Category: Uncategorized

In fairness, he’s right

US President Barack Obama accused Republicans of wanting to turn the United States into a “Third World” country as he rallied support for his reelection campaign.

The Republican Party by and large supports immigration and it is immigration that has turned large sections of America into a Third World country, so Obama’s statement is entirely correct. He does, however, leave out the fact that Democrats support immigration even more strongly and are just as guilty of turning the United States into a Third World country.

Just as you can’t have a police state without police, you can’t have a Third World country without Third Worlders.

The death of chivalry

A woman misdiagnoses the cause:

Sitting in traffic sucks, but it’s the ultimate observation capsule for people-watching. Might as well scrutinize while you’re stuck between a ditzy chick in a monster SUV and a tourist trying to snap pictures of the White House from the driver’s seat.

It’s where I spied a young couple out on a date. He cracked a wry joke, she giggled daintily, and they held hands as they strolled up a block in the heart of downtown D.C. How in-the-honeymoon period adorable are they? I thought. But when Cute Couple paused to enter a restaurant, my foot almost slipped off the brake: he all but broke his neck to get in ahead of her and let the door slam—I mean, physically slonk her—on her shoulder.

I sent her a telepathic message to turn tail, hail a cab, and end that date immediately. But she didn’t. She grimaced and limped in after him. And that’s one of the reasons why chivalry is dying a slow, brutal death.

A failure to provide negative reinforcement for impolite behavior is one of the reasons, but it’s not the primary or the secondary one. The primary reason is that women are behaving in an increasingly rude manner and men are taking note of their behavior and reacting accordingly. And by rude, I mean ludicrously, obnoxiously so. It’s not just the classic door-opening routine. Women just no longer wait for men; watch a man park at the mall sometime and you’ll notice that more often than not, the woman will be halfway to the entrance by the time the guy has locked the car door. Women have also become prone to issue commands rather than making requests; if you hear someone barking “hold this” or “buy that” in public, it will almost always be a woman issuing orders to a man.

I’ve also noticed that many women will simply come to a complete stop on the sidewalk or in public places without warning those behind them. It happens all the time in the grocery store, but I was most impressed with a woman I saw at a theme park a few weeks ago. She actually stopped, bent over, and started messing around with her kid’s stroller despite the fact that she was standing right in the middle of the single chokepoint through which hundreds of people were passing. It would have taken all of three seconds to move off to the side before blocking off the central portion of the passageway, but clearly that would have been far too much trouble given the apparent urgency of removing her little boy’s sweater. So, why would anyone, man or woman, be polite to those who behave in such an ridiculously inconsiderate manner?

The second reason is that men are being taught by example that it is totally pointless to even attempt to be polite. I was brought up to be conventionally “chivalrous”, but I am increasingly less so these days since one can seldom do so successfully. After the fourth or fifth time you start to walk around the car to get a door for a woman, but by the time you get there she has already opened it, gotten in, and is pulling the door shut, you start to feel like an ass. Eventually, you stop bothering. Each little such lesson adds up, until finally you reach the point where you are blithely allowing heavy glass doors to slam into your date entering behind you, much to the horror of a watching passerby.

It’s pretty simple. If women are not going to provide men, especially young men, with opportunity, positive reinforcement, and an example, they cannot reasonably lament that men don’t treat them the way their grandfathers treated their grandmothers. However, it must be noted that the young woman does correctly identify what she can do to help improve a man’s social graces.

And if I did so happen to be out with a dude who apparently didn’t know better, I’d stop at the restaurant door and wait. And wait. And wait some more until he got the drift. Same thing at the table pausing for a chair to be pulled out. Same thing at the car door.

That’s what my mother did with me when I was younger. Once, when I was about 10, I was curious to see what would happen if I didn’t get the door. She didn’t say anything at first, she just stood there silently at the entrance to Rosedale looking straight ahead. Finally, without turning towards me, she said “I don’t know about you, but I’ve got all day.” My curiosity assuaged and my lesson learned, I opened the door.

Why do atheists love killing people?

As I pointed out in TIA, it is not difficult to understand why extraordinarily ambitious atheists in positions of great political power show such a strong predilection for mass slaughter. They are usually obsessed with forcibly modifying society on a large scale and it is impossible to do that without “breaking a few eggs”. Contra Sam Harris, their bloody acts are perfectly rational; we can and should reject their justifications but we cannot fault their logic. But how does one explain the likes of largely apolitical atheists like Terry Pratchett, whose early-onset Alzheimer’s has inspired him to produce a work of murder propaganda?

Viewers of the BBC2 show will see the writer, whose Discworld series of books have sold millions of copies worldwide, at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland with the 71 year–old motor neurone disease sufferer, named only as Peter. Sir Terry, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2008, also reveals that he is “a believer in assisted death”.

