Strong and wrong

Bill Clinton said, "When people are insecure, they'd rather have somebody who is strong and wrong than someone who's weak and right," That is a tough choice but I agree with Clinton. My reasoning is that if I am strong I can change my mind when presented with new information but if I appear weak, I won’t be able to change. Using the current candidates for President, consider the differences between Trump and Carson. A guy like Trump could change his mind about a temporary stop to Muslims coming into the country but Carson could never project strength like Trump is doing. It is one thing to change your mind on an issue but quite another thing to change your personality. Even if you tried that, the people would see right through it. I don’t know what these two candidates are really like but Trump is perceived as strong and Carson is not. It might just be a lot of bombastic talk but the perception is that Trump is strong and Carson is not and more to the point, Obama based on recent polls, is seen as weak on terrorism.

Church fires

There was a Muslim Church set afire this week in California and this made news. Here are some other quotes from the news. Since 2003, 13 mosques around the country have suffered arson or bombing attacks. A spate of arsons this month at six predominately black churches in the St. Louis area has raised concerns that these incidents could be racially motivated. But they are by no means the first arsons at places of worship this year. As of July 14, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) had ruled 29 of 79 fires at houses of worship in 2015 to be arson, although some investigations were ongoing. Indeed, about half of all the fires at houses of worship in the past 20 years were intentionally set, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of data from the ATF. Of the 4,705 reported fire incidents at houses of worship between 1996 and 2015, 2,378, or 51%, had been ruled intentional as of July.

Paris meeting

On President Obama’s inaugural tour of Europe he said that America was arrogant. "there have been times where America's shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive" America is once again showing it’s arrogance by praising the recent environmental meeting in Paris. Lest we forget the western world went through the industrial revolution between 1750 and 1850 and it was done by using coal. Now we have countries in Africa and Asia that are going through their version of the industrial revolution and we point out to them how we have made improvements by switching to natural gas. If the true intention of this meeting was to confront the problem of global warming the whole thing would have centered around moving away from coal and onto oil and finally natural gas, but this is not what is going on. The purpose of this meeting was to transfer money from the developed world to the developing world and they succeeded with a promise of 100 billion dollars a year. Of this amount only 10 billion has been pledged and 3 billion of that is coming from the US. Another problem with transferring money to developing countries is that all too often the money is siphoned off and ends up in the hands of some unscrupulous leader. The President will not be depending on the senate to ratify this agreement as a treaty since that takes 67 votes and the last time this was tried was with the 1997 Kyoto protocol. A senate vote on the protocol was defeated 95 to 0 so the treaty was out. I find it interesting that the President says the Republican controlled senate will not pass this agreement when in fact the last time not one Democrat voted in favor.

Refugees

Trying to make sense out of the current controversy surrounding the closing of borders to Muslims is not as straight forward as if first seems. For example, President Obama some weeks ago suggest that we bring in 10 to 25 thousand refugees from Syria. There was some concern raised but most people felt it was the right thing to do. Then the terror attack in California came and muddied the waters. Next it was reveal that the engagement visa was not properly vetted and that caused more concern. Now we find out that many blank Syrian VISA’s and the printing machines needed to make VISAs are in the hands of the terrorist. It would be reasonable for President to call for a temporary halt in the refugee program until these issues can be clarified. Just to illustrate how complicate this can get, what if the president decided to temporarily halt the Syrian refugee program but offered an exemption to Syrians who are non-Muslim. Some would say even if you wanted to do this, how would you determine which Syrians are non-Muslim and of course the same question can be asked about which Syrians are really Syrians. Many of these refugees left with only the clothes on their backs and have little proof of who they are or where they come from. It seems it would be difficult to vet people who have so little background information. The government was caught unawares by the engagement VISA. Will there be other surprises down the road?

Crimes against Jews

There are about 6.7 million Muslims in the United States and about 5.4 million Jews. In the last few years, specifically anti-Muslim crimes have made up about 13 or 14 percent of hate crimes considered to be committed with a religious bias. That amounts to nearly 100 anti-Islam hate crimes each year from 2011 to 2013. As for crimes against Jews: The ADL counted 912 incidents in 2014, up from 751 in 2013. “The United States still continues to be unique in history” as a safe place for Jews, said Abraham Foxman, the ADL’s outgoing national director. “It’s still different here than anywhere else, but don’t take anything for granted, and be concerned,” Foxman said. Even though crimes against Jews are 7 times more frequent the crimes against Muslims get all of the publicity.

Non-voters

In the 2012 presidential election 126 million people voted and 93 million did not. The reason many give for not voting is they feel that there is no difference between candidates, no matter the party. Recall that George Wallace who ran as an independent said, there is not a dimes worth of difference between the democrats and the republicans. These same people may be looking at Trump as someone who is different and if 10% of them would come out and vote it could win the election. This may be one of the reasons that the Republican establishment does not want him to get the nomination because the fear he could win the election. This is contrary to what the experts say, since they are predicting an easy win for Clinton if Trump is the nominee but of course these people seem to be wrong about many things these days.

Iran and the rest

The recent remarks by Trump regarding Muslims have some people saying that this will cause a rift between the United States and our gulf ally’s and that is likely but when President Obama signed the treaty with Iran that caused a much bigger rift. The Shia Muslims of Iran are more threatening to the Sunni Muslims of the rest of the Middle East than any remarks made by any American. These countries are so afraid of the Shia dominated Iran that they are willing to allow Israeli airplanes to fly over their territory if they choose to attack Iran’s nuclear sites. It takes a lot of fear to align Israel with Saudi Arabia but the Iran nuclear deal has done just that.