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WND column

The Death of Diversity

Throughout history, nations have taken violent exception to being invaded by large masses of foreigners. The Canaanites did not take kindly to Israelite immigration into the Promised Land, nor did the Israelites later welcome the arrival of Philistine immigrants from the Aegean Sea. The Arabs, who immigrated to Palestine in the centuries that followed Hadrian’s destruction of Judea after the Third Jewish War, are still actively resisting the return of the Jews to their ancient ancestral lands 63 years after the Israeli war of independence.

In Spain, the Reconquista took 770 years, from King Pelagius’ defeat of the Umayyad Caliphate at the Battle of Covadinga in 722 to the last European sultan’s capitulation to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492.

People value their cultures, their traditions, their religion, their land and their blood. They always have and they always will.

A Dance with Dragons review – no spoilers

It was interesting to read George R.R. Martin’s latest so soon after seeing HBO’s A Game of Thrones and reading two fantasy series that some have attempted to compare to Martin’s epic, The First Law by Joe Abercrombie and The Prince of Nothing by R. Scott Bakker. My first thought upon simply viewing the size of the tome was that Martin is clearly suffering from the same disease that inflicted Stephen King and JK Rowling before him. It would appear that some time in between A Storm of Swords and A Feast For Crows, Martin came down with a bad case of morbus nemendatorus. This is the illness which strikes an author after he has become so prodigiously successful that he no longer sees any need to pay heed to an editor. It can be diagnosed on sight by the simple measurement of the thickness of the first book in the series and comparing it with that of the last book in the series. After reading A Dance with Dragons, it is abundantly clear that Mr. Martin has not yet recovered from it.

Read the rest at the Black Gate.

UPDATE – Matthew David Surridge, who is one of the best critics in the SF/F genre, offers a substantially different take on the novel.

More Republican lies

The interesting thing about the Republican white flag is that it wasn’t even a real flag. Karl Denninger went through the details and broke it down:

NO domestic spending cuts whatsoever.

NO material changes to entitlement spending ($25 billion/year on Medicare is pointless.)

NO other mandatory spending cuts. Anywhere.

Remember, the deal was supposed to be about $2 trillion in total – $1.2 as outlined above, and then $800 billion in “revenue increases” (tax hikes.) The deal “blew up” when Obama wanted another $400 billion in taxes. We’re talking about chicken**** here folks – these “cuts” are not real, they are all “reductions in planned spending increases.

In other words, the Republicans were offering real tax increases and nonexistent spending cuts in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. Boehner and Cantor are shameless liars whose only goal is to raise the debt ceiling without letting the Tea Party and fiscal conservatives know that they have done so without any significant spending cuts.

Moreover, there is no chance of forced default. In August, there will be a projected $150 billion in tax revenue. Interest payments will only be $29 billion. That leaves more than $120 billion to spend on everything else. So, anyone who claims that default is unavoidable as of August third or anytime in August is blatantly lying.

The 4th Bush

Here we go again. Jeb Bush contemplates 2012:

“You never say never. This is a standard answer that I’ve kind of learned how to give which is — you never say never, but I never rule out being on Dancing with the Stars either … there are a lot of ways you can make a difference.”

No. Oh, please no. Not another bloody Bush. Somewhere in New York City, Kathryn Jean Lopez is burning out the batteries on her personal massager. And I can already hear Karl Rove and Dick Morris babbling complete nonsense about the Hispanic vote in my nightmares.

The logic of neocon rage

John Podhoretz, who has advocated war against Iran and Iraq, is outraged by the evil in Norway:

The monstrous events today in Norway—as of this writing, word is that a gunman slaughtered at least 30 kids at a youth camp who had gathered to hear about the earlier bombing of government offices in Oslo—have stirred in me a kind of rage I haven’t felt this viscerally since the days after 9/11, when my apartment in Brooklyn Heights looked out directly on the violent purple gash in the sky that hovered over the wreckage like a demonic counterimage of the holy cloud that followed the Jews through the desert in the aftermath of the Exodus. Perhaps it is that my own daughter is, as I write, at her own day camp outside New York City, and so there is something visceral, primal, in my sense of connection to the dead and dying and their parents. This rage, which is accompanied by all manner of violent thoughts about what should be done and could be done to the living body of the depthlessly evil monster who committed this Satanic act, is disturbing in its intensity. I would like it to go away. But it won’t, and it shouldn’t, because without it–without a stark response to something so purposefully awful–we are unilaterally disarming ourselves. The monster and his comrades have the passion to commit their foul deeds. If we respond with dispassion, we are ceding to them part of the animating force that makes us human. If we decide to intellectualize our emotions rather than allow them to influence us, we are turning our back on our responsibility to those whose lives were stripped from them.

