By Victor Davis Hanson
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
In the past 40 years, the United States has intervened to go after autocrats in Afghanistan, Grenada, Haiti, Iraq, Libya, Panama, Somalia, and Serbia. We have attacked by air, by land, and by a combination of both. In the post-Vietnam, post–Cold War era, are there any rules to guide us about any action envisioned against Syria or Iran — patterns known equally to our enemies?
1. The target cannot have nuclear weapons. Strongmen in Pakistan and North Korea by virtue of their nukes are exempt from American reaction (unlike Syria or, at present, Iran) — unless they directly threaten our existence or that of our allies. With the end of the Cold War, many rogue states lost the Soviet nuclear umbrella and are still scrambling to acquire their own nuclear weapons to ensure them deterrence, especially against the United States, which has not yet invaded a nuclear nation.
2. We do not attack large countries. About 30 million or so — roughly the population of Iraq or Afghanistan — is the upper limit. That criterion suggests that we will not ourselves seek regime change in Iran (population: 65 million) through force — a different case from punitive bombing or preemptive air attacks on its nuclear facilities.
3. The target should not directly border either Russia or China. We violated this commandment in Afghanistan, apparently encouraged by the global climate of goodwill toward America after 9/11, the short and mountainous Chinese border, and the fact that China shares our fear of radical Islam. But otherwise, after Vietnam and the Cold War, the former Soviet republics, North Korea, Tibet, and the countries of Southeast Asia will always be off-limits to U.S. intervention.
4. U.N. sanction and U.S. congressional approval, however praised and sometimes sought, seem irrelevant. We obtained neither before bombing Serbia, the former but not the latter in Libya, and the latter but not the former in Iraq. We obtained both for Gulf War I, but neither for Panama or for Grenada.
5. Africa seems exempt. Tens of thousands perished in Congo, Darfur, and Rwanda. Africa has oil. No matter. Somalia is as much Middle Eastern as African, and our intervention there was a particularly half-hearted affair. In Africa, even genocide is not a reason for U.S. military intervention — quite in contrast to Serbia, where NATO finally intervened. Idealism is often as praised as it is subordinated to realist concerns.
6. We often intervene in Central America and the Caribbean — the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Haiti, Panama — but are less likely to do so in South America, where the politics are riskier, the distances greater, and the nations larger and stronger.
7. Intervention is mostly a bipartisan affair. Democrats went into Haiti, Libya, Serbia, and Somalia, Republicans into Afghanistan, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, and Libya. Republicans may have intervened a little more since Vietnam, but then there have been more years of Republican administrations. Anti-war protests are usually aimed at Republicans, rarely at Democrats, who enjoy far more latitude in the use of force.
8. There is no consistent or predictable rationale for invading a country; it can be supposed national interest and/or oil (Iraq, Libya), “humanitarian” considerations (Haiti, Serbia, Somalia), spheres of interest (Grenada, Panama), or simple retaliation (Afghanistan).
9. The insertion of ground troops is necessary to create postwar governments (Afghanistan, Iraq, Serbia, etc.); without them we have little influence (Libya).
10. The target is usually a government rather than gangs, tribes, or terrorists; if it is one of the latter, either we do not go in to remove those in control, whatever the provocation (Lebanon), or we fail when we do (Haiti, Somalia). The verdict on Afghanistan is still out.
11. We are adept at removing dictators (Afghanistan, Grenada, Iraq, Libya, Panama, Serbia), but less so at fostering calm in their wake (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya).
12. The American people usually favor intervention at the outset, but regret it when hundreds of Americans are killed, or violence continues. Those who most assiduously demanded action are most likely to blame the leaders who followed their advice, apparently embarrassed when violence continues and our losses mount.
13. Russia and China almost always oppose our intervention. nations that support our intervention usually do so privately — and publicly only to the degree post facto that it is clear that we succeeded quickly and without much turmoil.
14. The U.N. has far more problems with removing genocidal dictators than with allowing them to perpetuate genocide.
15. No intervention provides much of a model for any other.
Based on these rules, we can make two general observations about Syria and Iran. In Syria, the U.S., on proper humanitarian grounds, could easily intervene through air power alone — without either congressional or U.N. sanction — to so weaken the non-nuclear Assad regime that, as happened in Serbia and Libya, it would surely and quickly implode. That said, we probably will not, given that such action would offend China and Russia, would not ensure quiet or stability in the aftermath, be soon criticized by those pundits who originally urged us to go in, and in six months be either unappreciated or overtly criticized by nations that had initially demanded that we do something to stop the slaughter.
As far as Iran goes, based on past precedents, there is zero chance that the United States would ever intervene to change the government, either on the ground or by an extended bombing campaign — and only a slight chance we will preempt by bombing suspected Iranian nuclear facilities.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
The State of the World: Explaining U.S. Strategy
By George Friedman
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
The fall of the Soviet Union ended the European epoch, the period in which European power dominated the world. It left the United States as the only global power, something for which it was culturally and institutionally unprepared. Since the end of World War II, the United States had defined its foreign policy in terms of its confrontation with the Soviet Union. Virtually everything it did around the world in some fashion related to this confrontation. The fall of the Soviet Union simultaneously freed the United States from a dangerous confrontation and eliminated the focus of its foreign policy.
In the course of a century, the United States had gone from marginal to world power. It had waged war or Cold War from 1917 until 1991, with roughly 20 years of peace between the two wars dominated by the Great Depression and numerous interventions in Latin America. Accordingly, the 20th century was a time of conflict and crisis for the United States. It entered the century without well-developed governmental institutions for managing its foreign policy. It built its foreign policy apparatus to deal with war and the threat of war; the sudden absence of an adversary inevitably left the United States off balance.
After the Cold War
The post-Cold War period can be divided into three parts. A simultaneous optimism and uncertainty marked the first, which lasted from 1992 until 2001. On one hand, the fall of the Soviet Union promised a period in which economic development supplanted war. On the other, American institutions were born in battle, so to speak, so transforming them for a time of apparently extended peace was not easy. Presidents George HW Bush and Bill Clinton both pursued a policy built around economic growth, with periodic and not fully predictable military interventions in places such as Panama, Somalia, Haiti and Kosovo.
These interventions were not seen as critical to U.S. national security. In some cases, they were seen as solving a marginal problem, such as Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega's drug trafficking. Alternatively, they were explained as primarily humanitarian missions. Some have sought a pattern or logic to these varied interventions; in fact, they were as random as they appeared, driven more by domestic politics and alliance pressures than any clear national purpose. U.S. power was so overwhelming that these interventions cost relatively little and risked even less.
The period where indulgences could be tolerated ended on Sept. 11, 2001. At that point, the United States faced a situation congruent with its strategic culture. It had a real, if unconventional, enemy that posed a genuine threat to the homeland. The institutions built up during and after World War II could function again effectively. In an odd and tragic way, the United States was back in its comfort zone, fighting a war it saw as imposed on it.
The period from 2001 until about 2007 consisted of a series of wars in the Islamic world. Like all wars, they involved brilliant successes and abject failures. They can be judged one of two ways. First, if the wars were intended to prevent al Qaeda from ever attacking the United States again in the fashion of 9/11, they succeeded. Even if it is difficult to see how the war in Iraq meshes with this goal, all wars involve dubious operations; the measure of war is success. If, however, the purpose of these wars was to create a sphere of pro-U.S. regimes, stable and emulating American values, they clearly failed.
By 2007 and the surge in Iraq, U.S. foreign policy moved into its present phase. No longer was the primary goal to dominate the region. Rather, it was to withdraw from the region while attempting to sustain regimes able to defend themselves and not hostile to the United States. The withdrawal from Iraq did not achieve this goal; the withdrawal from Afghanistan probably will not either. Having withdrawn from Iraq, the United States will withdraw from Afghanistan regardless of the aftermath. The United States will not end its involvement in the region, and the primary goal of defeating al Qaeda will no longer be the centerpiece.
President Barack Obama continued the strategy his predecessor, George W. Bush, set in Iraq after 2007. While Obama increased forces beyond what Bush did in Afghanistan, he nevertheless accepted the concept of a surge -- the increase of forces designed to facilitate withdrawal. For Obama, the core strategic problem was not the wars but rather the problem of the 1990s -- namely, how to accommodate the United States and its institutions to a world without major enemies.
The Failure of Reset
The reset button Hillary Clinton gave to the Russians symbolized Obama's strategy. Obama wanted to reset U.S. foreign policy to the period before 9/11, a period when U.S. interventions, although frequent, were minor and could be justified as humanitarian. Economic issues dominated the period, and the primary issue was managing prosperity. It also was a period in which U.S.-European and U.S.-Chinese relations fell into alignment, and when U.S.-Russian relations were stable. Obama thus sought a return to a period when the international system was stable, pro-American and prosperous. While understandable from an American point of view, Russia, for example, considers the 1990s an unmitigated disaster to which it must never return.
The problem in this strategy was that it was impossible to reset the international system. The prosperity of the 1990s had turned into the difficulties of the post-2008 financial crisis. This obviously created preoccupations with managing the domestic economy, but as we saw in our first installment, the financial crisis redefined the way the rest of the world operated. The Europe, China and Russia of the 1990s no longer existed, and the Middle East had been transformed as well.
During the 1990s, it was possible to speak of Europe as a single entity with the expectation that European unity would intensify. That was no longer the case by 2010. The European financial crisis had torn apart the unity that had existed in the 1990s, putting European institutions under intense pressure along with trans-Atlantic institutions such as NATO. In many ways, the United States was irrelevant to the issues the European Union faced. The Europeans might have wanted money from the Americans, but they did not want 1990s-style leadership.
China had also changed. Unease about the state of its economy had replaced the self-confidence of the elite that had dominated during the 1990s in China. Its exports were under heavy pressure, and concerns about social stability had increased. China also had become increasingly repressive and hostile, at least rhetorically, in its foreign policy.
In the Middle East, there was little receptivity to Obama's public diplomacy. In practical terms, the expansion of Iranian power was substantial. Given Israeli fears over Iranian nuclear weapons, Obama found himself walking a fine line between possible conflict with Iran and allowing events to take their own course.
Limiting Intervention
This emerged as the foundation of U.S. foreign policy. Where previously the United States saw itself as having an imperative to try to manage events, Obama clearly saw that as a problem. As seen in this strategy, the United States has limited resources that have been overly strained during the wars. Rather than attempting to manage foreign events, Obama is shifting U.S. strategy toward limiting intervention and allowing events to proceed on their own.
Strategy in Europe clearly reflects this. Washington has avoided any attempt to lead the Europeans to a solution even though the United States has provided massive assistance via the Federal Reserve. This strategy is designed to stabilize rather than to manage. With the Russians, who clearly have reached a point of self-confidence, the failure of an attempt to reset relations resulted in a withdrawal of U.S. focus and attention in the Russian periphery and a willingness by Washington to stand by and allow the Russians to evolve as they will. Similarly, whatever the rhetoric of China and U.S. discussions of redeployment to deal with the Chinese threat, U.S. policy remains passive and accepting.
It is in Iran that we see this most clearly. Apart from nuclear weapons, Iran is becoming a major regional power with a substantial sphere of influence. Rather than attempt to block the Iranians directly, the United States has chosen to stand by and allow the game to play out, making it clear to the Israelis that it prefers diplomacy over military action, which in practical terms means allowing events to take their own course.
This is not necessarily a foolish policy. The entire notion of the balance of power is built on the assumption that regional challengers confront regional opponents who will counterbalance them. Balance-of-power theory assumes the leading power intervenes only when an imbalance occurs. Since no intervention is practical in China, Europe or Russia, a degree of passivity makes sense. In the case of Iran, where military action against its conventional forces is difficult and against its nuclear facilities risky, the same logic applies.
In this strategy, Obama has not returned to the 1990s. Rather, he is attempting to stake out new ground. It is not isolationism in its classic sense, as the United States is now the only global power. He appears to be engineering a new strategy, acknowledging that many outcomes in most of the world are acceptable to the United States and that no one outcome is inherently superior or possible to achieve. The U.S. interest lies in resuming its own prosperity; the arrangements the rest of the world makes are, within very broad limits, acceptable.
Put differently, unable to return U.S. foreign policy to the 1990s and unwilling and unable to continue the post-9/11 strategy, Obama is pursuing a policy of acquiescence. He is decreasing the use of military force and, having limited economic leverage, allowing the system to evolve on its own.
Implicit in this strategy is the existence of overwhelming military force, particularly naval power.
Europe is not manageable through military force, and it poses the most serious long-term threat. As Europe frays, Germany's interests may be better served in a relationship with Russia. Germany needs Russian energy, and Russia needs German technology. Neither is happy with American power, and together they may limit it. Indeed, an entente between Germany and Russia was a founding fear of U.S. foreign policy from World War I until the Cold War. This is the only combination that could conceivably threaten the United States. The American counter here is to support Poland, which physically divides the two, along with other key allies in Europe, and the United States is doing this with a high degree of caution.
China is highly vulnerable to naval force because of the configuration of its coastal waters, which provides choke points for access to its shores. The ultimate Chinese fear is an American blockade, which the weak Chinese navy would be unable to counter, but this is a distant fear. Still, it is the ultimate American advantage.
Russia's vulnerability lies in the ability of its former fellow members of the Soviet Union, which it is trying to organize into a Eurasian Union, to undermine its post-Soviet agenda. The United States has not interfered in this process significantly, but it has economic incentives and covert influence it could use to undermine or at least challenge Russia. Russia is aware of these capabilities and that the United States has not yet used them.
The same strategy is in place with Iran. Sanctions on Iran are unlikely to work because they are too porous and China and Russia will not honor them. Still, the United States pursues them not for what they will achieve but for what they will avoid -- namely, direct action. Rhetoric aside, the assumption underlying U.S. quiescence is that regional forces, the Turks in particular, will be forced to deal with the Iranians themselves, and that patience will allow a balance of power to emerge.
The Risks of Inaction
U.S. strategy under Obama is classic in the sense that it allows the system to evolve as it will, thereby allowing the United States to reduce its efforts. On the other hand, U.S. military power is sufficient that should the situation evolve unsatisfactorily, intervention and reversal is still possible. Obama has to fight the foreign policy establishment, particularly the U.S. Defense Department and intelligence community, to resist older temptations. He is trying to rebuild the foreign policy architecture away from the World War II-Cold War model, and that takes time.
The weakness in Obama's strategy is that the situation in many regions could suddenly and unexpectedly move in undesirable directions. Unlike the Cold War system, which tended to react too soon to problems, it is not clear that the current system won't take too long to react. Strategies create psychological frameworks that in turn shape decisions, and Obama has created a situation wherein the United States may not react quickly enough if the passive approach were to collapse suddenly.
It is difficult to see the current strategy as a permanent model. Before balances of power are created, great powers must ensure that a balance is possible. In Europe, within China, against Russia and in the Persian Gulf, it is not clear what the balance consists of. It is not obvious that the regional balance will contain emerging powers. Therefore, this is not a classic balance-of-power strategy. Rather it is an ad hoc strategy imposed by the financial crisis and its impact on psychology and by war-weariness. These issues cannot be ignored, but they do not provide a stable foundation for a long-term policy, which will likely replace the one Obama is pursuing now.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
The fall of the Soviet Union ended the European epoch, the period in which European power dominated the world. It left the United States as the only global power, something for which it was culturally and institutionally unprepared. Since the end of World War II, the United States had defined its foreign policy in terms of its confrontation with the Soviet Union. Virtually everything it did around the world in some fashion related to this confrontation. The fall of the Soviet Union simultaneously freed the United States from a dangerous confrontation and eliminated the focus of its foreign policy.
In the course of a century, the United States had gone from marginal to world power. It had waged war or Cold War from 1917 until 1991, with roughly 20 years of peace between the two wars dominated by the Great Depression and numerous interventions in Latin America. Accordingly, the 20th century was a time of conflict and crisis for the United States. It entered the century without well-developed governmental institutions for managing its foreign policy. It built its foreign policy apparatus to deal with war and the threat of war; the sudden absence of an adversary inevitably left the United States off balance.
After the Cold War
The post-Cold War period can be divided into three parts. A simultaneous optimism and uncertainty marked the first, which lasted from 1992 until 2001. On one hand, the fall of the Soviet Union promised a period in which economic development supplanted war. On the other, American institutions were born in battle, so to speak, so transforming them for a time of apparently extended peace was not easy. Presidents George HW Bush and Bill Clinton both pursued a policy built around economic growth, with periodic and not fully predictable military interventions in places such as Panama, Somalia, Haiti and Kosovo.
These interventions were not seen as critical to U.S. national security. In some cases, they were seen as solving a marginal problem, such as Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega's drug trafficking. Alternatively, they were explained as primarily humanitarian missions. Some have sought a pattern or logic to these varied interventions; in fact, they were as random as they appeared, driven more by domestic politics and alliance pressures than any clear national purpose. U.S. power was so overwhelming that these interventions cost relatively little and risked even less.
The period where indulgences could be tolerated ended on Sept. 11, 2001. At that point, the United States faced a situation congruent with its strategic culture. It had a real, if unconventional, enemy that posed a genuine threat to the homeland. The institutions built up during and after World War II could function again effectively. In an odd and tragic way, the United States was back in its comfort zone, fighting a war it saw as imposed on it.
The period from 2001 until about 2007 consisted of a series of wars in the Islamic world. Like all wars, they involved brilliant successes and abject failures. They can be judged one of two ways. First, if the wars were intended to prevent al Qaeda from ever attacking the United States again in the fashion of 9/11, they succeeded. Even if it is difficult to see how the war in Iraq meshes with this goal, all wars involve dubious operations; the measure of war is success. If, however, the purpose of these wars was to create a sphere of pro-U.S. regimes, stable and emulating American values, they clearly failed.
By 2007 and the surge in Iraq, U.S. foreign policy moved into its present phase. No longer was the primary goal to dominate the region. Rather, it was to withdraw from the region while attempting to sustain regimes able to defend themselves and not hostile to the United States. The withdrawal from Iraq did not achieve this goal; the withdrawal from Afghanistan probably will not either. Having withdrawn from Iraq, the United States will withdraw from Afghanistan regardless of the aftermath. The United States will not end its involvement in the region, and the primary goal of defeating al Qaeda will no longer be the centerpiece.
President Barack Obama continued the strategy his predecessor, George W. Bush, set in Iraq after 2007. While Obama increased forces beyond what Bush did in Afghanistan, he nevertheless accepted the concept of a surge -- the increase of forces designed to facilitate withdrawal. For Obama, the core strategic problem was not the wars but rather the problem of the 1990s -- namely, how to accommodate the United States and its institutions to a world without major enemies.
The Failure of Reset
The reset button Hillary Clinton gave to the Russians symbolized Obama's strategy. Obama wanted to reset U.S. foreign policy to the period before 9/11, a period when U.S. interventions, although frequent, were minor and could be justified as humanitarian. Economic issues dominated the period, and the primary issue was managing prosperity. It also was a period in which U.S.-European and U.S.-Chinese relations fell into alignment, and when U.S.-Russian relations were stable. Obama thus sought a return to a period when the international system was stable, pro-American and prosperous. While understandable from an American point of view, Russia, for example, considers the 1990s an unmitigated disaster to which it must never return.
