For better or worse, the world economy is tied together. Thus what happens in Europe or China is indeed of importance here in this nation. And what is happening in the European economy is frightening indeed. This from The Telegraph:
Here’s an astonishing statistic; more than 30pc of all government debt in the eurozone – around €2 trillion of securities in total – is trading on a negative interest rate.
With the advent of European Central Bank quantitative easing, what began four months ago when 10-year Swiss yields turned negative for the first time has snowballed into a veritable avalanche of negative rates across European government bond markets. In the hunt for apparently “safe assets”, investors have thrown caution to the wind, and collectively determined to pay governments for the privilege of lending to them.
So Europeans are expecting such a bursting bubble in their economy that they are willing to invest money and lose several percent just for the guarantee that, at the end of the time period, the majority of the corpus will still be there. That is chilling, particularly when one realizes that the European Union members are, collectively, our largest trading partner. Not only does this mean trouble on the economic horizon generally, with the cost of borrowing so low, it also means that European stock markets will be seeing a bubble forming, making any potential downturn even worse. The great European experiment in socialism may well be coming to a cataclysmic end, though you can bet your bottom dollar, literally, that the US under Obama will race to shore them up for awhile. It is not a good idea, but we may be looking at a real depression otherwise. China's economy, the other big world driver, is likewise built on smoke and mirrors. Honest to God, this is 2005 all over again, only this time there isn't enough money in the world to prop up Europe, let alone Europe and China, if they both go belly up at the same time.
Each week, the Watcher's Council hosts a forum, in addition to holding a weekly contest for best posts among the members of the Council. I have been kindly invited to respond to this week's question. Update: The forum is up, with several different answers to the question, all worth your read.
It is beyond question that our nation is in decline. We stand mired in historic levels of debt, yet massive deficit spending by Congress continues unabated. Regulations are being pumped out by unelected bureaucrats at record pace, working fundamental changes to our nation that could never pass Congress. Yet Congress sits by and the odd Congresscritter only occasionally impotently complains in speeches. Medicare and Social Security threaten to bankrupt our nation in the foreseeable future unless reformed, yet Congress does not just nothing, but manages to compound the problems with Obamacare. We have a tyrannical President who unconstitutionally threatens our country's make up by unilaterally legislating the legalization of millions of illegal aliens, while an utterly supine Congress with the sole Constitutional authority to legislate is allowing this to happen. It appears that elections for either party no longer matter to change our national trajectory.
Our Supreme Court today sits as a sort of unelected Politburo deciding that the Constitution means whatever five of them want it to mean based on their whim of the day. What was supposed to be the least dangerous of our co-equal branches of government is now arguably the most dangerous. The left is using our military as a laboratory for insane social experiments, the worst being to allow women into front line combat units, something that can only be accomplished in any number by lowering the physical standards. And that does not even begin to consider the impact on unit cohesion. Space exploration as well as virtually everything to do with space is without doubt of incredible importance to our future. Moreover, it is vital that we continue to develop space defense technology to protect our many satellites upon which modern life is dependant. Space technology is an area where we have still a distinct advantage, yet Obama has killed our nation's space program. Lastly, our national security posture hasn't been this bad since the 1930's.
I think it would be fair to say we are not merely in decline, but rapidly approaching key tests during our descent that will determine our future. It is hard to say which will be the first key test, whether it will come in the form of severe economic stress as the interest rates rise on our outrageous national debt, or whether it will come in the choking of our economy by ever more far reaching regulations by the EPA and FCC, or whether it will come from foreign countries energized by our growing weakness. The only sure lesson of history is that the tests will come.
Our nation has proven resilient in the past, but in the past, we've been much better positioned to respond to challenges. In the past hundred years, we've faced the Depression and come through. But that was at a time when our massive excess industrial capacity sat untapped and we started from a point with no major deficits. We faced WWII and came through. But that was at a time when the other allied nations had strong militaries of their own, not the empty shells that they now have. We faced down the Soviet Union, but that was at a time when our military was at the pinnacle of its strength, not now when Obama has starved our military for funding, going so far as to change our national security posture from being able to fight two simultaneous wars to one. That was a change not based on any threat assessment, but rather a desire to divert the savings to his various welfare programs. And he has likewise overseen the devolution of our nuclear capacity -- something that has maintained the peace in Europe for 75 years -- because of his insane, utopian vision of a world without nuclear weapons. Somebody, please inform the North Koreans, the Iranians, and the other Middle Eastern nations now initiating their own nuclear weapons programs.
Bookworm Room has added her own cogent thoughts to this list above. To paraphrase, in the past, when challenges faced our nation, we had a fundamental love of country to join us. Our immigrants once came for the freedom to seek wealth. Yet today, "our immigrants come for handouts that they then wire to the tyrannies back home." And worst of all:
Our young people once thought that we brought freedom to the world; our young people now believe that we are evil. When a nation's young people think that they and their country are unworthy, the ink is on the suicide pact. And when they've been trained to think of themselves as fragile victims, you can bet that the first drop of blood spilled will seal that pact.
It is hard for me to believe that America will retain a dominant position in the world beyond another decade or so. Perhaps this would not matter if America was intrinsically evil as the left seems to think, or if those who would replace us were benign. The reality is that no nation is strong enough to take our place at the moment, and those who will vie for influence do not have a history of rule by law or democracy. Nor do I believe there is any leader we could elect in 2016 that could restore the Constitutional systems that have allowed us to flourish for much of the past two centuries.
That said, perhaps in response to the key tests and trials foreseeable on our national horizon, things might change. My pessimism is moderated by the reality that history has few straight lines, and great nations have rarely gone gentle into that good night. But my pessimism is made worse by the knowledge that, with key tests and trials come great costs in gold and in blood. The question is not whether America is in decline, but how low we must fall before we even begin to recover, and at what cost?
