A Strong Foreign Policy Requires a Strong Economy, Credible Military

By Peter Morici

Saturday, May 31, 2014

In a major address at West Point, President Obama once again sought to articulate a foreign policy that places greater emphasis on diplomacy, economic leverage and recourse to international law. Facing crises, “U.S. military action cannot be the only – or even primary – component of our leadership.”

All this assumes that the U.S. has a strong economy that can deliver opportunities to nations that cooperate and withhold benefits from those that don’t.

Too often, however, the Democratic or Republican president has sacrificed U.S. economic interests in international trade and investment deals that have neither adequately supported U.S. businesses and workers nor effectively supported U.S. foreign policy objectives.

For example, the United States and its EU allies opened their markets and access to technology to China in 2001 and Russia in 2012 by approving their entry into the World Trade Organization. These deals were part of broader strategies to integrate former cold war adversaries in a system of global commerce and shared prosperity that has made war unthinkable among former foes in Europe, Japan and the South Pacific.

Sadly some of the actors did not get the script.

China is using money it earns trading with the west to rapidly modernize its navy and bully Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam and others in Asia to cede sovereignty over disputed territory in the East and South China Seas.

Russia has taken the dividends from selling natural gas, nonferrous metals and machinery to Europe to modernize its army, steal the Crimea from the Ukraine and bully other former Soviet states to think twice about closer ties with the EU and NATO.

Similarly, Russia is using its natural gas sales to Europe, and Gasprom’s control of critical choke points in the eastern EU’s pipeline infrastructure to blackmail the Ukraine and warn others in Europe of very cold winters if they don’t let it keep what it has stolen in the Crimea.

Opening U.S. markets to Chinese products and other trade deals have proven no bonanza for the U.S. economy. For example, thanks to Beijing’s high tariffs and administrative barriers to imports, currency manipulation and other subsidies to its exports, and piracy of intellectual property the U.S. economy is burdened with a $275 billion bilateral trade deficit that is killing about 4 million jobs.

Of course, the United States has failed to play its strengths by failing to develop its own abundant offshore oil. The resulting $230 billion petroleum trade deficit is killing at least another 3 million jobs.

Consequently, the U.S. economy has grown a paltry 1.7 percent annually since 2000—half the pace accomplished during the prior two decades. Obama, short on revenues but eager to finance national health care, food stamps and other entitlements, has sacrificed vital investments in troop strength and equipment modernization.

Now, U.S. foreign policy has a double deficit—resources and courage.

In Europe, the United States now lacks assets on the ground to effectively challenge Russia’s incursions into the Ukraine. And Angela Merkel can’t rally domestic support for stronger economic sanctions against Moscow, because German multinationals are fearful of losing too much business.

In the Pacific, the president is refusing to commit American naval resources to confront Chinese ships that run off Philippine fishermen and harass Japanese vessels, and generally violate international law guaranteeing freedom of navigation.

Moscow wants back several parts of its lost empire and to challenge U.S. objectives in places like Syria and Iran. Beijing is seeking dominance in the western Pacific and to assert its authoritarian political system as a viable alternative to American-style democracy.

Unless American diplomacy is backed up by a credible U.S. military commitment, and an economy that can support it, Moscow and Beijing will succeed to the peril of U.S. interests and our allies in Europe and the Pacific.

In the end, U.S. presidents can’t continue pursuing foolish international trade and energy policies, and sacrificing military spending to increase entitlements popular with voters, without living in a much more dangerous world.

Just Assume We Have a Climate Crisis

By Paul Driessen

Saturday, May 31, 2014

Climate modelers and disaster proponents remind me of four guys who were marooned on an island, after their plane went down. The engineer began drawing plans for a boat; the lumberjack cut trees to build it; the pilot plotted a course to the nearest known civilization. But the economist just sat there. The exasperated workers asked him why he wasn’t helping.

“I don’t see the problem,” he replied. “Why can’t we just assume we have a boat, and simply leave?”

In the case of climate change, those making the assumptions demand that we act immediately to avert planetary crises based solely on their computer model predictions. It’s like demanding that governments enact laws to safeguard us from velociraptors, after Jurassic Park scientists found that dinosaur DNA could be extracted from fossilized mosquitoes, and brought the “terrible lizards” back to (Hollywood) life.