The problem in this strategy was that it was impossible to reset the international system. The prosperity of the 1990s had turned into the difficulties of the post-2008 financial crisis. This obviously created preoccupations with managing the domestic economy, but as we saw in our first installment, the financial crisis redefined the way the rest of the world operated. The Europe, China and Russia of the 1990s no longer existed, and the Middle East had been transformed as well.
During the 1990s, it was possible to speak of Europe as a single entity with the expectation that European unity would intensify. That was no longer the case by 2010. The European financial crisis had torn apart the unity that had existed in the 1990s, putting European institutions under intense pressure along with trans-Atlantic institutions such as NATO. In many ways, the United States was irrelevant to the issues the European Union faced. The Europeans might have wanted money from the Americans, but they did not want 1990s-style leadership.
China had also changed. Unease about the state of its economy had replaced the self-confidence of the elite that had dominated during the 1990s in China. Its exports were under heavy pressure, and concerns about social stability had increased. China also had become increasingly repressive and hostile, at least rhetorically, in its foreign policy.
In the Middle East, there was little receptivity to Obama's public diplomacy. In practical terms, the expansion of Iranian power was substantial. Given Israeli fears over Iranian nuclear weapons, Obama found himself walking a fine line between possible conflict with Iran and allowing events to take their own course.
Limiting Intervention
This emerged as the foundation of U.S. foreign policy. Where previously the United States saw itself as having an imperative to try to manage events, Obama clearly saw that as a problem. As seen in this strategy, the United States has limited resources that have been overly strained during the wars. Rather than attempting to manage foreign events, Obama is shifting U.S. strategy toward limiting intervention and allowing events to proceed on their own.
Strategy in Europe clearly reflects this. Washington has avoided any attempt to lead the Europeans to a solution even though the United States has provided massive assistance via the Federal Reserve. This strategy is designed to stabilize rather than to manage. With the Russians, who clearly have reached a point of self-confidence, the failure of an attempt to reset relations resulted in a withdrawal of U.S. focus and attention in the Russian periphery and a willingness by Washington to stand by and allow the Russians to evolve as they will. Similarly, whatever the rhetoric of China and U.S. discussions of redeployment to deal with the Chinese threat, U.S. policy remains passive and accepting.
It is in Iran that we see this most clearly. Apart from nuclear weapons, Iran is becoming a major regional power with a substantial sphere of influence. Rather than attempt to block the Iranians directly, the United States has chosen to stand by and allow the game to play out, making it clear to the Israelis that it prefers diplomacy over military action, which in practical terms means allowing events to take their own course.
This is not necessarily a foolish policy. The entire notion of the balance of power is built on the assumption that regional challengers confront regional opponents who will counterbalance them. Balance-of-power theory assumes the leading power intervenes only when an imbalance occurs. Since no intervention is practical in China, Europe or Russia, a degree of passivity makes sense. In the case of Iran, where military action against its conventional forces is difficult and against its nuclear facilities risky, the same logic applies.
In this strategy, Obama has not returned to the 1990s. Rather, he is attempting to stake out new ground. It is not isolationism in its classic sense, as the United States is now the only global power. He appears to be engineering a new strategy, acknowledging that many outcomes in most of the world are acceptable to the United States and that no one outcome is inherently superior or possible to achieve. The U.S. interest lies in resuming its own prosperity; the arrangements the rest of the world makes are, within very broad limits, acceptable.
Put differently, unable to return U.S. foreign policy to the 1990s and unwilling and unable to continue the post-9/11 strategy, Obama is pursuing a policy of acquiescence. He is decreasing the use of military force and, having limited economic leverage, allowing the system to evolve on its own.
Implicit in this strategy is the existence of overwhelming military force, particularly naval power.
Europe is not manageable through military force, and it poses the most serious long-term threat. As Europe frays, Germany's interests may be better served in a relationship with Russia. Germany needs Russian energy, and Russia needs German technology. Neither is happy with American power, and together they may limit it. Indeed, an entente between Germany and Russia was a founding fear of U.S. foreign policy from World War I until the Cold War. This is the only combination that could conceivably threaten the United States. The American counter here is to support Poland, which physically divides the two, along with other key allies in Europe, and the United States is doing this with a high degree of caution.
China is highly vulnerable to naval force because of the configuration of its coastal waters, which provides choke points for access to its shores. The ultimate Chinese fear is an American blockade, which the weak Chinese navy would be unable to counter, but this is a distant fear. Still, it is the ultimate American advantage.
Russia's vulnerability lies in the ability of its former fellow members of the Soviet Union, which it is trying to organize into a Eurasian Union, to undermine its post-Soviet agenda. The United States has not interfered in this process significantly, but it has economic incentives and covert influence it could use to undermine or at least challenge Russia. Russia is aware of these capabilities and that the United States has not yet used them.
The same strategy is in place with Iran. Sanctions on Iran are unlikely to work because they are too porous and China and Russia will not honor them. Still, the United States pursues them not for what they will achieve but for what they will avoid -- namely, direct action. Rhetoric aside, the assumption underlying U.S. quiescence is that regional forces, the Turks in particular, will be forced to deal with the Iranians themselves, and that patience will allow a balance of power to emerge.
The Risks of Inaction
U.S. strategy under Obama is classic in the sense that it allows the system to evolve as it will, thereby allowing the United States to reduce its efforts. On the other hand, U.S. military power is sufficient that should the situation evolve unsatisfactorily, intervention and reversal is still possible. Obama has to fight the foreign policy establishment, particularly the U.S. Defense Department and intelligence community, to resist older temptations. He is trying to rebuild the foreign policy architecture away from the World War II-Cold War model, and that takes time.
The weakness in Obama's strategy is that the situation in many regions could suddenly and unexpectedly move in undesirable directions. Unlike the Cold War system, which tended to react too soon to problems, it is not clear that the current system won't take too long to react. Strategies create psychological frameworks that in turn shape decisions, and Obama has created a situation wherein the United States may not react quickly enough if the passive approach were to collapse suddenly.
It is difficult to see the current strategy as a permanent model. Before balances of power are created, great powers must ensure that a balance is possible. In Europe, within China, against Russia and in the Persian Gulf, it is not clear what the balance consists of. It is not obvious that the regional balance will contain emerging powers. Therefore, this is not a classic balance-of-power strategy. Rather it is an ad hoc strategy imposed by the financial crisis and its impact on psychology and by war-weariness. These issues cannot be ignored, but they do not provide a stable foundation for a long-term policy, which will likely replace the one Obama is pursuing now.
Why It's Great To Be a Psychotic A-Hole
By Ben Shapiro
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
President Obama apologized this week for the U.S. military's accidental burning of Qurans in Afghanistan. "I wish to express my deep regret for the reported incident," said Obama. "I extend to you and the Afghan people my sincere apologies. ... We will take the appropriate steps to avoid any recurrence, to include holding accountable those responsible."
The Quran burnings prompted massive riots in Afghanistan, as per the Islamist handbook, page 248, which, incidentally, may be the only book other than the Quran published in most Arabic-speaking countries. U.S. servicemen were murdered. The Qurans were only burned in the first place because terrorists were writing messages in them to their friends. None of that stopped Obama from making his apology.
Obama sure taught those Afghani terrorists a lesson. He taught them to keep on being psychotic a-holes.
Let's say you're driving on a city street with your daughter in the car. You accidentally rear end a sketchy looking fellow in a pickup truck, scraping his bumper. He immediately climbs out of the truck, baseball bat in hand, and proceeds to wallop your little girl in the head. Should you apologize for rear ending him? Or should you try to protect her from the second shot by killing this psychotic monster?
The liberal answer is an odd version of the legal eggshell-skull approach to torts -- you leave the victim as you find him. From the liberal perspective, this means that if you scraped a guy's bumper, it's your fault if he goes berserk and murders your child. The same holds true on foreign policy: It was our burning of the Qurans that caused the psychotic behavior. The solution is not to burn Qurans and to apologize as early and as often as possible.
The real solution is something different: Kill the bad guys, or imprison them. No apologies. There's no way to avoid setting off psychotic people; sooner or later, they're going to go off and hurt somebody. The key to stopping crazy people is to go after them pre-emptively, to hunt them down, identify them and take them out of play.
If we don't, we embolden them.
Why not be a psychotic a-hole if you're going to be treated with kid gloves? In fact, you will only be treated with kid gloves if you do act like a psychotic a-hole. Here's why: Liberals assume that people who are insane don't mean what they say -- Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, for example. Once those demented and evil people carry out their threats, liberals then revert to typical eggshell-skull theory -- they were crazy, so we should have left them alone. It's a win-win.
It's actually a win-win-win -- the psychotic a-holes avoid vengeance because, after all, they're lunatics. We don't want to punish people for being crazy. They simply can't control themselves!
The result of all of this is a world run by psychotic a-holes. We are supposed to cater to them, so as not to offend their sensibilities. We are supposed to avoid vengeance, since they're not responsible for their actions. And we're supposed to give them anything they want, to keep the nuts happy.
These people aren't nuts, though. They're evil, and they're opportunistic. When they see weakness, they strike. It's as true for everyday criminals as it is for Islamists around the globe. We cannot surrender to any of them. But our president already is.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
President Obama apologized this week for the U.S. military's accidental burning of Qurans in Afghanistan. "I wish to express my deep regret for the reported incident," said Obama. "I extend to you and the Afghan people my sincere apologies. ... We will take the appropriate steps to avoid any recurrence, to include holding accountable those responsible."
The Quran burnings prompted massive riots in Afghanistan, as per the Islamist handbook, page 248, which, incidentally, may be the only book other than the Quran published in most Arabic-speaking countries. U.S. servicemen were murdered. The Qurans were only burned in the first place because terrorists were writing messages in them to their friends. None of that stopped Obama from making his apology.
Obama sure taught those Afghani terrorists a lesson. He taught them to keep on being psychotic a-holes.
Let's say you're driving on a city street with your daughter in the car. You accidentally rear end a sketchy looking fellow in a pickup truck, scraping his bumper. He immediately climbs out of the truck, baseball bat in hand, and proceeds to wallop your little girl in the head. Should you apologize for rear ending him? Or should you try to protect her from the second shot by killing this psychotic monster?
The liberal answer is an odd version of the legal eggshell-skull approach to torts -- you leave the victim as you find him. From the liberal perspective, this means that if you scraped a guy's bumper, it's your fault if he goes berserk and murders your child. The same holds true on foreign policy: It was our burning of the Qurans that caused the psychotic behavior. The solution is not to burn Qurans and to apologize as early and as often as possible.
The real solution is something different: Kill the bad guys, or imprison them. No apologies. There's no way to avoid setting off psychotic people; sooner or later, they're going to go off and hurt somebody. The key to stopping crazy people is to go after them pre-emptively, to hunt them down, identify them and take them out of play.
If we don't, we embolden them.
Why not be a psychotic a-hole if you're going to be treated with kid gloves? In fact, you will only be treated with kid gloves if you do act like a psychotic a-hole. Here's why: Liberals assume that people who are insane don't mean what they say -- Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, for example. Once those demented and evil people carry out their threats, liberals then revert to typical eggshell-skull theory -- they were crazy, so we should have left them alone. It's a win-win.
It's actually a win-win-win -- the psychotic a-holes avoid vengeance because, after all, they're lunatics. We don't want to punish people for being crazy. They simply can't control themselves!
The result of all of this is a world run by psychotic a-holes. We are supposed to cater to them, so as not to offend their sensibilities. We are supposed to avoid vengeance, since they're not responsible for their actions. And we're supposed to give them anything they want, to keep the nuts happy.
These people aren't nuts, though. They're evil, and they're opportunistic. When they see weakness, they strike. It's as true for everyday criminals as it is for Islamists around the globe. We cannot surrender to any of them. But our president already is.
When Will America Wise Up?
By Michael Youssef
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
When will America realize that the infidel by any name is still an infidel?
We have poured trillions of dollars into Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Egypt, to say nothing of what is more precious than money—the blood of the brave men and women of the United States military. And for what?
To watch Iran’s influence permeate Iraq? To see the butcher of Teheran hold and raise hands with the propped-up presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan? If there is a picture worth a billion words, that is it. That picture of Islamic unity is like using American sacrifice and tax dollars to jab a finger in America’s eye.
Some misguided policymakers in Washington, D.C. actually think we can do good in Syria by supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda types against Bashar al-Assad, the Shiite dictator and ally of Shiite Iran. Those policymakers will say we need to abide by our humanitarian principles and support the revolutionaries, regardless of their Islamic stripes.
However, helping one Islamic militant faction against another is a huge mistake. They know how to use America to serve their long-term purposes, and the ultimate outcome will backfire against us just like it did in Egypt and Libya.
Although history repeatedly shows how our good intentions in the Middle East go awry, we are apparently so desperate for our enemies’ approval that we will abandon knowledge altogether.
What happened to wisdom? What happened to statesmen who take into account historic and sectarian divisions? What happened to judicious diplomacy? Jesus speaks of being wise as serpents and gentle as doves, yet when I look at our foreign policymakers, I see very little serpent-like sagaciousness.
There is a saying in the Arab/Muslim world that truly reflects how various Islamic factions view one another: “My brother and I against my cousin, but my cousin and I against the stranger.”
Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq and Pakistan may bomb each other, but we will always be the stranger, the infidel. The holding and raising of those three leaders’ hands is like a middle-finger salute to America and the West. They proclaim that “my cousin and I are against you.”
No matter how many trillions of dollars we pour into those countries, they will always hate the infidels. If the riots and the killing of two American soldiers in Afghanistan last week do not convince our policymakers of the desperate need for wisdom, then even the threat of our demise may not do it.
Our citizens and leaders who truly understand that region must not surrender to the abandonment of wisdom. We must change our approach and return to judicious diplomacy. The protection of our tax dollars, the lives of our soldiers, and ultimately, our very survival depends on it.
Knowing that part of the world as I do, and having confidence in the principled core of some American leaders, I will keep on pleading for real change as long as I live.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
When will America realize that the infidel by any name is still an infidel?
We have poured trillions of dollars into Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Egypt, to say nothing of what is more precious than money—the blood of the brave men and women of the United States military. And for what?
To watch Iran’s influence permeate Iraq? To see the butcher of Teheran hold and raise hands with the propped-up presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan? If there is a picture worth a billion words, that is it. That picture of Islamic unity is like using American sacrifice and tax dollars to jab a finger in America’s eye.
Some misguided policymakers in Washington, D.C. actually think we can do good in Syria by supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda types against Bashar al-Assad, the Shiite dictator and ally of Shiite Iran. Those policymakers will say we need to abide by our humanitarian principles and support the revolutionaries, regardless of their Islamic stripes.
However, helping one Islamic militant faction against another is a huge mistake. They know how to use America to serve their long-term purposes, and the ultimate outcome will backfire against us just like it did in Egypt and Libya.
Although history repeatedly shows how our good intentions in the Middle East go awry, we are apparently so desperate for our enemies’ approval that we will abandon knowledge altogether.
What happened to wisdom? What happened to statesmen who take into account historic and sectarian divisions? What happened to judicious diplomacy? Jesus speaks of being wise as serpents and gentle as doves, yet when I look at our foreign policymakers, I see very little serpent-like sagaciousness.
There is a saying in the Arab/Muslim world that truly reflects how various Islamic factions view one another: “My brother and I against my cousin, but my cousin and I against the stranger.”
Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq and Pakistan may bomb each other, but we will always be the stranger, the infidel. The holding and raising of those three leaders’ hands is like a middle-finger salute to America and the West. They proclaim that “my cousin and I are against you.”
No matter how many trillions of dollars we pour into those countries, they will always hate the infidels. If the riots and the killing of two American soldiers in Afghanistan last week do not convince our policymakers of the desperate need for wisdom, then even the threat of our demise may not do it.
Our citizens and leaders who truly understand that region must not surrender to the abandonment of wisdom. We must change our approach and return to judicious diplomacy. The protection of our tax dollars, the lives of our soldiers, and ultimately, our very survival depends on it.
Knowing that part of the world as I do, and having confidence in the principled core of some American leaders, I will keep on pleading for real change as long as I live.
Sickening Regulation
By Michael Tanner
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Never underestimate the brilliance of our federal bureaucracy.
The Department of Health and Human Services has announced that it must delay implementation of new reimbursement codes for Medicare. Those new regulations would have increased the total number of reimbursement codes from the current 18,000 to more than 140,000 separate codes. The delay will undoubtedly come as a relief for physicians who will have additional time to try to understand the bureaucratic complexity of rules that, for example, apply 36 different codes for treating a snake bite, depending on the type of snake, its geographical region, and whether the incident was accidental, intentional self-harm, assault, or undetermined. The new codes also thoroughly differentiate between nine different types of hang-gliding injuries, four different types of alligator attacks, and the important difference between injuries sustained by walking into a wall and those resulting from walking into a lamppost.
And Democrats wonder why Americans still resist having the government control our health care?
Less than a month before the Supreme Court hears arguments on the constitutionality of Obamacare, the American people have already reached their judgment. According to the latest USA Today poll, fully 75 percent of Americans believe the new health-care law’s individual mandate is unconstitutional. And if the Court doesn’t throw Obamacare out, Americans want Congress to do so: Half of voters want the law repealed, compared to 44 percent who want it retained. Moreover, those who want it repealed feel much more intensely about it. Fully 32 percent “strongly support” repeal, compared to just 18 percent who “strongly oppose” it. This is consistent with other polls — for example, the latest Rasmussen poll has 53 percent of likely voters supporting repeal, with just 38 percent opposed — and virtually unchanged since the law passed.
Despite constant predictions by the media and the laws supporters, Obamacare is not becoming more popular.
The public seems to understand that government intervention does not generally make things less expensive. And there are good reasons for the public’s skepticism. For example, the Congressional Budget Office reported in December that at least six programs that were supposed to save money under Obamacare not only don’t, but some actually are increasing costs. And Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of both Obamacare and its precursor Romneycare, now says that premiums are likely to rise under the new health-care law. In fact, Gruber warns that, even after receiving government subsidies, some individuals will end up paying more than they would have without the reform. Gee, thanks, Mr. President.
And the public understands that imposing new taxes, mandates, and regulations will do nothing to create jobs in a struggling economy. In fact, a poll released last month by the Chamber of Commerce showed that for 74 percent of small businesses they’re “causing an impediment to job creation.”
At the same time, the controversy over the administration’s contraception mandate has brought home to voters just how coercive the health-care law really is.
Most of all, Americans understand that, from the beginning, the debate over health-care reform has been about control. The Obama administration believes that decisions about health care are simply too important and too complex for the average American and his doctor to make for themselves. Only the experts in Washington can get those decisions right. After all, only Washington can understand the difference between a burn from a hot toaster (Code No. X15.1) and a burn from an electronic-game keyboard (Code No. Y93.C1).
