Wikileaks Publishes Army documents

Below is an article from Voice of America, called "WikiLeaks, the Pentagon and the War in Afghanistan"
with my comments:

"This week, the website WikiLeaks published more than seventy-five thousand American military documents on the war in Afghanistan. These documents from the Army and Marine Corps included secret reports from the past six years.  ...


Defense Secretary Robert Gates says the problems they describe are not new. But he says their release could harm troops and damage American relationships in that part of the world. He says intelligence sources and methods will become known, and Afghans who have helped American forces may now be in danger."

 

"ROBERT GATES: "Will people trust us? Will people whose lives are on the line trust us to keep their identities secret? Will other governments trust us to keep their documents and their intelligence secret?"
 

Gates is 100% right. People will not trust us. This will make it much more difficult to recruit spies and informants in any country. If a lowly soldier can access their identities and put their lives and the lives of their families in danger, then they won't feel safe. And if they don't feel safe, they won't cooperate.

This makes it much harder to get accurate intelligence on the ground. And this means that the war will continue longer and more people will die. And in fact, the lives of people who have trusted the United States, who have helped to save the lives of our soldiers are now in danger.

MICHAEL MULLEN: "Mr. Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing. But the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family."

"In London, Mr. Assange said WikiLeaks is still examining fifteen thousand more documents. He says the released documents do not include any top-secret reports or names of informants or information like troop movements.

JULIAN ASSANGE: " This material doesn't just reveal abuses, this material describes the past six years of war, every major attack that resulted in someone being detained or someone being killed."

WikiLeaks is a nonprofit organization that publishes documents from governments and businesses. It released the military documents on Sunday. It gave early copies to three news organizations in the United States, Germany and Britain.

This is a true crime against humanity. At this point, it is not known how many people will die because of this lunatic. But I could easily see it running into the thousands if not tens of thousands. Julian is a true criminal and should be arrested and put in solitary confinement for the rest of his life.

There is a class of people, who care nothing about human life, who can kill with no remorse, no caring, no regret. George Soros is one of these people. But also so is Julian Assange. A person who leaks documents, which will result in the deaths of not only American troops, but also Afghanistan citizens who helped us and their families. And Assange holds this up as some great achievement. True evil.


The White House is urging WikiLeaks not to not publish any more classified documents about the Afghan war.

Good call. I agree with the Obama administration on this. But they need to do more than simply request this. They need to take legal action against the founder and backers of Wikileaks and shut them down. This is a true crime. And I don't believe that they are serving some "higher purpose" by doing this. They are simply getting more people killed. And a full investigation needs to be rapidly done to determine who got these documents to Wikileaks. I don't think it was one person, I suspected a group, considering the number of documents.These soldiers need to be placed for the rest of their life in solitary confinement.


This is yet another example of how the hard left, as represented by Assange, cares nothing about human life.

NAACP vs Tea Party

The NAACP is the last group that should be criticizing the Tea Party for being racist. The NAACP supports a number of black racists, such as Louis Farrakhan and others. If the NAACP is SO concerned about racism, they should start by condemning some of their supporters that are racist against White people and / or Jews.

Lessons from School

I had the wonderful fortune to be able to attend a private school which taught me a great deal.

The school, which is not going to be named here, demanded extremely high academic achievement. Every student was expected to excel. Period. There were no excuses. If a child was not doing well in school, what that meant in their mind is that they were not consistently getting a B or better grade, there was something wrong. And in their mind, that was due only to a few reason:

1) Student needs help. In this case the school provided tutors to work with students so they did better. Sometimes older students acted as tutors for younger students, but not always.

2) The teacher is lousy -- If a lot of students in a class were not getting the material, eventually the teacher would be shown the door. There wasn't a lot of talking. You either made the grade or you didn't. You either performed or you didn't. End of story. One child doesn't equal a lousy teacher. But lots of them do.

3) Student Refuses to behave -- Sometimes students would refuse to do homework, refuse to work with the faculty. Sometimes students would get involved with drugs. In any event, the solution was that the student either had to shape up or ship out. In other words, if they consistently refused to get with the program, and work hard and turn around their grades, they would be shown the door. Same thing with students who beat up other students or got involved with drugs. Same punishment. They had to leave.

No other excuses were listened to. Nobody was interested in hearing how there were some other excuses to lack of achievement. Literally, nobody cared. It was one of the above. Period. And believe it or not, most of the children rose to the occasion and actually got their grades into an acceptable range. And the ones that were not interested in learning left. It was just as simple as that. The ones that wanted to be there were given help when their grades slipped. As long as they had the will to learn, the school was there to help them (for the most part.) But the student had to really want it and be willing to put in the long hours of homework necessary to succeed.