Climate models help improve our conceptual understandings of climate systems and the forces that drive climate change. However, they are terrible at predicting Earth’s temperature and other components of its climate. They should never be used to set or justify policies, laws or regulations – such as what the Environmental Protection Agency is about to impose on CO2 emissions from coal-fired power plants.

Even our best climate scientists still have only a limited grasp of Earth’s highly complex and chaotic climate systems, and the many interrelated solar, cosmic, oceanic, atmospheric, terrestrial and other forces that control climate and weather. Even the best models are only as good as that understanding.

Worse, the models and the science behind them have been horribly politicized. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was ostensibly organized in 1988 to examine possible human influences on Earth’s climate. In reality, Swedish meteorologist Bert Bolin and environmental activist groups wanted to use global warming to drive an anti-hydrocarbon, limited-growth agenda. That meant they somehow had to find a human influence on the climate – even if the best they could come up with was “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” [emphasis added]

“Discernible” (ie, detectable) soon metamorphosed into “dominant,” which quickly morphed into the absurd notion that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have now replaced natural forces and become the only factors influencing climate change. They are certainly the only factors that climate activists and alarmists want to talk about, and use to generate scary “scenarios” that are presented as actual predictions of future calamities – while they attempt to silence debate, criticism and skepticism.

They predict, project or forecast that heat waves will intensify, droughts and floods will be stronger and more frequent, hurricanes will be more frequent and violent, sea levels will rise four feet by 2100 [versus eight inches since 1880], and forest fires and other natural calamities will be worse than ever before.

Natural forces obviously caused the Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age and the Pleistocene Ice Ages. (A slab of limestone that I dug up has numerous striations – scratches – left by the last mile-thick glacier that covered what is now my home town in Wisconsin.) After long denying it, the IPCC finally acknowledged that the LIA did occur, and that it was both worldwide and an agricultural disaster.

However, the models and computer algorithms the IPCC and EPA rely on still do not include the proper magnitude of solar cycles and other powerful natural forces that influence climate changes. They assume “positive feedbacks” from GHGs that trap heat, but understate the reflective and thus cooling effects of clouds. They display a global warming bias throughout – bolstered by temperature data contaminated by “urban heat island” effects, due to measuring stations being located too close to human heat sources. They assume Earth’s climate is now controlled almost entirely by rising human CO2/GHG emissions.

It’s no wonder the models, modelers and alarmists totally failed to predict the nearly-18-year absence of global warming – or that the modeled predictions diverge further from actual temperature measurements with every passing year. It’s no wonder modelers cannot tell us which aspects of global warming, global cooling, climate change and “climate disruption” are due to humans, and which are the result of natural forces. It’s hardly surprising that they cannot replicate or “hindcast” the global temperature record from 1950 to 1995, with reasonable or acceptable accuracy – or that they are wrong almost every time.

In 2000, Britain’s Met Office said cold winters would be a thing of the past, and “children just aren’t going to know what snow is.” The 2010 and 2012 winters were the coldest and snowiest in centuries. In 2013, Met Office scholars said the coming winter would be extremely dry; the forecast left towns, families and government agencies totally unprepared for the immense rains and floods that followed.

In 2007, Australia’s climate commissioner predicted Brisbane and other cities would never again have sufficient rain to fill their reservoirs. The forecast ignored previous drought and flood cycles, and was demolished by record rains in 2011, 2013 and 2014. Forecasts of Arctic and Antarctic meltdowns have likewise ignored the long history of warmer and colder temperatures and ice buildups and breakups.

The Bonneville Power Administration tried to cover all the bases in its latest report, saying global warming would cause Columbia River Basin snowpack to melt faster, future precipitation to fall as rain, reservoirs to be overwhelmed – and water levels to be well below normal year round. Meanwhile, President Obama insists that global temperatures will soar, wildfires will be more frequent and devastating, floods and droughts will be more frequent and disastrous, rising seas will inundate coastal cities as Arctic and Antarctic ice shelves melt and disintegrate, and 97% of scientists agree.

And still the IPCC says it has “very high confidence” (the highest level it assigns) to the supposed agreement between computer model forecasts and actual observations. Meanwhile, climate researchers and modelers from Nebraska, Penn State, Great Britain and other “learned institutions” continue to focus on alleged human influences on Earth’s climate. They know they will likely lose their government, foundation and other funding – and will certainly be harassed and vilified by EPA, environmentalists, politicians, and their ideological and pedagogical peers – if they examine natural forces too closely.