According to an article in the WSJ (available around the paywall here), the 2012 raid on the bin Laden compound in Pakistan netted the single greatest collection of intelligence materials since 9/11. At the time -- and since -- the Obama message was that al Qaeda was all but destroyed and that it was time to wind down the war on terror. As Obama said, when two years ago he asked Congress to repeal the Authorization For Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed in the wake of 9/11, this war on terror "must end."
However, the wealth of materials captured in the bin Laden raid told a different story. They told of a vastly expanding threat from al Qaeda, the Taliban and the ISIS, as well as complicity by Iran. Those facts contradicted the Obama administration's narrative, so not only were they kept from the public eye, but in what can only be seen as treasonous insanity, they were walled off from analysis by our intelligence community for at least a year, and have had only limited availability since. Yes, read that last line twice and let it sink in.
After a pitched bureaucratic battle [that lasted about a year], a small team of analysts from the Defense Intelligence Agency and Centcom was given time-limited, read-only access to the documents. The DIA team began producing analyses reflecting what they were seeing in the documents.
At precisely the time Mr. Obama was campaigning on the imminent death of al Qaeda, those with access to the bin Laden documents were seeing, in bin Laden’s own words, that the opposite was true. Says Lt. Gen. Flynn: “By that time, they probably had grown by about—I’d say close to doubling by that time. And we knew that.”
This wasn’t what the Obama White House wanted to hear. So the administration cut off DIA access to the documents and instructed DIA officials to stop producing analyses based on them.
Even this limited glimpse into the broader set of documents revealed the problems with the administration’s claims about al Qaeda. Bin Laden had clear control of al Qaeda and was intimately involved in day-to-day management. More important, given the dramatic growth of the terror threat in the years since, the documents showed that bin Laden had expansion plans. . . .
The WSJ article goes on to argue for making all of the documents from the bin Laden raid publicly available. I'd be satisfied if they'd just make them available to our intel analysts. This incident highlights both how and why Obama's foreign policy has been a complete disaster for our national security. Obama's policies are completely out of touch with reality. Obama values ideology and political power more than he does our national security. And while our nation can recover from the economic disaster that the Obama regime has been, it is far less certain that we can recover from the damage Obama has done to our national security,
In 2008, I wrote a post supporting John McCain's presidential bid on the issue of national security. I argued that McCain could be expected to make national security decisions respecting "Iran, Iraq and terrorism" based on the long term interests of our country while Obama would make such decisions based on ideology and polls. I think history has proven my point with a terrible vengeance, but it is a hollow 'I told you so.' Even I never expected this degree of disaster. As Victor Davis Hanson recently stated, "Obama’s morally confused foreign policy is making the world more dangerous by the day."
- Obama refused to intercede in Syria at the start of their civil war. While Obama fiddled, pro-Western forces in Syria were overcome by the Sunni radical groups. Syria is now a war for spoils between the Wahabbi radicals of ISIS and the mad mullahs of Iran.
- Obama's war in Libya against Qaddafi, who at least maintained the neutrality of that country, has opened up Libya for exploitation by ISIS and al Qaeda.
- Obama fully supported the Muslim Brotherhood administration of Mohamed Morsi in Egypt as they used authoritarian tactics to reshape that nation into a permanent theocracy. The Obama administration still maintains ties with the Muslim Brotherhood while having a very cool relationship with Egypt's secular leader, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who, it should be noted, is the only national leader, Islamic or otherwise, to call for a reform of Islam.
- Obama refuses to even acknowledge Islam's role in the Islamic terrorism that is reshaping our world. That refusal to engage in the war of ideas guarantees that Islamic terrorism, perhaps apocalyptic given the ever increasing likelihood of a WMD attack, will never be defeated.
- Obama's entire foreign policy, based on fantasy and, we now know, a simple refusal to acknowlede uncomfortable facts, has allowed for the rise of ISIS, an utterly animalistic group that has now have proclaimed a caliphate in the areas of Syria and Iraq where they hold sway. In addition, the ISIS now hold parts of Libya. The ISIS threatens to destabilize other Sunni countries in the already unstable Middle East.
- Obama, who named as one of his many insane, utopian goals, a world without nuclear weapons, has significantly reduced our nuclear arms capacity That nuclear capacity is what has kept the peace in Europe, the Pax Americana, of the past near seventy years.
- Obama unilaterally changed our national defense posture from being able to fight in two theaters of war simultaneously -- our defense posture since WWII -- to being able to fight in one. This was certainly not based on any threat assessment. It was based on his desire to use more of our nations wealth to fund his domestic programs.
- Under Obama, defense spending has become our nation's lowest priority, and, according to a 2015 Heritage Foundation analysis, our military capabilities are significantly declining. Add to that is Obama's decision to use our military to advance the social policies of radical feminists by allowing women into the combat arms without even the pretense of a study to determine how this would effect, let alone enhance, our war fighting capability.
- Obama, who promised in his 2008 campaign and again in his 2012 campaign that he would stop Iran's nuclear program, has broken a sanctions regime that had finally brought the Iranian theocracy to its knees. Iran is the quintessential bad actor in the world. The mad mullahs of Iran have been at war with U.S. interests, and often times the U.S. itself, since almost the first day Iran's theocracy was proclaimed in 1979. The mad mullahs pose the single greatest threat to our and the world's long term security. Yet Obama appears on the cusp of cutting a deal with Iran to allow them to continue their nuclear enrichment - and thus their march towards a nuclear arsenal.
- Obama, by allowing Iran to continue its nuclear program, is igniting a nuclear arms race in the Middle East as Saudi Arabia and other nations start their own nuclear programs for self defense. The only thing more frightening than Iran with nuclear weapons is Iran and the Wahhabists of Saudi Arabia with nuclear weapons.