Unfortunately for the Obama administration, the American people just don’t believe them.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Never underestimate the brilliance of our federal bureaucracy.
The Department of Health and Human Services has announced that it must delay implementation of new reimbursement codes for Medicare. Those new regulations would have increased the total number of reimbursement codes from the current 18,000 to more than 140,000 separate codes. The delay will undoubtedly come as a relief for physicians who will have additional time to try to understand the bureaucratic complexity of rules that, for example, apply 36 different codes for treating a snake bite, depending on the type of snake, its geographical region, and whether the incident was accidental, intentional self-harm, assault, or undetermined. The new codes also thoroughly differentiate between nine different types of hang-gliding injuries, four different types of alligator attacks, and the important difference between injuries sustained by walking into a wall and those resulting from walking into a lamppost.
And Democrats wonder why Americans still resist having the government control our health care?
Less than a month before the Supreme Court hears arguments on the constitutionality of Obamacare, the American people have already reached their judgment. According to the latest USA Today poll, fully 75 percent of Americans believe the new health-care law’s individual mandate is unconstitutional. And if the Court doesn’t throw Obamacare out, Americans want Congress to do so: Half of voters want the law repealed, compared to 44 percent who want it retained. Moreover, those who want it repealed feel much more intensely about it. Fully 32 percent “strongly support” repeal, compared to just 18 percent who “strongly oppose” it. This is consistent with other polls — for example, the latest Rasmussen poll has 53 percent of likely voters supporting repeal, with just 38 percent opposed — and virtually unchanged since the law passed.
Despite constant predictions by the media and the laws supporters, Obamacare is not becoming more popular.
The public seems to understand that government intervention does not generally make things less expensive. And there are good reasons for the public’s skepticism. For example, the Congressional Budget Office reported in December that at least six programs that were supposed to save money under Obamacare not only don’t, but some actually are increasing costs. And Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of both Obamacare and its precursor Romneycare, now says that premiums are likely to rise under the new health-care law. In fact, Gruber warns that, even after receiving government subsidies, some individuals will end up paying more than they would have without the reform. Gee, thanks, Mr. President.
And the public understands that imposing new taxes, mandates, and regulations will do nothing to create jobs in a struggling economy. In fact, a poll released last month by the Chamber of Commerce showed that for 74 percent of small businesses they’re “causing an impediment to job creation.”
At the same time, the controversy over the administration’s contraception mandate has brought home to voters just how coercive the health-care law really is.
Most of all, Americans understand that, from the beginning, the debate over health-care reform has been about control. The Obama administration believes that decisions about health care are simply too important and too complex for the average American and his doctor to make for themselves. Only the experts in Washington can get those decisions right. After all, only Washington can understand the difference between a burn from a hot toaster (Code No. X15.1) and a burn from an electronic-game keyboard (Code No. Y93.C1).
Unfortunately for the Obama administration, the American people just don’t believe them.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
What Kids Now Learn in College
By Dennis Prager
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
As high school seniors throughout America will be receiving acceptance letters to colleges within the next month, it would be nice for parents to meditate on what they are getting for the $20–$50,000 they will pay each year.
• The United States is no better than any other country, and in many areas worse than many. On the world stage, America is an imperialist country, and domestically it mistreats its minorities and neglects its poor, while discriminating against non-whites.
• There is no better and no worse in literature and the arts. The reason universities in the past taught Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Bach rather than, let us say, Guatemalan poets, Sri Lankan musicians, and Native American storytellers was “Eurocentrism.”
• God is at best a non-issue, and at worst, a foolish and dangerous belief.
• Christianity is largely a history of inquisitions, crusades, oppression, and anti-intellectualism. Islam, on the other hand, is “a religion of peace.” Therefore, criticism of Christianity is enlightened, while criticism of Islam is Islamophobia.
• Israel is a racist state, morally no different from apartheid South Africa.
• Big government is the only humane way to govern a country.
• The South votes Republican because it is still racist and the Republican party caters to racists.
• Mothers and fathers are interchangeable. Claims that married mothers and fathers are the parental ideal and bring unique things to a child are heterosexist and homophobic.
• Whites can be racist; non-whites cannot be (because whites have power and the powerless cannot be racist).
• The great world and societal battles are not between good and evil, but between rich and poor and the powerful and the powerless.
• Patriotism is usually a euphemism for chauvinism.
• War is ignoble. Pacifism is noble.
• Human beings are animals. They differ from “other animals” primarily in having better brains.
• We live in a patriarchal society, which is injurious to women.
• Women are victims of men.
• Blacks are victims of whites.
• Latinos are victims of Anglos.
• Muslims are victims of non-Muslims
• Gays are victims of straights.
• Big corporations are bad. Big unions are good.
• There is no objective meaning to a text. Every text only means what the reader perceives it to mean.
• The American Founders were sexist, racist slaveholders whose primary concern was preserving their wealthy status.
• The Constitution says what progressives think it should say.
• The American dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima was an act of racism and a war crime.
• The wealthy have stacked the capitalist system to maintain their power and economic benefits.
• The wealthy Western nations became wealthy by exploiting Third World nations through colonialism and imperialism.
• Defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman is as immoral as defining marriage as the union of a white and a white.
Some conclusions:
If this list is accurate — and that may be confirmed by visiting a college bookstore and seeing what books are assigned by any given instructor — most American parents and/or their child are going into debt in order to support an institution that for four years, during the most impressionable years of a person’s life, instills values that are the opposite of those of their parents.
And that is intentional.
As Woodrow Wilson, progressive president of Princeton University before becoming president of the United States, said in a speech in 1914, “I have often said that the use of a university is to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible.”
In 1996, in his commencement address to the graduating seniors of Dartmouth College, the then president of the college, James O. Freedman, cited the Wilson quote favorably. And in 2002, in another commencement address, Freedman said that “the purpose of a college education is to question your father’s values.”
For Wilson, Freedman, and countless other university presidents, the purpose of a college education is to question (actually, reject) one’s father’s values, not to seek truth. Fathers represented traditional American values. The university is there to undermine them.
Still want to get into years of debt?
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
As high school seniors throughout America will be receiving acceptance letters to colleges within the next month, it would be nice for parents to meditate on what they are getting for the $20–$50,000 they will pay each year.
• The United States is no better than any other country, and in many areas worse than many. On the world stage, America is an imperialist country, and domestically it mistreats its minorities and neglects its poor, while discriminating against non-whites.
• There is no better and no worse in literature and the arts. The reason universities in the past taught Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Bach rather than, let us say, Guatemalan poets, Sri Lankan musicians, and Native American storytellers was “Eurocentrism.”
• God is at best a non-issue, and at worst, a foolish and dangerous belief.
• Christianity is largely a history of inquisitions, crusades, oppression, and anti-intellectualism. Islam, on the other hand, is “a religion of peace.” Therefore, criticism of Christianity is enlightened, while criticism of Islam is Islamophobia.
• Israel is a racist state, morally no different from apartheid South Africa.
• Big government is the only humane way to govern a country.
• The South votes Republican because it is still racist and the Republican party caters to racists.
• Mothers and fathers are interchangeable. Claims that married mothers and fathers are the parental ideal and bring unique things to a child are heterosexist and homophobic.
• Whites can be racist; non-whites cannot be (because whites have power and the powerless cannot be racist).
• The great world and societal battles are not between good and evil, but between rich and poor and the powerful and the powerless.
• Patriotism is usually a euphemism for chauvinism.
• War is ignoble. Pacifism is noble.
• Human beings are animals. They differ from “other animals” primarily in having better brains.
• We live in a patriarchal society, which is injurious to women.
• Women are victims of men.
• Blacks are victims of whites.
• Latinos are victims of Anglos.
• Muslims are victims of non-Muslims
• Gays are victims of straights.
• Big corporations are bad. Big unions are good.
• There is no objective meaning to a text. Every text only means what the reader perceives it to mean.
• The American Founders were sexist, racist slaveholders whose primary concern was preserving their wealthy status.
• The Constitution says what progressives think it should say.
• The American dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima was an act of racism and a war crime.
• The wealthy have stacked the capitalist system to maintain their power and economic benefits.
• The wealthy Western nations became wealthy by exploiting Third World nations through colonialism and imperialism.
• Defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman is as immoral as defining marriage as the union of a white and a white.
Some conclusions:
If this list is accurate — and that may be confirmed by visiting a college bookstore and seeing what books are assigned by any given instructor — most American parents and/or their child are going into debt in order to support an institution that for four years, during the most impressionable years of a person’s life, instills values that are the opposite of those of their parents.
And that is intentional.
As Woodrow Wilson, progressive president of Princeton University before becoming president of the United States, said in a speech in 1914, “I have often said that the use of a university is to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible.”
In 1996, in his commencement address to the graduating seniors of Dartmouth College, the then president of the college, James O. Freedman, cited the Wilson quote favorably. And in 2002, in another commencement address, Freedman said that “the purpose of a college education is to question your father’s values.”
For Wilson, Freedman, and countless other university presidents, the purpose of a college education is to question (actually, reject) one’s father’s values, not to seek truth. Fathers represented traditional American values. The university is there to undermine them.
Still want to get into years of debt?
Piracy Is Not Competition
By Robert VerBruggen
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
In the February 27 issue of National Review, Reihan Salam and Patrick Ruffini argue that Hollywood lobbyists have been more successful than they deserve to be, especially by nearly passing the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA). Most of their article’s main points are unobjectionable: SOPA was problematic; the Internet is a wondrous development that should not be overregulated; Hollywood has received unseemly financial favors from various levels of government; and copyright law has been needlessly expanded at the hands of the entertainment industry.
Salam and Ruffini are also correct that the Web has thrown numerous established businesses, from brick-and-mortar retailers to newspapers to the U.S. Postal Service, into turmoil, forcing them to confront highly efficient online competition. They are right, too, that the government should let the market work its magic in these cases. But they are wrong to include the threat Hollywood faces from Internet piracy in this trend.
When brick-and-mortar bookstores complain about the threat they face from Amazon.com, they are complaining that customers will leave them for a superior alternative; when Hollywood complains about piracy, they are complaining that customers have left them for an illegal alternative. They have stopped paying for Hollywood products yet are still consuming them. These are not even remotely similar situations — morally, legally, or economically.
With this distinction in mind, one might find it rather odd for Salam and Ruffini to insist that the solution to piracy is “innovation” rather than law enforcement. By “innovation,” they mean primarily that Hollywood should make it easier and cheaper for customers to buy their content digitally, citing studies indicating that when digital content becomes readily available through legal channels, piracy goes down. But even assuming Hollywood can discourage piracy by cutting prices and offering its content in different ways, since when do we tell crime victims to appease their tormenters?
Moreover, in no other industry do we allow consumers to force prices down by taking products for free whenever they, personally, think the legal versions are too expensive or inconvenient. Any customer may refuse to buy a product that’s undesirable, or even organize a boycott — but then that customer needs to go without the product. Salam and Ruffini provide no justification for singling out industries that sell intellectual property — and little evidence that these industries’ disproportionately young, bratty, and entitled consumers are better equipped than the free market to decide what a “fair” price is for an album or movie that cost thousands or even millions of dollars to create and market. Essentially, they are calling for price controls calibrated to the liking of the Occupy Wall Street crowd.
Salam and Ruffini also note that despite the cratering of sales for easily pirated media — recorded music and home movies, in particular — the entertainment industry as a whole is doing all right by some metrics. But once again, even if this is true, it applies a standard to the entertainment industry that no other sector must suffer under — namely, that it must tolerate violations of its legal rights so long as it remains profitable.
Of course, one may claim that the legal rights themselves are the problem, and should be eliminated or substantially weakened — but Salam and Ruffini take no such position in their piece, at least not explicitly. There are also the matters of how government should prioritize copyright enforcement, and what tradeoff we should strike between enforcing copyright laws and keeping legitimate Internet activity unrestricted. But Congress has for centuries recognized some form of copyright, the Constitution explicitly authorizes the legislature to do so, and even Salam and Ruffini concede that piracy is common and increasing. Thus it would seem that the industry has a strong moral and legal justification to ask the government to enforce copyright law more effectively.
And as regards economics, it doesn’t seem that Salam and Ruffini’s preferred “innovative” solutions hold the key to a diverse and lively, yet convenient and affordable, entertainment industry.
For starters, while making content widely available for low prices does seem to reduce piracy, it hardly eliminates it. In surveys, the number of Americans who reported downloading music illegally decreased by about 40 percent between 2007 and 2010, and even this was partly attributable to a law-enforcement effort (the shutdown of LimeWire, a popular pirate service) rather than improved legal entertainment options. In Sweden, the number of people who pirate music dropped only 25 percent thanks to the appearance of Spotify — which can be thought of as an online music collection to which access is unlimited, so long as users either listen to commercials occasionally or pay a $5–10 monthly subscription fee.
(On a side note, the Swedish survey also indicated that about one-third of Spotify users planned to leave when new limitations for non-paying customers went into effect; these included capping use at ten hours per month and limiting each song to five free plays. These are the people Salam and Ruffini trust to have determined whether entertainment prices are too high.)
And speaking of Spotify, Salam and Ruffini highlight it as the kind of innovation that will rescue the industry from piracy. As Spotify’s own management has noted, many of its users are former pirates, so much of the money it brings in would have been lost otherwise. This is a good way for the company to frame the issue, because there’s not much money to be had.
Spotify’s payment formulas are not public, but various leaks indicate that on average, artists and labels are paid around one-third of one cent every time a user listens to (“streams”) a song. By way of comparison, artists and labels make 70 cents when a song is purchased for 99 cents from iTunes. Thus, a user has to listen to a song on Spotify more than 200 times before earning ad revenue for the artist and label that’s equivalent to a sale.
Seen a different way, when an artist manages to attract a million Spotify listens — no small feat — it brings in just $3,300, and if a given user listens to 20 hours’ worth of four-minute songs in a month, his activity generates just one dollar for artists and labels. Some distributors and labels that have tried Spotify — including my favorite indie heavy-metal label, Century Media — have pulled their music from the service because of the low pay.
Plenty of other labels are still on Spotify, of course. But it’s hard to make the case that Spotify, as an alternative, innovative model, provides reasonable compensation to artists and labels in return for the costs of producing, promoting, and selling recorded music. At best, it can be seen as a loss leader to promote live shows and T-shirt sales — meaning that people like me, who listen to music constantly but rarely interact with bands in other ways, become free riders, thanks to the industry’s attempts to “innovate” its way around a law-enforcement problem.
And, despite not paying artists and labels much, Spotify isn’t making money yet.
Some of the same problems plague a similar innovation in TV and movie distribution, Netflix’s streaming service. As Megan McArdle of The Atlantic has noted, studios initially didn’t mind the low compensation they received from streaming, because streaming was a low percentage of overall consumption and probably cut into Netflix DVD rentals more than actual DVD sales. But as streaming gained ground and threatened other revenues, the low pay became a problem, and Netflix has yet to come up with a solution to attract more studio content. Though the company hiked prices dramatically last year, its streaming service is still lacking when it comes to new movies and recent seasons of TV shows.
Further, while Salam and Ruffini cite statistics indicating that the global entertainment industry is doing A-okay, it’s just as easy to cite evidence that piracy is lowering creative output — as with any complex economic topic, entertainment sales can be analyzed from any angle, and the numbers can say whatever you want them to. Some economists have even purported to prove the laughable thesis that it was just a coincidence that sales imploded at the exact moment when piracy took off.
But piracy does “put pressure on profit margins,” as Salam delicately put it on National Review Online recently. By one estimate, per capita, inflation-adjusted spending on recorded music has fallen 64 percent since its peak in the late 1990s, and is lower today than at any time since at least 1973, despite the fact that every other person you pass on the street is wearing earbuds. The numbers change little when one uses total rather than per capita revenue, and home-video sales are falling as well. It is difficult to tell how much of this is attributable to trends other than piracy — for example, iTunes made it possible to buy individual songs for 99 cents instead of purchasing entire albums — but it seems undeniable that piracy played a major role. That in itself should be troubling to anyone who thinks the profit motive matters — with less profit, presumably, will come less creative output.
And “less creative output” must be measured not only against the entertainment industry as it stood before the Internet — no one is saying we should ban the Web, so such a comparison is meaningless — but also against the entertainment industry today as it would stand with a better anti-piracy regime and the benefits of the Internet. If our failures of copyright enforcement hampered the entertainment industry while the Internet’s sales and marketing potential should have been boosting output, we as a society have lost out.
It’s not possible to measure against a hypothetical world, but one can at least contend that some forms of creative output are in outright decline. As commentator Eduardo Porter noted in the New York Times, while the total number of music-album releases rose between 2005 and 2010, releases of albums that sold at least 1,000 copies — a rather low standard by which to judge whether an artist is making a significant contribution to the world of recorded music — declined about 40 percent. Of course, like Salam and Ruffini’s, Porter’s data are highly debatable — he relies on the Nielsen sales database, which excludes some independent releases and does not count sales of single songs.
The finer points of entertainment economics aside, if widespread and increasingly popular illegal behavior is costing American companies business, and possibly reducing artists’ creative output, it is first and foremost a law-enforcement problem, not an “innovation” problem. It is entirely reasonable for Hollywood to petition the government for better anti-piracy efforts, even if the industry has lobbied for bad legislation in the past.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
In the February 27 issue of National Review, Reihan Salam and Patrick Ruffini argue that Hollywood lobbyists have been more successful than they deserve to be, especially by nearly passing the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA). Most of their article’s main points are unobjectionable: SOPA was problematic; the Internet is a wondrous development that should not be overregulated; Hollywood has received unseemly financial favors from various levels of government; and copyright law has been needlessly expanded at the hands of the entertainment industry.
Salam and Ruffini are also correct that the Web has thrown numerous established businesses, from brick-and-mortar retailers to newspapers to the U.S. Postal Service, into turmoil, forcing them to confront highly efficient online competition. They are right, too, that the government should let the market work its magic in these cases. But they are wrong to include the threat Hollywood faces from Internet piracy in this trend.
When brick-and-mortar bookstores complain about the threat they face from Amazon.com, they are complaining that customers will leave them for a superior alternative; when Hollywood complains about piracy, they are complaining that customers have left them for an illegal alternative. They have stopped paying for Hollywood products yet are still consuming them. These are not even remotely similar situations — morally, legally, or economically.
With this distinction in mind, one might find it rather odd for Salam and Ruffini to insist that the solution to piracy is “innovation” rather than law enforcement. By “innovation,” they mean primarily that Hollywood should make it easier and cheaper for customers to buy their content digitally, citing studies indicating that when digital content becomes readily available through legal channels, piracy goes down. But even assuming Hollywood can discourage piracy by cutting prices and offering its content in different ways, since when do we tell crime victims to appease their tormenters?
Moreover, in no other industry do we allow consumers to force prices down by taking products for free whenever they, personally, think the legal versions are too expensive or inconvenient. Any customer may refuse to buy a product that’s undesirable, or even organize a boycott — but then that customer needs to go without the product. Salam and Ruffini provide no justification for singling out industries that sell intellectual property — and little evidence that these industries’ disproportionately young, bratty, and entitled consumers are better equipped than the free market to decide what a “fair” price is for an album or movie that cost thousands or even millions of dollars to create and market. Essentially, they are calling for price controls calibrated to the liking of the Occupy Wall Street crowd.
