How Global Warming Cooked the Books

The problem with the theories of anthropomorphic global warming is that the models don't predict future observed events.  They also largely ignore historic weather events which occurred before systematic temperature records began about 135 years ago.  Finally, we have less than 30 years of experience with all global climate models because we didn't have the computing power to run predictions for such complex models before about 1985.  Here's a link to a description of the climate over the last 18,000 years.  See what you've been missing.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/29/climate-and-human-civilization-over-the-last-18000-years-2/comment-page-1/

Obama says that 99.5% of climate scientists think controlling CO2 emissions is important.  The original paper this figure is based on, by John Cook, has been completely discredited by reviewers, including reviewers who accept the thesis of anthropomorphic global warming, AGW.  See Professor Richard Tol's blog entry about Cook's paper:

http://richardtol.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/now-almost-two-years-old-john-cooks-97.html

Professor Tol  accepts AGW.  See

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Tol

FDA Wants To Regulate Medical Lab Tests

The latest target for federal regulation is medical laboratory testing.  The FDA sees lab developed tests as the Wild West.  This situation requires the FDA to be in charge of evaluating medical lab tests for both safety and effectiveness.  Industry objections are met with liberal arguments that if the FDA does not regulate medical lab test, we might as well get rid of municipal health departments.

Some VA patients see government controlled medicine as a vast Stalinist gulag that can kill them with delays.  Why do liberals always assume that government is actually going to help?  Bureaucrats don't become saints in employee orientation.  They stay just as self-interested as they were before they became civil service employees. 

It amazes me that government is always looking for more responsibilities to take on, especially given their poor record at accomplishing most of the things they are already responsible for.  Perhaps we should have a moratorium on expanding government responsibility until all of the fraud and abuse everybody talks about is reduced by a measurable amount.

My argument is that we have gone past the point of diminishing returns with governmental regulation at the federal level.  I do not advocate dismantling the FDA, merely stopping its growth.  

There is a difference between snake oil purchased by individuals who can barely read and lab tests purchased by doctors for their patients.  Doctors are government licensed educated consumers who should be allowed to make decisions based on their own education and experience.   Since liberals want a change, they have the burden of proof.  They need to show some evidence that doctors are not qualified to judge lab tests and that large numbers of lab tests are misused with a huge casualty rate which is not controlled by personal injury lawsuits.  Or liberals can pretend "The Jungle" was written recently about current events, instead of in 1906.

Naive Belief Government Will Care for Us

As usual, liberals use any shooting as an excuse to thump for gun control.  They accuse anyone who believes they have the right to armed self-defense of being corporate shills for the gun lobby, who want this entire country to arm up so you/they can turn dead bodies into profits.  They carry on like this even if the shooting was terrorists in France and California, both with very strict gun control.  It seems obvious to me that liberals have a hammer of a solution in gun control, and the whole world is a nail.

By liberal reasoning, liberals are just shills for a government that wants total power over our lives.  We are supposed to believe that the government will take care of us if we give up our own ability to take care of ourselves.

To believe government will take good care of us, you have to ignore how politics really works.  In Chicago, everyone knows if your neighborhood didn't vote right, Mayor Richard J. Daley wouldn't repair your streets and sidewalks.  This is still the rule in politics today.  The government seizes guns because then it can decide who gets police protection and who doesn't.  The government takes over health care so it can decide who gets treatment and who doesn't.  The government controls carbon dioxide emissions so it can decide who gets electricity and who does not.  The government already decides that left wing nonprofit groups get tax exemptions and right wing Tea Party groups do not. 

Imagine how many fewer people would have been hurt if two or three of the people in the room had been armed.  The Jihadi couple would have been shot dead before they could do much damage.  Gun free zones are target rich environments for terrorists and the insane.  They are a guarantee of no resistance.  Leftist gun control laws make sure all potential targets are totally defenseless.  This guarantees happy hunting for ISIS.

In Israel, terrorists are using knives or cars as weapons.  It's the hate, not the weapons.  

Have We Made Progress on Race or Not?

Conservatives are judging President Obama by the content of his character. Liberals are judging President Obama by the color of his skin. So who is closer to MLK's ideal? The reason liberals see racism under every bed and behind every tree is that they need minorities to vote their identity. If you vote your identity, then the results your government actually produces are irrelevant.