- Obama, when presented with a rare strategic opportunity during Iran's Green Revolution to perhaps topple or at least alter the trajectory of Iran's bloody and lawless theocracy, wholly ignored the opportunity until the mad mullahs had almost completely regained control.
- Russia has already invaded the Ukraine, and several NATO nations are concerned, probably not unreasonably, that Russia might invade and that NATO, led by the U.S., will not respond.
- North Korea is continuing to build and refine its nuclear arsenal. And its Dear Leader is beating the war drums, telling Army commanders this week to prepare for a Great War of Reunification against the U.S. and South Korea.
The world today is a far more dangerous place for America than it was in 2008, when Obama took office. We can't stop Obama's continued degradation of our national security between now and 2017, but let us hope we can slow it, at least in regards to Iran's march to a nuclear arsenal. Otherwise, our nation will not recover from the damage Obama has done and may yet do.
Former NSA and later CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden is one of the people in the best position to discuss the NSA programs that aggregate vast amounts of "meta-data" on phone calls in, to and from the U.S. Here he is on the Fox News Sunday show, speaking of their use, value, and alluding to safeguards:
In the WSJ,former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey wrote today in full throated defense both of the NSA program and to assure that it is not being misused, drawing contrasts to the IRS. He also takes pains to point out that the type of meta-data being gathered by the NSA does not violate Article 4 of the Constitution.
I am inclined to agree that the NSA program is probably valid and legal. It is unfortunate for the nation that the exposure of this program comes on the heels of real scandals of government abuse of power. It is more unfortunate that this reveals yet more of our intelligence methods to those who would do us harm.
The leak of this information came from Edward Snowden, a 29 year old described in the WSJ:
Mr. Snowden told the Guardian he grew up in Elizabeth City, N.C., though his family later moved to Maryland. He described himself as having been a poor high school student who eventually obtained a GED. He enlisted in the Army in 2003, but left the military after a training accident. He started working as a security guard at an NSA site, went on to work for the CIA, and left that job in 2009, he told the Guardian.
I have real questions about how this joker got a top secret clearance. That aside, Snowden claims that he leaked the information on the NSA program because he was concerned with privacy and government overreach. But then he seeks asylum with . . . China? Well, Hong Kong, which is today a province of Communist China. Given Snowden's avowed motives, his choice of places to defect ought to be raising, well, red flags. This from former CIA agent Bob Baer on CNN today.
Update: The Daily Beast has a primer on how to keep "NSA at bay. Do government surveillance disclosures have you fearing Uncle Sam’s reach? Winston Ross looks at PGPs, secret phone apps, and burners like The Wire to cloak your digital trail."
Update 2: Dafyyd at Big Lizards agrees that the NSA program was probably Constitutional and non-intrusive to ordinary Americans. Says he, "Nevertheless, I have a very strong feeling (I'll make it a prediction) that, strangely enough, this non-scandal will turn out to be the most devastating scandal of the Obama administration." I concur in the reasoning he lays out in his post.
Law prof. William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection expresses the disquiet I and probably most feel about this massive gathering of data:
But I’m also concerned with what could be done with the information gathered about American citizens not suspected of a crime if put into the hands of politicians and political groups, and bureaucrats who work for or are sympathetic to such politicians and political groups.
That really is the crux of the issue as exists now. From Benghazi to Fast and Furious and, most importantly, to the IRS's multiple scandals, I have no trust that this information will not be misused by the left to punish political "enemies," as Obama has previously classed us on the right.
Also at Legal Insurrection, Mandy Nagy points out that the Snowden leak was largely already made public by NSA cryptologist Bill Binney in 2011 and even earlier than that by NSA employee Thomas Drake. The only thing that is new, really, is that the MSM and the left (to the extent there is a distinction) have taken note and are up in arms about all of this.
Are you considering backing gun control laws? Do you think that because you may not own a gun, the rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment don't matter?
CONSIDER:
- In 1929 the Soviet Union established gun control. From 1929 to 1953, approximately 20 million dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
- In 1911, Turkey established gun control. From 1915-1917, 1.5 million Armenians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
- Germany established gun control in 1938 and from 1939 to 1945, 13 million Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally ill, and others, who were unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
- China established gun control in 1935. From 1948 to 1952, 20 million political dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
- Guatemala established gun control in 1964. From 1964 to 1981, 100,000 Mayan Indians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
- Uganda established gun control in 1970. From 1971 to 1979, 300,000 Christians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
- Cambodia established gun control in 1956. From 1975 to 1977, one million "educated" people, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
That places total victims who lost their lives because of gun control at approximately 56 million in the last century. Since we should learn from the mistakes of history, the next time someone talks in favor of gun control, find out which group of citizens they wish to have exterminated. . . .
Put simply, gun control is a means of insuring that targeted populations cannot defend themselves against government oppression. Indeed, in our nation, gun control started in states controlled by Democrats as a means of insuring that the black population would not be armed.
Of the four wars that happened in my lifetime, none occurred because America was too strong.
- - Ronald Reagan
Our military is being asked yet again to do more with less. I guess if we can repeal DADT in the middle of war, there's no reason we can just cut the military budget, already nearly 20% below historic average relative to GDP, by another $78 billion.
The world is not a safe place. Not all of the laws on paper and nor all of the treaties written in ink will change that reality, nor stop a single bullet. Notwithstanding the beliefs of many on the left, America is not the cause of strife in the world, it is the stabilizing influence. We weaken our military even further at our own peril. We may find that we have saved a penny today, only to have to spend a pound in the long run. While there may be savings to be had in reforming the Pentagon procurement system, I think it ill advised indeed to be cutting weapons systems or manpower.
IF there is any doubt that greens are true watermelons - green on the outside, red on the inside, listen to Hugo Chavez condemn capitalism to great applause at the IPCC meeting in Copenhagen.