Salam and Ruffini also note that despite the cratering of sales for easily pirated media — recorded music and home movies, in particular — the entertainment industry as a whole is doing all right by some metrics. But once again, even if this is true, it applies a standard to the entertainment industry that no other sector must suffer under — namely, that it must tolerate violations of its legal rights so long as it remains profitable.
Of course, one may claim that the legal rights themselves are the problem, and should be eliminated or substantially weakened — but Salam and Ruffini take no such position in their piece, at least not explicitly. There are also the matters of how government should prioritize copyright enforcement, and what tradeoff we should strike between enforcing copyright laws and keeping legitimate Internet activity unrestricted. But Congress has for centuries recognized some form of copyright, the Constitution explicitly authorizes the legislature to do so, and even Salam and Ruffini concede that piracy is common and increasing. Thus it would seem that the industry has a strong moral and legal justification to ask the government to enforce copyright law more effectively.
And as regards economics, it doesn’t seem that Salam and Ruffini’s preferred “innovative” solutions hold the key to a diverse and lively, yet convenient and affordable, entertainment industry.
For starters, while making content widely available for low prices does seem to reduce piracy, it hardly eliminates it. In surveys, the number of Americans who reported downloading music illegally decreased by about 40 percent between 2007 and 2010, and even this was partly attributable to a law-enforcement effort (the shutdown of LimeWire, a popular pirate service) rather than improved legal entertainment options. In Sweden, the number of people who pirate music dropped only 25 percent thanks to the appearance of Spotify — which can be thought of as an online music collection to which access is unlimited, so long as users either listen to commercials occasionally or pay a $5–10 monthly subscription fee.
(On a side note, the Swedish survey also indicated that about one-third of Spotify users planned to leave when new limitations for non-paying customers went into effect; these included capping use at ten hours per month and limiting each song to five free plays. These are the people Salam and Ruffini trust to have determined whether entertainment prices are too high.)
And speaking of Spotify, Salam and Ruffini highlight it as the kind of innovation that will rescue the industry from piracy. As Spotify’s own management has noted, many of its users are former pirates, so much of the money it brings in would have been lost otherwise. This is a good way for the company to frame the issue, because there’s not much money to be had.
Spotify’s payment formulas are not public, but various leaks indicate that on average, artists and labels are paid around one-third of one cent every time a user listens to (“streams”) a song. By way of comparison, artists and labels make 70 cents when a song is purchased for 99 cents from iTunes. Thus, a user has to listen to a song on Spotify more than 200 times before earning ad revenue for the artist and label that’s equivalent to a sale.
Seen a different way, when an artist manages to attract a million Spotify listens — no small feat — it brings in just $3,300, and if a given user listens to 20 hours’ worth of four-minute songs in a month, his activity generates just one dollar for artists and labels. Some distributors and labels that have tried Spotify — including my favorite indie heavy-metal label, Century Media — have pulled their music from the service because of the low pay.
Plenty of other labels are still on Spotify, of course. But it’s hard to make the case that Spotify, as an alternative, innovative model, provides reasonable compensation to artists and labels in return for the costs of producing, promoting, and selling recorded music. At best, it can be seen as a loss leader to promote live shows and T-shirt sales — meaning that people like me, who listen to music constantly but rarely interact with bands in other ways, become free riders, thanks to the industry’s attempts to “innovate” its way around a law-enforcement problem.
And, despite not paying artists and labels much, Spotify isn’t making money yet.
Some of the same problems plague a similar innovation in TV and movie distribution, Netflix’s streaming service. As Megan McArdle of The Atlantic has noted, studios initially didn’t mind the low compensation they received from streaming, because streaming was a low percentage of overall consumption and probably cut into Netflix DVD rentals more than actual DVD sales. But as streaming gained ground and threatened other revenues, the low pay became a problem, and Netflix has yet to come up with a solution to attract more studio content. Though the company hiked prices dramatically last year, its streaming service is still lacking when it comes to new movies and recent seasons of TV shows.
Further, while Salam and Ruffini cite statistics indicating that the global entertainment industry is doing A-okay, it’s just as easy to cite evidence that piracy is lowering creative output — as with any complex economic topic, entertainment sales can be analyzed from any angle, and the numbers can say whatever you want them to. Some economists have even purported to prove the laughable thesis that it was just a coincidence that sales imploded at the exact moment when piracy took off.
But piracy does “put pressure on profit margins,” as Salam delicately put it on National Review Online recently. By one estimate, per capita, inflation-adjusted spending on recorded music has fallen 64 percent since its peak in the late 1990s, and is lower today than at any time since at least 1973, despite the fact that every other person you pass on the street is wearing earbuds. The numbers change little when one uses total rather than per capita revenue, and home-video sales are falling as well. It is difficult to tell how much of this is attributable to trends other than piracy — for example, iTunes made it possible to buy individual songs for 99 cents instead of purchasing entire albums — but it seems undeniable that piracy played a major role. That in itself should be troubling to anyone who thinks the profit motive matters — with less profit, presumably, will come less creative output.
And “less creative output” must be measured not only against the entertainment industry as it stood before the Internet — no one is saying we should ban the Web, so such a comparison is meaningless — but also against the entertainment industry today as it would stand with a better anti-piracy regime and the benefits of the Internet. If our failures of copyright enforcement hampered the entertainment industry while the Internet’s sales and marketing potential should have been boosting output, we as a society have lost out.
It’s not possible to measure against a hypothetical world, but one can at least contend that some forms of creative output are in outright decline. As commentator Eduardo Porter noted in the New York Times, while the total number of music-album releases rose between 2005 and 2010, releases of albums that sold at least 1,000 copies — a rather low standard by which to judge whether an artist is making a significant contribution to the world of recorded music — declined about 40 percent. Of course, like Salam and Ruffini’s, Porter’s data are highly debatable — he relies on the Nielsen sales database, which excludes some independent releases and does not count sales of single songs.
The finer points of entertainment economics aside, if widespread and increasingly popular illegal behavior is costing American companies business, and possibly reducing artists’ creative output, it is first and foremost a law-enforcement problem, not an “innovation” problem. It is entirely reasonable for Hollywood to petition the government for better anti-piracy efforts, even if the industry has lobbied for bad legislation in the past.
"Act of Valor" Directors Focused on Authenticity, not Hollywood Fantasy
By John Hanlon
Monday, February 27, 2012
“We thought that Hollywood’s misrepresented their community for so long that it would be great to get their story authentically told,” director Scott Waugh said about his new film, “Act of Valor.” Directed by Waugh and his colleague Mike McCoy, the film attempts to take an authentic look at Navy SEALs and stars eight active-duty SEALs. I recently had a chance to interview “Valor’s” directors in Washington D.C., where they talked about the truth behind the story, their goals in their film, and the threats that still face our nation today.
“Act of Valor” tells the fictional story of a threat to the United States posed from a group of would-be terrorists who plan to sneak over a dozen suicide vests into our country. After a kidnapped undercover agent is rescued, the SEALs discover the plan to infiltrate our nation and must prevent the terrorists from crossing the border.
Although the story is fictional, many of the things that happen in it are based on true stories. As Waugh said, the film features “five real acts of valor” that actually occurred. As Waugh said, “when you watch it and you see those certain things that seem implausible, we’re just saying, those have happened.”
To add to the film’s authenticity, the film features real gunfire in some of the action sequences and the actual wives and families of the SEALs appear in it as well.
At first, all eight SEALs said no to the film but the filmmakers persuaded them by gaining their trust. They also told the SEALs that they wanted to create an accurate portrayal of what they are like on and off the battlefield. Waugh said that he went into the film with the Hollywood representation of these officers, which he said is “always some screwed-up Rambo Terminator” but he noted that the real men “are just so humble…they were so different than what they are presented as” in other films.
McCoy added that the filmmakers also wanted to show the bond that these military men share. As he said, the SEALs “really understood that we were gonna make a movie about the brotherhood.” After seeing it in real life, he said, “wow, we’ve never seen that before amongst men.”
And the directors were quick to note that the movie is not political. “There’s no policy in this movie. It’s simple. It’s about a threat to the homeland,” Waugh said. He added that because 9/11 occurred eleven years ago, many people question whether or not the United States is still being threatened. “That threat’s still there,” he said. “Thank God we have a fantastic military that threat has been prevented from happening again.”
Although many films don’t present look at who the Navy SEALs are, “Act of Valor” stands out for its valiant attempt at showing what these military men and women do every day. It’s a must-see.
Monday, February 27, 2012
“We thought that Hollywood’s misrepresented their community for so long that it would be great to get their story authentically told,” director Scott Waugh said about his new film, “Act of Valor.” Directed by Waugh and his colleague Mike McCoy, the film attempts to take an authentic look at Navy SEALs and stars eight active-duty SEALs. I recently had a chance to interview “Valor’s” directors in Washington D.C., where they talked about the truth behind the story, their goals in their film, and the threats that still face our nation today.
“Act of Valor” tells the fictional story of a threat to the United States posed from a group of would-be terrorists who plan to sneak over a dozen suicide vests into our country. After a kidnapped undercover agent is rescued, the SEALs discover the plan to infiltrate our nation and must prevent the terrorists from crossing the border.
Although the story is fictional, many of the things that happen in it are based on true stories. As Waugh said, the film features “five real acts of valor” that actually occurred. As Waugh said, “when you watch it and you see those certain things that seem implausible, we’re just saying, those have happened.”
To add to the film’s authenticity, the film features real gunfire in some of the action sequences and the actual wives and families of the SEALs appear in it as well.
At first, all eight SEALs said no to the film but the filmmakers persuaded them by gaining their trust. They also told the SEALs that they wanted to create an accurate portrayal of what they are like on and off the battlefield. Waugh said that he went into the film with the Hollywood representation of these officers, which he said is “always some screwed-up Rambo Terminator” but he noted that the real men “are just so humble…they were so different than what they are presented as” in other films.
McCoy added that the filmmakers also wanted to show the bond that these military men share. As he said, the SEALs “really understood that we were gonna make a movie about the brotherhood.” After seeing it in real life, he said, “wow, we’ve never seen that before amongst men.”
And the directors were quick to note that the movie is not political. “There’s no policy in this movie. It’s simple. It’s about a threat to the homeland,” Waugh said. He added that because 9/11 occurred eleven years ago, many people question whether or not the United States is still being threatened. “That threat’s still there,” he said. “Thank God we have a fantastic military that threat has been prevented from happening again.”
Although many films don’t present look at who the Navy SEALs are, “Act of Valor” stands out for its valiant attempt at showing what these military men and women do every day. It’s a must-see.
Monday, February 27, 2012
When American Jobs and Opportunity are Political Collateral Everyone Loses
By David Holt
Sunday, February 26, 2012
The decision to shudder the Keystone XL pipeline makes little sense. The President rejected the proposal on the grounds there wasn’t enough time to assess its environmental impact shortly after a three year review by the State Department found the project would “ be the safest in the history of constructed pipelines”.
In addition, the pipeline enjoys strong bi-partisan congressional support and the backing of influential groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Laborers International Union of North America. Adding to this, recent polls indicate over 70 percent of Americans support the pipeline’s completion. This widespread acceptance exists because the undertaking would create over 20,000 jobs, provide a reliable source of energy from a trusted ally, and would limit our exposure to price shocks emanating from constrained oil supplies on the global market-like those occurring now.
All of these facts should have led to an approval, instead the President said no. How could this be?
It’s simple. The U.S. environmental lobby made this project a line-in-the-sand. As they see it, stopping the pipeline blocks the development of Canada’s oil sands- the second largest source of carbon in the world. This will facilitate the development of renewable energy and eliminate, or reduce, the need for a carbon alternative.
This view is dangerously naïve and is unsupported by the realities of the world. Blocking the project will not reduce the carbon footprint of the human race; it actually might increase due to carbon shuffling. Worse, denial of the pipeline alienates a trusted ally and provides an opportunity for one of our Nation’s most ardent competitors to gain significant regional influence.
But the decision has been made, and for now at least, we are left to deal with the consequences. Those consequences include a steady increase in the average U.S. gas price by twenty cents per gallon since the project’s denial. American households spent over $4,000 on gasoline in 2011 and current prices indicate this number could jump significantly this year. While the Keystone XL project isn’t a panacea against rising oil prices its completion would have buffered us from this and future increases.
The other consequence is needed employment for workers in our nation’s most struggling economic sectors. While TransCanada has indicated it will continue to pursue the project with a later completion date; the immediate consequence is 20,000 American jobs at a time of stubbornly high unemployment and continued economic malaise.
The rejection of the pipeline meant the immediate loss of 8,500 construction jobs, a sector currently experiencing a 17.7% unemployment rate. Many of these jobs would have been filled by hard-working Americans who could use some good news. According to project data, this includes 2,584 operators, 1,887 laborers, 1,921 welders, 272 mechanics, and dozens of quality and environmental control supervisors. In addition, we also lost 8,500 monitoring jobs and 3,000 jobs at the project’s thirty pump stations.
All of this is lost over false environmental concerns already disproven by one of the President’s most trusted agencies. Never mind the fact the pipeline would have been monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week with over 21,000 data points linked to satellites that feed data to a control center at five second intervals.
Apparently none of these factors trumped the need to satisfy a key constituency that believes our nation must jettison all fossil fuels from its energy repertoire. Due to the decision to please a few at the expense of many our nation’s businesses and consumers now face significant uncertainties, and increased costs; all because the President failed to stand up for science, facts and reason.
America needs energy from all sources to remain economically competitive and struggling Americans need jobs to keep their heads above water. The Keystone XL pipeline would have provided both. Keystone XL’s safety and regulatory standards are unparalleled, it has passed rigorous inspections, and it stands to create 20,000 jobs across a myriad of sectors. For all these reasons, its rejection is difficult to understand and is something we must work collectively to reverse.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
The decision to shudder the Keystone XL pipeline makes little sense. The President rejected the proposal on the grounds there wasn’t enough time to assess its environmental impact shortly after a three year review by the State Department found the project would “ be the safest in the history of constructed pipelines”.
In addition, the pipeline enjoys strong bi-partisan congressional support and the backing of influential groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Laborers International Union of North America. Adding to this, recent polls indicate over 70 percent of Americans support the pipeline’s completion. This widespread acceptance exists because the undertaking would create over 20,000 jobs, provide a reliable source of energy from a trusted ally, and would limit our exposure to price shocks emanating from constrained oil supplies on the global market-like those occurring now.
All of these facts should have led to an approval, instead the President said no. How could this be?
It’s simple. The U.S. environmental lobby made this project a line-in-the-sand. As they see it, stopping the pipeline blocks the development of Canada’s oil sands- the second largest source of carbon in the world. This will facilitate the development of renewable energy and eliminate, or reduce, the need for a carbon alternative.
This view is dangerously naïve and is unsupported by the realities of the world. Blocking the project will not reduce the carbon footprint of the human race; it actually might increase due to carbon shuffling. Worse, denial of the pipeline alienates a trusted ally and provides an opportunity for one of our Nation’s most ardent competitors to gain significant regional influence.
But the decision has been made, and for now at least, we are left to deal with the consequences. Those consequences include a steady increase in the average U.S. gas price by twenty cents per gallon since the project’s denial. American households spent over $4,000 on gasoline in 2011 and current prices indicate this number could jump significantly this year. While the Keystone XL project isn’t a panacea against rising oil prices its completion would have buffered us from this and future increases.
The other consequence is needed employment for workers in our nation’s most struggling economic sectors. While TransCanada has indicated it will continue to pursue the project with a later completion date; the immediate consequence is 20,000 American jobs at a time of stubbornly high unemployment and continued economic malaise.
The rejection of the pipeline meant the immediate loss of 8,500 construction jobs, a sector currently experiencing a 17.7% unemployment rate. Many of these jobs would have been filled by hard-working Americans who could use some good news. According to project data, this includes 2,584 operators, 1,887 laborers, 1,921 welders, 272 mechanics, and dozens of quality and environmental control supervisors. In addition, we also lost 8,500 monitoring jobs and 3,000 jobs at the project’s thirty pump stations.
All of this is lost over false environmental concerns already disproven by one of the President’s most trusted agencies. Never mind the fact the pipeline would have been monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week with over 21,000 data points linked to satellites that feed data to a control center at five second intervals.
Apparently none of these factors trumped the need to satisfy a key constituency that believes our nation must jettison all fossil fuels from its energy repertoire. Due to the decision to please a few at the expense of many our nation’s businesses and consumers now face significant uncertainties, and increased costs; all because the President failed to stand up for science, facts and reason.
America needs energy from all sources to remain economically competitive and struggling Americans need jobs to keep their heads above water. The Keystone XL pipeline would have provided both. Keystone XL’s safety and regulatory standards are unparalleled, it has passed rigorous inspections, and it stands to create 20,000 jobs across a myriad of sectors. For all these reasons, its rejection is difficult to understand and is something we must work collectively to reverse.
Climate Debate Will Burn Public Schools
By Neal McCluskey
Monday, February 27, 2012
With the recent revelations of a prominent scientist using dirty tricks against global-warming skeptics, the overheated climate debate has taken another ugly turn. Worse, the scandal reveals that our children’s minds may be the newest battleground in the unending global warming war.
The scandal revolves around the unauthorized publication of internal documents from the Heartland Institute, an organization in the forefront of global-warming skepticism. Among the items exposed was a plan to create a K-12 curriculum casting doubt on the “consensus” that global warming is real, man-made, and dangerous. Indeed, the most damning document – which Heartland maintains is fake while confirming the authenticity of the others – says the lessons are aimed at “dissuading teachers from teaching science.”
The scandal doesn’t end with publication of the documents, or the possibility that one is a forged fraud, however. It is how Peter Gleick – hydroclimatologist, president of the Pacific Institute, and admitted deceiver – obtained some of them: by assuming the identity of a Heartland board member.
“In a serious lapse of…judgment and ethics,” Gleick stated on his Huffington Post blog, “I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else's name.”
This is hardly the only behavior in the climate debate jarringly inconsistent with the image of scientists as even-handed truth-seekers who simply analyze facts and report objective conclusions.
A couple of years ago a similar act of legerdemain – publication of a purloined trove of emails from climate-change believers – produced considerable evidence that the discussants had tried to strong-arm scientific journals into blackballing anyone who cast doubts on their views. “Climategate” was like getting a rancid pizza from a guy with the flu – both the delivery method, and what was delivered, made you sick.
All this illustrates why everyone – no matter where they fall on climate change – should be greatly concerned about mixing global warming with public schools. It reveals both how contentious the issue is, and how subject scientists – like all people – are to uncertainty and selfishness.
The shear contentiousness of the issue is a mammoth problem because public schools – institutions that diverse people are all forced to support – can’t handle it. Trying to teach hot-button issues usually creates, first, highly divisive conflict, and then barren curricula.
