.       

 

Oh, I did have one funny problem not a week after the ‘babies’ arrived .  Even though Pete had set the slide switches back a bit, I was still sometimes accidentally turning off one of the pickups, and so because my nerve damaged hand had gotten a bit better in the last 9 months (thank you God) I moved my finger picking from between the pickups to over the bridge (rear) pickup where I would be working further away from the controls.  Well, after several hours of practicing like that, all Rock and Roll, and drinking London Dry Gin in celebration to the Great U.K. that had brought me my new wonderful instruments, I looked down and found that the bridge pickup was sunk into the body down on one side.  Bringing out my Tool Kit and taking up the Pick Guard to get a closer look, I found I had smashed out the bracket of the pickup that goes to the height adjust screw.   The bracket was made out of PLASTIC!

 

Plastic!?   Oh, God, that was obviously going to be a weak link in the chain.  I am famously ROUGH on my musical instruments.  Anything made out of plastic, that starts out brittle enough in its Life but then gets more and more brittle with each passing minute, well, it is simply marked for death the moment it goes into my Music Studio… it may last a while, but ultimately, certain death awaits for anything made of Plastic.  Pete, well, now, I saw him as a friend.  We exchanged stories. Christmas Cards.  We made jokes.  Yes, I was annoyed about plastic pickup brackets, but I was not going to fire off some nasty email to my friend.  First I would examine the problem and think of a good ‘fix’.   After I cooled off and got positive, then I would let him know what was going on.

 

One thing I did not want to do was replace the pickup.  It sounded fine, and it is made out of, really expensive magnets and really good wire.  I did not want to have to simply throw that stuff into the trash bin… Carbon Footprint and all that.  What I wanted do was to re-bracket the existing pickup and continue to use it.  I scratched my head and drew up plans and took them to my Friendly Island Guitar Repair guy, a Japanese Gentleman.  He looked at it for 5 seconds and said, “Oh, I just cut out piece of firm sponge or foam and lay it down in that groove under the pickup, and it all be as good as fixed”.  It was that easy.  I felt stupid  and silly for having made up my elaborate plans.  However, to be fair to myself, I had not undid all the strings so I could fully take up the Pick Guard (it had already been late the night before when the problem occurred and I had to put the investigation off until later and catch up on my beauty sleep).   When you look at the internal carvings and cutouts (of surprisingly good quality by the way.  I have had Chinese Instruments where the carved out sections had been done by hammer and chisel, and apparently with no more care than could be taken in just 5 or 10 minutes), and see how everything had been laid out, it becomes obvious that you only need to stick a sponge in the groove directly under the pickup.  Oh, but it did not end there, as there is something funny about the Japanese Mentality… when I got the Mandola back the next day, the screw hole was empty.  Huh!?  What!?   The Friendly Japanese Repair Man said, “Oh, screw hole broke, and Pickup up on foam pad.  You don’t NEED screw.”    My God, it took 5 good minutes to convince him that an empty screwhole next to a pickup makes it LOOK like something is broken, and that LOOKING LIKE something is broken is, well, almost exactly the same as actually BEING broken.  ”So we super glue screw in hole”, he finally says.  Well, thank God… I was thinking we would have to take out the dozen or so Pick Guard screws, loosen the strings, lift out the pick guard and find a nut to roll onto the end of that ‘missing’ screw to take up space and to make everything seem Right with the Universe.  But with super glue, the job was completed in less time than it takes to talk about it.

 

Oh, next morning, when I had indeed cooled off as I know I would have,  I had emailed Mr. Mallinson about the break, and asked for his suggestion for fixing it, and then by that same evening had emailed him again about the rather easy and elegant fix that the Japanese Gentleman had been able to apply.  Mr. Mallinson confessed that he had been thinking of a complicated bracket fix too, but then after learning of the Foam Pad idea, he recalled that a number of instruments on the Market come with Foam Pads arranged in the instrument body underneath the pickups,  so that if a bracket ever does break, no one would ever know the difference.  But until now, he hadn’t thought about it much.  We all learn something new every day.   And you know the Pickup Height Adjustments really aren’t all that important.  You see, the Height Adjustments on these pickups are there so that the pickups can be interchanged between various instrument, but that if they are slid into their position and brought up to the stop presented by the cut-to-fit hole in the pick-guard then they are at their optimum height to begin with, and you never need to adjust what is perfect to begin with.  So, anyway, if you order a mandolin from Almuse, that is, my friend Pete Mallinson, then clarify what the construction of the pickup is, and if the bracket is plastic, simply remind him to cut a pad and insert it into the slot under the pickup… I am sure he will know what you are talking about.