While outside, it was a reverse watermelon, with the red being worn on the outside.
Meanwhile, if you want proof of the existence of God, just look to Copenhagen. As the IPCC conference goes into its final day while Gore et al try to convince us that global warming is real and a hot catastrophe is just around the corner, a blizzard is going on outside:
World leaders flying into Copenhagen today to discuss a solution to global warming will first face freezing weather as a blizzard dumped 10 centimeters (4 inches) of snow on the Danish capital overnight.
“Temperatures will stay low at least the next three days,” Henning Gisseloe, an official at Denmark’s Meteorological Institute, said today by telephone, forecasting more snow in coming days. “There’s a good chance of a white Christmas.” . . .
Denmark has a maritime climate and milder winters than its Scandinavian neighbors. It hasn’t had a white Christmas for 14 years . . . and only had seven last century. Temperatures today fell as low as . . . 25 Fahrenheit.
Ace of Spades ponders whether God may be trying to give all of us - and in particular the Goracle - a message? Could it be that bit about "Thou shall have no other God . . ."
At any rate, this led Ace to do a riff on the arguments for and against the existence of God from the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy:
The pratical upshot of all this is that is that wherever Albert Arnold Gore, Junior, chief evangelist for the Cult of the Virgin Gaia, goes, spreading his Gospel of a rapidly-warming earth, the weather suddenly takes an intense turn to the frigid and starts dumping snow on every SUV and private jet in his carbon-throbbing vehicular entourage.
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindboggingly ironic could happen, and continue happening, and happen and happen and happen and then happen again some more, purely by chance, and without some Divine Hand manipulating the cosmic weather machine, that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. . .
The only thing standing in the way of a binding deal to soak the West and regulate carbon world-wide, all in the name of world socialism anthropogenic global warming (AGW), is, in what has to be the world's greatest irony in all of recorded history, communist China. The fact that the Chinese realize world socialism isin't such a great idea - since they practiced it in their own country until the death of Mao - ought to tell us all something. Amazing, isin't it, that the last stalwart defender of capitalism - and perhaps the savior of it if they remain firm - will be a communist country.
Interestingly enough, it was recently leaked that the UN IPCC's call for carbon reduction targets are insufficient to ward off their own most likely scenarios for catastrophe. If that is the case, then the primary motivaters at the Copenhagen conference must be something other than saving Gaia at all costs.
There are certainly many vested interests driving Copenhagen - and their motivations all boild down to power and money. As to the latter, the rent-seekers stand to profit immensely from carbon regulation and the global carbon trading scheme. That scheme is threatened if a new deal is not put in place tomorrow. At least one outlet is saying that the grand bargain today will be a deal to keep Kyoto in place amongst the signatories and add a non-binding agreement for non-signatories, such as the U.S. As EU Referendum points out, such a deal will keep the carbon trading scheme alive:
[T]he deal is that the Kyoto Protocol is saved – which is what all the fuss was really about. That safeguards the carbon market and opens the way for it to expand to the $2-trillion level by the year 2020. Against that, even €100 billion is chump-change - you can buy countries with that sort of money.
Their deal in place, the kleptocrats and the Corporatocracy can go away happy and plan how to spend all their ill-gotten gains, leaving the leaders to grandstand, make their deals, shake hands and strut through their photo-sessions before jetting off in olumes of "carbon" to be greeted as saviours by their underwhelmed peoples.
As for saving the planet, well no-one really believes that greenie shit anyway ... except the greenies, and they don't matter. There is plenty of pepper spray left and no shortage of temporary detention space. Now that the money men have got what they came for, all the rest is theatre.
If one wanted to truly regulate carbon, then there would be a simple carbon tax, perhaps varied by industry and based on the ease with which the particular industry could regulate carbon output. Instead, there is the carbon trading scheme that is, one a massive distortion of free markets, and two, an invitation to fraud, corruption, and gamesmanship.
According to a recent PJM article, the Europeant carbon trading scheme (ETS) that went into effect five years ago has driven up energy prices in Europe by as much as 20% for the rank and file. It has proven a cesspool of fraud, with organized crime exploiting the interplay between carbon credits and the EU VAT tax system. And indeed, "Europol says that in some EU countries, up to 90 percent of the entire market volume is fraudulent." But probably the worst aspect of the ETS is how it has distorted the marketplace. This from PJM:
. . . For example, European steelmakers have threatened to leave the EU for India, eliminating the jobs of up to 90,000 European workers in the process, unless the EU grants the steelmakers free carbon credits worth hundreds of millions of euros. As a result, ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steel company, has gained windfall profits in the form of carbon credits worth nearly €1 billion, for which it paid nothing. By 2012, ArcelorMittal will have accumulated surplus permits for 80 million tons of carbon dioxide, which is equivalent to the pollution generated annually by all of Denmark.
ArcelorMittal is now free to sell its surplus carbon credits on the market or to hoard them for future use. If it hangs on to them, the company will be able to avoid cutting greenhouse gas emissions possibly for decades, effectively undermining the ETS. According to Sandbag, a British NGO that campaigns to improve carbon trading, the EU’s ETS has been turned into “a system for generating free subsidies.”
Even Rajendra K Pachauri, who has been the chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since 2002, has been suspected of having a role in gaming the EU system to profit from the trade in carbon credits. The Mumbai-based Tata Group, an Indian multinational conglomerate which has business ties to Pachauri (who accepted the Nobel Peace Price on behalf of the IPCC (which it shared with Al Gore in 2007) for its work on global warming), may stand to make several hundred million euros in EU carbon credits simply by closing a steel production facility in Britain. . . .