I grew up in Montana in the late 50's and early 60's. I spent my summers on a ranch on the Flathead Indian Reservation near St. Ignatius, Montana. The Flathead Indians were not very well off. Some Indians were hunting just to get enough to eat. They would literally shoot fish with a .22 because it was legal for them and easier than hooks and bait. My family was unpopular locally with other ranch owners because we paid "white wages" to Indians working on our ranch.

There is a BIG difference today. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes run several profitable businesses including timber operations and an electronics factory as well as a luxury hotel and casino. They have established Salish and Kootenai College, which grants both 2 year and 4 year degrees. They even have a permitting process for tourists using their land for camping. (When I visited, I found out that Lower Mission Falls, where my family used to picnic, was tribal land and I needed a permit.) The point is that they have made immense progress through their own hard work. To pretend that everything is still the same is to demean their accomplishments.

In the larger picture, liberals pretending that racism is still rampant throughout the US demean the accomplishments of countless individuals who started with nothing and improved themselves and their families against the odds with hard work and study. It's just wrong, and worse, it's a cynical lie told merely to further leftist political fortunes because liberal governments have no accomplishments they can point to. 

The Right Way and the Wrong Way to Fight ISIS

Lanny Davis, a Clinton supporter, wrote a fascinating article about how to fight ISIS recently.  (See link.)  In the article he explains that military force alone can’t defeat ISIS.  Mr. Davis then quotes Hillary saying, "We are in a contest of ideas against an ideology of hate and we have to win."  I couldn’t disagree more.  ISIS believes that their violent cause is commanded and aided by God.  Jihadists view military success as evidence of divine favor.  Quaker style gentle persuasion is not going to change the hearts and minds of ISIS fanatics.

The right way to fight ISIS is to remove their funding by destroying their ability to sell oil. The wrong way to fight ISIS is to forbid air attacks on oil trucks because the drivers might be civilians. The right way to fight ISIS is to strafe and bomb military convoys moving ISIS fighters and supplies on ISIS highways. The wrong way is to forbid air attacks on military convoys if any civilian human shields are sighted traveling with the convoys. The right way to fight ISIS is to bomb Improvised explosive device factories. The wrong way to fight ISIS is to avoid bombing improvised explosive device factories because ISIS locates them is civilian neighborhoods. The right way to fight ISIS is to make sure that the most effective allies we have on the ground, the Kurds, are very well supplied with whatever they need to push ISIS out of Northern Iraq and Norther Syria. The wrong way is to route all military aid through Baghdad, whose army is ISIS' major supplier of weapons when they abandon them and run away.

To sum up, the only way to defeat the rabid dogs of ISIS is to kill a lot of them and take their territory away from them, which will discourage their potential recruits. What the Obama - Clinton team has been doing is pretending to fight ISIS, giving the appearance that ISIS is easily beating the US. This attracts more recruits to commit more terrorism. It gives Jihadist elements world-wide the impression that the US is a paper tiger that can be easily vanquished.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/11/25/the_right_way_and_wrong_way_to_defeat_isis_128847.html

Multiculturalism is the Problem, Not Immigration

The Paris attacks led people to question which immigrants are admitted to Europe, and by extension which immigrants are allowed into the US.  It seems like leftists the world over prefer to admit immigrants that are opposed to Western ideas and denounce Western Civilization.

All leftists hate Western ideas, either openly or covertly. It isn’t so surprising leftists want to import more folks who also hate Western ideas. It's also not too surprising that leftists are so stupid they can't see what the end game looks like when unassimilated minorities want to change the countries they live in to look more like the countries they came from. But the problem is not immigration itself.  The problem is the combination of immigration and multiculturalism.

The US needs educated self-supporting immigrants that assimilate. We don't have enough children on our own to prevent demographic collapse. We need the smartest people possible to maintain our technological edge. But immigration is one area where we absolutely need diversity. Too many of any one group means that group doesn't have to assimilate. They can just stick together as an undigested lump and insist everyone else adjust to them.

The traditional melting pot model of immigration actually works. My grandfather's family were Jews from Budapest. His life-long friend was a cowboy born in Montana who spoke Danish at home growing up. My grandmother's family were a mixture of late 1890’s English immigrants and Huguenot (Protestant) French who had been in this country for so long I don't know when they first got here.  Despite very different backgrounds, it all worked very well.

We should not let leftist idiots' multicultural manure force us to abandon what has worked for us for over two centuries. It's the multiculturalism that's the problem, not immigration.

