The US Military Academy used to be a steward of American military values.
Leaders won’t “lie, cheat, steal or tolerate those who do”.
George W. Bush did all of that and still got rewarded. What message does that send to our future and current leaders?
As of July of this year, Afghanistan and Iraq have produced 59,496 casualties. We all see 52,566 daily as the walking wounded in our society.…
Lots of exciting news regarding the so-called Trump dossier. Most of the headlines and the stories are talking about the Hillary campaign buying the report and/or the Fusion Groups role in the dossier.
I don’t have a problem with the Clinton Campaign buying what they thought was opposition research. Yeah, they look stupid for buying such a brazenly false report, but politics at the presidential level is a blood sport. The more dirt you can dig up on your opponent helps to make people not vote for them.
What I want to know is who funded creating the dossier. That is the huge red herring out there. I’m inclined to believe that it was deep state “never Trump” folks. Remember who turned the dossier over to the FBI – John McCain.
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Most of us have mixed feelings about “whistle-blowers”. On the one hand, we all applaud when the truth is revealed. Heck, most of us “wish” for the so-called good old days when the media was objective.
We like whistleblowers a lot when they reveal things that folks we don’t like do (the right loves Hillary stuff and the left loves anti military complex stuff, for example).
We like it less when it embarrasses out country. People hate Bradley Manning because he revealed some of the bad things we were doing in the war. Many folks hate Edward Snowden because he revealed some of the evil that our surveillance state still does. Many folks have very mixed feelings about Julian Assange.
If we want the truth, the truth that turns information into knowledge, we need to concentrate on the truth and not the messenger. The truth is the truth, no matter what motivations the messenger might have.…
It’s a sad commentary on the United States right now that we seem to not be able to make military equipment. The F35 debacle speaks for itself. The Navy has so many problems with the Littoral ships and the latest aircraft carrier that you can write books about it.
Well, in an equal opportunity moment, it appears that the Army isn’t immune either.
At the “battle” of Kirkuk, Kurds armed what seems to be 1970s technology Chinese anti-tank missiles destroyed a US Army M1A1 tank owned and operated by the Iraqi army.
This isn’t a rare occurrence. ISIS destroyed Iraqi M1A1 tanks in the beginning of the war near Mosul. They even captured some and operate them. Hezbollah has at least one M1A1 tank. It’s not mobile, but the guns still work and they tow it into battle! Houthi rebels in Yemen are destroying Saudi Arabian M1 tanks with anti-tank missiles.
The US is currently spending $20 million per tank for 1000 M1 tanks to upgrade the turrets with all sorts of high tech.
Meanwhile the Russians are fielding their T90 and Armata tanks which are clearly marked improvements on older tank technology and perhaps are the best in the world. A complete, latest version of the T90 costs $4.5 million.
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The Uranium One “scandal” has its genesis in the end of the Cold War. With the end of the Cold War, the Soviets had tons of highly enriched uranium, most in the form of warhead, bombs and submarine reactors. A big fear of the western world was this inventory turning up in the hands of bad actors around the world.
The US solution was to buy it all. It got dollars into the hands of a fledgling Russian government and got the stockpiles off of the world market. The US problem was what to do with it. With the end of the Cold War, we needed much less of it and had surplus warheads and bombs.
We sold our two government run reclamation facilities for $3 billion. We sweetened the deal by giving them the exclusive rights to the Russian products. The business worked out well. Then the Russian-US deal went south. Negotiations went nowhere, and President Obama terminated the program by executive order.
The company had big plans for commercial use of nuclear energy. They applied for a loan guarantee to build a new plant and were turned down. Meanwhile, the Obama administration approved a loan guaranty for a plant owned by the French government to be built in Idaho. A Dutch/UK/Germany company built a plant in Louisiana. Obam’s folks cited safety flaws which years later were dismissed by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Both links tell more about the story, with the second link being published in 2009 which gives more background.
Maybe this isn’t only about the Russians and Hillary. There is a lot more to be seen.…
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.
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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.
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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.…