Thus they input erroneous data, simplistic assumptions, personal biases, and political and financial calculations, letting models spew out specious scenarios and phony forecasts: garbage in, garbage out.

The modelers owe it to all of us to get it right – so that we can predict, prepare for, mitigate and adapt to whatever future climate conditions nature (or humans) might throw at us. They cannot possibly do that without first understanding, inputting and modeling natural factors along with human influences.

Above all, these supposed modeling experts and climate scientists need to terminate their biases and their evangelism of political agendas that seek to slash fossil fuel use, “transform” our energy and economic systems, reduce our standards of living, and “permit” African and other impoverished nations to enter the modern era only in a “sustainable manner,” as callous elitists often insist.

The climate catastrophe camp’s focus on CO2 is based on the fact that it is a byproduct of detested hydrocarbon use. But this trace gas (a mere 0.04% of Earth’s atmosphere) makes life on this planet possible. More carbon dioxide means crops, forests and grasslands grow faster and better. CO2’s role in climate change is speculative – and contradicted by real-world measurements, observations and history.

Computer models, scenarios and predictions of planetary Armageddon are little more than faulty, corrupt, even fraudulent pseudo-science. They have consistently forecast what has not happened on Planet Earth, and failed to forecast what did happen.

They must no longer be allowed to justify EPA’s job-killing, economy-strangling, family-bashing rules for vehicles, power plants, cement kilns, refineries, factories, farms, shopping malls and countless other facilities that are or soon will be regulated by agency fiat.

The Idiots Lose Their Religion

By Carlos Alberto Montaner

Saturday, May 31, 2014

Eduardo Galeano has been one of the darlings of the Left for more than four decades, ever since his hugely popular bestseller, The Open Veins of Latin America, was published in 1971. Now the 73-year-old Uruguayan writer has backed away from his landmark book, saying at a conference in Brazil that the leftist rhetoric of the book is “awful” and shows how little he knew at the time about economics and the way the world really works.

This was the book that President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela presented to President Barack Obama when the two met in Trinidad in 2009. At that time, Chávez declared that Galeano’s book had helped him understand Latin American reality. Now it appears that “reality” was a fiction, spawned by immaturity and ideology.

The title of Galeano’s book explains its central theory: The open veins of Latin America have been drained of life by exploitive imperial powers, most notably the United States, leaving the region poor and underdeveloped.

And how do the imperial overlords exploit Latin America? By purchasing its natural resources at low prices and using them to produce much-higher-priced manufactured goods whose profits go into the pockets of well-heeled U.S. companies and investors. Latin America, meanwhile, remains poor, as this endless cycle of exploitation repeats itself generation after generation.

As a political writer myself, I know it took real courage — even gallantry — for Galeano to publicly correct himself. It’s not easy to admit when you are wrong. And it is even more difficult when you are a hero to so many, as Galeano has been.

In 1996, I wrote a book with Peruvian author Álvaro Vargas Llosa, a senior fellow with the Independent Institute and the author of Liberty for Latin America, and Colombian journalist and diplomat Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza. Our book, Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot, explained why and how Galeano was wrong. It eventually sold half a million copies, not nearly as many as Galeano’s book has sold.

Galeano’s Open Veins was just one of the subjects of our book. But it was one of the most important, since his book — even now — continues to sell well and is used as a textbook in many universities in the United States, Latin America, and Europe, which might explain the poor understanding that prevails in the academic world about Latin America’s economic problems.

The third chapter of our guide was titled “The Idiot’s Bible” and was devoted to explaining what Galeano himself now confirms: that the author knew very little about economics, and what little he thought he knew was totally wrong.

For example, in his book Galeano promotes the “theory of dependence,” which is the idea that the rich and powerful nations and peoples of the world assign and enforce a second-class, subservient economic status to the nations and peoples of the developing world, what was then called the Third World. This theory is one of classic leftist victimhood, a conspiratorial vision of history in which America the strong rules over Latin America the weak.

Galeano had never stopped to think why other poor societies — such as South Korea, Taiwan, Estonia, Singapore, and Hong Kong — had emerged from misery without being stopped by anyone. We could make the same observation about the achievement of Israel and, in Latin America, Chile.