 

Let me sum up by saying that these are splendid Mandolins, but you should buy soon because I can’t see how Mr. Mallinson can hope to keep prices as low as he has been setting them.  As word gets out, he will see more orders come in, and he will simply have more work than he could ever hope to handle.  At that point he can do one of two things – he can raise prices to reduce demand, or he can go to the Bank and get a loan for more capital equipment and to hire on a staff of skilled workers, so as to expand his capacity.  At least for the mean time, I don’t see Mr. Mallinson significantly expanding his operation.  I expect he will first raise his prices, and THEN if demand continues to increase, he will be forced by Necessity, that Great Mother of Invention, to go to the Bank and get the means to turn his present little shop into an out right Factory.  Hey, Leo Fender, had started in his basement too.  

 

Oh, but before I finish, let me add a word on Mandolin Coil Pickup history.  Electric Coil Pickups for Mandolin never used to exist.  As I recall from having read about it somewhere, Pete used to have a real job but he worked on instruments as a hobby and it intrigued him that no one had ever built an electric coil mandolin before.  Guitar pickups are readily available but Guitar pickups are larger and longer, and so he tried turning them almost criss-cross  to cover only the distance required of a Mandolin, but they sounded ‘funny’.  And so he decided that there just needed to be special Mandolin pickups… requiring different sized magnets and wiring… all to fit into the smaller scale.  It took a lot of trial and error, but finally he was getting the sound he wanted.   Then he lost his Day Job.  Capitalism was going through one of its Necessary Corrections which, we are told, would ultimately benefit us all, but temporarily throw a lot of us out of work. But Pete saw it as an opportunity to put his hobby pickups on the Market.  He would make his pass time activity pay the rent.  Pete then became a One Man Musical World Revolution.   I can bet that my favorite Dixie Chick, Marty Maquire, was playing one of the first Almuse electric pickup mandolins ever made when I saw her on the concert tape.

 

Now about the Future of  Electric Coil Mandolins.  They sound so, well, Rock and Roll, that I really hold out little hope for the Future of Electric Guitars. The Mandola with its High Enough and Low Enough Range is sure to captivate the World and sweep the Guitar into the dusty corners of the Rock and Roll Museums.   Oh, yes, people intuitively think that the Guitar has more range, as it has six strings, against just the four pairs of string that the Mandolin family has.   But you need to consider that the Guitar Family tunes its strings 5 semitones apart, but that the Mandolin (and Violin) Family of instruments tune their strings at 7 Semitones apart, so that the Mandolins have 140% more notes per string that the Guitar Family, so that when you finally compare the guitar with its Six Strings to the Mandolin’s 4 stringed pairs, after the advantage the Mandolin has in Note Per String, the Guitar only enjoy an advantage of a measly 7% in its range, and all of that range comes at the low side, and when have you ever seen a fantastic guitar solo done on the low side top of the neck?  Uh, never.   And now think about how large and clumsy a guitar is when compared to the sleek little mandola.  Rock and Roll Mandolins and Mandolas offer an advantage that will not long be ignored. 

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Update January 2014.  I was emailing Mr. Pete Mallinson of Almuse in the U.K. and was placing another Custom Order and was detailing how we could work around and help secure the pickups against their weak plastic brackets, remembering that I had had one bracket break, oh, and incidentally, after 5 months of very strenuous practice, I had not been able to break a second bracket.  Well, Mr. Mallinson told me that the problem should not be an issue in the future as he had instantly set out to procure stronger brackets of better material, and had re-built his existing stock and new pickups being built will be of the stronger materials.