No Matter What FBI Director Comey Does, Hillary Walks

Since there is no liberal alternative to Hillary, there will be no indictment, even if Director Comey finds enough classified material on Clinton's home email server to open a wikileaks franchise. The only thing Comey could do at that point is resign and call a press conference. However, if the Justice Department classifies the details of classified emails on Hillary's email server, Mr. Comey will not be able to reveal what he knows without breaking the law. You see, it's quite easily done as long as you don't care about the law or ethics or anything else except keeping power. Liberals believe they have the equivalent of a divine right to rule. Classifying the outcome of the Hillary investigation would be a no brainer for them.


http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/261582-fbi-chief-is-wild-card-for-clinton 

Republicans Need to Leak More Investigation Results

Republicans have no reason to expect Pravda Press coverage to be anything but Democrat's propaganda. For that reason, Republicans should give advance notice of everything they find in investigations to conservative media outlets well before Democrats testify in committee hearings. That gives the truth a head start before the Democrats start to drown it out with talking points which are divorced from reality. No mainstream lefty media should be able to scoop conservative media outlets on conservative events ever again. If the Hillary Clinton's emails about Al Qaeda involvement in Benghazi had been Fox News headlines and Wall Street Journal editorials 2 days before her testimony, it would have been much harder for the Pravda Press to ignore them as nothing new.  Keeping them a secret until the day of the hearings served no useful purpose.

Hillary's Many Unanswered Questions

The Pravda Press has worked overtime in playing the Benghazi hearings as a waste of time. But they are not. To this day, nobody knows who ordered 16 US Army Special Forces Soldiers and 6 Diplomatic Protection agents out of Libya in August, 2012. Nobody knows why there were no US forces on alert in Europe, Africa or the Middle East to support diplomatic facilities in case of attack. Before the investigation, nobody knew Hillary had her own private, very poorly protected, email server. Before the hearing, nobody knew that Hillary knew she was lying when she made public statements about the video being the cause of the attack. The committee did a very good job of finding things considering that when they started they got a stone wall response to every subpoena they issued.

The hearings played out exactly as I expected. Hillary lied smoothly and splendidly. Liberal idiots (redundant?) swallowed the lies hook, line and sinker. The new information was that Hillary knew the day of the attack that Ansar Al-Sharia, an Al Qaeda affiliate, planned and carried out a successful terrorist attack on the Benghazi consulate and the CIA Annex. This means she knowingly lied about the attack being the result of an internet video. In spite of the evidence, Hillary, the Prada Press and the whole liberal propaganda machine insists that she didn't lie. 

The FBI works for the Justice Department, the same Justice department that did not indict Lois Lerner in the IRS targeting scandal. Most of the Tea Party Organizations have yet to get the exemptions they are entitled to by law, but Lois skates free. The Fix is in. The FBI findings will not be released until after the 2016 elections.

Just Leaving the Middle East Will Just Increase the Killing

A lot of ordinary people think it's time to just leave the Middle East.  I think the way we got to this situation in the first place was to just leave Iraq.  ISIS is Al Qaeda in Iraq with a changed name and slightly different ideology.  ISIS used the Shiite dominance in Iraq as its initial recruiting tool. 

When we finally intervened to stop ISIS, Barry the Brilliant decided not to wipe out Bashar al Assad's air force on the ground.  There are widespread reports in military circles that the strike was planned and called off at the last minute.  The combined effect of just leaving Iraq and leaving Damascus' air force intact resulted in the deaths of literally hundreds of thousands of Syrians and Iraqis.  

If we leave now, the killing will only move at a more rapid pace.  If you can live with civilian deaths rising towards one million and the rising risk of general, possibly nuclear, war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Egypt, Jordan and perhaps Israel in the Middle East, then we should leave.  I can't.

Guilty or Not, Don't Expect Hillary Indictment

If you believe the Justice Department will file charges against any Democrat for anything, then I would like to sell you a bridge in Brooklyn. I'm not just talking about Lois Lerner here, who skates after obviously using the IRS to target Tea Party groups. Lerner didn't get charged with anything. How about Jon Corzine, who managed commodity brokerage MF Global into bankruptcy? Corzine was a big fund raiser for Obama and a former Democratic Governor and Senator from New Jersey. He ordered $700 million of customer funds to be used to cover corporate debts. His excuse, in sworn testimony before Congress, was that his accounting systems were so bad he didn't know what he was doing. First, using customer money for corporate purposes is the biggest no-no in the brokerage business. Second, under Sarbanes Oxley, CEO Jon Corzine was responsible for the condition of his accounting and ignorance is not a defense. He was not indicted either. As we say in Chicago, the fix is in. There is no alternative to Hillary for a liberal presidential candidate, so there will be no indictment of Hillary, NO MATTER WHAT HILLARY DOES OR DID.

