Filed under: Foreign Policy, History, The United States | Tags: Poland, Presidential Medal of Freedom, White House Gaffe
America’s highest civilian award is the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In the ceremony last Tuesday, while presenting World War II Polish resistance hero Jan Karski with a posthumous medal, President Obama made a reference to” Polish death camps.” It was Jan Karski who brought evidence of the existence of Nazi Death Camps to America.
You can’t go stumbling along in foreign relations without an understanding of history. Europeans have long memories, and Poland was a Nazi-occupied country, and a great many Poles were executed at Auschwitz and Birkenau. The presence of the Nazi concentration camps in Poland was a deep affront. To suggest that the camps were Polish when awarding a medal, posthumously, to a resistance hero is more than tasteless. To assign the task — not of apologizing — but of saying oh, the President just misspoke, is a greater insult.
But then Obama is the one who notified the Poles with a midnight phone call on September 17, 2009, the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland, that we were pulling the plug on our missile defense base they had stuck out their necks to host.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk responded: “I am certain that our American friends are capable of a more explicit reaction than issuing a correction and the spokesperson of the White House expressing regret. When someone says “Polish death camps,” it’s as if there was no Hitler. That is why our Polish sensitivity in these situations is so much more than just simply a feeling of national pride.”
Embarrassing incidents can be smoothed with a real apology.
ADDENDUM:Lo and behold. “The issue hasn’t gone away just because he wants it to,” and, as Jim Treacher at the Daily Caller reports, “in an undoubtedly ego-bruising development, he’s been forced to publicly apologize.” The Hill reported:
President Obama has penned a letter of apology expressing “regret” over using the phrase “Polish death camps” in a ceremony earlier this week, which has drawn heavy criticism from Polish officials.
“In referring to ‘a Polish death camp’ rather than ‘a Nazi death camp in German-occupied Poland,’ I inadvertently used a phrase that has caused many Poles anguish over the years and that Poland has rightly campaigned to eliminate from public discourse around the world,” Obama wrote in a letter released by the Polish government. “I regret the error and agree that this moment is an opportunity to ensure that this and future generations know the truth.”
Filed under: Energy, Foreign Policy, Military, National Security, The United States | Tags: Armed Services Committee Says No, Military Green Energy Experiment, No Subsidies - No Fuel
The House Armed Services Committee’s proposed Pentagon Budget contains a provision that could bring a screeching halt to the U.S. military’s ambitious experimentation with biofuels. This is a very good thing.
Actually, it was probably the president’s ambitious idea. President Obama seems to be a true believer in anthropogenic global warming, whether from conviction on his own part or from conviction urged by the support of Big Green is unknown.
The Army has been developing alternative fuel technologies for ground vehicles, such as a high-tech steam engine that can run on a variety of fuels, including biofuels. The Army is contracting with Cyclone Power Technologies developer of the all-fuel, clean-tech Cyclone Engine, and Advent Power have been awarded a contract to develop a compact 10kW auxiliary power unit designed to increase operating efficiencies and decrease fuel usage of ground combat vehicles.
The committee sensibly voted to ban the Department of Defense from purchasing alternative fuels that cost more than traditional fossil fuels.
The Air Force has been test-flying a 50-50 blend of camelina and jet fuel in public displays of its high-performance Thunderbirds demonstration team. Camelina is a weedy plant in the mustard family.
The Navy has been testing a variety of biofuels in ships and aircraft, including its Blue Angels demonstration team. Along with camelina, the Navy’s tests include algae and waste grease. The Navy has spent a whole year in an all-out effort to launch a Green Strike Group by mid-June, in time to participate in the multinational Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) maritime exercise. Every member of the Green Strike Group, including both ships and aircraft, must run on green fuel.
When the Commander-in-Chief supports clean green fuels, the military salutes and says yes sir. But the world has changed, or rather our knowledge of the energy situation in the world has changed. America is awash in accessible fossil fuels. The Navy attended a “Sustainable Maritime Fuels Forum in Australia earlier this Spring, and toured local biofuel facilities. Yet Australia has become a fossil fuel powerhouse, with plentiful resources for hundreds of years.