In 2008, a documentary on Sky Television called Right To Die? showed 59–yearold Craig Ewert ending his life. He also suffered from motor neurone disease. Dr Peter Saunders, director of the charity Care Not Killing, criticised the BBC’s decision to broadcast the programme, saying it was acting “like a cheerleader for legalising assisted suicide”.

Despite the fervent assertions of atheists to the contrary, again and again we see that their political objectives revolve around two things, sex and death. They can’t even hide behind the defense that “assisted death” is voluntary, because in the Netherlands, at least 20 percent of the legal euthanasia is performed without the patient’s consent.

1995: The Dutch survey, reviewed in the Journal of Medical Ethics, looked at the figures for 1995 and found that as well as 3,600 authorized cases there were 900 others in which doctors had acted without explicit consent. A follow-up survey found that the main reason for not consulting patients was that they had dementia or were otherwise not competent.

2009: The annual report of the regional commissions that oversee the Netherlands’ euthanasia law said there were 2,636 cases in 2009, the vast majority of them euthanasia, or “mercy killing“, as opposed to assisted suicide, or helping someone to die. That represented about 2 per cent of all Dutch deaths last year, based on figures from Statistics Netherlands. Of the cases, slightly over 80 percent were cancer patients and more than 80 per cent of the deaths occurred in the patient’s home. The rise follows a 10.5 per cent rise in 2008….

What I find most reprehensible is that the same atheists who concoct a myriad of imaginary ways in which religious faith could be somehow considered dangerous, even though it hasn’t been for dozens of centuries, habitually feign an inability to imagine how legalizing “assisted death” could possibly go awry. But what were the Mongols, the Nazis, the Soviets, and the Red Guards doing, if not energetically assisting death?

If Mr. Pratchett, whose books I quite enjoy, wishes to kill himself, that is between him and God. But it is deeply immoral for him to seek to absolve himself of the responsibility for his death and place the burden on another individual, and it is horrifically irresponsible for him to lobby for the legalization of what will certainly turn into another form of state-sponsored murder of the innocent, the aged, the helpless, and the unconsenting.

A Fed official on the need for “post-crisis” reform

From the speech entitled Financial Reform: Post Crisis? by Thomas Hoenig, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City

In the United States, we observe with each crisis and market collapse that policymakers consistently intervene to protect an ever broader group of creditors and investors from loss. This includes the LDC debt crisis, the failure of Continental Illinois, and the thrift industry and stock market collapses of the 1980s. These previous public interventions, though, pale in comparison to what was done recently. Market participants and large financial institutions have little reason to doubt that they will be bailed out again.

Let me offer just one staggering example. When Gramm-Leach-Bliley was passed in 1999, the five largest U.S. banking organizations controlled $2.3 trillion in assets, or about 38 percent of all banking industry assets. Currently, Bank of America by itself and in spite of its need for government support during the crisis has the same level of assets – $2.3 trillion – as the top five did in 1999 and the top five now have 52 percent of all banking industry assets. What clearer sign could we find that market discipline no longer exists?

Past actions and this growth have given our largest organizations significant competitive advantages over other financial institutions. For example, creditors and uninsured depositors at too-big-to-fail organizations believe that there is almost no chance that they will have to take a loss. This idea is formally acknowledged by the credit rating agencies when they give these organizations separate “support” and “standalone” ratings, which explicitly factor in the government support they likely will receive. The difference in these two ratings thus provides one measure of the funding advantages that too-big-to-fail organizations have over others.

Haldane estimated that this funding advantage amounted to about $250 billion in 2009 for 28 of the largest banks in the world. At the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, we estimated the ratings and funding advantage for the five largest U.S. banking organizations during this crisis. In June 2009, these organizations had senior, long-term bank debt that was rated four notches higher on average than it would have been based on just the actual condition of the banks, with one bank given an eight notch upgrade for being too big to fail. Looking at the yield curve, this four-notch advantage translates into more than a 160 basis point savings for debt with two years to maturity and over 360 basis points at seven years to maturity.

In a competitive marketplace, where just a few basis points make a difference, these funding advantages are huge and represent a highly distorting influence within financial markets. I’ll name three. They don’t have to sell creditors on the strength of their condition. They have significant advantages in competing for funds. And, they have significant incentives to take on more risk, hold less capital, and book more assets.

Of course, the salient fact that Hoenig leaves out of the equation is that between 40 and 45% of those trillions in big bank assets are worthless, according to my calculations. Which is why more government support will almost certainly be required in order to keep the “too big to fail” banks from failing.

No deal

Even the editors at NRO can’t stomach the ludicrous no-cuts deal that Boehner is attempting to strike with the Senate and White House:

We initially supported the deal House Speaker John Boehner cut with the White House to cut $38.5 billion from the rest of the fiscal year 2011 budget. It was only a pittance in the context of all of Washington’s red ink, but it seemed an acceptable start, even if we assumed it would be imperfect in its details. What we didn’t assume was that the agreement would be shot through with gimmicks and one-time savings. What had looked in its broad outlines like a modest success now looks like a sodden disappointment….