The WSJ expounds on the plant closing discussed in the above paragraph. That closing saw 1700 British workers loose their job and saw the plant moved to India - meaning that there was no reduction in carbon released into the atmosphere. Tata made a windfall. It would be hard to find any better example with which to indict the entire carbon trading morass. As the WSJ concludes:
To summarize: Cap and trade is a scheme that would impose heavy carbon taxes and allowances on U.S. industries, which would then have an incentive to move overseas themselves, or to sell those allowances to overseas companies that could use them to become more competitive against U.S. companies. Like the 1,700 Brits at Redcar, American workers would be the big losers.
If that is not market distortion on steroids, nothing is. And the people paying for it, in higher energy bills and lost jobs, are the rank and file.
The rent seekers won't be the only one's walking away from Copenhagen with their gravy train intact. The third world kleptocrats have a friend in the Obama administration, which, through Sec. of State Hillary Clinton, announced that the U.S. will take part in sending $100 billion a year to either the World Bank or the UN to distribute as they see fit to further the third world's fight against AGW. My ability to state all of the above without a single vulgarity has reduced to zero my reserve of self discipline. I will go Galt before I see a penny of my taxes to this socialist insanity.
Charlie Martin, writing at PJM, notes that, as more data is made public - even beyond the bombshell Russian reveleations of the other day - the more we are finding inexplicable anecdotes wherein AGW scientists have made large upward adjustments to raw temperatures that could not possibly be justified. These include:
- The Keenan study comparing raw temperature data for Alaska to the "corrected, homogenized and cooked IPCC data the IPCC is using for Alaska
- Nashville, where Anthony Watts finds a slight 130 year cooling trend from the raw data that the IPCC has somehow turned into a warming trend.
- Antarctica, where the GHCN has removed inconvienient data points. Digging into it further, it became apparent that the GHCN based its homogonized and cooked warming ternd on a single station in Antarctica - Rothra Station - the one in a heat island that shows anamolous warming.
And as Joseph D'Aleo points out at PJM, it would appear that the adjusted data used by the CRA - that we now learn was cherry picked in Russia and, as we see in the examples above, tortured above - is virtually the exact same figures used by Hadley, NASA, amd GHCN. Further, he points out all the difficulties apparent in trying to determine "global" temperatures, not the least of which are major declines in the number of monitoring stations, incomplete data sets, and the use of the remaining stations to extrapolate temperatures of locations at great distance away - indeed, 1000 kilometers and more.
Bishop Hill looks at the revelations from Russia yesterday - that the IPCC and Hadley have cooked the Russian books to show AGW in that country where the data indicates none exists - from the standpoint of "gatekeeping. As he notes:
. . .at least some sceptics simply gave up trying to get their views published because they knew they could not get their findings past the gatekeepers. This demonstrates that the IPCC reports can never be anything other than biased. The scientific literature does not represent the collected knowledge mankind has about the climate. It represents the collected views of part of the climatological community.
And lastly, perhaps the most criminal aspect of AGW science has been how they have committed a fraud on the public while stonewalling, refusing to provide their raw data, meta-data, computer programs to allow others to verify their work. Thank God for Steve McIntyre, the brilliant Canadian who has persevered for over a decade to correct this situation and set the records straight. Bishop Hill has a post detailing Steve's efforts to verify the fraudulent Yamal tree ring study for nearly a decade while the author, Briffa, stonewalled. It makes fascinating reading.
President Barack Obama, calling current deficit spending “unsustainable,” warned of skyrocketing interest rates for consumers if the U.S. continues to finance government by borrowing from other countries.
“We can’t keep on just borrowing from China,” Obama said at a town-hall meeting in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, outside Albuquerque. “We have to pay interest on that debt, and that means we are mortgaging our children’s future with more and more debt.”
No kidding. So did he come just now come to this epiphany . . . Right after wracking up a world record national debt on borrowed money and driving our federal bond ratings to the brink of downgrading? As Instapundit quite pithily asked, "If Obama were trying to wreck America as a superpower, what would he be doing differently?"
Obama sent a record budget to Congress, proposing billions in funding for every left wing cause imaginable, then claimed yesterday that he is fiscally responsible for asking for cuts amounting to 1/2 of 1% of his total budget. It is shameless to the point of parody. But scratch the surface of the budget and the savings and you quickly go from parody to ominous.
The bulk of Obama's proposed savings are coming from our Defense budget, the one place where significant increases in funding are necessary. And to make matters worse, among those handful of billions Obama intends to save, a goodly part of it comes from deep cuts in our missile defense program. This in a world that is getting more, not less, dangerous, and with our military desperately in need of expansion and refit. Obama is ignoring the exponential growth of the nuclear threat and he is reordering our defense spending priorities in the same manner that France did prior to 1939.
You can read at Hot Air the story of the Obama budget and Obama's mind-numbingly ridiculous assertion of fiscal responsibility for his proposing of $17 billion in budget cuts. And Bizzyblog points out that even the $17 billion in cuts is all smoke and mirrors. I will not add to that. My concern is with the defense side of the coin - and a small coin it has become.
Our military is in dire straights in terms of size and equipment. The following is from an article by MG Robert Scales discussing our military readiness posture in April, 2007. It was, at the time, critical, and there is nothing that I have seen since to suggest a significant change to that posture.
We have learned from painful experience in Iraq and Afghanistan that tomorrow's ground forces must be re-equipped with many more fighting vehicles that are light, mobile, easily transported and capable of keeping more soldiers protected for longer periods. Properly equipping the Army to win the long war will be very expensive. But we have fought 12 wars in the last 30 years and all but one has been decided on the ground. We will fight another one sooner than any of us would like. If we are to break the cycle of underfunding followed by rapid re-funding that has caused so much human tragedy, we must start now and must build a new Army for tomorrow rather than put yesterday's Army back on the shelf.