The battle over evolution is illustrative. The debate over the teaching human origins kicked off at least as far back as the famous Scopes “Monkey” trial of 1925, and it still tears communities apart today.
And what’s kept what peace we have? Avoiding the topic, as a recent survey of high school biology teachers found. Roughly 60 percent of teachers reported that they gloss over or skip evolution – even if state standards require it – because of the conflict they fear would result.
But what if one view could be imposed on all kids, without rancor or watering down?
That’s even more troubling. The main purpose of science is to tackle matters we do not fully understand. To teach that there is only one right view on such matters, then, is inimical to this purpose. It is also extremely dangerous, taking everyone down darkened paths, eliminating alternate routes, and leaving no options for escape if what’s “right” turns out to be wrong.
Finally, we see in these scandals that scientists will sometimes stoop to trickery and bullying rather than rely on the power of their evidence. It’s because they are human. If you invest huge amounts of your time and reputation into an idea you will fight to defend it, both because you think you are right, and for your advancement.
What is the best defense against basic, human self-interest? Not handing anyone all the levers of power.
In the case of education, that means moving away from a system of schooling controlled by government, and towards parental choice and educator freedom. It means enabling all to access a curriculum that’s coherent because it’s not a compromise. It means making ideas compete, and giving no one special access to children’s minds.
People on all sides of the global-warming debate will take issue with this, insisting that it would be wrong not to make all children learn their, often biased, “truth.” But climate change isn’t scientifically settled, and even if it were, most public schools still wouldn’t touch it. Only school choice overcomes these myriad, treacherous problems.
Monday, February 27, 2012
With the recent revelations of a prominent scientist using dirty tricks against global-warming skeptics, the overheated climate debate has taken another ugly turn. Worse, the scandal reveals that our children’s minds may be the newest battleground in the unending global warming war.
The scandal revolves around the unauthorized publication of internal documents from the Heartland Institute, an organization in the forefront of global-warming skepticism. Among the items exposed was a plan to create a K-12 curriculum casting doubt on the “consensus” that global warming is real, man-made, and dangerous. Indeed, the most damning document – which Heartland maintains is fake while confirming the authenticity of the others – says the lessons are aimed at “dissuading teachers from teaching science.”
The scandal doesn’t end with publication of the documents, or the possibility that one is a forged fraud, however. It is how Peter Gleick – hydroclimatologist, president of the Pacific Institute, and admitted deceiver – obtained some of them: by assuming the identity of a Heartland board member.
“In a serious lapse of…judgment and ethics,” Gleick stated on his Huffington Post blog, “I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else's name.”
This is hardly the only behavior in the climate debate jarringly inconsistent with the image of scientists as even-handed truth-seekers who simply analyze facts and report objective conclusions.
A couple of years ago a similar act of legerdemain – publication of a purloined trove of emails from climate-change believers – produced considerable evidence that the discussants had tried to strong-arm scientific journals into blackballing anyone who cast doubts on their views. “Climategate” was like getting a rancid pizza from a guy with the flu – both the delivery method, and what was delivered, made you sick.
All this illustrates why everyone – no matter where they fall on climate change – should be greatly concerned about mixing global warming with public schools. It reveals both how contentious the issue is, and how subject scientists – like all people – are to uncertainty and selfishness.
The shear contentiousness of the issue is a mammoth problem because public schools – institutions that diverse people are all forced to support – can’t handle it. Trying to teach hot-button issues usually creates, first, highly divisive conflict, and then barren curricula.
The battle over evolution is illustrative. The debate over the teaching human origins kicked off at least as far back as the famous Scopes “Monkey” trial of 1925, and it still tears communities apart today.
And what’s kept what peace we have? Avoiding the topic, as a recent survey of high school biology teachers found. Roughly 60 percent of teachers reported that they gloss over or skip evolution – even if state standards require it – because of the conflict they fear would result.
But what if one view could be imposed on all kids, without rancor or watering down?
That’s even more troubling. The main purpose of science is to tackle matters we do not fully understand. To teach that there is only one right view on such matters, then, is inimical to this purpose. It is also extremely dangerous, taking everyone down darkened paths, eliminating alternate routes, and leaving no options for escape if what’s “right” turns out to be wrong.
Finally, we see in these scandals that scientists will sometimes stoop to trickery and bullying rather than rely on the power of their evidence. It’s because they are human. If you invest huge amounts of your time and reputation into an idea you will fight to defend it, both because you think you are right, and for your advancement.
What is the best defense against basic, human self-interest? Not handing anyone all the levers of power.
In the case of education, that means moving away from a system of schooling controlled by government, and towards parental choice and educator freedom. It means enabling all to access a curriculum that’s coherent because it’s not a compromise. It means making ideas compete, and giving no one special access to children’s minds.
People on all sides of the global-warming debate will take issue with this, insisting that it would be wrong not to make all children learn their, often biased, “truth.” But climate change isn’t scientifically settled, and even if it were, most public schools still wouldn’t touch it. Only school choice overcomes these myriad, treacherous problems.
Shooting in Afghan Interior Ministry Occurs at a Crucial Time
By George Friedman
Monday, February 27, 2012
Two NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) officers were killed Feb. 25 inside the Afghan Interior Ministry in Kabul. Details are limited, but reports suggest that the two officers, according to some accounts an American colonel and major, were gunned down possibly following a verbal clash with the shooter.
Some reports have suggested that the incident took place in a particularly secure area within the ministry. All ISAF personnel working in ministries in and around Kabul have been recalled. The Taliban have claimed responsibility for the shootings, a standard response to any incident like this.
This is certainly not the first incident of its kind in Afghanistan, though deaths in more secure compounds are relatively rare. Nevertheless, the "Vietnamization" strategy, in which ISAF forces in the country rely increasingly heavily on indigenous forces and personnel for the day-to-day administration and security of the country, almost ensures that elements opposed to the regime will infiltrate indigenous security forces to some degree.
Tensions between the foreign troops and local nationals naturally will build up over the course of a long occupation, and there will be incidents in which an Afghan soldier or policeman turns his weapon on foreign troops in a spontaneous act of rage in a disagreement rather than in a planned attack. Local security personnel can also simply look the other way or actively facilitate an attack.
In April 2011, a suicide bomber wearing an Afghan military uniform was able to get deep inside the Afghan Defense Ministry, where he was gunned down before he could detonate his vest, but not before he fatally shot two other Afghans. In September 2011, an Afghan employee of the U.S. Embassy opened fire on a CIA annex, killing one U.S. national. As for the Feb. 25 incident, the Interior Ministry is a high-profile target for militant attacks, meaning security is high and personnel walking its halls would have been cleared at checkpoints.
Meanwhile, protests have continued over the reported burning of Korans and other religious materials at Bagram Air Field, reports that first emerged Feb. 21. Though there may not be a connection between the protests and the Feb. 25 shooting, the shooting comes at a time when questions about the unrest, particularly its durability and the extent to which it can be quelled, remain unclear.
Militarily, in addition to the issue of how to address expanding unrest in the country, the question is how to balance the security of ISAF personnel with effective coordination between ISAF and the Afghan government and its security forces. The recall of all personnel from all ministries could be an indication of the perceived threat level or concern about more incidents, neither of which would be a good sign for that coordination.
As the drawdown of foreign forces begins to accelerate and the responsibility of indigenous forces grows, close coordination becomes increasingly important. And as the Taliban move forward on talks to reach a political accommodation and negotiated settlement on the future of Afghanistan, the existing tension between Washington and the regime of Afghan President Hamid Karzai also has an impact on the American negotiating position. The impact of this shooting on day-to-day coordination between the two countries is certainly worth watching.
Monday, February 27, 2012
Two NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) officers were killed Feb. 25 inside the Afghan Interior Ministry in Kabul. Details are limited, but reports suggest that the two officers, according to some accounts an American colonel and major, were gunned down possibly following a verbal clash with the shooter.
Some reports have suggested that the incident took place in a particularly secure area within the ministry. All ISAF personnel working in ministries in and around Kabul have been recalled. The Taliban have claimed responsibility for the shootings, a standard response to any incident like this.
This is certainly not the first incident of its kind in Afghanistan, though deaths in more secure compounds are relatively rare. Nevertheless, the "Vietnamization" strategy, in which ISAF forces in the country rely increasingly heavily on indigenous forces and personnel for the day-to-day administration and security of the country, almost ensures that elements opposed to the regime will infiltrate indigenous security forces to some degree.
Tensions between the foreign troops and local nationals naturally will build up over the course of a long occupation, and there will be incidents in which an Afghan soldier or policeman turns his weapon on foreign troops in a spontaneous act of rage in a disagreement rather than in a planned attack. Local security personnel can also simply look the other way or actively facilitate an attack.
In April 2011, a suicide bomber wearing an Afghan military uniform was able to get deep inside the Afghan Defense Ministry, where he was gunned down before he could detonate his vest, but not before he fatally shot two other Afghans. In September 2011, an Afghan employee of the U.S. Embassy opened fire on a CIA annex, killing one U.S. national. As for the Feb. 25 incident, the Interior Ministry is a high-profile target for militant attacks, meaning security is high and personnel walking its halls would have been cleared at checkpoints.
Meanwhile, protests have continued over the reported burning of Korans and other religious materials at Bagram Air Field, reports that first emerged Feb. 21. Though there may not be a connection between the protests and the Feb. 25 shooting, the shooting comes at a time when questions about the unrest, particularly its durability and the extent to which it can be quelled, remain unclear.
Militarily, in addition to the issue of how to address expanding unrest in the country, the question is how to balance the security of ISAF personnel with effective coordination between ISAF and the Afghan government and its security forces. The recall of all personnel from all ministries could be an indication of the perceived threat level or concern about more incidents, neither of which would be a good sign for that coordination.
As the drawdown of foreign forces begins to accelerate and the responsibility of indigenous forces grows, close coordination becomes increasingly important. And as the Taliban move forward on talks to reach a political accommodation and negotiated settlement on the future of Afghanistan, the existing tension between Washington and the regime of Afghan President Hamid Karzai also has an impact on the American negotiating position. The impact of this shooting on day-to-day coordination between the two countries is certainly worth watching.
Dean Faces Bad News for Banning Good News
By Mike Adams
Monday, February 27, 2012
Dear Dean (Name Withheld):
I am writing today with some very bad news for you. It would appear that, by the end of the year, you may be removed from your position as Dean of Students at (University Name Withheld). But, first, let me share the Good News – that is, if you will promise not to prosecute me for it.
I used to be an atheist. When people tried to share the Gospel with me, I would hurl profanity at them. I would even use a word that begins with “f” and ends with “u-c-k.” (I’m not talking about “fire-truck,” by the way). The Gospel offended me, so I told people to take a hike whenever they tried to share it with me. Now that I have converted, I no longer suffer from that kind of extreme emotional insecurity. And that is Good News. Now it’s time for the bad news.
Recently, a student at your university tried to share the Gospel with another student at your university. That makes sense. You do work at a Christian University. But then three things happened that made little sense. I will present them in chronological order – and in order from the least to most ridiculous event:
1. The student who was hearing the Gospel told the one sharing the Gospel that it was “offensive.” Of course, the Gospel has always been offensive. They would not have nailed Jesus to a cross if it were not. Then, the student demanded that the sharer of the Good News end the conversation. Fair enough. Maybe he was just having a bad day.
2. The next day, the still-offended student filed a speech code complaint over the Gospel sharing incident. The conduct he was engaged in, by the way, is considered sin by the Bible and “diversity” by the student handbook. At many “Christian” universities, the pages of the student handbook that deal with diversity carry more weight than the pages of the Bible that deal with sin. So the real sin is often using the word sin. And that is tantamount to banning the Gospel, which is the only means of dealing with sin – in part, because it confronts sin directly. So you have a choice between the speech code and the Gospel – unless, of course, you were born with the speech code gene.
3. Finally, and most ridiculously, you actually took the complaint seriously and forced the student to stop sharing the Gospel unless someone specifically asked to hear it. The incident was isolated. There was no accusation of harassment. The offending student had no intention of speaking to the offended student again. But you had to permanently ban him from initiating conversations about salvation at a so-call Christian university. The more universities speak of tolerance, the more they reek of intolerance. The paradox is that you’ve demonstrated that principle with your indifference to principle.
But this is the last time you are ever going to silence a student who wishes to share the Gospel. By my count – I have been talking with and mentoring the “offending” student daily - you had approximately five meetings in which you threatened disciplinary action. At each one of these meetings you spoke. Each time you spoke, you offended the Gospel-sharing student. And, worse, now that other Christians are hearing of the incident, they are also offended and intimidated into silence. Put simply, they are now afraid to share the Gospel at your “Christian” university. One could say you are bullying them with the speech code. And you can’t defend yourself by saying this was an “isolated” incident. You prosecuted the Gospel-sharer based on an isolated incident. Remember?
So I have done what I must do. I have begun by organizing a series of five counter-claims against you – one for each time you spoke to the Gospel-sharing student. These five claims will come from five different students whose speech has been chilled by your conduct. They will all be delivered at once in the form of hate speech charges. In other words, you have used the speech code as a sword against others and now the sword is about to be taken from you. And it will be pointed directly toward your heart. Unless you relinquish it voluntarily you will die by it.
Let me be very specific – even at risk of repeating myself: If you don’t get rid of the campus speech code within the next ten weeks we are coming after your job. That is only bad news if you do not repent of your sinfully censorious ways and allow students to share the Good News. As always, your fate depends upon your courage and willingness to do the right thing. It is my fervent prayer that you will learn from the example of your student-accusers. They are showing what it means to be bold in the face of emotional weakness masquerading as intellectual diversity.
You’ll be hearing from us soon,
Mike S. Adams
Monday, February 27, 2012
Dear Dean (Name Withheld):
I am writing today with some very bad news for you. It would appear that, by the end of the year, you may be removed from your position as Dean of Students at (University Name Withheld). But, first, let me share the Good News – that is, if you will promise not to prosecute me for it.
I used to be an atheist. When people tried to share the Gospel with me, I would hurl profanity at them. I would even use a word that begins with “f” and ends with “u-c-k.” (I’m not talking about “fire-truck,” by the way). The Gospel offended me, so I told people to take a hike whenever they tried to share it with me. Now that I have converted, I no longer suffer from that kind of extreme emotional insecurity. And that is Good News. Now it’s time for the bad news.
Recently, a student at your university tried to share the Gospel with another student at your university. That makes sense. You do work at a Christian University. But then three things happened that made little sense. I will present them in chronological order – and in order from the least to most ridiculous event:
1. The student who was hearing the Gospel told the one sharing the Gospel that it was “offensive.” Of course, the Gospel has always been offensive. They would not have nailed Jesus to a cross if it were not. Then, the student demanded that the sharer of the Good News end the conversation. Fair enough. Maybe he was just having a bad day.
2. The next day, the still-offended student filed a speech code complaint over the Gospel sharing incident. The conduct he was engaged in, by the way, is considered sin by the Bible and “diversity” by the student handbook. At many “Christian” universities, the pages of the student handbook that deal with diversity carry more weight than the pages of the Bible that deal with sin. So the real sin is often using the word sin. And that is tantamount to banning the Gospel, which is the only means of dealing with sin – in part, because it confronts sin directly. So you have a choice between the speech code and the Gospel – unless, of course, you were born with the speech code gene.
3. Finally, and most ridiculously, you actually took the complaint seriously and forced the student to stop sharing the Gospel unless someone specifically asked to hear it. The incident was isolated. There was no accusation of harassment. The offending student had no intention of speaking to the offended student again. But you had to permanently ban him from initiating conversations about salvation at a so-call Christian university. The more universities speak of tolerance, the more they reek of intolerance. The paradox is that you’ve demonstrated that principle with your indifference to principle.
But this is the last time you are ever going to silence a student who wishes to share the Gospel. By my count – I have been talking with and mentoring the “offending” student daily - you had approximately five meetings in which you threatened disciplinary action. At each one of these meetings you spoke. Each time you spoke, you offended the Gospel-sharing student. And, worse, now that other Christians are hearing of the incident, they are also offended and intimidated into silence. Put simply, they are now afraid to share the Gospel at your “Christian” university. One could say you are bullying them with the speech code. And you can’t defend yourself by saying this was an “isolated” incident. You prosecuted the Gospel-sharer based on an isolated incident. Remember?
So I have done what I must do. I have begun by organizing a series of five counter-claims against you – one for each time you spoke to the Gospel-sharing student. These five claims will come from five different students whose speech has been chilled by your conduct. They will all be delivered at once in the form of hate speech charges. In other words, you have used the speech code as a sword against others and now the sword is about to be taken from you. And it will be pointed directly toward your heart. Unless you relinquish it voluntarily you will die by it.
Let me be very specific – even at risk of repeating myself: If you don’t get rid of the campus speech code within the next ten weeks we are coming after your job. That is only bad news if you do not repent of your sinfully censorious ways and allow students to share the Good News. As always, your fate depends upon your courage and willingness to do the right thing. It is my fervent prayer that you will learn from the example of your student-accusers. They are showing what it means to be bold in the face of emotional weakness masquerading as intellectual diversity.
You’ll be hearing from us soon,
Mike S. Adams
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Act of Valor Trumps Hollywood’s Asinine Squalor
By Doug Giles
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Finally, a 21st century movie that doesn’t portray our military as corrupt, stupid, confused torturers who murder innocent babies.
Act of Valor, which opened this weekend, features active (and anonymous) Navy SEALs in the re-creation of real events that showcase our crème de la crème rescuing our operatives and crushing our enemies in an OMG type of way.
I’ve got two words for the manner in which our boys were depicted in this flick … Sa-lute!
If I were a wannabe enemy of the U.S.A. (foreign or domestic) I’d be crapping my cargo pants (or tunic) after viewing Act of Valor—chiefly because our special forces are some bad mamajambas who have the tools and the tenacity to jack you up.
Yep, be afraid, villains, as our troops are effective ministers of God poised, ready and willing with stealth and style to inflict the wrath of God on those who do evil. I’m talkin’ Romans 13:1-5 style. Look it up if you don’t know what I’m talking about.
Another thing that I truly enjoyed about this film was the unambiguous patriotism of the soldiers and their families. Yep, no whining about their missions from their families or the SEALs who sacrificed their lives and limbs for God and country. It almost felt like I was in America again as I watched this movie. It was weird—but a good weird.
Even though it’s shocking to see our troops displayed in a magnificent manner within this Occuculture that loathes them, it was not a shocker to me; I have had the good fortune to spend time with many of our special ops and other soldiers in hunting camps from Alaska to Texas and have found them just as the movie displayed them: consummate class acts without a hint of the BS Hollyweird has smeared them with over the last decade.
I can’t say enough good things about this movie. In the theater in which my wife and I watched it we spotted several older gents and couples who sat in their seats and silently wept as the credits rolled. It was sacred.
I’m sure all the scabs and the venomous wood lice of the Left are going to crawl out from under the rocks where they dwell and bash this war pic, but that’s alright. Our SEALs and others have afforded you the right to be stupid and bray your insanity by keeping bad guys at bay, both at home and abroad, and thereby giving you the wherewithal to play your silly and ungrateful games against our fair land.