The truth is that economic progress and prosperity are elective. A society can choose to do things the right way or the wrong way, and these choices have consequences. Do them the right way and within a couple of generations the economy will take off; do the opposite and the economy will sink.

Oddly enough, Galeano’s mea culpa comes at a time when my co-authors and I are publishing a new installment in our series of idiots’ guides, following The Creators of Misery and The Return of the Idiot.

In reporting on Galeano’s change of heart, the New York Times noted that our 1996 volume had “dismissed Open Veins as ‘the idiot’s bible,’ and reduced its thesis to a single sentence: ‘We’re poor; it’s their fault.’”

The Times was right. And now, it appears, Galeano may be getting it right as well.

Laverne Cox Is Not a Woman

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, May 30, 2014

The world is abuzz with news that actor Laverne Cox has become the first transgender person to appear on the cover of Time magazine. If I understand the current state of the ever-shifting ethic and rhetoric of transgenderism, that is not quite true: Bradley Manning, whom we are expected now to call Chelsea, beat Cox to the punch by some time. Manning’s announcement of his intention to begin living his life as a woman and to undergo so-called sex-reassignment surgery came after Time’s story, but, given that we are expected to defer to all subjective experience in the matter of gender identity, it could not possibly be the case that Manning is a transgendered person today but was not at the time of the Time cover simply because Time was unaware of the fact, unless the issuance of a press release is now a critical step in the evolutionary process.

As I wrote at the time of the Manning announcement, Bradley Manning is not a woman. Neither is Laverne Cox.

Cox, a fine actor, has become a spokesman — no doubt he would object to the term — for trans people, whose characteristics may include a wide variety of self-conceptions and physical traits. Katie Couric famously asked him about whether he had undergone surgical alteration, and he rejected the question as invasive, though what counts as invasive when you are being interviewed by Katie Couric about features of your sexual identity is open to interpretation. Couric was roundly denounced for the question and for using “transgenders” as a noun, and God help her if she had misdeployed a pronoun, which is now considered practically a hate crime.

The phenomenon of the transgendered person is a thoroughly modern one, not in the sense that such conditions did not exist in the past — Cassius Dio relates a horrifying tale of an attempted sex-change operation — but because we in the 21st century have regressed to a very primitive understanding of reality, namely the sympathetic magic described by James George Frazer in The Golden Bough. The obsession with policing language on the theory that language mystically shapes reality is itself ancient — see the Old Testament — and sympathetic magic proceeds along similar lines, using imitation and related techniques as a means of controlling reality. The most famous example of this is the voodoo doll. If an effigy can be made sufficiently like the reality it is intended to represent, then it becomes, for the mystical purposes at hand, a reality in its own right. The infinite malleability of the postmodern idea of “gender,” as opposed to the stubborn concreteness of sex, is precisely the reason the concept was invented. For all of the high-academic theory attached to the question, it is simply a mystical exercise in rearranging words to rearrange reality. Facebook now has a few score options for describing one’s gender or sex, and no doubt they will soon match the number of names for the Almighty in one of the old mystery cults.

Regardless of the question of whether he has had his genitals amputated, Cox is not a woman, but an effigy of a woman. Sex is a biological reality, and it is not subordinate to subjective impressions, no matter how intense those impressions are, how sincerely they are held, or how painful they make facing the biological facts of life. No hormone injection or surgical mutilation is sufficient to change that.

Genital amputation and mutilation is the extreme expression of the phenomenon, but it is hardly outside the mainstream of contemporary medical practice. The trans self-conception, if the autobiographical literature is any guide, is partly a feeling that one should be living one’s life as a member of the opposite sex and partly a delusion that one is in fact a member of the opposite sex at some level of reality that transcends the biological facts in question. There are many possible therapeutic responses to that condition, but the offer to amputate healthy organs in the service of a delusional tendency is the moral equivalent of meeting a man who believes he is Jesus and inquiring as to whether his insurance plan covers crucifixion.

This seems to me a very different sort of phenomenon from simple homosexuality (though, for the record, I believe that our neat little categories of sexual orientation are yet another substitution of the conceptual for the actual, human sexual behavior being more complex and varied than the rhetoric of sexual orientation can accommodate). The question of the status of gay people interacts with politics to the extent that it in some cases challenges existing family law, but homosexual acts as such seem to me a matter that is obviously, and almost by definition, private. The mass delusion that we are inculcating on the question of transgendered people is a different sort of matter, to the extent that it would impose on society at large an obligation — possibly a legal obligation under civil-rights law, one that already is emerging — to treat delusion as fact, or at the very least to agree to make subjective impressions superordinate to biological fact in matters both public and private.