Remembering that I use a pick-stick (two slats of wood glued together with picks at their tip) because my thumb and forefinger had been weakened sufficiently by a nerve pinch that I can not really hold and control a pick in the traditional manner, and in using a pick stick the lateral forces exerted on the strings is much higher than ordinary, well, I started experiencing a problem where the middle strings would jump the Nut.  Often on guitars where the head stock comes straight off the neck, they install string trees or string guides or string guide bars in order to exert downward pressure on the strings after the Nut to keep them in place.  This had not been a problem with the Mandola, which I mostly play and had not been aware of it till I started practicing with the Mandolin.  Unfortunately there are not String Trees on the Market for Mandolin, nor are there specifically made String Guide Bars.  You would probably have to do a little work to get them made in a local machine shop.  But if you order a Custom Mandolin, or buy one 'on spec' from a catalog selection, look for the feature of the Head Stock being angled back.  Mr. Mallinson wishes that people would ask for that feature, but when they ask for little Fender Look-a-like copies, well, he makes them with a straight head stock in order to be faithful to the Fender Design.   Well, as they say, "consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds", and so when ordering a Custom design, whatever it is to look like, get him to angle back the Head Stock, as it will perform better, and NOBODY will notice that it is not exactly like a Telecaster or a Stratocaster.  Oh, in regards to my Mandolin, well, I have secured the problem for now, first by placing string loops around the string pairs coming off the tuner pegs so that the strings will align straight to the Nut, and not at an angle (the strings always jump in the direction of the angle), and then between the first and second tuner pegs I had run a string over the center four strings and pulled it tight and tied it off under the head, to keep downward pressure on the strings behind the Nut... yes, it is an ugly fix, but it will work until I can get to a machine shop with drawings... OH!  I got an email from Mr. Mallinson, and he informed me that he is sending me out some brass things he found in his Work Shop.  When they arrive, I will take them to my friendly neighborhood guitar repair man and have them installed and let everybody know how they are working.   But, after a week or so of playing the Mandolin with just the 'quick fix' strings tied in place (oh, use heavy string), well, I have quite gotten used to the ugliness, and rather think that it gives a certain look of lived with character.

Oh, more news.  Mr. Mallinson has passed word... see his Facebook, I hear... that he is cutting off his Custom Order List and will begin to make instruments 'on spec', that is, for catalog selection.  He explains that he uses up a great deal of time in consulting with customers on each and every detail of their Custom Instruments, and this same time could be used in simply turning out generally good and desirable instruments.  Besides, I suspects he gets many inquiries which ask whether he just doesn't have any mandolins that can be purchased NOW.   He hopes to start answering "Yes, and various Models to choose from".   Now, I suppose I might have been lucky to have gotten there in time for my 'Custom' Mandolas, as I am not sure that Mandolas will be included in his catalogue.  We all shall see.        

No to Obama’s Syrian War

It was not long ago that the first premise in understanding all of Political Science was that States act in regards to their own self interests.   But now we see a new Age where, contrary-wise, some of the most powerful states seem to be acting for their own destruction, so caught up in believing their own propaganda and principles in the clouds that they have forgotten that Life is Real and that blunders can have serious consequences and so efforts should be made to mitigate and avoid them.

 

America from the very beginning of the ‘Arab Spring’ has vociferously supported the terrorists, anarchists, and extremist Religious Factions … the so-called ‘Peaceful Protesters’ so dear to the American State Department… even after these “peaceful protestors” attack and kill their overseas Ambassadors.  And what has happened so far with the Arab Spring?.  Regimes that had been in place to serve the purpose of providing a Secular State relatively fair for all the Tribes and Sects within their Jurisdiction, well, they have been swept away and replaced by militant minorities bent on capturing all power to themselves.   The West calls that ‘democracy’ forgetting its own History, where so often Democracy was used purely as a mechanism for a conspiracy of gangs to take over Government in order to grab all the jobs and funnel all of the tax money into their own personal pockets through rigged contracts and sweet-heart land purchases.  In fact, with Special Interests and the newest Lobby Laws, it is more as that than perhaps ever before… as long as the Crooks fill out the right forms ‘Corruption’ is perfectly legal.  But the West suffered all of these humiliations during its phase of strongest growth, and the West grew in DESPITE of Democracy.  But the Arab World is poor, and with the Structural World Recession almost guaranteeing that nothing will ever get better, did they really need all of the De-Stabilization that would go along with Democracy – the hostility between Party, Class, and Sect that would break out  inevitably?

 

It is cynical to think so, but the only way we can see Self Interest in what America has been doing in the Arab World, is that America wants the Arab World to fall into chaos and ruin.   America already has a growing China, India, Latin America and portions of Africa to contend with in the chase for Economic and Cultural World Superiority, and would only seem to benefit from being able to write off the entire Arab Corner of the World as a definite non-contender.

But why get dragged into it?  Obama threatened an open war if such and such a linewere crossed, in this case something so easy to simulate as a chemical attack.   It should be obvious to anybody with common sense that after Obama pledged to come into the War on the side of the terrorists if there were to be a chemical attack, that the Terrorists would indeed make it their first priority to engineer and conduct a Chemical Attack themselves and then to blame it on the Syrian Government.  It is argued, “Oh, but the Terrorists would NEVER kill their own People!”   Well, think about it for a second.  These Terrorists only need to be told that the Victims would be Martyrs, and then all would be fine and dandy…. Wouldn’t it?  That IS how they think, isn’t it?  Please, convince me I am wrong, but I really do think they have a Crazy Religion that makes them think and do crazy things.