Lastly, parents, take your teenagers to see Act of Valor. Maybe, just maybe, some of the courage, patriotism and dignity depicted in this film will erase the film this crappy culture has slimed your kid with.
God bless America, our warriors who protect her, and those involved with this movie. Amen.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Finally, a 21st century movie that doesn’t portray our military as corrupt, stupid, confused torturers who murder innocent babies.
Act of Valor, which opened this weekend, features active (and anonymous) Navy SEALs in the re-creation of real events that showcase our crème de la crème rescuing our operatives and crushing our enemies in an OMG type of way.
I’ve got two words for the manner in which our boys were depicted in this flick … Sa-lute!
If I were a wannabe enemy of the U.S.A. (foreign or domestic) I’d be crapping my cargo pants (or tunic) after viewing Act of Valor—chiefly because our special forces are some bad mamajambas who have the tools and the tenacity to jack you up.
Yep, be afraid, villains, as our troops are effective ministers of God poised, ready and willing with stealth and style to inflict the wrath of God on those who do evil. I’m talkin’ Romans 13:1-5 style. Look it up if you don’t know what I’m talking about.
Another thing that I truly enjoyed about this film was the unambiguous patriotism of the soldiers and their families. Yep, no whining about their missions from their families or the SEALs who sacrificed their lives and limbs for God and country. It almost felt like I was in America again as I watched this movie. It was weird—but a good weird.
Even though it’s shocking to see our troops displayed in a magnificent manner within this Occuculture that loathes them, it was not a shocker to me; I have had the good fortune to spend time with many of our special ops and other soldiers in hunting camps from Alaska to Texas and have found them just as the movie displayed them: consummate class acts without a hint of the BS Hollyweird has smeared them with over the last decade.
I can’t say enough good things about this movie. In the theater in which my wife and I watched it we spotted several older gents and couples who sat in their seats and silently wept as the credits rolled. It was sacred.
I’m sure all the scabs and the venomous wood lice of the Left are going to crawl out from under the rocks where they dwell and bash this war pic, but that’s alright. Our SEALs and others have afforded you the right to be stupid and bray your insanity by keeping bad guys at bay, both at home and abroad, and thereby giving you the wherewithal to play your silly and ungrateful games against our fair land.
Lastly, parents, take your teenagers to see Act of Valor. Maybe, just maybe, some of the courage, patriotism and dignity depicted in this film will erase the film this crappy culture has slimed your kid with.
God bless America, our warriors who protect her, and those involved with this movie. Amen.
Why Does the Left Despise Valor
By Kevin McCullough
Sunday, February 26, 2012
There is a pretty reliable predictor in America today. If someone says something nice about our military, the need to support them, or show demonstrative appreciation for them outright--that person is likely a person of the political and theological right.
I'm not sure why that's the case, but it is so dog gone accurate in the circles of punditry, media, and entertainment, I have to think it's not much different in other places where hard core partisan ranks exist.
This weekend is the perfect example.
One of the most important films to be made in such a long time--honoring our military--reinforces the love of family, the honor of sacrifice, the love of country, and most importantly deep appreciation for men who do things most of us would shrink from. Yet almost universally in media, punditry, and entertainment circles it is being panned as pro-war-mongering-propaganda-responsible-for-all-that-is-wrong. They base these arguments on everything from video games, to perceived war crimes.
They lay these charges at the feet of Act Of Valor, an independently produced film debuting this weekend.
But what I want to know more specifically is why?
Why were there repeated articles on GAWKER and HUFFINGTON POST this week--prior to the film’s release and in a couple of instances complete admission by the person writing the critique that admitted they hadn't seen more than the trailer--that included denouncements of danger, lies, and propaganda that this film contained?
Everybody knows that the left hates war. To a fault. I've debated leftists who believed freeing slaves, stopping the Holocaust, or liberating fifty million people from the suffocation of tyranny is somehow an abuse.
What the media will never tell you is that the right doesn't like war either.
But the difference between the two mindsets is simple: sometimes stopping a known evil is worth the sacrifice of the price paid.
The overarching problem for the left is that increasingly evil is indistinguishable, unrecognizable, and in some cases ignored. Pious platitudes about negotiating, compromising, or blaming America for her wrongs, somehow become a relevant response from the left when staring into the eyes of a tyrant who would kill us if he had the power to do so.
Which brings us back to the heart of Act Of Valor...
In a completely apolitical way Navy SEALs penetrate boundaries, carry out missions, and sometimes take lives of those who are committing the most heinous of crimes. The toll it takes on them as they carry out their mission is never seen--it's not really allowed to be, and the media seems little to care.
This film and every amazing frame of its mind-blowing photography, authentication, action, and yes story is an overt thank you to the SEALs--and by extension the Soldiers, Marines, and others--who put their life on the line, with only the backing of one another to cause them to believe they will make it home.
It's easy for the writers at Rolling Stone, CNN, Gawker, the Huffington Post, and even Mr. Moviefone to mock, deride, and seek to undo the tribute this movie paints.
But it does not make it less than the ugly gesture that it is for these leftist populated outlets to spill their bile upon.
Maybe I'm angry, because I have loved ones in harms way today as I pen these words. Not low-life drop outs that Charlie Rangel would have you believe all military service personnel are, but academically high-achieving, physical specimens that take their knowledge, their strength, their character, and their valor into the line of fire, to keep us from harm tonight.
I don't know what total box office proceeds will be when the final chapter of Act Of Valor's narrative is written, but I know that it is a great piece of filmmaking; it has action that succeeds better than anything Matt Damon ever made. And while the suave smoothness of the well-turned phrase isn't perfect, knowing that we owe our lives to the men who had the courage to reveal their identities even in making this film, gives me greater appreciation for its well-produced message.
Friends, don't buy the tripe. Act Of Valor is a demonstration of courage in that it even exists.
It is difficult to put into words how GOOD this film is.
It is even harder to put into words how important this film is.
And how much we owe... to "the damn few!"
Sunday, February 26, 2012
There is a pretty reliable predictor in America today. If someone says something nice about our military, the need to support them, or show demonstrative appreciation for them outright--that person is likely a person of the political and theological right.
I'm not sure why that's the case, but it is so dog gone accurate in the circles of punditry, media, and entertainment, I have to think it's not much different in other places where hard core partisan ranks exist.
This weekend is the perfect example.
One of the most important films to be made in such a long time--honoring our military--reinforces the love of family, the honor of sacrifice, the love of country, and most importantly deep appreciation for men who do things most of us would shrink from. Yet almost universally in media, punditry, and entertainment circles it is being panned as pro-war-mongering-propaganda-responsible-for-all-that-is-wrong. They base these arguments on everything from video games, to perceived war crimes.
They lay these charges at the feet of Act Of Valor, an independently produced film debuting this weekend.
But what I want to know more specifically is why?
Why were there repeated articles on GAWKER and HUFFINGTON POST this week--prior to the film’s release and in a couple of instances complete admission by the person writing the critique that admitted they hadn't seen more than the trailer--that included denouncements of danger, lies, and propaganda that this film contained?
Everybody knows that the left hates war. To a fault. I've debated leftists who believed freeing slaves, stopping the Holocaust, or liberating fifty million people from the suffocation of tyranny is somehow an abuse.
What the media will never tell you is that the right doesn't like war either.
But the difference between the two mindsets is simple: sometimes stopping a known evil is worth the sacrifice of the price paid.
The overarching problem for the left is that increasingly evil is indistinguishable, unrecognizable, and in some cases ignored. Pious platitudes about negotiating, compromising, or blaming America for her wrongs, somehow become a relevant response from the left when staring into the eyes of a tyrant who would kill us if he had the power to do so.
Which brings us back to the heart of Act Of Valor...
In a completely apolitical way Navy SEALs penetrate boundaries, carry out missions, and sometimes take lives of those who are committing the most heinous of crimes. The toll it takes on them as they carry out their mission is never seen--it's not really allowed to be, and the media seems little to care.
This film and every amazing frame of its mind-blowing photography, authentication, action, and yes story is an overt thank you to the SEALs--and by extension the Soldiers, Marines, and others--who put their life on the line, with only the backing of one another to cause them to believe they will make it home.
It's easy for the writers at Rolling Stone, CNN, Gawker, the Huffington Post, and even Mr. Moviefone to mock, deride, and seek to undo the tribute this movie paints.
But it does not make it less than the ugly gesture that it is for these leftist populated outlets to spill their bile upon.
Maybe I'm angry, because I have loved ones in harms way today as I pen these words. Not low-life drop outs that Charlie Rangel would have you believe all military service personnel are, but academically high-achieving, physical specimens that take their knowledge, their strength, their character, and their valor into the line of fire, to keep us from harm tonight.
I don't know what total box office proceeds will be when the final chapter of Act Of Valor's narrative is written, but I know that it is a great piece of filmmaking; it has action that succeeds better than anything Matt Damon ever made. And while the suave smoothness of the well-turned phrase isn't perfect, knowing that we owe our lives to the men who had the courage to reveal their identities even in making this film, gives me greater appreciation for its well-produced message.
Friends, don't buy the tripe. Act Of Valor is a demonstration of courage in that it even exists.
It is difficult to put into words how GOOD this film is.
It is even harder to put into words how important this film is.
And how much we owe... to "the damn few!"
Be Like China?
By Paul Jacob
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Venture capitalist Eric X. Li, in an op-ed for The New York Times, “Why China’s Political Model Is Superior,” credits the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre with producing the “stability” that “ushered in a generation of growth and prosperity.”
No question about the growth: China’s economy has been experiencing double-digit expansion for years, now boasting the world’s second largest economy. But if political repression really formed a necessary ingredient in economic progress, the world’s economic rankings would look nearly reversed.
As for America, Li explains that our problem is an “expanded” political franchise, “resulting in a greater number of people participating in more and more decisions.”
“Elected representatives have no minds of their own and respond only to the whims of public opinion as they seek re-election,” Li informs, and “special interests manipulate the people into voting for ever-lower taxes and higher government spending, sometimes even supporting self-destructive wars.”
Who is Li kidding? The American people didn’t get a vote on going to war in Iraq or Afghanistan (or launching drone strikes in a particular country such as Yemen or Pakistan or . And Congress doesn’t dare vote to declare wars anymore, fearing a measure of accountability might result.
We certainly didn’t vote for Obamacare, which was unpopular when passed. We didn’t vote for Mr. Bush’s tax cuts — though given the choice, I would have — or his new Medicare entitlement.
The people never voted to raise the debt ceiling.
We certainly didn’t vote for Mr. Bush’s stimulus or Mr. Obama’s even bigger stimulus spending. We didn’t favor or have any say on the massive and wrongheaded TARP bailout.
Our current crippling level of taxes, spending, and massive debt has been set entirely by our elite national political leaders. The problem isn’t too much control by the people, but too little.
Still, Mr. Li blindly points to California and predicts an American “future” of “endless referendums, paralysis and insolvency.”
Wait a second . . . Americans have no initiative or referendum powers at the national level. And Li is all wet on the nature of California’s financial problems, which have not in large measure been caused by big-spending voters at the ballot box, but by big spending legislators at the capitol. When the American Legislative Exchange Council analyzed all 50 states in “Rich States, Poor States,” the 24 initiative states scored much higher than states without voter access to the ballot. The top seven states in the ranking were all states with statewide initiative and referendum, as were 12 of the top 15 states. Only one initiative state was in the bottom five states: California.
Lastly, let’s note that the national government most affected by citizen-led initiatives and referendums is Switzerland, which also just happens to enjoy the world’s highest per capita income.
But, as Li tells us, “China is on a different path. Its leaders are prepared to allow greater popular participation in political decisions if and when it is conducive to economic development and favorable to the country’s national interests . . .” After all, “political rights . . . should be seen as privileges to be negotiated based on the needs and conditions of the nation.”
Those negotiations have left Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo languishing in a prison in that very same utopia.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Venture capitalist Eric X. Li, in an op-ed for The New York Times, “Why China’s Political Model Is Superior,” credits the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre with producing the “stability” that “ushered in a generation of growth and prosperity.”
No question about the growth: China’s economy has been experiencing double-digit expansion for years, now boasting the world’s second largest economy. But if political repression really formed a necessary ingredient in economic progress, the world’s economic rankings would look nearly reversed.
As for America, Li explains that our problem is an “expanded” political franchise, “resulting in a greater number of people participating in more and more decisions.”
“Elected representatives have no minds of their own and respond only to the whims of public opinion as they seek re-election,” Li informs, and “special interests manipulate the people into voting for ever-lower taxes and higher government spending, sometimes even supporting self-destructive wars.”
Who is Li kidding? The American people didn’t get a vote on going to war in Iraq or Afghanistan (or launching drone strikes in a particular country such as Yemen or Pakistan or . And Congress doesn’t dare vote to declare wars anymore, fearing a measure of accountability might result.
We certainly didn’t vote for Obamacare, which was unpopular when passed. We didn’t vote for Mr. Bush’s tax cuts — though given the choice, I would have — or his new Medicare entitlement.
The people never voted to raise the debt ceiling.
We certainly didn’t vote for Mr. Bush’s stimulus or Mr. Obama’s even bigger stimulus spending. We didn’t favor or have any say on the massive and wrongheaded TARP bailout.
Our current crippling level of taxes, spending, and massive debt has been set entirely by our elite national political leaders. The problem isn’t too much control by the people, but too little.
Still, Mr. Li blindly points to California and predicts an American “future” of “endless referendums, paralysis and insolvency.”
Wait a second . . . Americans have no initiative or referendum powers at the national level. And Li is all wet on the nature of California’s financial problems, which have not in large measure been caused by big-spending voters at the ballot box, but by big spending legislators at the capitol. When the American Legislative Exchange Council analyzed all 50 states in “Rich States, Poor States,” the 24 initiative states scored much higher than states without voter access to the ballot. The top seven states in the ranking were all states with statewide initiative and referendum, as were 12 of the top 15 states. Only one initiative state was in the bottom five states: California.
Lastly, let’s note that the national government most affected by citizen-led initiatives and referendums is Switzerland, which also just happens to enjoy the world’s highest per capita income.
But, as Li tells us, “China is on a different path. Its leaders are prepared to allow greater popular participation in political decisions if and when it is conducive to economic development and favorable to the country’s national interests . . .” After all, “political rights . . . should be seen as privileges to be negotiated based on the needs and conditions of the nation.”
Those negotiations have left Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo languishing in a prison in that very same utopia.
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Capitalism or Socialism- No Middle Way
By Doug French
Saturday, February 25, 2012
The foreclosure crisis has crawled on for going on four years now with no end in sight. The S&P/Case-Shiller index for August fell 3.8 percent from a year ago. The index includes home prices for 20 US cities.
"Continued house price declines could lead to even more defaults, foreclosures and distress sales, undermining wealth, confidence and spending," William Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said. "Breaking this vicious cycle is one of the most pressing issues facing policy makers."
Every one of the Republican presidential candidates is being asked how they would handle the slow-motion housing wreck. Long shot Newt Gingrich says he would rewrite the rules to make it profitable for banks to renegotiate loan principal amounts.
"He disagrees with his Republican colleagues that the free market will find a fair way to let the banks and homeowners work things out," writes Karoun Demirjian for the Las Vegas Sun.
President Obama has jumped in to adjust Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac rules to allow refinances for loans exceeding 125 percent loan to value.
The president says this will save underwater homeowners thousands of dollars a year.
Princeton professor Alan Blinder penned an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal proposing forced principal reductions with the cost to be shared by banks and taxpayers — with the proviso that government be given an equity kicker when housing prices go back up.
Blinder also thinks the Federal Reserve and Treasury should provide cheap financing to developers who will use the money to buy up properties with the intention of renting the properties out.
Harvard's Martin Feldstein put in his two cents' worth on the issue for the New York Times. Feldstein points out that home values have dropped 40 percent. The result, he writes, is "less consumer spending, leading to less business production and fewer jobs."
Feldstein claims the government can stop the fall in house prices by slicing off any mortgage principal amount owed exceeding 110 percent loan to value. He says this policy would cost $350 billion or less and would modify 11 million of the 15 million "underwater" homes in America. The banks and the government would split the cost, and in the case of mortgages held by Fannie and Freddie, "the government would just be paying itself," he writes, presumably with a straight face.
In exchange for having their lender take a haircut over 110 percent, borrowers would accept full recourse on the modified loan.
"I cannot agree with those who say we should just let house prices continue to fall until they stop by themselves," writes Feldstein. "Although some forest fires are allowed to burn out naturally, no one lets those fires continue to burn when they threaten residential neighborhoods."
"Recovering the 31 percent plunge in home prices from their 2006 peak will probably be years in the making as foreclosures throw more properties on the market and sales flag," writes Shobhana Chandra for Bloomberg.
Despite the obvious, policymakers and wonks think trimming mortgage principal down to just 10 percent underwater or that lowering borrowers' financing costs for those 25 percent (or more) underwater will somehow halt the slide in home values and spur consumer spending.
The belief is that if homeowners are just kinda, sorta underwater then they will keep on faithfully paying Fannie, Freddie, BoA, Wells, Morgan, and the rest. Never mind that it will still take years of steady payments to ever see the faintest ray of equity light shine through the crack between what's owed and the home's value.
We can see how this works out for a hypothetical couple created by Brent T. White in his Arizona Legal Studies discussion paper. The young couple buys a 1,380-square-foot home in Salinas, California, for $585,000 in January 2006. The couple purchased the home with no money down with a 30-year, fully amortizing loan at 6.5 percent interest. The payment including insurance and taxes is $4,300 a month.
Now the home is only worth $187,000. An Obama refinance of the $560,000 that they still owe on the note will lower their payment by $900. But the couple will never really own any of the home.
Under the Martin Feldstein plan, the note holder and taxpayers would eat $354,300, leaving the young couple with a mortgage of $205,700. Given the ultralow current mortgage rates of 4.5 percent, a 30-year fully amortizing deal including taxes and insurance would be a payment in the neighborhood of $1,250.
If we closed the deal this month, assuming home prices don't fall any further in Salinas, our young couple will see some equity in December 2016.
Meanwhile the same home can be rented for $1,000 a month. Instead of paying $1,250 a month to have equity of $168 in 61 months, saving the extra $250 a month and earning no interest on it equals $15,250 in the same amount of time.
Of course home prices in central California might rise 2 percent a year, so after five years the home would be worth $206,500, but then half of any equity belongs to Uncle Sam under the Blinder plan.
All of these ideas to save the housing market and supposedly to increase consumer spending do exactly the opposite. These plans keep people chained to underwater mortgages, keeping them from moving to where there are more and better job opportunities.
Unemployed heavy-equipment operator Charles Mills wanted to leave North Las Vegas for Oklahoma and a job, but he is $200,000 underwater on a home he bought at the peak of the housing market in 2006. The plans mentioned by Blinder and Feldstein would relieve Mills of roughly $190,000 of the debt, but the principal reduction won't put him back to work. Plus, the odds of a quick turnaround in North Las Vegas home values are about the same as for the Kansas City Royals to win the 2012 World Series.