- MG Robert Scales, discussing the degraded state of Army readiness as of April, 2007. Indeed, as he points out, but for the Reagan era, our military had suffered significant underfunding for decades - under both Republican and Democratic administrations.
You will recall that a central argument of Obama and the left for bringing the Iraq War to an immediate surrender was because our military was undersized and the Iraq war was taking a tremendous toll on our equipment. The fact of a degraded military was certainly true, though the answer to that was not to surrender in Iraq, it was to make a big increase in defense spending. Bush and the Republican administration through 2006 attempted to fight two wars without increasing the defense budget to realistically account for equipment degradation and shortfalls. This remained true when the left took over Congress in 2006.
Now that the left has the reins of power, the one thing that Obama is not doing is making any increases in defense spending. Indeed, instead of rearming the military so it is prepared for the most difficult of confrontations - a conventional war - Obama is making huge cuts in expensive weapons systems that we will need for such confrontations in the future. He is instead, through Sec. of Def. Gates, reordering priorities in order to fight the much less costly "last war." You can read the itemization of cuts here. Secretary of Defense Gates seems fully complicit in this - and if his performance at Senate Hearings the other day are any indication, then he is both acting as the front man for specific Obama policy he is willing to be less then honest in furtherance of that policy. I am very surprised by that.
But that is an aside. The long and short of it all is that, instead of keeping us on a track so that we maintain superiority on the conventional battlefield, Obama is ordering our military to focus on unconventional warfare - i.e., the "last war." While it gives Obama the luxury of not having to sink billions into defense, the "last war" theory of military preparedness has ever been a trap for nations. For example, one need only to look to France in the late 1930's. They prepared for the next war expecting a replay of the last one - and thus, they based their defense around fixed fortifications of the Maginot Line. The line was breached by a new form of warfare - blitzkrieg - using superior weapons. France fell in days.
And it is not as if we face a paucity of conventional war threats. China, North Korea, Russia, and Iran are the four most obvious of those threats at the moment, but who knows where the next threat will come from. Indeed, Iraq was a conventional threat in 2002. But our conventional warfare capabilities then were so superior that they quickly folded - as indeed, they had near a decade earlier. Moreover, we now know that the Soviet Union considered attacking the West in the 1980's. Kim Il Sung put North Korea on a war footing about a year or so prior to that. Both pulled back. Why they did so is simple to assess - they had a very realistic respect for our capabilities to fight a conventional war. To paraphrase - it was "peace through superior firepower." But take away the perception of that superiority and, as surely as night follows day, the enemies of the West will not feel so constrained.
If we remain fully prepared for a conventional war, we can still also be prepared for unconventional conflicts. The reverse is not true. And thus, if we give away our conventional warfare superiority, we do so at great cost. Nor will it be something that can be at all easily resurrected. Combat systems today take years to develop and then years to ramp up production. The decisions made today will be with us for decades to come.
Compounding this situation by orders of magnitude is Obama's unfathomable decision to cut spending for missile defense. One of the cuts about which Obama so spuriously crowed yesterday was almost a 15% cut - 1.2 billion dollars - in the budget for the Missile Defense Agency. Can there be any possible justification for this? This is a system that grows more critical by the day. Pakistan is on the edge of takeover by the Taliban. North Korea wants to sell its technology to the highest bidders. Iran is continuing with their nuclear program and it has kick started proliferation throughout the Middle East. With that in mind, nothing could be more important to the defense of our nation and the free (for the moment) world than a robust missile defense.
Obama's cuts in defense are not rationale. ACORN is set to receive vast amounts of funding, while our military capabilities are to degraded. It leads one to wonder whether Obama is simply cynical and opportunistic, or is he really as naive and unrealistic as his budget priorities make him appear? Or is it a toxic mix of all four?
The Iranian theocracy's dash towards a nuclear arsenal as picked up speed as they make no attempt now to engage in even the motions of cooperation on the nuclear issue. The U.S. changed its policy and met as part of unilateral negotiations with Iran to no avail. Ahmedinejad has announced a near doubling in centrifuge capacity at Natanz, turning out enriched uranium on an industrial scale. There are many meetings going on between U.S. and the Israeli government. The immediate question is whether President Bush will deal with this problem while he is still in office or whether he will kick it down the road. The former is seeming more likely. _________________________________________________________
The mad mullahs race towards a nuclear weapon grows ever apace. On Saturday, Ahmedinejad announced that Iran had doubled the enrichment capacity of its Natanz plant to 6,000 centrifuges. Iran has no use for this nuclear fuel in any sort of civilian energy program. Nonetheless, as Fox reported:
A total of 3,000 centrifuges is the commonly accepted figure for a nuclear enrichment program that surpasses the experimental stage and can be used as a platform for a full industrial-scale program that could churn out enough material for dozens of nuclear weapons.
Iran says it plans to move toward large-scale uranium enrichment that ultimately will involve 54,000 centrifuges.
Moreover, Iran has announced a complete halt to cooperation with the IAEA and their probe of the nature of Iran's nuclear program. This also from Fox News:
Iran on Thursday signaled it will no longer cooperate with International Atomic Energy Agency experts investigating for signs of nuclear weapons programs, confirming that the probe — launched a year ago with great expectations — was at a dead end.
Coming from Iranian Vice President Gholam Reza Aghazadeh, the announcement compounded international skepticism about denting Tehran's nuclear defiance just five days after Tehran stonewalled demands from six world powers to suspend activities that can produce the fissile core of warheads.
Besides demanding a stop to uranium enrichment — which can create both fuel and the nuclear missile payloads — the international community also has been pressuring Tehran to cooperate with the IAEA in its probe of allegations that Tehran hid attempts to make nuclear arms.
That investigation was launched a year ago under a so-called "work plan" between the Vienna-based agency and Tehran.