Leif Ericson Says Global Warming is Malarkey

My problem with the whole argument for man-made global warming is the narrowness of the time frame of observations being used. Just look up the Wikipedia entry on paleoclimatology and look at the temperature graph over millions of years. There are some really wide swings and long periods of time when Earth was a lot hotter than it is now. 
 
I think the 135 year time span of the primary detailed observations leaves a lot of room for reasonable doubt, particularly since the satellite record for the last 36 years shows almost no change. The obvious political motivations of the people behind the global warming movement, who seek unchecked absolute power through the control of all energy use, makes me believe they have both the motive and opportunity for falsifying the data. The fact that Michael Mann's famous hockey stick did not show the Medieval Warming Period at all should make everyone think that something is fishy. The Medieval Warming Period is why Leif Ericson was able to discover America sometime around 980 AD. The following Little Ice Age is why there were no Viking settlements when Christopher Columbus got here in 1492. The existence of both the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age really are accepted scientific and historical facts. 
 
I know some legitimate scientists take this very seriously. But I believe that the planet is a very big place with a huge amount of water that is going to buffer whatever man does in the short run. I think AGW is a political movement disguised as science. I don't think AGW has met its burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leif_Erikson

Liberals' Contempt for Truth, Law and Responsibility

This week Liberals demonstrated their total contempt for truth and the rule of law.  Liberals also demonstrated domestic politics and personal convenience are much more important to them than national security.  The only thing Liberals are really good at is avoiding responsibility for any of their decisions and getting their supporters in the press to justify whatever the outcomes are as brilliant, unavoidable or Bush’s fault.

First, on the facts leading up to the Benghazi attack, it’s clear that Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, was responsible for the protection of State Department personnel in Benghazi.

The 16 member Army Special Forces team assigned to protect State Department personnel in Libya plus a six-member State Department elite force called a Mobile Security Deployment team followed orders and left Libya in August, 2012. This was about a month before the attack. The embassy in Tripoli, Libya, asked repeatedly to retain them, and asked repeatedly for more security after they left, but the State Department denied all of the requests.  The nobody in the Obama Administration has ever explained who ordered the extra security teams home and why the order was given.  However, it’s clear from a military point of view that the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, was responsible.

Military commanders who fatally weaken their defenses before a successful enemy attack do not get promoted. Hillary is asking to be promoted to Commander in Chief.

The House Committee’s political motives for investigating the Benghazi attacks don't change these facts.  Here are the links on the security teams’ withdrawal:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390444799904578048344154761294

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/middle-east/article24738427.html

http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2014/may/19/ron-johnson/hillary-clintons-state-department-reduced-security/

Hillary Clinton’s 11 hours of testimony before the Benghazi Committee is very easy to summarize.  “I lied, so what.”  All of the nit picking excuses in the world, and Hillary and her defenders have tried to come up with all of them, don’t change the fact that the entire Obama Administration knowingly said that the Benghazi attack was tied to an internet video when they knew that it was a planned terrorist attack by Ansar Al Sharia, an Al Qaeda affiliate.  Getting all emotional about all those Republican men verbally beating up on a poor little old grandmother is a smoke screen.  People died, then Hillary lied.

At this point Liberals start talking about attacks on American Embassies during Republican presidential terms.   The difference between previous attacks on American Embassies and the Benghazi attack is that the Republican Administrations didn't try to cover up who made the attacks and why they were made. Just like in Watergate, the cover up is the big problem here.

Moving on to Hillary’s email server, the talking points here are that none of the information on the server was marked as classified.  The information is classified whether it has the secret stamp on it or not. The law does not say it has to be stamped to be classified. Information that describes intelligence sources and methods, for example, is something that everyone except the completely clueless knows is classified at least secret and more likely top secret. Everyone also knows that ignorance is not a defense, and I don't think any Hillary supporter would want to claim she was ignorant of the law anyway, or would they? 

The server did not meet federal standards for handling classified material. The server was not even set up to meet commercial standards of preserving privacy and preventing hacking. A subcontractor was backing up the data both on site and in a cloud.  Hillary's folks didn't even know it was happening. We are talking extreme, perhaps criminal, negligence here. 