The idea that the too-big-to-fail banks will cover half the cost of these plans is laughable. The hit to their capital would be considerable, sending the banks right back to Washington's door with a tin cup.
And how much bureaucracy would be required to manage the implementation of these plans and determination of equity splits when homes are sold?
All of these plans are not really aid to underwater homeowners as much as another bailout for the banks — not to mention Fannie and Freddie.
Any business dominated by entities only in business because of the good graces of the government cannot be considered part of the free market. The reason the housing market is not clearing is that the government stands in the way by propping up the large mortgage holders.
No reasonable person sees Fannie Mae and sister entity Freddie Mac, which were seized by the government in September 2008, as the product of spontaneous order. To stay in business, the two firms together have needed about $169 billion in taxpayer bailout funds, with no end in sight.
Changes to FASB rules 157, 115, and 124, which allowed banks greater discretion in determining at what price to carry certain types of securities on their balance sheets and recognition of other-than-temporary impairments have made the big banks wards of the state as well.
The real help for underwater homeowners will only arrive when Fannie, Freddie, and the rest are allowed to fail. The equivalent of a chapter 7 bankruptcy filing (liquidation) would put these underwater loans out for bid in the market place. Would our mythical mortgage in Salinas, secured by a house worth $187,000, trade for $205,700? Not hardly.
No one can get a loan for a 110 percent of value in this market, let alone 125 percent, or 100 percent for that matter. Those looking for mortgages should expect to put 20 percent down. Values in a bankruptcy sale would reflect this reality and then some. Based on the liquidation prices received by the FDIC and other distressed debt sellers, this mortgage paper would likely be scooped up for half or a third of the home's value.
Buyers of the paper would immediately negotiate with borrowers to create loans that are conforming (80 percent LTV) and performing.
For instance, Selene Residential Mortgage Opportunity Fund purchased the mortgage secured by the home of Anna and Charlie Reynolds in St. George, Utah, for a deep discount, the Wall Street Journal reported in a front-page story. The Reynolds were struggling with a $3,464 monthly payment and the value of their home had plummeted.
Selene, run by Wall Street legend Lewis Ranieri,
buys loans to make a profit on them, not as a public service, but company officials say it is often more profitable to keep the borrower in the home than to foreclose. If a delinquent loan can be turned into a "performing" loan, with the borrower making regular payments, the value of that loan rises, and Selene can turn around and either refinance it or sell it at a profit.
Home values in St. George had plummeted in similar fashion to that of Las Vegas, only a two-hour drive away. Selene slashed the principle balance of the loan due from $421,731 to $243,182 and lowered the interest rate, reducing the Reynolds' monthly payment to $1,573.
"Around 90% of Selene's loan modifications involve reducing the principal," James R. Hagerty wrote in the WSJ, "compared to less than 2% of the modifications done by federally regulated banks in the first quarter."
And while many upside-down borrowers can't even find a human to talk to about their loan, let alone sit down and renegotiate terms that will benefit both parties, Selene immediately tries to contact the borrowers on the notes they have purchased, "sometimes sending a FedEx package with a gift card that can be activated only if the borrower calls a Selene debt-workout specialist."
It's hard to imagine Fannie and Freddie being so proactive.
Ludwig von Mises explained that one government intervention leads to an endless succession of interventions to deal with the effects of the first and subsequent interventions. Ultimately, it comes down to two choices. "Either capitalism or socialism: there exists no middle way," Mises wrote.
Likewise, there is no middle way to solve the housing crisis. For capitalism to work its magic and set underwater homeowners free, mortgage holders must be allowed to fail.
Saturday, February 25, 2012
The foreclosure crisis has crawled on for going on four years now with no end in sight. The S&P/Case-Shiller index for August fell 3.8 percent from a year ago. The index includes home prices for 20 US cities.
"Continued house price declines could lead to even more defaults, foreclosures and distress sales, undermining wealth, confidence and spending," William Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said. "Breaking this vicious cycle is one of the most pressing issues facing policy makers."
Every one of the Republican presidential candidates is being asked how they would handle the slow-motion housing wreck. Long shot Newt Gingrich says he would rewrite the rules to make it profitable for banks to renegotiate loan principal amounts.
"He disagrees with his Republican colleagues that the free market will find a fair way to let the banks and homeowners work things out," writes Karoun Demirjian for the Las Vegas Sun.
President Obama has jumped in to adjust Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac rules to allow refinances for loans exceeding 125 percent loan to value.
The president says this will save underwater homeowners thousands of dollars a year.
Princeton professor Alan Blinder penned an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal proposing forced principal reductions with the cost to be shared by banks and taxpayers — with the proviso that government be given an equity kicker when housing prices go back up.
Blinder also thinks the Federal Reserve and Treasury should provide cheap financing to developers who will use the money to buy up properties with the intention of renting the properties out.
Harvard's Martin Feldstein put in his two cents' worth on the issue for the New York Times. Feldstein points out that home values have dropped 40 percent. The result, he writes, is "less consumer spending, leading to less business production and fewer jobs."
Feldstein claims the government can stop the fall in house prices by slicing off any mortgage principal amount owed exceeding 110 percent loan to value. He says this policy would cost $350 billion or less and would modify 11 million of the 15 million "underwater" homes in America. The banks and the government would split the cost, and in the case of mortgages held by Fannie and Freddie, "the government would just be paying itself," he writes, presumably with a straight face.
In exchange for having their lender take a haircut over 110 percent, borrowers would accept full recourse on the modified loan.
"I cannot agree with those who say we should just let house prices continue to fall until they stop by themselves," writes Feldstein. "Although some forest fires are allowed to burn out naturally, no one lets those fires continue to burn when they threaten residential neighborhoods."
"Recovering the 31 percent plunge in home prices from their 2006 peak will probably be years in the making as foreclosures throw more properties on the market and sales flag," writes Shobhana Chandra for Bloomberg.
Despite the obvious, policymakers and wonks think trimming mortgage principal down to just 10 percent underwater or that lowering borrowers' financing costs for those 25 percent (or more) underwater will somehow halt the slide in home values and spur consumer spending.
The belief is that if homeowners are just kinda, sorta underwater then they will keep on faithfully paying Fannie, Freddie, BoA, Wells, Morgan, and the rest. Never mind that it will still take years of steady payments to ever see the faintest ray of equity light shine through the crack between what's owed and the home's value.
We can see how this works out for a hypothetical couple created by Brent T. White in his Arizona Legal Studies discussion paper. The young couple buys a 1,380-square-foot home in Salinas, California, for $585,000 in January 2006. The couple purchased the home with no money down with a 30-year, fully amortizing loan at 6.5 percent interest. The payment including insurance and taxes is $4,300 a month.
Now the home is only worth $187,000. An Obama refinance of the $560,000 that they still owe on the note will lower their payment by $900. But the couple will never really own any of the home.
Under the Martin Feldstein plan, the note holder and taxpayers would eat $354,300, leaving the young couple with a mortgage of $205,700. Given the ultralow current mortgage rates of 4.5 percent, a 30-year fully amortizing deal including taxes and insurance would be a payment in the neighborhood of $1,250.
If we closed the deal this month, assuming home prices don't fall any further in Salinas, our young couple will see some equity in December 2016.
Meanwhile the same home can be rented for $1,000 a month. Instead of paying $1,250 a month to have equity of $168 in 61 months, saving the extra $250 a month and earning no interest on it equals $15,250 in the same amount of time.
Of course home prices in central California might rise 2 percent a year, so after five years the home would be worth $206,500, but then half of any equity belongs to Uncle Sam under the Blinder plan.
All of these ideas to save the housing market and supposedly to increase consumer spending do exactly the opposite. These plans keep people chained to underwater mortgages, keeping them from moving to where there are more and better job opportunities.
Unemployed heavy-equipment operator Charles Mills wanted to leave North Las Vegas for Oklahoma and a job, but he is $200,000 underwater on a home he bought at the peak of the housing market in 2006. The plans mentioned by Blinder and Feldstein would relieve Mills of roughly $190,000 of the debt, but the principal reduction won't put him back to work. Plus, the odds of a quick turnaround in North Las Vegas home values are about the same as for the Kansas City Royals to win the 2012 World Series.
The idea that the too-big-to-fail banks will cover half the cost of these plans is laughable. The hit to their capital would be considerable, sending the banks right back to Washington's door with a tin cup.
And how much bureaucracy would be required to manage the implementation of these plans and determination of equity splits when homes are sold?
All of these plans are not really aid to underwater homeowners as much as another bailout for the banks — not to mention Fannie and Freddie.
Any business dominated by entities only in business because of the good graces of the government cannot be considered part of the free market. The reason the housing market is not clearing is that the government stands in the way by propping up the large mortgage holders.
No reasonable person sees Fannie Mae and sister entity Freddie Mac, which were seized by the government in September 2008, as the product of spontaneous order. To stay in business, the two firms together have needed about $169 billion in taxpayer bailout funds, with no end in sight.
Changes to FASB rules 157, 115, and 124, which allowed banks greater discretion in determining at what price to carry certain types of securities on their balance sheets and recognition of other-than-temporary impairments have made the big banks wards of the state as well.
The real help for underwater homeowners will only arrive when Fannie, Freddie, and the rest are allowed to fail. The equivalent of a chapter 7 bankruptcy filing (liquidation) would put these underwater loans out for bid in the market place. Would our mythical mortgage in Salinas, secured by a house worth $187,000, trade for $205,700? Not hardly.
No one can get a loan for a 110 percent of value in this market, let alone 125 percent, or 100 percent for that matter. Those looking for mortgages should expect to put 20 percent down. Values in a bankruptcy sale would reflect this reality and then some. Based on the liquidation prices received by the FDIC and other distressed debt sellers, this mortgage paper would likely be scooped up for half or a third of the home's value.
Buyers of the paper would immediately negotiate with borrowers to create loans that are conforming (80 percent LTV) and performing.
For instance, Selene Residential Mortgage Opportunity Fund purchased the mortgage secured by the home of Anna and Charlie Reynolds in St. George, Utah, for a deep discount, the Wall Street Journal reported in a front-page story. The Reynolds were struggling with a $3,464 monthly payment and the value of their home had plummeted.
Selene, run by Wall Street legend Lewis Ranieri,
buys loans to make a profit on them, not as a public service, but company officials say it is often more profitable to keep the borrower in the home than to foreclose. If a delinquent loan can be turned into a "performing" loan, with the borrower making regular payments, the value of that loan rises, and Selene can turn around and either refinance it or sell it at a profit.
Home values in St. George had plummeted in similar fashion to that of Las Vegas, only a two-hour drive away. Selene slashed the principle balance of the loan due from $421,731 to $243,182 and lowered the interest rate, reducing the Reynolds' monthly payment to $1,573.
"Around 90% of Selene's loan modifications involve reducing the principal," James R. Hagerty wrote in the WSJ, "compared to less than 2% of the modifications done by federally regulated banks in the first quarter."
And while many upside-down borrowers can't even find a human to talk to about their loan, let alone sit down and renegotiate terms that will benefit both parties, Selene immediately tries to contact the borrowers on the notes they have purchased, "sometimes sending a FedEx package with a gift card that can be activated only if the borrower calls a Selene debt-workout specialist."
It's hard to imagine Fannie and Freddie being so proactive.
Ludwig von Mises explained that one government intervention leads to an endless succession of interventions to deal with the effects of the first and subsequent interventions. Ultimately, it comes down to two choices. "Either capitalism or socialism: there exists no middle way," Mises wrote.
Likewise, there is no middle way to solve the housing crisis. For capitalism to work its magic and set underwater homeowners free, mortgage holders must be allowed to fail.
The Perversion of Rights
By Mark Steyn
Saturday, February 25, 2012
CNN’s John King did his best the other night, producing a question from one of his viewers:
“Since birth control is the latest hot topic, which candidate believes in birth control, and if not, why?”
To their credit, no Republican candidate was inclined to accept the premise of the question. King might have done better to put the issue to Danica Patrick. For some reason, Michelle Fields of the Daily Caller sought the views of the NASCAR driver and Sports Illustrated swimwear model about “the Obama administration’s dictate that religious employers provide health-care plans that cover contraceptives.” Miss Patrick, a practicing Catholic, gave the perfect citizen’s response for the Age of Obama:
“I leave it up to the government to make good decisions for Americans.”
That’s the real “hot topic” here — whether a majority of citizens, in America as elsewhere in the West, is willing to “leave it up to the government” to make decisions on everything that matters. On the face of it, the choice between the Obama administration and the Catholic Church should not be a tough one. On the one hand, we have the plain language of the First Amendment as stated in the U.S. Constitution since 1791: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
On the other, we have a regulation invented by executive order under the vast powers given to Kathleen Sebelius under a 2,500-page catalogue of statist enforcement passed into law by a government party that didn’t even bother to read it.
Commissar Sebelius says that she is trying to “strike the appropriate balance.” But these two things — a core, bedrock, constitutional principle, and Section 47(e)viii of Micro-Regulation Four Bazillion and One issued by Leviathan’s Bureau of Compliance — are not equal, and you can only “balance” them by massively increasing state power and massively diminishing the citizen’s. Or, to put it more benignly, by “leaving it up to the government to make good decisions.”
Some of us have been here before. For most of the last five years, I’ve been battling Canada’s so-called “human rights” commissions, and similar thought police in Britain, Europe, and elsewhere. As I write this, I’m in Australia, to talk up the cause of free speech, which is, alas, endangered even in that great land. In that sense, the “latest hot topic” — the clash between Obama and American Catholics — is, in fact, a perfect distillation of the broader struggle in the West today. When it comes to human rights, I go back to 1215 and Magna Carta — or, to give it its full name, Magna Carta Libertatum. My italics: I don’t think they had them back in 1215. But they understood that “libertatum” is the word that matters. Back then, “human rights” were rights of humans, of individuals — and restraints upon the king: They’re the rights that matter: limitations upon kingly power. Eight centuries later, we have entirely inverted the principle: “Rights” are now gifts that a benign king graciously showers upon his subjects — the right to “free” health care, to affordable housing, the “right of access to a free placement service” (to quote the European Constitution’s “rights” for workers). The Democratic National Committee understands the new school of rights very well: In its recent video, Obama’s bureaucratic edict is upgraded into the “right to contraception coverage at no additional cost.” And, up against a “human right” as basic as that, how can such peripheral rights as freedom of conscience possibly compete?
The transformation of “human rights” from restraints upon state power into a pretext for state power is nicely encapsulated in the language of Article 14 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which states that everyone has the right “to receive free compulsory education.” Got that? You have the human right to be forced to do something by the government.
Commissar Sebelius isn’t the only one interested in “striking the appropriate balance” between individual liberty and state compulsion. Everyone talks like that these days. For Canada’s Chief Censor, Jennifer Lynch, freedom of expression is just one menu item in the great all-you-can-eat salad bar of rights, so don’t be surprised if we’re occasionally out of stock. Instead, why not try one of our tasty nutritious rights du jour? Like the human right to a transsexual labiaplasty, or the human right of McDonald’s employees not to have to wash their hands after visiting the bathroom. Commissar Lynch puts it this way: “The modern conception of rights is that of a matrix with different rights and freedoms mutually reinforcing each other to build a strong and durable human rights system.”
That would be a matrix as in some sort of intricate biological sequencing very few people can understand? Or a Matrix as in the illusory world created to maintain a supine citizenry by all-controlling government officials? The point is, with so many pseudo-“rights” bouncing around, you need a bigger and bigger state: Individual rights are less important than a “rights system” — i.e., a government bureaucracy.
This perversion of rights is killing the Western world. First, unlike real rights — to freedom of speech and freedom of religion — these new freedoms come with quite a price tag. All the free stuff is free in the sense of those offers that begin “You pay nothing now!” But you will eventually. No nation is rich enough to give you all this “free” stuff year in, year out. Spain’s government debt works out to $18,000 per person, France’s to $33,000, Greece’s to $39,000. Thank God we’re not Greece, huh? Er, in fact, according to the Senate Budget Committee, U.S. government debt is currently $44,215 per person. Going by the official Obama budget numbers, it will rise over the next ten years to $75,000. As I say, that’s per person: 75 grand in debt for every man, woman, and child, not to mention every one of the ever-swelling ranks of retirees and disabled Social Security recipients — or about $200,000 per household.
So maybe you’re not interested in philosophical notions of liberty vs. statism — like Danica Patrick, tens of millions of people are happy to “leave it up to the government to make good decisions.” Maybe you’re relatively relaxed about the less theoretical encroachments of Big Government — the diversion of so much American energy into “professional services,” all the lawyering and bookkeeping and paperwork shuffling necessary to keep you and your economic activity in full compliance with the Bureau of Compliance. But at some point no matter how painless the seductions of statism, you run up against the hard math: As those debt per capita numbers make plain, all this “free” stuff is doing is mortgaging your liberty and lining up a future of serfdom.
I used to think that the U.S. Constitution would prove more resilient than the less absolutist liberties of other Western nations. But the president has calculated that, with Obamacare, the First Amendment and much else will crumble before his will. And, given trends in U.S. jurisprudence, who’s to say he won’t get his way? That’s the point about all this “free” stuff: Ultimately, it’s not about your rights, but about his.
Saturday, February 25, 2012
CNN’s John King did his best the other night, producing a question from one of his viewers:
“Since birth control is the latest hot topic, which candidate believes in birth control, and if not, why?”
To their credit, no Republican candidate was inclined to accept the premise of the question. King might have done better to put the issue to Danica Patrick. For some reason, Michelle Fields of the Daily Caller sought the views of the NASCAR driver and Sports Illustrated swimwear model about “the Obama administration’s dictate that religious employers provide health-care plans that cover contraceptives.” Miss Patrick, a practicing Catholic, gave the perfect citizen’s response for the Age of Obama:
“I leave it up to the government to make good decisions for Americans.”
That’s the real “hot topic” here — whether a majority of citizens, in America as elsewhere in the West, is willing to “leave it up to the government” to make decisions on everything that matters. On the face of it, the choice between the Obama administration and the Catholic Church should not be a tough one. On the one hand, we have the plain language of the First Amendment as stated in the U.S. Constitution since 1791: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
On the other, we have a regulation invented by executive order under the vast powers given to Kathleen Sebelius under a 2,500-page catalogue of statist enforcement passed into law by a government party that didn’t even bother to read it.
Commissar Sebelius says that she is trying to “strike the appropriate balance.” But these two things — a core, bedrock, constitutional principle, and Section 47(e)viii of Micro-Regulation Four Bazillion and One issued by Leviathan’s Bureau of Compliance — are not equal, and you can only “balance” them by massively increasing state power and massively diminishing the citizen’s. Or, to put it more benignly, by “leaving it up to the government to make good decisions.”