Governments are picking winners and losers with their usual wisdom. One after another of President Obama’s “green investments” is going broke. Europe is backing away from wind and solar as fast as they can— even sunny countries like Spain. Both wind and solar rely on fossil fuel energy as the required 24/7 backup. The math doesn’t work. Without subsidies and mandates for fleets or utilities to purchase biofuels, there would be no market.
The House Armed Services Committee has it right. If all this alternative energy costs way more than our own traditional fossil fuel; subsidies and mandates from the government to attempt to force their bright ideas on an unwilling military, that don’t, as yet work, is folly. Our military has enough problems with ill-advised downsizing, presidential leaks, and failure to understand the military’s mission. They don’t need to be messing around with alternative fuels as well.
It is very odd that at the same time the military is being forced to downsize, and desperately needed replacement of needed equipment is cancelled, we are indulging in wispy ideas that small experiments in alternative fuels can be expanded to supply massive quantities of fuel to run the military. The math doesn’t work. Growing crops to compete with fossil fuel takes vast acreages of land needed for food; and is only conceivable if the price of fossil fuel is extraordinarily high. The president is trying to make that happen, but the people aren’t going to go along.
Filed under: Capitalism, Environment, Global Warming, Junk Science, Politics, Religion, United Nations | Tags: Conference on Sustainable Development, Hold Back Human Progress, World Wildlife Fund
Are you familiar with the World Wildlife Fund? Huge, wealthy worldwide organization, preserving wildlife, caring for the environment, doing good environmental works. If you visit their website and look at their board of directors, it’s an impressive list of the prominent and very well-to-do.
The other face of the World Wildlife Fund is as an extremist green campaigning group. In their just-issued Living Planet Report for 2012, they state that economic growth should be abandoned, that citizens of the world’s wealthy nations should prepare for poverty and that all the human race’s energy should be produced as renewable electricity within 38 years from now.
The hard greens demand that the enormous numbers of wind farms, tidal barriers and solar arrays required under their plans should be built while at the same time severely rationing supplies of concrete, steel, copper and glass. The document is endorsed by the European Space Agency (ESA) an organization which would cease to exist were the document’s recommendations to be fully carried out. They’re important. Nobody said they had to make sense.
Ben Pile, the convenor of the Oxford Salon, said simply: “The real enemy is humanity itself.”
At Rio+20 next month, the world’s elites will meet in Brazil with the aim of holding back human progress.
Forty years ago, two ideas about humanity’s relationship with the natural world caught the imagination of the richest and most influential people. The first was that the demands of a growing population were taking more from the planet than could be replaced by natural processes. The second, related idea was that there exist natural ‘limits to growth’. These two reinventions of Malthusianism became the basis of a new form of global politics, which has sought to contain human industrial and economic development ever since.
Organizations like the WWF draw their supporters for emotional reasons. Love of baby animals, love of large and noble species like African elephants, pandas, rhinoceros, giraffes; beautiful photography can be very moving.
Fears of out-of-control population growth led Malthus and then Paul Erlich, author of the 1968 prophecy The Population Bomb to fear that we would run out of food, and humanity would starve. Fortunately Norman Borlaug came along with the Green Revolution, and put that worry aside.
The Club of Rome, a talk-shop for diplomats, noted politicians and researchers fostered the development of all sorts of organizations and conferences and commissions designed to save the world. An entire ecosystem of global, national, governmental and non-governmental organizations has emerged to advocate closer integration of human productive life with environmental care and to observe “the limits to growth.” Most notable is the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change which seeks a global agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
Well, all the predictions of doom didn’t happen. Average life-expectancy has increased by 10 years, the number of infants dying before the age of five has fallen from 134 per thousand to 58 per thousand. Human population has nearly doubled, and we are healthier, wealthier (even in spite of the recent downturns) and global GDP has risen threefold. We’ve learned to grow more food on less land, cured diseases, and made amazing progress, but those who joined the church of the doomed have established “sustainable development’ as an imperative of global politics. The first ‘Earth Summit’ was held in Rio leading to Agenda 21 and ‘the blueprint for a sustainable planet.’