Taking or receiving classified material at home and putting it on your own private email server is a slam dunk prosecution for mishandling classified material, a felony with a potential 10 year prison sentence. As someone with over 40 years in IT, it's my professional opinion that any foreign intelligence service that wanted the information could have stolen it from Hillary's private email server easily, leaving very little trace of their intrusion. If a Republican federal office holder at any elected or appointed level did this, they would be indicted and awaiting trial right now. The Pravda Press would be screaming for their blood. Since it's Hillary, the whole investigation is politically motivated and there's nothing worth investigating. The corruption of the mainstream media is monumentally disgusting. They are willing to tolerate a candidate for president who put her personal convenience above national security.

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/08/14/if-your-name-isnt-hillary-the-hammer-for-mishandling-secrets

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/hillary-clinton-email-server-fbi-platte-river-214521

Finally we get to the veto of the National Defense Authorization Act.  This veto is another example of how Liberals put partisan politics ahead of national security.  President Obama is holding the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force as hostages so he can extort more domestic spending from Congress.  President Obama doesn't care how many people ISIS kills in Syria, as long as he can spend as much as he wants domestically to buy votes for Democrats.  Just so you know, the bill Obama vetoed did not spend any money.  It did prohibit closing Guantanamo prison where 116 Jihadist killers are still being held.  It also changed some other regulations and increased pay scales if the money was authorized to fund it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp

Is Syria Putin's Real Goal?

Vladimir Putin believes (probably correctly) that a fall from power will mean his death. Putin came to power after the 1998 oil price crash forced a Russian bond default, drove inflation to 80% and pushed Boris Yeltsin out of office. The price of oil has crashed again. Putin needs a higher price of oil or a significant military victory to stay in power.

Putin's military support of Bashir al Assad is designed to raise the price of oil by fomenting chaos in the Middle East. The price of oil has increased from about $45 a barrel to almost $50 a barrel for Brent crude since Putin's intervention started, nice but insufficient.

Putin has other reasons for optimism on oil prices. The Iran Nuclear deal guarantees a Middle East war in the next 6 months. It both permits unlimited Iranian oil sales and gives Iran access to $150 billion in formerly frozen assets. Iran's oil revenue last year was about $55 billion. This is big money for the Mad Mullahs to spend on weapons and training militias and terrorists.

I don't think the Israelis, Saudis and Egyptians are going to wait peacefully while the Iranians to make enough nuclear weapons to wipe them out. I expect them to attack Iran's two big economic vulnerabilities. Over 90% of Iran's oil exports flow through the Kharg Island oil terminal, 16 miles offshore. All of Iran's gasoline, kerosene and diesel fuel is imported. They have no refineries. If Iran's enemies bomb Kharg Island and mine their harbors from the air, it puts Iran out of business economically. Iran would probably try to close the Strait of Hormuz to retaliate. Most of the Persian Gulf oil exports move through the Strait of Hormuz. Even if the Iranians are unsuccessful, the threat of attack may be enough. If the strait is a war zone, oil tanker ships moving through it will have no insurance. A significant amount of oil will not reach the international market.

I come to believe that Putin's Middle East moves may be a feint. If he’s going the military route, his target is most likely one of the three former Soviet Republics that are now NATO members. It's Putin's choice of Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania. I think Lithuania is a logical choice because taking it would give Russia land access to the Russian enclave of Kalingrad, formerly East Prussia. Putin has recently firmed up a deal with Belarus for a big Russian air base within striking distance of the Baltic States. This will be the first Russian military base in Belarus since it became an independent country.  The agreement didn’t get much coverage in the press.  I think even a massive Russian buildup on Lithuania’s border would not get much press either.

Barry the Brilliant has made polite gestures towards defending the Baltic countries, but nothing that would actually be effective. Our Smartest President Ever refuses to have more than a few hundred American soldiers in any of these countries, and they are just passing through. Obama also refuses to establish NATO air bases in any former Eastern Block counties because there's a treaty with Russia that promises we won't do that. Russia already broke that treaty, but we're still living up to it. If any NATO country falls to Russia, the failure of NATO to defend an ally effectively would destroy the alliance. Putin is desperate enough to try it. Given the Middle East chaos distracting world leaders, the general weakness of NATO and the specific weakness of the defenses in the Baltic countries, Putin has a decent chance of getting away with it.

Is Inflation No Longer a Problem?

Short term inflation is irrelevant.  The long term pattern is easy to see for a Vietnam Era vet like me.  When I was a kid, candy bars cost a nickel, silver was $1.25 an ounce and gold was $35 an ounce.  I grew up in Missoula, Montana, where I got my allowance as a single Morgan silver dollar coin every week.