Back then, IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei hailed it as "a significant step forward" that — if honored by Iran — would fill in the missing pieces of Iran's nuclear jigsaw puzzle; nearly two decades of atomic work, all of it clandestine until revealed by dissidents nearly six years ago. And he brushed aside suggestions that Iran was using the work plan as a smoke screen to deflect attention away from its continued defiance of a U.N. Security Council ban on enrichment.
But the plan ran into trouble just months after it was put into operation. Deadline after deadline was extended because of Iranian foot-dragging. The probe, originally to have been completed late last year, spilled into the first months of 2008, and then beyond.
Iran remains defiant, saying evidence from the U.S. and other board members purportedly backing the allegations was fabricated, and on Thursday Aghazadeh appeared to signal that his country was no longer prepared even to discuss the issue with the Vienna-based IAEA. . . .
And a month ago, Bush radically reversed U.S. policy and took part directly in a meeting with Iran on its nuclear issue. The meeting, which also involved the EU-3, China and Russia was a joke, with Iran refusing to discuss nuclear enrichment then or in the future. Was that meeting designed to justify a U.S. attack on Iran? That is certainly looking more plausible as time goes on. This from the Jerusalem Post:
Recent talks the United States held with Iran are aimed at creating legitimacy for a potential attack against Iranian nuclear facilities, defense officials speculated on Sunday as Defense Minister Ehud Barak headed to Washington for talks with senior administration officials.
Barak will travel to Washington and New York and will hold talks with his counterpart Robert Gates, Vice President Dick Cheney, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Michael Mullen, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley.
. . . IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi returned to Israel on Sunday from a week-long visit to the US as Mullen's guest. Ashkenazi held talks with Cheney, Hadley and other senior officials with a focus on the Iranian nuclear program.
"There is a lot of strategic thinking concerning Iran going on right now but no one has yet to make a decision what to do," said a top IDF officer, involved in the dialogue between Israel and the US. "We are still far away from the point where military officers are poring over maps together planning an operation."
In recent weeks, Mullen has said publicly that he is opposed to military action against Iran which would open a "third front" for the US military which is currently fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. . . .
Barak's talks in the US come a little over a week after the Bush administration sent its number three diplomat to Geneva to participate in European Union talks with Iran over its nuclear program.
The move led to reports that the US was changing its isolation tactic vis-Ã -vis Iran but Israeli defense officials speculated Sunday that the move was really a ploy to buy international support in the event that Bush decides to attack Iran in his last months in office.
"This way they will be able to say they tried everything," one official speculated. "This increases America's chances of gaining more public support domestically as well as the support of European nations which are today opposed to military action." . . .
Diplomatic officials have speculated that the Iran-US talks were also connected to the presidential elections.
Read the entire article. If we are going to go to war with Iran over the nuclear issue - and I think it is inevitable - the sooner the better. Waiting will only benefit Iran, much like waiting through the mid-30's allowed the Nazi's to go from extreme weakness to a war machine of sufficient size that it cost tens of millions of lives to defeat. The problem is exponentially more dangerous when the topic under discussion is a nuclear arsenal. We forget the lesson of Nazi Germany at our peril.
If anyone in the MSM is paying attention, will they start to press Obama now on his suicidally naive and grandiose plans for "aggressive diplomacy" with Tehran? The recent attempt at talks with Iran by the EU, Russia, China and the U.S. to end Iran's march towards a nuclear arsenal were wholly useless did nothing more than throw into stark relief Iran's motivations and strategy. When the Iranian proposals for endless diplomacy but refusing to address its nuclear enrichment make even the Russian envoy life, it is clear that no amount of diplomacy standing alone is going to stop Iran. It really does seem like 1938 with Iran as Germany and Obama poised to become the stand in for Britain's Neville Chamberlain and France's Édouard Daladier. _____________________________________________________
The NYT reports on the recent meeting between the EU-3, Russia, China and the U.S. with Iran. Several things are apparent. One, nothing will stop the Iranian march towards a nuclear arsenal and all the danger that holds for the world. Two, the hardliners are in complete control of the reigns of power in Iran and it is showing in the margins of their increasingly hardline and amateurish diplomacy. Three, Iran wants nothing more than for the West to engage in endless "aggressive diplomacy." Indeed, Obama must seem a gift from Allah to the mad mullahs. This from the NYT:
. . . For the six powers — the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany — [Iran's counterproposal, containing misspellings and incorrect grammar] was just as disappointing as its style. Sergei Kisliak, the Russian deputy foreign minister, could not suppress a laugh when he read it, according to one participant.
The talks on Saturday included the participation of a senior American official for the first time. The six powers were hoping that Iran would accept a compromise formula to pave the way to formal negotiations. For six weeks, Iran would not add “any new nuclear activity,” refraining from the new installation of centrifuges that enrich uranium, and the United States and other powers would not seek new United Nations sanctions.
But both in their paper, and throughout the talks, the Iranians did not discuss the formula, called a “freeze for freeze.” As a result, they left the impression that they wanted to lure the parties into an open-ended, cost-free, high-level negotiating process.
“The paper calls for a huge exercise in talking,” said one senior European official. “If you were to try to implement it, it would take a minimum of several years.”
Officials spoke on condition of anonymity under normal diplomatic rules.
. . . The Iranian document, which has not been made public, offered a snapshot of Iran’s negotiating style. It put the burden on the other parties. Its imprecise language and misspellings were in sharp contrast to the rigorous approach by Iranian negotiators, many of them career diplomats, who were in charge in 2003 when France, Britain and Germany began the initiative of incentives in exchange for suspension of major nuclear activities. Those diplomats have since been replaced.
The paper called for at least three more meetings with Javier Solana, the European Union foreign policy chief, who represents the six powers. Those would be followed by at least four meetings at the foreign ministers’ level, which would start with the halting of any sanctions against Iran, “both inside and outside” the United Nations Security Council.