But after this tough regimen, when students went to college, they often did really well. One of my friends went to college after this heavy regimen and ended up getting on the Dean's list. He was so used to the pressure this helped him succeed when he went to college. And other students ended up getting good jobs right out of high school, simply off the reputation of the school. A friend of mine was hired right out of high school as a software programmer by a major Fortune 100 software firm based primarily on the reputation of the school and the strength of my friend's technical skill.

So the lesson I learned in school is NOBODY CARES. All that ANYONE cares about is getting the job done. Excuses are just that, excuses and nobody really cares about them or you. That is why you have to work hard and excel.

In public schools today, students are given a million and one excuses as to why they can't or won't perform in school. From the fact that they are Black, to the fact that they are poor, the list goes on and on. But in the end, when they try to get a job, nobody cares. And so many young black men think that racism is preventing them from succeeding and this is true sometimes. But most of the time what is holding them back is lack of skills and behind this lack of skills is a government run, leftist high school that don't teach them the basics they need to work. Misguided, stupid leftists promote that anyone has the right to stay in school, no matter their misbehavior and all this ends up doing is making things harder for the students who actually want to learn.

So, if more schools taught the lessons my school taught me, we would have a true renaissance in education.

"Land for Peace"

The biggest mistake in my mind, that Israel continues to commit is continuing to withdraw from territory with the hope of peace. It is a clear failure yet Israel continues to do this. It is Israel's solution to everything. Withdraw from more territory. And I can't stand when they do this. It actually drives me crazy. Experience has shown that when Israel withdraws from territory,there is never more peace, only more war.

Let's take Israel's withdrawal from south Lebanon. It actually boggles my mind how stupid some Israeli government officials are, chief among them, defense secretary Ehad Barak. Stupid, stupid, stupid leftist. Stupid. I admire his bravery in combat, he is an extremely decorated soldier and I respect that. But his decision, strongly supported by his friends and fellow travelers on the left to abandon south Lebanon to Hezbollah terrorists and to betray Israel's allies among the Christian Lebanese was beyond stupid and actually criminal in my mind. So Israel withdraws and their is all of this talk about how this will bring peace. Weakness never brings peace. Whoever promotes this is actually deluded or on drugs. Or doesn't know anything about how the Middle East works. Or a combination of the above.

Israel under Barak's direction abandons south Lebanon and betrays its allies, the Christian Lebanese. The Christians, lacking any friends, completely abandoned and stabbed in the back by Barak and his leftist friends, join the emergent power in south Lebanon, Hezbollah, not necessarily because they agree with their ideology, but of course in the world of the Middle East, you have to either be powerful or have powerful friends in order to survive, especially for a relatively weak community like the Christians are. Hezbollah builds up military might in the south, now assisted by the Christians who of course, have no choice but to support this and they begin attacking Israel, since their purpose is to exterminate every Jew everywhere starting with Israel. This action puts Israelis living in north Israel under rocket attack, the IDF responds and the Christians are caught in the crossfire.  Thousands of people die, who did not need to die if Israel would have done the right thing, the thing that they promised the Christians they would do when they first moved into Lebanon, which is help the Christians expel the terrorist Muslims and restore the government to Christian rule. But of course leftists can't face what it actually takes to achieve victory. And they seem to always be confused when their stupid solutions backfire on them. Now we have Barak and his friends on the left demand that Israel withdraw from more territory which is complete suicide.

Everything above applies to the Gaza withdrawal. It is true that Barak doesn't bear complete responsibility for this, it is another stupid move by the Israeli government which has brought about more problems. Before the Gaza disengagement, there were problems in Gaza, but nowhere near the problems that we have today,with rockets being fired into south of Israel and a terrorist organization ruling the land. Israel has to go into Gaza in order to stop the rockets. Roughly 1300 people die, 600-700 of them were terrorists, but a lot of innocent people died as well, which breaks my heart because one of my good friends is from Gaza. And none of these people had to die. None. If Israel had simply done the right thing and stayed in Gaza, there would have never been any rockets. But no, Israel has to bend to the will of the anti-semitic "international community" instead of doing the right thing, the moral thing.

And yet, today, for some strange, crazy reason, many Israeli leaders are calling for giving Arab terrorists yet more land. Now looking at what happened in Lebanon and Gaza, what do these people think is going to happen once they get land. Are they going to make peace with the Jews? Are they going to adhere to any peace treaties? No. Absolutely not. They haven't so far, so why would they once they got more land. This is a complete idiocy.

The whole idea of land for peace reminds me of this story. A criminal keeps breaking into a safe and stealing thousands of dollars. The bank hires a security guard who tries to stop the robber but is ultimately ineffective in stopping all of the thefts. The security guard goes to the president of the bank and says, "There is no way to stop a bank robber. He steals two thousand dollars a week so the only way to stop him is to give him $10,000 a week." It is actually that stupid. It is rewarding misbehavior and when you do that, all you get is more misbehavior. In the above theoretical example, the bank robber, once he starts getting $10,000 a week from one bank manager will take this money and work on extorting more money. In other words, the problem doesn't end it only gets worse.

