Dresden, China and Global Warming

Today’s post is brought to you by Dresden, Germany where 12 civilians were killed when a missile missed it’s intended target in an assault on the Taliban this weekend. Ok, that’s completely false. I thought that we were fighting a war, so why is the top story on every news outlet that 12 Afghan civilians were killed by accident? If you’ve been reading this long, you know that I am opposed to the war ... but if you fight a war, people die, that’s how it works! This weekend is the 65th anniversary of the allied bombing raids on Dresden (a cultural center) where somewhere between 18,000 and 40,000 civilians died. Tens of thousands of people were burned to death on purpose as part of the military strategy, and 65 years later it is somehow unacceptable if our soldiers make any mistakes. They are well trained and well equipt and we have put them in harms way to defeat an invisible enemy and then we do not permit them to make a single error. If a bomb misses its target they are on the front page, if a 19 year old gets spooked while searching Baghdad houses in the middle of the night and pulls the trigger we drag him home, vilify him and try him for murder. War is horrendous, violent, brutal and messy ... there is nothing precise about it, there is nothing humane about it. If you want war then you must embrace the path of destruction it leaves in every village it touches, you must embrace the soldiers who come home broken and are discarded by our military, you must embrace the innocent who are killed, wounded and left homeless, fatherless, motherless ... it’s part and parcel to the war you want. If you oppose the war, then we need to end it by bringing our brave men and women home, out of harms way. What you can’t do is pretend that you are against war while waging war. You can’t be V.P. Biden and say that the Iraq war was not “managed well” and left us in danger while adding tens of thousand of troops on the ground in Afghanistan. I don’t think it was worth one of the 4,694 lives it cost, but the Iraq war was a success, our brave men and women in military defeated the enemy they were sent to defeat and a democratically elected government was left in a position to defend itself. All the objectives of that war were met and I commend our troops for the job they did there. I have watched two funeral processions already this year honoring Afghan war dead, 43 Americans have died there in less than two months ... war is horrible and we need to bring our men and women home, but short of that we need to support them in everything they do there ... we owe them that much ... we have sent them to die in a foreign nation, they are our brother’s and sisters and I love them.


And in “how do you like me now?” news, President Obama has decided to invite the Dali Lama to the White House, they will meet next week (China has demanded that the meeting not take place) and discuss how the United States can aggravate a country that holds billions of dollars of our national debt. The best way I can think of is to embrace a Tibetan in exile who travels the globe trash talking the Chinese government at every opportunity ... that ought to make them REAL happy. Lets find out what happens to our economy when China makes a margin call. We’ll become the Mortimer and Randolph Duke of the global economy ... sleeping on the street, begging Canada for some food. But at least the President will be serene after meeting “his holiness”.

Today we close with global climate change news ... yeah, we were just kidding about that whole global warming thing ... sorry. Professor Phil Jones, who is at the center of the “Climategate” affair, conceded that there has been no “statistically significant” rise in temperatures since 1995. “We concluded, with overwhelming statistical significance, that the IPCC’s climate data are contaminated with surface effects from industrialization and data quality problems. These add up to a large warming bias,” Basically they put the temperature collection devices in really stupid places, like next to air conditioning units or garbage incinerators ... so, while the globe is not warming ... it is warmer right next to an incinerator, good to know!

Happy Monday!