So, it’s evil for Saudis to kill Americans, it’s evil for Norwegians to kill Norwegians and nominal Norwegians, but it is a moral imperative for Americans to kill Iraqis and Iranians. Got it? Let’s compare the bodycount to date:

9/11: 2,996 deaths. VISCERAL RAGE!
Oslo: 92 deaths. DEPTHLESS AND SATANIC EVIL!
Iraq: 135,369 deaths. NOT ENOUGH DEAD SUNNIS! (1)
Iran: ???? deaths. KILL AMALEKITES FOR ISRAEL! (2)

(1) “What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn’t kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything? Wasn’t the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?”

(2) “If Barack Obama wants Israel to pull back to the 1967 borders, a position that could not be politically achieved today. If he thought that would solve everything, the best way for him to do that is to hit Iran’s nuclear facilities. If the US takes out Iran’s nuclear capacity and Obama goes to Jerusalem and says, ‘I have saved you from Amalek, I have saved you from the revival of the greatest threat to the Jewish people, you do something for me.”

Needless to say, Podhoretz the Younger is not only selective about what sort of deaths fill him with BOUNDLESS RAAAAGE and what sort he would like to see more of, but he also supports the very sort of immigration policy that appears to have led to yesterday’s lethal attacks in Norway.

“[A]s a Jew, I have great difficulty supporting a blanket policy of immigration restriction because of what happened to the Jewish people after 1924 and the unwillingness of the United States to take Jews in.”

So, Norway should permit Sri Lankans and Tunisians to settle in Norway because the USA didn’t permit Jews to settle in the USA in 1924. Got it? Podhoretz’s emotional histrionics are particularly ironic in light of the way the logic of his various positions suggests that the U.S. military should have attacked the Utoya Worker’s League camp and slaughtered everyone “between the ages of 15 and 35” in order to save Norway from Cush. The amusing thing is that there is a very good chance that at least one of the deaths that so outrage him now was that of a male Sunni between 15 and 35.

It also strikes one that perhaps the Iranians should consider rethinking their strategy vis-a-vis Israel. Instead of pursuing nuclear weapons, which is, per Podhoretz, bad, Tehran should simply order a few hundred thousand of its citizens to peacefully immigrate to Israel, which is, per Podhoretz, good. No doubt this will cause Podhoretz the Younger to abandon his call for war with Iran and joyfully embrace the new Persian-Israelis.

UPDATE – One wonders if Podhoretz will soon express similar rage over the death of a 35-year old youth who was gunned down in Tehran today.

The theatre continues

The House Republicans walk out when Obama refuses to accept their surrender:

President Barack Obama and congressional leaders are scrambling to find a way ahead on a debt deal after House Speaker John Boehner threw negotiations into crisis by walking out less than two weeks before the deadline to avoid a potentially catastrophic default.

A visibly frustrated Obama summoned Boehner, R-Ohio, to the White House for a Saturday morning meeting with the three other leaders – Sens. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

“We have run out of time and they are going to have to explain to me how it is that we are going to avoid default” on Aug. 2, the president told reporters at a hastily scheduled news after Boehner’s announcement.

The media coverage of the debt ceiling issue has really been abysmal. There is absolutely no more threat of U.S. default in August than there was yesterday or than there is today. If Obama elects to default by deciding to pay for the occupation of Afghanistan or sending out Social Security checks instead of paying interest on the debt, it is no more unavoidable or necessary than a default by a private individual who decides to buy a new car instead of paying his mortgage and credit card bills.

There is a perfectly good case to be made for strategic default, especially considering how much U.S. debt is owed to its self-appointed enemy of the future, China. But it is a blatant and shameless lie to claim that a failure to reach an agreement on raising the debt ceiling, or even a budget, means that a default cannot be avoided.

It shouldn’t be hard to explain to Obama how to avoid a default. First, you collect tax revenues. Second, you pay the interest on the outstanding debts. Third, you pay for your various spending programs with whatever money you have left. Since interest was only $197 billion in 2010 and tax revenues were $2,162 billion, it is mathematically obvious that any default can only be an intentional and strategic one, the protestations of politicians notwithstanding.

It’s official

It appears I was eight months early in predicting mainstream recognition of economic depression “towards the end of 2010” in RGD:

We can only hope that the politicians huddled in Washington and Brussels succeed in averting these threats. But here’s the thing: Even if we manage to avoid immediate catastrophe, the deals being struck on both sides of the Atlantic are almost guaranteed to make the broader economic slump worse.