It boggles my mind that the state of Israel, with more PHds per capita than any other country can't grasp this simple truth. Reward bad behavior get more bad behavior. Punish bad behavior and get less bad behavior (terrorism). When I see more Arabs joining anti-Israel organizations I can't say that I am totally surprised. If Israel and America show themselves to be weak partners, liable to changing their mind and betraying their allies, naturally people won't want to support these countries. They will go with a group that appears to be a long term partner that will defend them. I'm not saying this is right, I'm simply saying that this is the way the Middle East, and  much of the rest of the world, works. 

A Problem with a "Non-interventionist" Foreign Policy

Radical Leftists, Ron Paul supporters and many people in between advocate what is called a non-interventionist foreign policy. In other words, we should never get involved with the internal or other affairs of another country unless they are attacking the United States. That we should trade with every country equally and treat repressive regimes like that in the Sudan the same as we treat democratic allies such as France with the assumption that everyone will be friendly towards us if we are friendly towards them. I understand the attraction of that point of view, things are much simpler in the world if you believe this. But unfortunately life doesn't go that way. Ignoring evil doesn't make evil go away. Evil can't be reasoned with and it must be confronted and destroyed. And ignoring evil, allowing evil and injustice to persist is what is at the heart of a the so-called "non-interventionist" foreign policy.

In fact, as I have extensively covered in past posts, in many cases, a non-interventionist foreign policies can lead to far more deaths to our current foreign policy, which is, as I have also covered before, extremely flawed. But if their were a choice between our current foreign policy and a non-interventionist, completely pacifist foreign policy, I would choose what we have now. The reason for this is clear when you actually face evil, when you actually confront it and understand it for what it is, you will realize that there is no actual reason, that exists for evil actions. While evil individuals and groups tend to make up reasons for their actions, they are all imaginary, the only place they exist is the mind of the person doing the evil actions. When evil is not confronted and handled, this leads to more injustice, harm and deaths. For example, let's take Vietnam, there were a stream of Leftists who protested around this nation during the 1960s and early 1970s to end the US involvement in Vietnam. The propaganda of the Leftists clamed that all of the US was committing attroicities on the people in Vietnam and everything would be perfect if we simply left. Non-interventionist propaganda, adding up to the "fact" that the US should not get involved in conflicts with countries that are not directly attacking the US was spread around. The US government foolishly followed this advice. In the wake of the US withdrawal from Vietnam, the Communists committed crimes against humanity, in three years they killed as many innocent civilians as had been killed by both sides in 15 years of fighting before this point. So looking at this, what was better, to stay a few years and actually win the war or cut and run. Obviously staying would have reduced the number of civilian deaths. Yet leftists will choose the path which leads to more civilian deaths and say that this in fact is the more humanitarian path, which is of course a lie. Now having said there, if there had been a way to break the will of the communists without resorting to war, if there had been a way to get them to leave alone Vietnam without resorting to war, of course that would have been better. And I also believe that the war was grossly mishandled, there was no need to drag it out for 20 years. When a war needs to be fought, the enemy needs to be overwhelmed with heavy force (not an atomic bomb, but lots of conventional bombs on strategic, military targets) and quickly forced to surrender. Not piecemeal attacks here and there.

So what we can learn from this is confronting and destroying evil leads to peace. It leads to fewer deaths than waiting for evil to develop and then attacking or even worse, allowing evil to develop.

The Black Community and Excuses

One reason the black community is in so much trouble is the tendency, within the community to blame other people as opposed to looking within for the reasons behind bad situations. For example, let's look at the increasing number of babies being born to single mothers. This is a major problem that hasn't been faced fully by the NAACP and other black civil rights organizations. Statistics show that a child born in a single parent household will, statistically, not do as well as a child born in a household run by a father and a mother. For example, children of two family households are more likely to go to college, they are more likely to stay away from a life of crime, they are more likely to succeed. But you seen an endless stream of black "leaders" blaming these problems on the "white man," "Jews," "the racist society," the government and other such things. But the real problem, is that we have 75% of black children being born out of wedlock. We have an increasing number of young black men who are not staying with their children. We have an epidemic of children being raised in the streets instead of being raised by their family and that along with a horrible education system, run by government bureaucrats and unions and a tendency of two many in the black community to, instead of having faith in a higher power, to have faith in government and leftist ideas. Those are the real things causing the problems that we run into.

