Why Should We Help the Kurds?

Why should we help the Kurds?   Because the Kurds could easily become another democratic island of stability in the Middle East, like Israel.  The Kurds are a group of people united by their own separate language and culture, split between Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran. The Kurds are definitely not trying to turn the clock back to the 7^th century. The Kurds are mostly secular Sunni Muslims who believe in religious tolerance.  They also include Kurdish speaking Yazidis, Shiites and Christians.  During the ISIS advances, they took in Arab refugees without regard for religion, Christians, Shiites and Sunnis.  They helped organize, train and arm Yazidis and Arab Christian militias.  They have women fighters in their militia units, some trained as snipers.  The Kurds even have regular commercial flights from the Kurdish Regional Capital, Erbil, Iraq, to Tel Aviv, Israel.  The Kurds are as close as you can get to democratic tolerant folks outside of Israel.  Iraqi Kurds are extremely pro American.  They believe the US saved them from annihilation when Saddam Hussein was lashing out after the first Gulf War.  They are trying to get as close to us as they can.  

The Kurds have been the most effective military units fighting ISIS.  In Syria, they are so reliable that it’s an embarrassment.  The Kurds have to recruit and train Sunni Arab defense forces to control the Arab villages they capture from ISIS.  While the villagers are happy ISIS is gone, they will not accept a Kurdish occupation.  To keep the villages free of ISIS, the villagers need weapons and training.   ISIS never captured any Kurdish weapons in working condition during their original advances.  When Kurdish militia retreats it's because they're out of ammo or taking horrendous casualties. 

Original Article (May require subscription):

https://www.wsj.com/articles/syrian-kurds-deserve-a-seat-at-the-negotiating-table-1483914439#lf_comment=181780162:632979006

War Crime: Islamic Terrorists Used Human Shields in Yemen

War is hell because you have to make horrible, lose or lose worse decisions.  Trump took a chance and AQAP set up the combat so civilian shields died, including a very pretty 8 year old girl.

Under Obama we waited a year to start bombing ISIS oil trucks because they had civilian drivers. We didn't bomb ISIS vehicle bomb factories, because they were in civilian neighborhoods. ISIS used the time to make an extra $600 million at least. They also killed at least 50,000 additional people. For a year, ISIS had a sex slave market in Raqaa, Syria, where they sold captured Yazidi and Christian women in auctions. For a year, ISIS beheaded defenseless civilians for minor infractions of Sharia law. For a year, ISIS used armored vehicle suicide bombs to expand their territory. All because we didn't want to kill the civilians who were helping ISIS or were being used as human shields by ISIS.  The result of our decision not to kill human shields was the we gave ISIS more time to kill more people on the ground than the human shields we would have killed stopping them earlier.

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) is one of the most deadly Islamic terrorist organizations in the world. Under President Obama, the US used drone strikes to kill targets like the one Trump ordered attacked by SEAL Team 6. With a drone strike there is no opportunity to capture computers and memory sticks that yield intelligence information on AQAP's operations. Trump took a chance. The operational security for this operation was poor. AQAP knew we were coming. They were ready for us. I believe AQAP had the 8 year old girl there on purpose, to be killed and give them a propaganda victory. I believe they had a lot of women with guns there also intentionally. Using civilians as human shields is a war crime. Using bombs and strafing to destroy a building used by an enemy as a firing position is not, even if the destruction of the building results in civilian casualties. The people responsible for the civilian casualties are the members of AQAP who located a military firing position in the middle of a civilian neighborhood with no evacuation of the civilians and positioned civilians inside the firing position. AQAP committed a war crime that lead to the death of the 8 year old girl.

Palestinian Resettlement or Inherited Refugee Status?

I have never understood why being a Palestinian refugee is an inheritable condition.  I thought refugees were supposed to find some place to live permanently after being displaced from their former country.  It has been almost 70 years since the original refugees left Israel on the advice of the Mufti of Jerusalem, among others.  The vast majority of Palestinian refugees have never seen the places that they are refugees from.  They are still supported as refugees by a unique UN agency, United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, which guarantees the descendants of the original 1948 Palestinian refugees welfare payments, free healthcare and education  from the UN forever.  The UN makes no effort to resettle these people anywhere else.  There were 700,000 Palestinian refugees in 1948, and now there are 5 million.  I don't see how essentially locking these people up in Palestine for a cage match with the Israelis helps them. They should be offered resettlement.

Global Warming Doesn't Meet Its Burden Of Proof

How accurately do the man-made global warming models predict future climate temperatures? Is there any statistical significance to the predictions?

The burden of proof is on the man-made global warming alarmists. They are the folks who want to spend huge amounts of money to fight the phantom menace, so they have to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that global warming is occurring, that man's activities are causing the global warming and that their solution, getting all of our energy from renewable energy sources, is the most cost effective solution to the global warming problem. So far, I don’t think global warming alarmists have met any of their burden of proof.

If global warming was a scientific theory without a political program attached to it, it might be easier to believe that its proponents were not cooking the books.  However, when you read something that says initially the data didn't fit the hypothesis, so the data was adjusted, it tends to lessen scientific credibility a lot.  That's exactly what this sentence says: "the apparent slowdown was due to measurement errors that, when corrected, show that global temperatures have risen steadily."  If you also notice that the Climate Research Unit fought off a Freedom of Information lawsuit requesting a copy of their unadjusted raw data by saying that it had accidentally been erased, you begin to think something very unscientific is going on.  Then you notice that scientific papers that find evidence that global warming is not happening are suppressed and their authors' careers are destroyed, global warming begins to look more like a religion that science. 

The cost of changes that the alarmists want to impose is staggering. In the US, 33% of our electricity is generated from burning coal. To meet the Paris climate goals, we will probably have to scrap all coal fired generators. This represents trillions of dollars in investment. Another 33% of electricity in the US is generated from burning natural gas. Mean green organizations want all of these generators closed as well. The US gets 20% of our electricity from nuclear power. Almost all nuclear generators in the US are over 20 years old. Over half are over 30 years old. The number of nuclear plants decommissioned in the last several years easily outnumbered the new nuclear generators.
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=427&t=3

Assuming that any global warming we see is man-made, the answer is nuclear power, which emits no carbon at all. But alarmists don’t like nuclear power. Assuming you don't like nuclear power, then we have to build a lot of dams, probably killing a lot of snail darters and other endangered fish. We also have to carpet sunny places like Death Valley with solar collectors without regard to the possible extinction of obscure lizards. We also have to build wind turbines and kill literally tons of migratory birds and ruin the view from Martha's Vineyard. We also have to build a lot of high voltage transmission lines through everybody's back yards to move the renewable power from where it’s generated to where it’s used. But the environmentalists, who fervently believe in global warming, fight all of these things. 

Assuming you don't like any of these options, you have to assume a miracle happens in order to stop the carbon. Or we can go back to 19th century technology and live in an Amish paradise. I’ve personally mucked out barns. Horses have a major pollution problem. The expense of all of this gets obscene. The flimsy justification for the economic ruin that the fight against global warming will cause, is a statistically insignificant anomaly. Good luck with the politics of flimsy justification, miracles and economic ruin!