 

Anyway, the Attack had to have come from the Terrorists.  The Syrian Army has of late been winning the Conventional War.  They only needed to keep doing what they have already been doing.   They have more Tanks and more Helicopters and Airplanes.  They are not running out of bullets – Russia is supplying them. The Regime Troops are loyal – they have to be, because they know they are fighting for their lives (look what happened in Libya, Iraq, and in a limited sense Egypt, where those members of the Army and Police were guilty of no more than trying to do their jobs and to maintain Law and Order, but were subsequently treated like Enemies of the State after the Revolutions swept away the former Regimes – thousands of them were slaughtered by the celebrating Terrorists, and those who have survived have been marginalized to the furthest and darkest circle of their Societies.  But the Terrorists have no such practical prod for their Loyalty, as they can simply walk away whenever they finally think they have had enough.   So, the Syrian Regime’s ONLY means to lose a war that they were almost certainly sure to win was to initiate a Chemical Attack.   So why would they do such a stupid thing?  Especially since almost every single casualty was a civilian…that is harmless civilians, and not just Terrorists who come home at night.  The attack came at night when there was no battle, and no effort was then made afterward by the Regime Forces to swoop in and secure the territory.  If Syria were to use a Chemical Attack, wouldn’t it be in order to tip the scales during some serious raging battle, and not just to kill woman and children in the middle of the night?   If War with America would result from just one Chemical Attack, then wouldn’t it be common sense to make that One Attack a huge coordinated Attack across all of Syria, hitting any and every place where there were still an entrenched Opposition, to win the Civil War in one bold stroke, and then have its hands free to deal with whatever America would do later.   But we are supposed to believe that the Regime risked it all just so that the International News Agencies could deluge the World in photos of dead mothers and babies as a prelude to a certain War with America, oh, and the French, who have apparently revived and regained their famous old National Trait of Saber Rattling and Militaristic Provocateuring.   Leave it to the French to bring back Colonialism like the Good ol’ Days.  

 

America says it has ‘proof’ that the Syrian Regime launched the Chemical Attack, but then only goes as far as pointing out that there was a Chemical Attack (well, that much is kind of obvious), and then leaves it as a given assumption that it all must simply be the Regime’s fault.  The strongest argument I have heard acknowledging that they really do need to directly connect Loyal Syrian Forces to the Attack was that they say that some Syrian Troops had been alerted to put on their gas masks, ostensibly to protect themselves from an attack they were themselves launching.  But certainly there are other explanations for this. After all, there was a Chemical Attack.  Things don’t just happen.  People first need to run  around, and weapons have to be put in place.   Is it odd to believe that Syrian Troops may have been alerted to Suspicious Activities indicating an immanent chemical attack? .  We might easily imagine that some patrol may have seen something, or that some spy or snitch got some word through.  As I said before, the common sense of the situation was for the Terrorists to mimic a Chemical Attack, and so the Syrian Forces were probably waiting for what was virtually inevitable, and so that when they were operating in Civilian Opposition Territory, that they were to be cautious and on the alert for just such a Mimic Chemical Attack.  Unless they are really stupid… but this far into the War, all the really Stupid soldiers are already dead.

 

Also, we must remember a while back toward the beginning, that with so much early- on military success going to the Free Syrian Army (Young Opportunistic Officers wishing to capitalize on a quick Regime Surrender as happened in Tunis, Egypt and then in Libya, there even helped along with American and French Military Support. These Young Officers thought it would go for themselves along these same lines and that they would only have to keep their heads down a few weeks and then when it was all over they could spring up like Heroes and then just waltz  into the Capital and claim as the Spoils of Battle all of the Government Jobs for themselves) and to the terrorists, well, with so many early successes on the Battle Field can’t we suppose that some Chemical Munitions Depot somewhere, or even just a small stockpile, may have been compromised and taken by the Young Traitor Officers and Terrorists.  