In fact, policy makers seem determined to perpetuate what I’ve taken to calling the Lesser Depression, the prolonged era of high unemployment that began with the Great Recession of 2007-2009 and continues to this day, more than two years after the recession supposedly ended.

Of course, Paul Krugman has no idea what he’s talking about. This is not a lesser depression, it is a larger depression. The full scale and scope simply isn’t apparent yet.

That’s why I referred to it as “the Great Depression 2.0” in RGD. In the 1930s, only the USA exacerbated the situation with Keynesian stimulus policies. In the 2000s, China, Japan, and the European countries all engaged in such policies, with China and Japan spending an even greater portion of their GDP on them than the USA. Therefore, we can expect the Great Depression 2.0 to be a genuinely worldwide one, as opposed to a mostly American one in the 1930s. It’s not that Europe didn’t experience a depression, but it wasn’t known as a “Great” depression because it was largely over by 1933.

“Europe’s subsequent decline was gentler, shorter, and smaller as European governments did not engage in the same heroic attempts to fight the effects of the contraction that the U.S. government did. There was no European Reconstruction Finance Corporation or New Deal to prolong the downturn, so the European economies hit their collective nadir in 1932 and had already grown past their pre-depression levels in 1936. With the exception of Germany, which suffered from the economic complications of a socialist government, crushing war reparations, and the famous Weimar Republic hyperinflation, unemployment in Europe was lower than in the United States. While U.S. unemployment reached an estimated peak of 24.9 percent in 1933, British unemployment peaked at 17 percent in 1932 and French unemployment never even reached double digits. Japan saw neither a big pre-1929 boom nor a massive post-1929 bust….”
– RGD, p. 178

UPDATE: Okay, this comment made me laugh.

I’m honestly sorry to say this, but when you start your article with “Amanda Marcotte is right,” you’ve pretty much just taken your credibility, shot it in the back of the head, and are now frantically digging a hole to bury the corpse in before somebody comes to investigate the loud noise.

Vibrancy in Norway

An explosion in Oslo:

6.01pm: John Magnus, chief foreign correspondent of Oslo’s VG newspaper, told the Guardian he was sitting at his desk when the massive explosion in central Oslo today blew him off his chair.

It was 3.26 in the afternoon. The whole building was shaking. It was dancing. There was glass flying through the newsroom. I was on the far side of the building from where the prime minister’s office is. The entire glass front of our building has been blown out …

I saw people screaming and covered in blood. There were at least four people I saw who looked lifeless with their faces covered. We’ve had it confirmed that two people are dead but there are other locations that the emergency services have not reached yet.

Naturally, this bombing will no more lead the Norwegian people to reconsider the wisdom of permitting Muslim immigration than the vast increase in the number of rapes committed by Muslim men. But it should. The multiculturalists will be quick to point out the mathematically obvious fact that that most Muslims don’t set off bombs. But this is irrelevant. Because it is also a fact that if a nation does not permit Muslims to enter its borders, it is far less likely to ever suffer any such incidents.

Expansionist Islam offers a challenge to the freedom of religion, (a right that does not actually exist in most countries outside the United States), that few secularists or Christians are presently capable of understanding. It should be eminently clear by now that simply repeating the multicultural mantra that “diversity is our strength” is not going to serve any purpose. At some point, it is going to become abundantly clear to everyone on all sides that the separatist practices of the past were not “outdated raciss bad-thought”, but the result of observation and experience.

UPDATE – According to the latest reports, the killer was a native Norwegian opposed to Muslim immigration, the Norwegian Labour Party, and the Worker’s Youth League. The political camp appears to have been the main target and the bombing merely a diversion. If this is indeed the case, it will represent the long-simmering immigration invasion moving to the inevitable next stage, as it looks as if the killer’s objective may have been to reduce the size of the next generation of left-wing quislings. Regardless, the possibility that certain political policies may have provoked such a violent response cannot logically be taken as any sort of rational justification for the continuation of those societally destructive policies.

From Wikipedia: “The Workers’ Youth League (Bokmål: Arbeidernes Ungdomsfylking, Nynorsk: Arbeidaranes Ungdomsfylking, or AUF) is the youth organization affiliated with the Norwegian Labour Party. AUF was formed in April 1927, following the merger of Left Communist Youth League and Socialist Youth League of Norway. Its ideology is social democracy and democratic socialism. The current leader is Eskil Pedersen. Many former leading figures in AUF have gone on to serve in significant positions in government, such as the incumbent Prime Minister of Norway, Jens Stoltenberg.”