As a matter of government, I have little or no desire to police how Cox or any other man or woman conducts his or her personal life. But having a culture organized around the elevation of unreality over reality in the service of Eros, who is a sometimes savage god, is not only irrational but antirational. Cox’s situation gave him an intensely unhappy childhood and led to an eventual suicide attempt, and his story demands our sympathy; times being what they are, we might even offer our indulgence. But neither of those should be allowed to overwhelm the facts, which are not subject to our feelings, however sincere or well intended.

Mass Killers Hold Culture -- and Country -- Hostage

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, May 30, 2014

Can we please stop holding the country hostage to crazy people?

Every year a tiny number of mentally ill people go on horrific killing sprees. It just happened in California. I won't name the person because I think the media attention lavished on these horror shows encourages some of these young men -- and they are almost all young men -- to seek fame or validation through bloodshed.

In an entirely human response, we get spun up into a frenzy of finger-pointing. In the aftermath of the Gabby Giffords shooting, many of the country's leading journalists and politicians suggested the former congresswoman was shot because of the "violent" political rhetoric of Sarah Palin, Rep. Michele Bachmann and other Tea Party-affiliated politicians. It was beyond stupid and slanderous. It was also utterly devoid of evidence. (The culprit was a severe paranoid schizophrenic who abused drugs.)

In 2012, at a screening of "The Dark Knight Rises" in Aurora, Colorado, another mentally ill young man allegedly murdered 12 people. Because he died his hair orange and booby-trapped his home the way the comic book villain The Joker might have, many speculated that he was motivated by the Batman movies to kill.

After the particularly horrifying mass murder in Newtown, Connecticut, many speculated that the mentally ill killer was at least partially driven to kill by violent video games.

In the wake of the recent murder spree in California, Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday tried to lay some of the blame on romantic comedies.

"How many students watch outsized frat-boy fantasies like "Neighbors" and feel, as [the suspected killer] did, unjustly shut out of college life that should be full of 'sex and fun and pleasure'? How many men, raised on a steady diet of Judd Apatow comedies in which the shlubby arrested adolescent always gets the girl, find that those happy endings constantly elude them and conclude, 'It's not fair'?"

Hornaday was vilified, drawing the ire of many of the same liberals who thought nothing of blaming the Giffords shooting on Tea Party rhetoric. The hypocrisy is annoying, but the more interesting issue is: What if Hornaday is right? What if everyone is right? What if Batman movies, militaristic metaphors in politics, Seth Rogen's romantic exploits, video games and -- for good measure -- violent movies, existentialist philosophy, "The Catcher in the Rye" and all of the other usual suspects are what set off these sick young men?

In other words: So what? I don't mean to trivialize these heinous tragedies, but what, exactly, do people propose? Should we police film, politics, novels, video games and every other type of communication and discourse for words and ideas that might set off a statistically microscopic minority of crazy people? What would that effort look like? How many censors would it require? How many hundreds of millions of people would be inconvenienced? Could free speech and artistic expression possibly survive?

Oh, and would it actually, you know, work?

I am not an absolutist on such things. After all, I'm not naming these killers precisely because I think the culture matters, including the news culture. But I am more concerned about the effects of culture on sane people. Regardless, it seems to me like a kind of insanity to think we can hold the entire society hostage to the reactions of insane people.

Why not instead focus on the source of the problem: the very small minority of mentally ill people who pose a danger to themselves and others. And, yes, guns need to be part of that equation. But blanket efforts to ban guns seem like an analogous effort to ban dangerous speech or art. About a third of U.S. households own a gun, according to surveys, but the number may be higher than that. Getting rid of guns will infringe on the rights of tens of millions of sane, law-abiding citizens in order to tackle a problem posed by dozens of people. And, like it or not, the Supreme Court has reaffirmed that we have a constitutional right to own a firearm, subject to reasonable regulation.

One reasonable regulation: doing what we reasonably can to keep guns out of the hands of people who might find Seth Rogen's sexploits, or video games, or Batman movies a good excuse to murder innocent people in cold blood. There would still be murderers, of course. But at least the focus would be where it belongs.