But instead of facing this and moving forward, there are an endless stream of excuses emanating from so-called black leaders. Excuses which, in the end get in the way of what we actually need to do, which is take responsibility for the crime and other bad conditions in our community. We, as black people, need to face the problems and a group and solve them. We need to start with our friends and our family members who are not taking as much responsibility for their families. While we can't control their life we can make them know that we disapprove of their behavior. We can encourage them to do the right thing. And if we all do this, we will see a change. We can stop supporting welfare state policies which have only shown, statistically to harm our community and we must insist that policies are implemented on a state and federal level which help small business expand so that their are more jobs. We can stop supporting the socialist teacher's union that only holds black children down. We must recognize that in order for us to become more successful, we need a better education system for our children, one that through the free market rewards competence and punishes schools that are failing like the vast majority of the schools in the black community are.

The absolute last thing we need is more excuses which simply are designed to make us feel better but do not, in the long run solve any of the problems that we face.

Ron Paul is Wrong

This is a difficult post to write. For most of my life, I have been a Ron Paul supporter but over the last year I have come to realize, through my extensive study of history, that, while Paul is right about the need to examine government agencies and eliminate useless agencies, his foreign policy is completely off the wall. His belief, and the belief of many of his libertarian followers, that we can get rid of every single regulation, including regulations dealing with civil rights for minorities is also wrong.

His thinking, along with the thinking of many libertarians is flawed. The basic flaw is that everyone is reasonable. That reasonable people will make reasonable decisions. That all government regulation is bad.  That no regulations are needed at all. And that point of view is as wrong as the Socialist point of view that everything needs to be regulated. They are opposite sides of the same coin and both are wrong.

The fact of the matter is that while they make a good point, there are far too many regulations, the solution is not to get rid of all regulation. The solution is to look at these and get rid of many as possible. But Ron Paul and his son Rand actually go too far when it comes to this. Let's take Paul's position on discrimination. Both Rand and Ron believe that private companies, operating off of private land should be able to discriminate against black people since private industry should not be subject to controls by the government. Now of course this is wrong, since the private land is being defended by public resources. Government agencies are paving the roads that bring people to the business. They are being defended by the state and local government. Therefore they should be subject to a minimal level of regulation. Not over regulation. But they should have to serve me and not be able to refuse me service because I am black. The government has done a lot of bad things, but the civil rights act of 1964 was not one of those things.

Another area where Ron Paul is 100% wrong is foreign policy. And this is one of many reasons why I can't support Paul as President. His thinking, that if we leave other countries alone, they will leave us alone is just not true. Even a casual study of history shows that this is the case. We should minimize the number of wars we are in. War should definitely not be the first thing that we do in the face of a disagreement with another state. But the fact of the matter is, that there are valid cases for war. For example World War 2. In fact, a major problem with World War 2, is that we didn't enter the war soon enough. We waited until we were attacked and by the time we were attacked the Germans, Italian and Japanese had already built up their war machine. Germany should have been attacked right after they tried to invade Czechoslovakia. But we didn't. And 60 million died as a result.

Another thing he loves to talk about is the Islamic world. In his thinking and the thinking of people with similar points of view, the Islamic world would love us if we would simply desert Israel and all of our allies in the region. This is dangerous and highly flawed thinking. From the beginning of the Republic, America has faced attacks from Islamic extremists. For example, the Barbary pirates, who were controlled by the Islamic leader, the Caliphate, waged jihad against the United States starting shortly after we got independence from the United Kingdom. We had done absolutely nothing to deserve these attacks -- when these attacks started we didn't even have an effective Navy. We were definitely not occupying anything or posing any threats to Islamic countries. These attacks only ceased once the Muslims were soundly defeated in the early 19th century. So, Paul's assertion that the Islamic world would love us if we went back to being impotent is idiocy. This incident, and others throughout history show that we have faced attacks from Muslims because we are "infidels" pure and simple.

Happy 4th of July

To all my readers, God bless America and have a wonderful 4th of July.

Racism

One point which I disagree with the mainstream Republican establishment is on the subject of race relations in America. While I believe that things are far better than they were 50 years ago, far better, I don't believe that we live in a color blind society. Now having said that, that doesn't give Blacks a blank check to become apathetic and give up. We simply need to go to college, work hard and overcome any barriers that we run into.

But I don't believe, like some on the far right do, for example Rand Paul, that we need to weaken laws designed to protect against racial discrimination. We still need some government oversigt in this area because, people still discriminate and there needs to be a way to resolve things when they do. There needs to be a happy middle. Are the majority of white Americans racist. No. Are some racist. Yes. Does there need to be laws against those who are racist. Yes. Is there reverse racism. Yes. And all forms of racism are evil.

Having said all that, the ultimate solution to racism is for people to become more familiar with people with other races so they can realize that people are more alike than they are different.