If you are perpetually worried about very big things, with other, um, planetary leaders, you are moving in rarefied circles.The conferences are held in the world’s finest resorts, the finest people attend, the finest food and drink is served, and you discuss the finest subjects. It seems quite proper to be discussing surrendering national autonomy, solving the problem of world poverty, solving the problems on inequality.
What if you think we do pretty well with progress, that an emphasis on sustainability is not particularly useful, and that in general the planet is in pretty good shape? Doesn’t matter. These NGOs, world leaders, celebrities, and environmentalists have moved to a higher level where no such dissent is allowed. These meetings are already far beyond democratic control. The slogan is “global problems need global solutions.”
It is simply another political drive for power, this time on running the world. The participants, drunk on the association with the most important people and the most important ideas, think big thoughts. Easy. All the real dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and the real enemy is humanity itself.
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Europe, Politics, The United States | Tags: Camp David Meeting, G8 Summit, Growth/ Jobs and Deficits
The Group of Eight met at Camp David on May 18 and 19 to be lectured by President Obama on how to solve their economic problems. just like he has. At least previously he had no compunctions about telling European heads of state how to manage. I’m sure he advised them to do more Keynesian stimulus — and to raise taxes, particularly on the wealthy. I don’t know any such thing, of course, but it’s a good bet.
Obama does not change his mind. His ideas are set in concrete. In spite of the failure of the previous stimulus, he still wants another. The Group of Eight issued “The Camp David Declaration” which says that “they need to take action to boost confidence and nurture recovery with reforms to raise productivity, growth and demand within a sustainable, credible and non-inflationary macroeconomic framework. We commit to fiscal responsibility and, in this context, we support sound and sustainable fiscal consolidation policies that take into account countries’ evolving economic conditions and underpin confidence and economic recovery.” There, doesn’t that give you a great burst of confidence.
There are 40 points of blather that essentially says that they’ll keep on trying to figure out what to do, and tried to hit all the hot points. They are opposed to the bad things, supportive of the good things, have deep concerns about Iran, the DPRK, and Syria and call on them to straighten out. They note that the people of North Africa have aspirations, and encourage them to have democratic and participatory government while under the sway of the Muslim Brotherhood. And, of course they want to promote growth and jobs, and their governments need to take action.
There was, Obama said, “a consensus for progress.”
We know it is possible — in part, based on our own experience here. In my earliest days in office, we took decisive steps to confront our own financial crisis — from making banks submit to stress tests to rebuilding their capital — and we put in place some of the strongest financial reforms since the Great Depression.
At the same time, we worked to get our own fiscal house in order in a responsible way. And through it all, even as we worked to stabilize the financial sector and bring down our deficits and debt over the longer term, we stayed focused on growing the economy and creating jobs in the immediate term.
Of course, we still have a lot of work to do. Too many of our people are still looking for jobs that pay the bills. Our deficits are still too high. But after shrinking by nearly 9 percent the quarter before I took office, America’s economy has now grown for almost three consecutive years. After losing hundreds of thousands of jobs a month, our businesses have created more than 4 million jobs over the past 26 months. Exports have surged and manufacturers are investing in America again.
There you go. Our economy is all recovered, we just have some tidying up to do. If the Europeans, whose situation is more complicated, will just do as Obama has done, all will be well.
Obama seems to have a separate film in which he is the hero, playing in his head, and he doesn’t understand that we’re watching the tragedy in an adjacent theater and it is building to a desperate climax. It’s not a good show, and a lot of the audience is already filing out.
Filed under: Middle East, Military, National Security, Politics, Terrorism, The United States | Tags: "Peace Dividends", Never Prepared, War and Peace
These videos from the Heritage Foundation explain some of the problems with America’s current defense posture. Whenever a war in ended and troops returned home, politicians are sure that was the last war, and they can quit spending money on a lot of military stuff, and spend it instead on things that will buy more votes at home. “The Peace Dividend” they always call it. Liberals are sure that we wouldn’t have any wars if it weren’t for the warmongering Republicans always in favor of throwing our weight around — around the globe.