 

Also, there is the possibility that it may have been a case of home grown Chemical Gases that the Terrorists managed to whip up themselves, from some Recipe in some Terrorist Cookbook… and we all know that they exist.   The Experts say that any real Government-Made Poison Gas has preservatives and stabilizing agents that the usual home grown varieties would probably lack.  But so far America is only making the broadest claims, which would well subsume even the most primitive forms of poison gas having been used in the Attack , and that the Terrorists could well have had the means to make by themselves.   If a more sophisticated poison was used, well, if this impending Syrian War is important enough to America, then maybe America provided it, or some unscrupulous Arms Dealer.  Oh, remember the infamous Colonel Oliver North who seemingly all by himself traded sophisticated arms to Iran for money to support South American Death Squads… supposedly he was Working for the White House and used his White House connections and ‘pull’ to do anything and everything, and all of the people giving him everything he asked for simply assumed he was working totally under the authority of the President.  Well, maybe Obama has his own ‘Colonel’ running around making ‘personal’ Arms Shipments.   And since everything like that is Top Secret, how would anybody know anything differently – and if they did guess the Truth and figure it all out, then they would be forbidden to say.   The Worst Thing about Governmental Secrecy is that our own Best People don’t know what is happening or are prevented from telling us when they do.  We are Shielding the Truth from even Ourselves.   

 

Okay, now, what if there is a War.  Obama promises only one small short limited action – “A shot over the bow”.   That is what he says, but how could he possibly mean it?  How short a War is, well, it is never entirely under the control of the Aggressor.  What if Syria decides to fight back?  They say they will!  We are to pretend that Obama has not thought of the possibility of a counter-attack, a reprisal?  And then what?  Would Obama simply mutter under his breath that “Well, we deserved that.”  And go back to being a neutral observer?  Certainly not.  America would answer reprisal with reprisal and attack again, and the hitting back and forth would pull America into another, yes, ANOTHER full blown land war.

 

And what if America did win, after years and years, just like in Iraq and Afghanistan, then what?  Well, we would have to support Elections (oh, after ‘outlawing’ any party that would represent the ‘enemy’, or about half of the population), but where the Anti-American Vote is certainly be stronger than any other factor, and we would have to turn the Country over to our New and even Worse Enemies.  And, yes, they would make a horrible go of things and their economies would collapse, and so America would have one less serious competitor on the World Stage, but, would not all of this happen even if America were to just leave it all alone.  The Islamic World with all of their internal hostilities, distrust, and with a primary Religion that Glorifies Violence and would hardly begin to do anything peacefully that couldn’t be done more gloriously with a Sword first, well, these Societies are structurally and institutionally dysfunctional.  America only needs to stand back, and stay clear of the Dust Clouds.   But Obama wants another 10 years of War.  I guess maybe he owns stock in some bullet or combat boot factory somewhere.

 

But now we need to ask ourselves, could America be doing this for Israel?  I can’t imagine why.  Even if Syria has not made an official Peace with Israel, still, Syria has managed to maintain stability and calm.   We can see that Syria was instrumental in winding down the Lebanese Civil War.  Then, of course, certain Lebanese Factions complained that Syria was wielding too much power in Lebanon, and the American State Department agreed and made ultimatums for Syria to get out.  So Syria left and then what happened?  Well, the Lebanese Militias got into their own little War with Israel, and it was all quite a stink.  But back before when it was Syrians patrolling that border, all was Peace and Calm.   Israel must see this.  Certainly they would rather have a Self-Interested Secular Dictator in charge of Syria then to allow the religious fanatics and Militias take over.

 

Or maybe Israel just wants things to go so bad that they can finally find justification for launching its 64 Nuclear Warheads against every Urban Center across the Vast Lands of the Sons of Abraham – the entire Near East, what the Israelis call “Greater Israel”, and after it cools down, to take it all over.  Well, what of the Radiation you may ask.   Well, even in the Eighties, and that was 30 years ago, they knew how to make “enhanced radiation warheads”, that is, bombs that had very short radiation half- lives in terms of post explosion contamination but  very intense sprays of radiation at the instant of their explosion – built to kill populations but to keep the property in fairly good condition and ready for ‘move in’ after just a very brief cooling off period.  Maybe that is what Israel is thinking.  They just need a big enough excuse.    Well, the destabilization and collapse of every responsible Arab Government and the Rise of the Crazies might just offer just such an excuse.   But why is America doing all of the heavy lifting to get us there.   Well, maybe it is just simple math.  Israel puts more money into every American Political Campaign, on average, then any combination of Amercan Special Interests.   Apparently the American Political System is bought and paid for, both Parties, and the politicians, even the ones at the very top, are just dancing like puppets at the ends of the Israeli Strings.   We need to ask, can our Politicians really be so nihilistic and corrupt?   But then we need to look at the de facto American Ideal, that Success is measured by Wealth.  Anything that makes an American Politician Richer must me Right.  Well, no, that isn’t right, but that is how the Culture Thinks.   We all should have known that the “Greed is Good” mantra was going to turn around on us and bite us all in the Ass.    Greed isn’t so good when you are the one being sold out.    Hmmmm, I wonder what Obama and all of the rest of them got for us all.