The Iranian document also seemed to suggest that there could be no discussion of the main issue of contention: some sort of limit on Iran’s production of enriched uranium, which can be used to make electricity or to fuel bombs. “The parties will abstain from referring to or discussing divergent issues that can potentially hinder the progress of negotiations,” the paper said.
The six powers want to use their proposed freeze-for-freeze period as a prelude to formal negotiations on a package of economic, political, technological and security rewards. But Iran has to stop enriching uranium for the formal talks to begin.
In its paper, Iran focused only on negotiating a “comprehensive agreement” for the rewards. The paper also said current international sanctions against Iran would be discontinued. The Iranian nuclear issue will no longer be dealt with by the Security Council or the 35-country governing board of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Only the atomic energy agency itself can deal with the subject, the paper said.
The most interesting posts of the day from across the blogosphere, all below the fold.
Art: Sappho, Charles A. Mengin _____________________________________________________
Callimachus has an incredibly poignant Memorial Day Post where he honors a gallery of the military and non-military who have fallen in Iraq, each with a unique and important story. Do read this one. And as always, see Wednesday’s Hero at a Rose By Any Other Name.
How much improved is the Iraq situation? From Political Insecurity, the story of a Marine platoon just returned to the U.S. from a tour in Anbar without firing a shot. And from Jammie Wearing Fool, this four year low in casualties throughout Iraq is simply inexplicable to - and apparently hoped to be a temporary anamoly by - the AP. Perhaps that is why, as JoshuaPundit points out, MSM coverage of the Iraq war has fallen off by 92%.
Bookworm Room writes on why she thinks conservatives who plan to sit out this election are making a foolish error indeed. I concur. McCain is a fiscal conservative, strong on national security, and will choose conservative judges. And the alternative is not merely bad for America, but potentially catastrophic. Power and Control writes a very insightful essay on what a conservative Republican tent must look like if it is to both retain its most important principals and attain a ruling majority. He (or she) does so by citing to Reagan.
Obama finally resigned from Trinity United yesterday after a radical sermon by one of his long-time associates, Father Michael Pfelger, made the news. Confederate Yankee looks at the many other associates of Obama and observes: "By comparison, Father Michael Pfleger, while a frothing radical in any other company, actually looks sedate compared to other men who have helped shape and mold Barack Obama."
At Stop the ACLU, they opine about Obama's resignation from Trinity, saying "everyone on planet earth will see such a move for what it is: a cheap, years-late political calculation. I guess Obama means to put this on the list of things we are not permitted to discuss." BizzyBlog points out that, though Obama announced that he is severing ties with Trinity, he is explicitly refusing to "denounce it." I do not think too many people will believe that a principled stand.
As Dave in Boca notes, at least some of the electorate are paying attention. Others are busy getting tattoos of their favorite candidate – and as Vast Right Wing Conspiracy opine, "God help us – these people probably vote." Regardless, as This Ain’t Hell notes, it appears that the fat lady is singing for Obama, though it may well be a very long aria.
Possibly no subset of socialist thought has been more thoroughly discredited than multiculturalism. Sake White says common sense will tell you why multiculturalism is unworkable. And Fulham Reactionary will point to how the Labour government utterly refuses to apply such common sense, now inviting Imams into the school system in order to promote multiculturalism and lessen radicalism. Hopefully, as Dhivestan Report memorializes, they will not kill the schoolchildren for failing to memorize the Koran.
An Englishman’s Castle observes that it appears the Scottish Raj may be out of touch with the voters south of Hadrian’s Wall. From Blonde Sagacity, one thing socialists on both sides of the pond do not like is a flag waving display of nationalism. This speaks of the poison of socialism spread through our lands that has as part of its dogma that our Western governments are the world oppressors.
In Britain, as in the U.S., the left attempts to address violent crime by further de-arming the public of anything they might use to protect themselves. As quoted at 4 Right Wing Whackos, "A person properly schooled in right and wrong is safe with any weapon. A person with no idea of good and evil is unsafe with a knitting needle, or the cap from a ballpoint pen." That is a profoundly true statement.
As Sheik Yer’mami observes, the radicals of both the socialist and Islamic variety are in max whine mode over the outspoken and much needed comments of Bishop Nazir Ali. Seraphic Secret notes comments similar to the Bishop’s from Italian journalist and Muslim convert to Catholicism, Magdi Allam, Dinah Lord has the story of two evangelical ministers who entered a Muslim enclave in West Midlands only to be ejected by the police and told that they would be charged with a "hate crime" if they returned to the area to proselytize.
From the Colossus of Rhodey, Islamist organizations are in a whinefest claiming that the term "war on terror" means war on Islam. No, though I wish it really did mean war on several specific sects. This is just a strategy by the Muslim Brotherhood and other related organizations to take the "war" out of the "war on terror" and turn it all into a police action.
Heh. From Hillbilly White Trash. "Back in November of '06 I said that the Republican congress didn't deserve to be reelected but that the nation didn't deserve what would happen if they lost." Betsy ponders Al Franken’s situation and the minimum acceptable standards to be a Democratic Senatorial nominee.
Quoted at American Digest on Scott McClellan: "Not since America's most revered feckless crapweasel, former Vermont Sen. James Jeffords, switched parties have Beltway Republicans been more eager to sew a half-starved ferret into someone's body cavity." Gay Patriot diagnoses Scott McClellan as suffering Huffingtonitis, a disease that manifests with an individual defining "his political views and make[ing] public statements in order to win social approval and/or acceptance."
Visit the swami at the Whited Sepulchre for his prognostications and the most important matters of the day. I think he may be batting 100% when all is said and done.
We are in a cyber-war with China, and likely losing according to the Glittering Eye.
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