It is partly a matter of basic philosophy. Liberals are usually opposed to guns, sure that if there were fewer guns, there would be less crime. That attitude spills over into national defense. What we need, they are sure, is simply more dialogue, more peacekeeping, more U.N. Obviously, I’m generalizing here.Liberals believe that the natural state of the world is Peace. Conservatives are more apt to recognize that War is pretty much the natural state of the world, and that the periods of Peace are to be celebrated, but to have Peace, you must prepare for War. Nicely encompassed in the statement “Speak softly, but carry a big stick.”
In 1933, the Army of the United States was 137,000 men. The U.S. Army was 16th in size in the world. The French Army, on the other hand numbered 5 million men. The military had built up somewhat by Pearl Harbor, after all, the war had been going on in Europe and China for a couple of years. Germany had invaded France in May of 1940. ,We were desperately unprepared, with obsolete planes, battleships for a carrier war. We couldn’t even strike back until Midway in June of 1942, and that was mostly luck. It was a long desperate slog until the American arsenal began to catch up with military needs. When the troops came home, we had a “Peace Dividend.”
By 1948 the army had declined to 554,000, and we were totally unprepared for the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950. And so it goes. The Taliban is stronger than ever, and the government is discussing how to ‘dialogue’ with them. We can talk about how it is impolite to throw acid in little girl’s faces, because they want to go to school.
Filed under: Election 2012, Global Warming, Islam, Middle East, Military, Politics, The United States | Tags: Afghanistan, Electoral Politics, The American Military
Uncle Jimbo, from Blackfive, takes exception to President Obama’s ‘strategy’ in Afghanistan. He wouldn’t have gone for the idea that the troops were fighting on Obama’s behalf either. The administration’s plans to ‘dialogue’ with the Taliban seem to be some vague part of the ‘strategy,’ whatever that is. It seems to be about— getting out before the election. There’s certainly a lot of rather large problems that must succumb to electoral politics.
Filed under: Europe, Freedom, Heartwarming, History, Military, National Security, The United States | Tags: General Mark Welsh III, U.S Military, U.S. Air Force Academy
If you can manage the time tonight, watch this speech by General Mark Welsh III, Commander U.S. Air Forces Europe, speaking to the cadets at the Air Force Academy last November. You will quickly see why he is such a respected leader, and the speech is moving, inspiring, and worth every minute of your time.
This week, General Mark Welsh III was nominated to be the next chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force. By all accounts, General Welsh is perhaps the most respected leader in the Air Force today, and for months both active and retired Air Force personnel were rooting for him to occupy the top slot. Currently serving as Commander, U.S. Air Forces Europe, Welsh will take over a service whose mission is more vital than ever, but one that has flown through lots of turbulence in recent years, from severe budget cuts to program mismanagement and security failures. It would be hard to find an American military leader as inspiring as General Welsh, now that David Petraeus has retired, and the Air Force will have a formidable leader in the coming years.
Like this:
Filed under: Intelligence, National Security, The United States, United Kingdom | Tags: Britain's MI6 and MI5, Terrorism in Yemen, U.S. Intelligence Community
Good news on the intelligence front has not been particularly plentiful. So when news that a new underwear plot was foiled, too much information was the problem. Former agents from the U.S. intelligence community are blaming the Obama administration for undermining national security and compromising the British intelligence establishment, MI6 and MI5.
Mike Scheur, former head of the CIA’s Bin Laden unit, said that leaking about the nuts and bolts of British involvement was despicable and would make a repeat of the operation difficult. “MI6 should be as angry as hell. This is something that the prime minister should raise with the president, if he has the balls. This is really tragic” Scheur said.”Any information is too much information. This does seem to be a tawdry political thing.”
Robert Grenier, former head of the CIA counter-terrorism centre, in an article for al-Jazeera, said the spies of the US intelligence community “rather than quietly celebrating success are wistfully shaking their heads…As the director of national intelligence launches an investigation, he does so knowing the real culprits—in the White House and on Capitol Hill — are beyond his reach. He added “As for British intelligence, …they must be really unhappy. …The Americans are doing a very good jjob of undermining trust, and the problem starts at the top.”
It was clear that the information from this agent could have gone on for some time, when it was cut off by a leak. His intelligence was helping to target crucial drone strikes within Yemen, including one that killed the man responsible for the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000. The leak appears to have frustrated a painstaking and risky operation.