Some of us have been here before. For most of the last five years, I’ve been battling Canada’s so-called “human rights” commissions, and similar thought police in Britain, Europe, and elsewhere. As I write this, I’m in Australia, to talk up the cause of free speech, which is, alas, endangered even in that great land. In that sense, the “latest hot topic” — the clash between Obama and American Catholics — is, in fact, a perfect distillation of the broader struggle in the West today. When it comes to human rights, I go back to 1215 and Magna Carta — or, to give it its full name, Magna Carta Libertatum. My italics: I don’t think they had them back in 1215. But they understood that “libertatum” is the word that matters. Back then, “human rights” were rights of humans, of individuals — and restraints upon the king: They’re the rights that matter: limitations upon kingly power. Eight centuries later, we have entirely inverted the principle: “Rights” are now gifts that a benign king graciously showers upon his subjects — the right to “free” health care, to affordable housing, the “right of access to a free placement service” (to quote the European Constitution’s “rights” for workers). The Democratic National Committee understands the new school of rights very well: In its recent video, Obama’s bureaucratic edict is upgraded into the “right to contraception coverage at no additional cost.” And, up against a “human right” as basic as that, how can such peripheral rights as freedom of conscience possibly compete?
The transformation of “human rights” from restraints upon state power into a pretext for state power is nicely encapsulated in the language of Article 14 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which states that everyone has the right “to receive free compulsory education.” Got that? You have the human right to be forced to do something by the government.
Commissar Sebelius isn’t the only one interested in “striking the appropriate balance” between individual liberty and state compulsion. Everyone talks like that these days. For Canada’s Chief Censor, Jennifer Lynch, freedom of expression is just one menu item in the great all-you-can-eat salad bar of rights, so don’t be surprised if we’re occasionally out of stock. Instead, why not try one of our tasty nutritious rights du jour? Like the human right to a transsexual labiaplasty, or the human right of McDonald’s employees not to have to wash their hands after visiting the bathroom. Commissar Lynch puts it this way: “The modern conception of rights is that of a matrix with different rights and freedoms mutually reinforcing each other to build a strong and durable human rights system.”
That would be a matrix as in some sort of intricate biological sequencing very few people can understand? Or a Matrix as in the illusory world created to maintain a supine citizenry by all-controlling government officials? The point is, with so many pseudo-“rights” bouncing around, you need a bigger and bigger state: Individual rights are less important than a “rights system” — i.e., a government bureaucracy.
This perversion of rights is killing the Western world. First, unlike real rights — to freedom of speech and freedom of religion — these new freedoms come with quite a price tag. All the free stuff is free in the sense of those offers that begin “You pay nothing now!” But you will eventually. No nation is rich enough to give you all this “free” stuff year in, year out. Spain’s government debt works out to $18,000 per person, France’s to $33,000, Greece’s to $39,000. Thank God we’re not Greece, huh? Er, in fact, according to the Senate Budget Committee, U.S. government debt is currently $44,215 per person. Going by the official Obama budget numbers, it will rise over the next ten years to $75,000. As I say, that’s per person: 75 grand in debt for every man, woman, and child, not to mention every one of the ever-swelling ranks of retirees and disabled Social Security recipients — or about $200,000 per household.
So maybe you’re not interested in philosophical notions of liberty vs. statism — like Danica Patrick, tens of millions of people are happy to “leave it up to the government to make good decisions.” Maybe you’re relatively relaxed about the less theoretical encroachments of Big Government — the diversion of so much American energy into “professional services,” all the lawyering and bookkeeping and paperwork shuffling necessary to keep you and your economic activity in full compliance with the Bureau of Compliance. But at some point no matter how painless the seductions of statism, you run up against the hard math: As those debt per capita numbers make plain, all this “free” stuff is doing is mortgaging your liberty and lining up a future of serfdom.
I used to think that the U.S. Constitution would prove more resilient than the less absolutist liberties of other Western nations. But the president has calculated that, with Obamacare, the First Amendment and much else will crumble before his will. And, given trends in U.S. jurisprudence, who’s to say he won’t get his way? That’s the point about all this “free” stuff: Ultimately, it’s not about your rights, but about his.
Why Apologize to Afghanistan?
By Andrew C. McCarthy
Saturday, February 25, 2012
We have officially lost our minds.
The New York Times reports that President Obama has sent a formal letter of apology to Afghanistan’s ingrate president, Hamid Karzai, for the burning of Korans at a U.S. military base. The only upside of the apology is that it appears (based on the Times account) to be couched as coming personally from our blindly Islamophilic president — “I wish to express my deep regret for the reported incident. . . . I extend to you and the Afghani people my sincere apologies.” It is not couched as an apology from the American people, whose frame of mind will be outrage, not contrition, as the facts become more widely known.
The facts are that the Korans were seized at a jail because jihadists imprisoned there were using them not for prayer but to communicate incendiary messages. The soldiers dispatched to burn refuse from the jail were not the officials who had seized the books, had no idea they were burning Korans, and tried desperately to retrieve the books when the situation was brought to their attention.
Of course, these facts may not become widely known, because no one is supposed to mention the main significance of what has happened here. First, as usual, Muslims — not al-Qaeda terrorists, but ordinary, mainstream Muslims — are rioting and murdering over the burning (indeed, the inadvertent burning) of a book. Yes, it’s the Koran, but it’s a book all the same — and one that, moderate Muslims never tire of telling us, doesn’t really mean everything it says anyhow.
Muslim leaders and their leftist apologists are also forever lecturing the United States about “proportionality” in our war-fighting. Yet when it comes to Muslim proportionality, Americans are supposed to shrug meekly and accept the “you burn books, we kill people” law of the jungle. Disgustingly, the Times would inure us to this moral equivalence by rationalizing that “Afghans are fiercely protective of their Islamic faith.” Well then, I guess that makes it all right, huh?
Then there’s the second not-to-be-uttered truth: Defiling the Koran becomes an issue for Muslims only when it has been done by non-Muslims. Observe that the unintentional burning would not have occurred if these “fiercely protective of their Islamic faith” Afghans had not defiled the Korans in the first place. They were Muslim prisoners who annotated the “holy” pages with what a U.S. military official described as “extremist inscriptions” in covert messages sent back and forth, just as the jihadists held at Gitmo have been known to do (notwithstanding that Muslim prisoners get their Korans courtesy of the American taxpayers they construe the book to justify killing).
Do you know why you are supposed to stay mum about the intentional Muslim sacrilege but plead to be forgiven for the accidental American offense? Because you would otherwise have to observe that the Koran and other Islamic scriptures instruct Muslims that they are in a civilizational jihad against non-Muslims, and that it is therefore permissible for them to do whatever is necessary — including scrawl militant graffiti on their holy book — if it advances the cause. Abdul Sattar Khawasi — not a member of al-Qaeda but a member in good standing of the Afghan government for which our troops are inexplicably fighting and dying — put it this way: “Americans are invaders, and jihad against the Americans is an obligation.”
Because exploiting America’s hyper-sensitivity to things Islamic advances the jihad, the ostensible abuse of the Koran by using it for secret communiqués is to be overlooked. Actionable abuse occurs only when the book is touched by the bare hands of, or otherwise maltreated by, an infidel.
As our great Iraqi ally Ayatollah Ali Sistani teaches, touching a kafir (“one who does not believe in Allah and His Oneness”) is to be avoided, because Islamic scripture categorizes infidels as equivalent to “urine, feces, semen, dead bodies, blood, dogs, pigs, alcoholic liquors,” and “the sweat of an animal who persistently eats filth.” That is what influential clerics — not al-Qaeda but revered scholars of Islamic law — inculcate in rank-and-file Muslims.
And they are not making it up. Sistani came upon this view after decades of dedicated scriptural study. In fact, to take just one telling example (we could list many, many others), the “holy” Koran we non-Muslims are supposed to honor proclaims (in Sura 9:28), “Truly the pagans are unclean . . . so let them not . . . approach the sacred mosque.” It is because of this injunction from Allah that non-Muslims are barred — not by al-Qaeda but by the Saudi Arabian government — from entering Mecca and Medina. Kafirs are deemed unfit to set their infidel feet on the ground of these ancient cities. You don’t like that? Too bad — grin and bear it . . . and, while you’re at it, surge up a few thousand more American troops to improve life in Kandahar.
Understand this: Muslims are killing Muslims all the time. Sunnis attack Shiites, Shiites attack Sunnis. Ahmadi Muslims are attacked in sundry Islamic countries. Often, these Muslim-on-Muslim atrocities involve not only murder but also the torching of the other sect’s homes and mosques — necessarily meaning Muslims are burning Korans, and with far more mens rea than the American personnel had in Afghanistan. None of these atrocities incite global Islamic rioting — it is just Muslim-on-Muslim violence, the numbing familiarity of which calls for no comment, except perhaps to mumble that it must have something to do with how “fiercely protective of their Islamic faith” Muslims are. (Actually, it has to do with Muslims’ deeming the perceived heresies of other Muslims to be apostasy, for which sharia prescribes the death penalty.)
Also understand this: In sharia societies, non-Muslim religious articles are confiscated and destroyed every single day as a matter of policy. In Saudi Arabia, where sharia is the law of the land, where Mecca and Medina are closed to non-Muslims, government guidelines prohibit Jews and Christians from bringing Bibles, crucifixes, Stars of David, and similar artifacts emblematic of their faith into the country. When that prohibition is violated, the offending items are seized and burned or otherwise destroyed. Moreover, though Saudis deny having an official policy that bans Jews from entering the country at all, reports are rampant of travelers’ being denied visas either because they are Jewish or because their passports bear stamps indicative of prior travel to Israel.
In spite of this shameful, conscious, systematic abuse of non-Muslims and their religious articles, King Abdullah has yet to send a letter of apology to Obama. All the presidential bowing in the world will not change this, not when Muslim supremacism is the irreducible core of mainstream Islam — not al-Qaeda Islam, mainstream Islam. And where is Mr. Karzai’s apology over the Afghan soldier who just killed two Americans? That is only the latest incident in a largely unreported epidemic: our “allies” turning their weapons on their Western trainers.
On second thought, who cares if Karzai apologizes? Our troops do not belong in Afghanistan. They have given more than enough, way more. So has our country.
If our government believes the Taliban and other factions are our enemies, allied with al-Qaeda to kill Americans, then we should unleash our military to destroy them. This should not be an endless counterinsurgency experiment that prioritizes the protection of Afghan civilians and the construction of Afghan civil society; it should be a war that our vast might enables us to win rapidly and decisively.
But our government has repeatedly professed that the Taliban are not our enemies. If that is true, we lack not only the will but the cause for waging war. We should leave — now. It is immoral to keep our young men and women there as sitting ducks in a place where the people hate Americans but we are not trying to vanquish them. We routed al-Qaeda years ago. We don’t need to defeat the Taliban or waste time negotiating with them, Karzai, the warlords, and the rest. Let them have their Korans and work it out for themselves with the compassion that has been such a Religion of Peace hallmark for the last 14 centuries.
That, however, cannot be the end of it. If, according to the president, we need to apologize to Muslims because we must accept that they have such an innate, extraordinary ardor for their religion that barbaric reactions to trivial slights are inevitable, then they should not be invited to enter a civilized country. At the very least, our immigration laws should exclude entry from Muslim-majority countries unless and until those countries expressly repeal repressive sharia laws (e.g., the death penalty for apostates) and adopt American standards of non-discrimination against, tolerance of, and protection for religious minorities.
If you really want to promote freedom in Islamic countries, an immigration policy based on civil-rights reciprocity would be a lot more effective, and a lot less expensive, than dispatching tens of thousands of troops to build sharia “democracies.” It would also protect Americans from people whose countries and cultures have not prepared them for the obligations of citizenship in a free society.
Saturday, February 25, 2012
We have officially lost our minds.
The New York Times reports that President Obama has sent a formal letter of apology to Afghanistan’s ingrate president, Hamid Karzai, for the burning of Korans at a U.S. military base. The only upside of the apology is that it appears (based on the Times account) to be couched as coming personally from our blindly Islamophilic president — “I wish to express my deep regret for the reported incident. . . . I extend to you and the Afghani people my sincere apologies.” It is not couched as an apology from the American people, whose frame of mind will be outrage, not contrition, as the facts become more widely known.
The facts are that the Korans were seized at a jail because jihadists imprisoned there were using them not for prayer but to communicate incendiary messages. The soldiers dispatched to burn refuse from the jail were not the officials who had seized the books, had no idea they were burning Korans, and tried desperately to retrieve the books when the situation was brought to their attention.
Of course, these facts may not become widely known, because no one is supposed to mention the main significance of what has happened here. First, as usual, Muslims — not al-Qaeda terrorists, but ordinary, mainstream Muslims — are rioting and murdering over the burning (indeed, the inadvertent burning) of a book. Yes, it’s the Koran, but it’s a book all the same — and one that, moderate Muslims never tire of telling us, doesn’t really mean everything it says anyhow.
Muslim leaders and their leftist apologists are also forever lecturing the United States about “proportionality” in our war-fighting. Yet when it comes to Muslim proportionality, Americans are supposed to shrug meekly and accept the “you burn books, we kill people” law of the jungle. Disgustingly, the Times would inure us to this moral equivalence by rationalizing that “Afghans are fiercely protective of their Islamic faith.” Well then, I guess that makes it all right, huh?
Then there’s the second not-to-be-uttered truth: Defiling the Koran becomes an issue for Muslims only when it has been done by non-Muslims. Observe that the unintentional burning would not have occurred if these “fiercely protective of their Islamic faith” Afghans had not defiled the Korans in the first place. They were Muslim prisoners who annotated the “holy” pages with what a U.S. military official described as “extremist inscriptions” in covert messages sent back and forth, just as the jihadists held at Gitmo have been known to do (notwithstanding that Muslim prisoners get their Korans courtesy of the American taxpayers they construe the book to justify killing).
Do you know why you are supposed to stay mum about the intentional Muslim sacrilege but plead to be forgiven for the accidental American offense? Because you would otherwise have to observe that the Koran and other Islamic scriptures instruct Muslims that they are in a civilizational jihad against non-Muslims, and that it is therefore permissible for them to do whatever is necessary — including scrawl militant graffiti on their holy book — if it advances the cause. Abdul Sattar Khawasi — not a member of al-Qaeda but a member in good standing of the Afghan government for which our troops are inexplicably fighting and dying — put it this way: “Americans are invaders, and jihad against the Americans is an obligation.”
Because exploiting America’s hyper-sensitivity to things Islamic advances the jihad, the ostensible abuse of the Koran by using it for secret communiqués is to be overlooked. Actionable abuse occurs only when the book is touched by the bare hands of, or otherwise maltreated by, an infidel.
As our great Iraqi ally Ayatollah Ali Sistani teaches, touching a kafir (“one who does not believe in Allah and His Oneness”) is to be avoided, because Islamic scripture categorizes infidels as equivalent to “urine, feces, semen, dead bodies, blood, dogs, pigs, alcoholic liquors,” and “the sweat of an animal who persistently eats filth.” That is what influential clerics — not al-Qaeda but revered scholars of Islamic law — inculcate in rank-and-file Muslims.
And they are not making it up. Sistani came upon this view after decades of dedicated scriptural study. In fact, to take just one telling example (we could list many, many others), the “holy” Koran we non-Muslims are supposed to honor proclaims (in Sura 9:28), “Truly the pagans are unclean . . . so let them not . . . approach the sacred mosque.” It is because of this injunction from Allah that non-Muslims are barred — not by al-Qaeda but by the Saudi Arabian government — from entering Mecca and Medina. Kafirs are deemed unfit to set their infidel feet on the ground of these ancient cities. You don’t like that? Too bad — grin and bear it . . . and, while you’re at it, surge up a few thousand more American troops to improve life in Kandahar.
Understand this: Muslims are killing Muslims all the time. Sunnis attack Shiites, Shiites attack Sunnis. Ahmadi Muslims are attacked in sundry Islamic countries. Often, these Muslim-on-Muslim atrocities involve not only murder but also the torching of the other sect’s homes and mosques — necessarily meaning Muslims are burning Korans, and with far more mens rea than the American personnel had in Afghanistan. None of these atrocities incite global Islamic rioting — it is just Muslim-on-Muslim violence, the numbing familiarity of which calls for no comment, except perhaps to mumble that it must have something to do with how “fiercely protective of their Islamic faith” Muslims are. (Actually, it has to do with Muslims’ deeming the perceived heresies of other Muslims to be apostasy, for which sharia prescribes the death penalty.)
Also understand this: In sharia societies, non-Muslim religious articles are confiscated and destroyed every single day as a matter of policy. In Saudi Arabia, where sharia is the law of the land, where Mecca and Medina are closed to non-Muslims, government guidelines prohibit Jews and Christians from bringing Bibles, crucifixes, Stars of David, and similar artifacts emblematic of their faith into the country. When that prohibition is violated, the offending items are seized and burned or otherwise destroyed. Moreover, though Saudis deny having an official policy that bans Jews from entering the country at all, reports are rampant of travelers’ being denied visas either because they are Jewish or because their passports bear stamps indicative of prior travel to Israel.
In spite of this shameful, conscious, systematic abuse of non-Muslims and their religious articles, King Abdullah has yet to send a letter of apology to Obama. All the presidential bowing in the world will not change this, not when Muslim supremacism is the irreducible core of mainstream Islam — not al-Qaeda Islam, mainstream Islam. And where is Mr. Karzai’s apology over the Afghan soldier who just killed two Americans? That is only the latest incident in a largely unreported epidemic: our “allies” turning their weapons on their Western trainers.
On second thought, who cares if Karzai apologizes? Our troops do not belong in Afghanistan. They have given more than enough, way more. So has our country.
If our government believes the Taliban and other factions are our enemies, allied with al-Qaeda to kill Americans, then we should unleash our military to destroy them. This should not be an endless counterinsurgency experiment that prioritizes the protection of Afghan civilians and the construction of Afghan civil society; it should be a war that our vast might enables us to win rapidly and decisively.
But our government has repeatedly professed that the Taliban are not our enemies. If that is true, we lack not only the will but the cause for waging war. We should leave — now. It is immoral to keep our young men and women there as sitting ducks in a place where the people hate Americans but we are not trying to vanquish them. We routed al-Qaeda years ago. We don’t need to defeat the Taliban or waste time negotiating with them, Karzai, the warlords, and the rest. Let them have their Korans and work it out for themselves with the compassion that has been such a Religion of Peace hallmark for the last 14 centuries.
That, however, cannot be the end of it. If, according to the president, we need to apologize to Muslims because we must accept that they have such an innate, extraordinary ardor for their religion that barbaric reactions to trivial slights are inevitable, then they should not be invited to enter a civilized country. At the very least, our immigration laws should exclude entry from Muslim-majority countries unless and until those countries expressly repeal repressive sharia laws (e.g., the death penalty for apostates) and adopt American standards of non-discrimination against, tolerance of, and protection for religious minorities.
If you really want to promote freedom in Islamic countries, an immigration policy based on civil-rights reciprocity would be a lot more effective, and a lot less expensive, than dispatching tens of thousands of troops to build sharia “democracies.” It would also protect Americans from people whose countries and cultures have not prepared them for the obligations of citizenship in a free society.
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