The Charlie Brown Republicans

Surely Lucy won’t pull the football away this time!

Republicans led by naïve supply-siders are preparing, for the third time in my life, to sell their souls on spending cuts in exchange for tax-rate reductions that are small, ineffective, and sure to be temporary. Ronald Reagan got his tax cuts, but he went to his grave waiting for those spending cuts. George W. Bush got his tax cuts, and ended his presidency with spending soaring and his entitlement-reform program in the garbage. And now certain Republicans are starting to slobber over the Gang of Six plan, because it reduces the top income-tax rate to 29 percent. Overall, the plan is supposed to be a tax increase — a $1.2 trillion one — but it sweetens the deal with rate cuts, and rate cuts turn Republicans into useless piles of goo.

The rate cuts, we are told, are “pro-growth.” Growth is the great magical unicorn that will deliver us from the burden of making hard decisions, we are promised.

But the important drivers of our deficit are entitlements, mainly centered on health care, the cost of which is growing at about three to four times the rate of GDP growth. We aren’t going to grow our way out of that problem — not at 2 percent, not at 5 percent. We’ll simply keep spending, pile up more debt, and have a debate like this again in a couple of years, if we’re lucky — or in a couple of weeks if we aren’t.

Nothing short of comprehensive reform of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security is going to stabilize our public finances. The Gang of Six deal contains only very vague language about “efficiency” in health-care spending, and it actually makes Social Security reform more difficult by introducing procedural barriers. It’s a terrible deal, and Republicans would be fools to take it.

As usual, the establishment Republicans are assuming that the threat of a SECOND OBAMA TERM will make 2012 THE MOSTEST IMPORTANTEST ELECTION EVAH and cause the rebellious Tea Party element to dutifully fall in line and vote them back into office. And they may well be right, again.

On the other hand, increasing numbers of Americans appear to be increasingly aware of the charade and of the irrelevance of the bi-factional game in comparison with the economic issues. If House Republicans are willing to raise the debt ceiling, then what difference does it make if the Magic Negro, Captain Underoos, or Al’s Pal happen to be seated in the Oval Office as the economy begins to deleverage?

The brilliance of U.S. strategery

Jim Lacey on the death of U.S. military strategy:

I teach strategy to Marines and other military officers for a living. The classes hear ad nauseam that if your plan does not include any directions as to how to carry it out, and how to obtain resources for it, then you do not have a strategy. You have an aspiration. The NMS has a lot of aspirations. There are several dozen of them in the first few pages alone. One has to wade through eight pages of aspirations before coming to: “The core task of our Armed Forces remains to defend our Nation and win its wars.” Wow! I would have led with that one.

Military strategists might wonder why the authors of the NMS made them wade through a third of the document before getting to the crucial reason of why we maintain a military in the first place. One might even wonder if the NMS authors really mean that winning wars is job number one, since elsewhere in the document you find: “Lastly, we will be prepared to act as security guarantor — preferably with partners and allies, but alone if necessary — to deter and defeat acts of aggression.” Lastly? Really? Since page one says, “Our foremost priority is the security of the American people, our territory, and our way of life,” one wonders what activities are so important that the military has moved defeating aggression to last in its order of concerns.

In related news, the U.S. Army recently reported that its officers will no longer utilize wargames as part of their military training, but will instead incorporate a rigorous program that includes The Ungame, “a non-competitive learning game of conversation that fosters listening skills as well as self-expression”, Dance Dance Revolution, and the popular teen party game Spin the Bottle. Two card games, Uno and Mille Bournes, were also given serious consideration, but the former was rejected as being “too competitive” while the latter was deemed to be a potentially negative influence on young officers due to its glorification of excess speed and failure to respect legal speed limits.

When asked for comment, Brigadier General Shaniqua Rodriguez expressed reservations about the new policy, saying: “The Ungame be cool and I rockin the hells outta DDR, but I ain’t kissing no mans nohow. I don’t play that shit. And what the White Man got against Uno? It be too brown and shit? They raciss!”

UPDATE: General Martin Dempsey, U.S. Army Chief of Staff, announced that “Uno, Chinese Checkers, and that African game where they clap and hop over sticks” would be added to the Army’s new training schedule, effective immediately. He also announced that he would not attempt to kiss Brigadier General Rodriguez even if the bottle pointed in her direction, commenting that “while she is fly, she is one crazy-ass Lebanese.”