Yemen has been a key target country for the CIA and MI6 in line with the growing strength of Aqap in recent years. But the lead on the ground has been taken by the Saudi intelligence service, the Mabahith, which is best placed to operate in the local environment and exploit links on either side of the border.
Filed under: Law, National Security, News of the Weird, Terrorism, The United States | Tags: Common Sense, Sexual Harassing 6-year Old, Terrorist Babies
— Aurora, Colorado. A six-year-old boy was suspended from school for sexual harassment. First-grader D’Avonte Meadows apparently said the line “I’m sexy and I know it” to a female while he was standing in the lunch line. He didn’t even sing it —”I only said the song,” he told the reporter.
His mother was not pleased. She said she sees things like “fondling, looking up her skirt” as sexual harassment, not quoting an MTV line. “They’re going to look at him like he’s a pervert. And it’s like, that’s not fair to him.” Sable Elementary issued a statement saying it couldn’t discuss the case; but they pointed out a school board policy that defines sexual harassment as any unwelcome sexual advance. There is no age limit.
— Newark, N.J. TSA failed to properly screen a baby for weapons when it was handed from one parent to another during a metal detector walk through. Both parents were screened before leaving for their gate. A TSA official said that police were told that the slip up was a “low-risk factor” given the circumstances of the incident. A short the e later, the TSA personnel realized that the baby had no been checked and began searching for the family.
Port Authority police unilaterally made the decision to evacuate the terminal, sweep the terminal for explosives and re-screen all of the passengers. This, of course, inconvenienced hundreds of passengers and delayed many flights, said the official who was not authorized to discuss the issue by name because of its delicacy.
Is the country being run by a committee? This seems like the work of a committee, they always mess everything up. Terrorist babies indeed.
Filed under: Election 2012, Military, National Security, Politics, Terrorism | Tags: Killing Bin Laden, The Afghanistan Speech!, The United States Military
It’s not that hard. You just think of who it is that’s doing the really hard stuff. You don’t have to expose them to publicity, which they don’t want. Just offer thanks and gratitude.
Filed under: Democrat Corruption, Foreign Policy, Islam, Israel, Terrorism | Tags: Ignoring Congress, Separation of Powers, The Imperial Presidency
The White House seems to have an odd relationship with the separation of powers. The 2010 mid-term election when Republicans took over control of the House of Representatives was a sharp rebuke to the administration and congressional Democrats. Rather than understand that as a call for more cooperation and bipartisanship, Obama saw it as a sign that he should just go around Congress, accomplishing his goals by executive orders and agency regulation.
The Friday night news dump showed that Obama had exceeded his own guidelines. He decided that he would ignore the restrictions of Congress’s Palestinian Accountability Act with a “waiver.” He made the decision to pour American taxpayer dollars —$192 million — into the coffers of the Palestinian Authority despite its being illegal. This was first printed in the foreign press (AFP), where many of the more interesting things about this administration first appear.
Congress mandated that no funds may be made available to the Palestinian Authority until it ends its terrorist activities and an independent audit is conducted of its finances. White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said it would ensure “the continued viability of the moderate PA government.” This is the same moderate government which has tried to form a pact with Hamas. He added that “the PA had fulfilled all its major obligations, such as recognizing Israel’s right to exist, renouncing violence and accepting the Road Map for Peace.”
In the real world, the PA is not only not moderate, but has reneged on all its commitments. The whole thing is a blatant lie.
Obama’s thinks of himself as an imperial president, above mere laws. His rant against the Supreme Court in the wake of the ObamaCare hearing was a disgrace. The Supreme Court is a fully equal branch of the government to the executive branch, and they decide what is Constitutional — not the president, who was a part-time lecturer on the 15th Amendment at the University of Chicago —not a professor of Constitutional Law.
Obama instructed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to inform Congress of the move, on the grounds that “waiving such prohibition is important to the national security interests of the United States.” Embarrassing.
Former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy suggests that Congress should slash the executive branch’s budget— perhaps with a treble damages rule. Will they do it? remains to be seen, but unless they respond definitively, the imperial presidency will continue. Obama doesn’t think anyone will dare to do so.
