President Obama chose West Point to mgive his speech on his new strategy for Afghanistan. He got a luke warm reception at best. Cadets appeared to be sleeping during Obama’s speech. They had to be ordered to applaud. Reports from soldiers in Afghanistan indicate that Obama did no better with the troops in the field.
Obama announced that he was sending 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, but would withdraw them in 18 months. What he failed to acknowledge was what has become know to the troops as the Karzai 12. The Washington times described it this way, “
“Karzai 12″ refers to Afghanistan’s newly re-elected president, Hamid Karzai, and a dozen rules set down by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the commander of U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan, to try to keep Afghan civilian casualties to a minimum.
The Times compiled an informal list of the new rules from interviews with U.S. forces. Among them:
• No night or surprise searches.
• Villagers have to be warned prior to searches.
• ANA or ANP must accompany U.S. units on searches.
• U.S. soldiers may not fire at the enemy unless the enemy is preparing to fire first.
• U.S. forces cannot engage the enemy if civilians are present.
• Only women can search women.
• Troops can fire at an insurgent if they catch him placing an IED but not if insurgents are walking away from an area where explosives have been laid.
These rules sound great, if one is the enemy we are fighting. They are a great way to lose a war. They are an even greater way to get thousands of American soldiers and marines killed. As the Times pointed out, the Taliban doesn’t have to obey these rules, only we do. If Obama wants to win this war, he should take a lesson from the last great war the US actually fought to win. He should look to our fathers and grandfathers that won WWII. They carpet bomber Berlin and never lost a minute of sleep. Any idea how many civilians died at that time? Or when the Enola Gray dropped her nuclear bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima? Did our leaders lose sleep over the loss of civilian lives then? NO. We did what we had to do to win, to protect American lives at home. Obama is fighting this war like an idiot child with his “if we are nice to them, they will be nice to us attitude.”
Should Obama send additional troops? Without a doubt, he should send the 40,000 General McChrystal needs, and the additional 80,000 he would like to have. And in order to actually win this war, Obama needs to immediately change the Rules of Engagement to reflect our desire to actually win. The only rule we need is if they appear to be the enemy, kill them. If civilians get hurt, sorry but it is a war, that is what happens in war. Next time the civilians that don’t want to get hurt in war will stop the Taliban and their Al-Qaeda counterparts from starting a war with America.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gets alot, if not most, of its “evidence” of climate change from Anglia University. With that in mind, it should have been devastating to their cause when in fact, they seem to have taken a page from President Obama on healthcare, just ignore the opposition even though they outnumber you.
The first point of contention should be the theory that the emails were leaked from a “hacked” servor. My understanding is that they weren’t hacked, they were released as a result of Britain’s version of the Freedom of Information Act. A similar FOA for information from NASA has resulted in NASA refusing to release its data on climate change. NASA recently, quietly changed its data to show that the 1930s were the hottest decade since records have been kept, not the 1990s as previously stated by NASA. The mistake was the result of bad numbers according to NASA.
The second point of contention is that the emails show an intention to do several things which would be fraudulent at best and criminal at worst. They specifically showed that the scientists that the UN rely on were changing numbers to make global warming appear real and dangerous, they showed that scientists were hiding evidence that stood in opposition to global warming, they showed that scientists were refusing to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests and would destroy documents before releasing them. The documents also showed that there were no peer-reviewed studies unless they could be reviewed only by scientists that supported the global warming conspiracy.
This should give government and the UN pause on the issue of climate change. It SHOULD. It doesn’t, but it should. In fact, government and the UN appear to be getting the wrong message.
Arthur Max and Karl Ritter of the Associated Press wrote, “The U.N.’s top climate official on Sunday conceded that hacked e-mails from climate scientists had damaged the image of global warming research but said evidence of a warming Earth is solid.” Really? Evidence is “solid”? The emails showed that the evidence was FAKED. Only a politician could honestly believe that “faked” evidence is solid, not unlike the Democrats that believe the people want their healthcare reform when all the polls show that fewer than 40% of America wants what the Dems are offering. The article goes on to say the following, “
In an interview with The Associated Press ahead of the U.N. climate summit starting Monday, Yvo de Boer said the e-mails pilfered from a British university fueled skepticism among those who believe the science is manipulated to exaggerate global warming.
“I think a lot of people are skeptical about this issue in any case,” de Boer said. “And then when they have the feeling … that scientists are manipulating information in a certain direction then of course it causes concern in a number of people to say ‘you see I told you so, this is not a real issue.’”
It would be hard not to believe that scientists are manipulating evidence when you have the emails that say the scientists are manipulating evidence. And that would tend to make people even more skeptical than they had previously been. The UN is on top of the matter.
E-mails stolen from the climate unit at the University of East Anglia appeared to show some of world’s leading scientists discussing ways to shield data from public scrutiny and suppress others’ work. Those who deny the influence of man-made climate change have seized on the correspondence to argue that scientists have been conspiring to hide evidence about global warming.
“This correspondence looks very bad,” said. “But I think both the university is looking into this (and) I believe there is a police investigation going on whether the e-mails were leaked or stolen.”
De Boer noted that the head of the U.N.’s expert panel on climate change, Rajendra Pachauri, had also announced that he would investigate the matter.
That should settle the matter. Ignore the faked and manipulated evidence and concentrate on an investigation into how the emails became public. Ignore the fact that Freedom of Information Act requests were being ignored by the scientists in question, and insist that the emails were “hacked” illegally.
Even the US Climate negotiator had a well thought out opinion.
“
U.S. climate negotiator Jonathan Pershing called the science on global warming “very robust, very substantial.” He told the AP that the controversy surrounding the leaked e-mails came at an “unfortunate” time, just before the long-awaited U.N. talks, “but has no fundamental bearing on the outcome.”
“Many of us have been exposed to those kind of events” where e-mails have been unintentionally published, he said. “All of us are adults. all of us are aware that there are consequences to writing e-mails, that the Internet is a very fluid place.”
So the problem isn’t that the evidence was manipulated to show a predetermined outcome, or that there was no peer review that might actually contradict the findings that global warming is man-caused, and no evidence that global warming was part of a natural cycle was considered. or even that the evidence was hidden from the public. The problem is that the evil internet and the internet users hacked emails and released them.
The truth of global warming is that it has nothing to do with global warming, climate change, or greenhouse gases. The sole purpose of the climate change issue is to take money from hard working wealthy nations to give to poorer nations.
Negotiators in Copenhagen are trying to set targets for controlling emissions of carbon dioxide and other global-warming gases, including by the leading contributors, China and the United States. They will also seek agreement on how much rich countries should pay to help poor nations to deal with climate change.
“Those are the two key issues,” de Boer said. “And if those can be unlocked I think the rest will come together as well.”
De Boer said he didn’t think the conference would fail because key nations have already made pledges on emissions and financial assistance — even though they are still short of what experts say is needed.
“It’s going to be two weeks of thorough negotiation to try and get the ambition level up and to get the financial specifics on the table,” de Boer said.
They won’t let false science get in the way of their true goal. The true goal appears to be obamanomics on an international scale, take from the rich to help the poor remain poor.