I haven't bought a candy bar lately, but the last time I did it was $1.25.  Silver is $15.96 an ounce today and gold is $1,323.  A 1921 Morgan silver dollar coin is worth about $27.

The traditional solution for bankrupt governments is to debase the money.  Henry VIII had trouble paying for his 6 wives, so he minted primitive sandwich coins with copper centers and silver overlay.  Because of where the silver wore off on the coin, he was known as "Old Coppernose."  

In modern US terms, we electronically print more money. Calling it quantitative easing doesn't change what's going on. The ultimate result is convenient only in the very short term. Longer term, it wrecks the economy and creates political instability. Hitler would have been trapped in beer halls if it hadn't been for the instability of runaway inflation.

Inflation makes it hard to estimate economic risk because the way it changes values is not uniform across asset classes. To paraphrase Orwell, some assets are more equal than others. When you add the different tax treatment for different assets, it gets worse. In general, inflation diminishes the information value of prices, which in turn reduces efficiency in the economy as a whole. Inflation is not something you wish for. It's something you live through. If the government takes the inflation to extremes, the economy breaks down, which leads to the government and society breaking down. Glib talk from liberal pundits is just whistling past the graveyard.

The US has been inflating the dollar for years.  After the Obama spending binge, I think we can expect more of the same.  The only question is the timing.

What Do We Get For Efforts in Afghanistan?

America is in an isolationist mood right now.  Lots of people are asking, “What do we get out of our efforts in Afghanistan?”  My answer is that we prevent the slaughter we're seeing now in Syria and Iraq.  The effects of our withdrawal can be seen in the disasters that happened as a result.

In Iraq, we left in a hurry so we could declare the tide of war had receded. Al Qaeda in Iraq renamed itself ISIS and seized a parts of Syria and Iraq.  They slaughtered Christians and Yazidis, saving only females of breeding age for sex slave auctions.  In the Iraqi Army, all of the senior officers the US trained were replaced by politically reliable but cowardly hacks.  They abandoned their units and fled before ISIS even got close.  Without officers or orders, the Iraqi Army ran away too.  ISIS is now using the weapons they captured from the Iraqi Army disintegration.

There were 100,000 dead Syrian civilians before we paid attention to Bashir al Assad.  Then Barry the Brilliant cancelled plans to destroy Assad's air force on the ground.  Now there are an additional 100,000 or more dead Syrian civilians.  Bashir al Assad's air force dropped improvised, shrapnel loaded barrel bombs on them.  There are millions of refugees fleeing the choice of barrel bombs or ISIS.

We could see the same in Afghanistan or worse, if we leave now.

Big News: Bombed Hospital or Taliban Attrocities?

The lead story today is that two bombs dropped by a US Air Force plane hit a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz.  Why is everyone ready to assume the US military bombed the hospital on purpose? We do more than any other military in the world to avoid hitting civilian targets. Our munitions and targeting are as accurate as we can make them. Our enemies generally intend to kill civilians. While the Taliban was in control of Kunduz they murdered and raped hundreds of civilians. Many were killed because they were family members of police or soldiers, or because they provided health care for women. Why is the outrage reserved for a targeting mistake, rather than the Taliban atrocities?

Amnesty International accuses the Taliban of atrocities against defenseless civilians, including mass rape and murder. This is war crimes on a massive scale. Maybe this isn't important because the Taliban raped and killed only Asian women and children? Well, that's racist. Maybe it's not important because that's what we expect the Taliban to do? Well, that's the bigotry of low expectations if I ever heard it. Maybe it's just the usual liberal priorities. Liberals don't care how many innocent people get raped and murdered, as long as domestic spending isn't cut and no American voters are harmed.

It’s likely American air strikes in Kunduz are being coordinated by a mix of forward air controllers (FACs) from multiple countries, including some Afghan Special Forces. This is because rules of engagement from President Obama generally restrict US Special Forces from engaging in combat. These FACs are being shot at while they coordinate the air strikes. If they read or say a coordinate wrong, the strike hits the wrong building. Two bombs could be dropped in a single pass of one aircraft.  It’s also possible that Taliban gunmen were firing from the hospital because they were hoping for an incident just like what happened.  Before the Pravda Press proclaims a war crime, perhaps they need to know something about military operations in a combat zone. They might also want to wait until the actual facts come out. So far, everything beyond the bombing itself is just speculation.

https://www.amnesty.org/.../afghanistan-harrowing.../