What is it about politicians and liberals that they have to lie about their life experiences? Hillary and her snipers, reporters and their threats to their lives, white women who claim to be black, you name it. It’s almost like they feel some need to appear to be the victims of the world so they will be more likeable. Elizabeth “Fauxcahontas” Warren is the latest. Amidst the Weinstein/Hollywood meltdown, she had to join the bandwagon. Now I understand that she is the poster child for the “love is blind” concept, but she had to proclaim that she was “chased around the office” when she was a younger law professor by her boss. Amazingly the Boston media actually went to the "way back" machine to see if she’d ever commented on this before. Turns out that she spoke at her boss' funeral and had nothing but goodness to say about him. She joked about being chased around the office. Perhaps one problem with the argument. This was in the days before the Americans with Disabilities Act and her boss had polio. You’d think if these folks were going to lie, they would be better at it.

If I could make up stuff like this, I’d be a famous author with lots of money. I used to think that some people shouldn’t be allowed to have children. I had this thought about parents who “raise” their children in drug dens and places like that. I now extend that thought to parents who totally screw up their children’s mind with “choose your sex” and “cultural appropriation”. Moms out there are actually trying to turn a Halloween costume choice into lessons in cultural appropriation. Halloween costumes should be about fun and fantasy, not some sort of “think about how evil it is to be white” exercise. This is too bizarre.

The problem with foreigners in America is that most Americans don’t know anything about them both in America and where they come from. When we stopped teaching civics in school, we lost out on learning about our own country. When we stopped teaching about other countries we stopped leaning about foreigners. Imagine if the only Americans that someone met were gang banger thugs from Chicago or Baltimore? Imagine if the only exposure they had to Americans was from watching Antifa protests, or San Francisco weird parades on TV? They would get a very different idea of what Americans were like than the America you and I know. Mexico is a perfect example. We ignore the knowledge at our own expense

The “new” information on the Uranium One crisis seems to have dropped to a trickle. Where there are stories, they are pretty much rehashed old news. I don’t like stories that are merely a lot of information. I hate the teasers of a big news story without the followup facts. Sometimes I think they do this on purpose so that you get bored with the story and forget about it. The Vegas shootings are a perfect example. We still don’t know what happened and it appears we never will. The Uranium One story is like that. A great teaser, but so far not much meat. I like to do my conspiracy analysis to stories like this. First test is always “who gains”. The second one is always, “why now”. Uranium One happened at the beginning of the Obama administration. Nine years ago. There have been hints and stories about this off and on over the past nine years. So why is it a crisis now? My first thought is that this is an attempt to take down Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor. At best he looks incompetent in this deal. At worst he is an enabler of international criminal doings. And it looks like he profited greatly.

Wars don’t always end on the day that the fighting stops. The legacy of wars since WW I is the lingering effects of our more sophisticated bombs, mortars and mines have decades later. Most of us see the war movies and think that everything that is used blows up when it hits the target. The reality is that they often don’t go off when they are first used, and they explode many years later. I lost a friend in the first Gulf War when he drove over a US cluster bomb that didn’t go off when it was dropped on a bombing raid. Germany reports that there are “tens of thousands” of unexploded Allied aerial bombs from WWII lurking underground. In North Korea, we dropped more bombs during that three year war than we had dropped in the entire Pacific Theater during WWII. North Korea is still paying the price.

The deep state would have you believe that nothing has happened good or bad in the Trump administration. My research shows otherwise, with some amazing things happening in the EPA and the Department of the Interior as the best examples. The best way to realize that good things are happening is to look one layer down from the media and see what the reactions are to what’s happening. Scott Pruitt over at EPA has gotten more death threats and other threats than anyone in the administration. This tells you at once of the good things he’s doing and also the level to which our opponents will fall to in their nastiness.(2 comments)

The commentary on the recent “road trip” in America is really good. The commentary includes links to the base report, which I recommend heartily. The liberals in this case really tried to figure out what “flyover” country was really like. Amazing that they tried. They just couldn’t come to the right conclusions, but I’d guess that they aren’t capable of that recognition. The struggle for the liberals for the past two generations has been over diversity. They still believe that differences can only be ok if we all embrace the same things. They can’t fathom that being different is ok. I believe it’s because they don’t understand America, what it stands for and in some ways really hate it. When everyone saw being an American was the unifier, things worked out well. In the absence of a unifying concept, we have a society today that probably can’t be called a society. Overall, America has nothing in common. In flyover country, we still love America and aren’t bothered by differences.(1 comment)

The Taliban in Afghanistan has many things in common with the Kurds in the region. Countries (to include the US) have “used” them to check Iran’s influence over Iran. Like the Kurds, the relationship hasn’t always worked out well. After the Soviets were defeated in Afghanistan the country was left in social and economic distress. 1.5 million dead, millions of refugees and a huge political vacuum. Afghanistan’s warlords attempted to fill the gap. The Taliban, made up of orphans who never knew Afghanistan, but schooled in Pakistan filled the gap. They brought law and order to a country that sorely needed it. Pakistan supported them, as did the US Clinton administration. This was a switch for us, as previously our support for the mujahideen to defeat the Soviet Union created al-Qaeda. Although we Americans aren’t famous for identifying distinctions between different cultures, there are more than one group of the Taliban, with the Afghanistan Taliban and the Pakistan Taliban being two of the more notorious different groups. The important lesson for us is that the Taliban and al-Qaeda are not the same groups. The Afghanistan Taliban are an extreme religious group that is very internally focused on Afghanistan. We share a common enemy with the Taliban in al-Qaeda. Perhaps we can agree to leave them alone.

The US policy towards the NATO countries has always been contentious. During the height of the Cold War our economic policy often seemed to hurt Europe as long as it hurt the Soviet Union. The threat of the Soviet Union allowed us to get away with the policy. With the fall of the Soviet Union, Europe was able to get a stable, cheaper low of oil and natural gas from Russia. It was a win for both Europe and Russia. Germany’s economic growth in the past 25 years can be attributed to this. With the Neos wanting to start a cold war with Russia, we keep on trying to punish Russia economically. Our sanctions against them really haven’t worked, so we are doubling down. Our latest round of sanctions are also against Europe, telling them they can’t trade with Russia. We’ve offered to sell them natural gas from the US to make up for it, but it is much more expensive for them, having to go by ship instead of by pipeline. The NATO countries are kicking back. They don’t see Russia in the same way we do, and don’t want to pay for a potentially less stable source of supply. It’s bad enough that we’ve alienated most of the Middle East countries. How does it serve our interests to alienate Europe?

One of the most famous quote from the Vietnam War was a statement attributed to an unnamed U.S. officer by AP correspondent Peter Arnett in his writing about Bến Tre city on 7 February 1968:
'It became necessary to destroy the town to save it', a United States major said today. He was talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong.
It appears that those tactics still exist in the US military. The campaign to free Raqqa from ISIS finally ended with the total destruction of the city! Comparing the battle to the one that the Syrian government backed by the Russians did to free Aleppo from ISIS shows some stark differences. Raqqa was destroyed by the Syrian Kurds, backed by US air strikes. Aleppo exists, is rebuilding and has become an economic center again. The battle there was with the Syrian army, backed by Russian air strikes. As Syria goes back to normal, which foreign country will be seen as an ally and which will be seen as an enemy?