As they push a bargain that is still not fully understood, Boehner and the leadership have put their members in an awful fix with another deadline to keep the government open fast approaching. We’d vote “no,” even if we understand the impulse to move on to more important matters and to avoid a leap into the dark that might include a politically damaging shutdown. At the very least, freshmen and other conservatives should be frank about the deal’s shortcomings, refusing to exaggerate its merits as their leadership often has. The episode is strike one against the speakership of John Boehner.

I think it was fairly obvious from the start that Boehner was a fraud, his tears and odes to the Tea Party notwithstanding. I have very little confidence that he will stand up and refuse to raise the debt ceiling next month either, which would explain Treasury Secretary Geithner’s apparent confidence that he will soon have more money to spend.

The problem with the NRO perspective is that the advertised $38.5 billion deal wasn’t any more financially serious than its $300 million revised version, it merely provided better window dressing for the House Republicans. But as Republican cheerleaders, the NRO editors have real cause to be concerned because Boehner’s actions are all but guaranteeing some sort of third party challenge to the Republicans in 2012 and 2014.

New wars, old strategies

Admiral Mahan on the best use of “the fleet in being”:

For the reasons that have been given, the safest, though not the most effective, disposition of an inferior “fleet in being” is to lock it up in an impregnable port or ports, imposing upon the enemy the intense and continuous strain of watchfulness against escape. This it was that Torrington, the author of the phrase, proposed for the time to do. Thus it was that Napoleon, to some extent before Trafalgar, but afterward with set and exclusive purpose, used the French Navy, which he was continually augmenting, and yet never, to the end of his reign, permitted again to undertake any serious expedition. The mere maintenance of several formidable detachments, in apparent readiness, from the Scheldt round to Toulon, presented to the British so many possibilities of mischief that they were compelled to keep constantly before each of the French ports a force superior to that within, entailing an expense and an anxiety by which the Emperor hoped to exhaust their endurance.
– Mahan, Lessons of the War with Spain

This strategy of “the fleet in being” is very similar to the strategy that has been utilized by the global jihad for the last decade. Since the danger posed by its “army in being” is most threatening so long as it remains largely hypothetical, there is little advantage for the jihad in directly engaging Western forces. It’s far more effective to stretch out the Western militaries then bleed them in as many different locations as possible. The Western divisions are like battleships, capable of crushing the mobile torpedo boats of the enemy any time they can bring them to bear, but seldom presented with the opportunity of doing so. It is the most sophisticated expression yet of what VDH describes as the Eastern way of war.

Due to the geographical extent of the conflict and the extremely limited amount of information involved, the ongoing war between the Islamic jihad and the nations of the West is strategically more akin to naval war taking place in the Age of Sail or the Age of Steam than any ground war from any period in history.

Mahan notes “it is evident that the active use of a “fleet in being,” however perplexing to the enemy, must be both anxious and precarious to its own commander. The contest is one of strategic wits”. Therefore, to defeat the jihad, contain its expansion, and return the Dar al-Islam to its previously quiescent state, it will be necessary to force it to reveal its forces and put them in the field. How this can best be done is a matter for strategic and tactical consideration, but it seems obvious that it cannot happen so long as an official policy of secular tolerance is in place throughout the West. And, of course, one is hesitant to have much confidence in a contest of strategic wits with the likes of CINC Obama and General Petraeus providing what passes for the wits.

In other words, this means that widespread ethnic and religious violence is almost certainly inevitable in the intermediate future. The recent ban of the burqah in France and the law against future minaret construction in Switzerland may be the first indications of an eventual European Reconquesta. Unfortunately, at this point, the two most probable outcomes would appear to be either a) secular submission to Islam or b) ethnic cleansing on a scale dwarfing that of any previously known to history. Both appear unthinkable now, and yet it is not difficult to see that the demographics dictate that one or the other will eventually come about. Either way, the multiculturalists and immigrationists are almost certain to be burdened with a historical legacy so terrible as to make the likes of Viktor Quisling and Neville Chamberlain appear national heroes by comparison.

Democrats doubt Obama’s eligibility

How else can you explain their opposition to state laws requiring presidential candidates to prove their eligibility?

The Arizona Senate has approved a revised bill requiring presidential candidates to prove they are U.S. citizens eligible to run for the office. The bill approved Wednesday gives candidates additional ways to prove they meet the constitutional requirements to be president. It was prompted by the ongoing claim by some that there is no proof President Barack Obama was born in the United States and is therefore ineligible to be president.

Democrats argued the bill exceeds the state’s authority and say state officials are not fully qualified to determine the validity of a candidate’s documents.

Logic dictates that if Democrats really believed Obama was fully eligible for the office of president, they wouldn’t object to laws like this Arizona law. The fact that they are so vehemently opposed to such laws is a strong indication that they harbor the same doubts about him that the so-called birthers do, they’re just afraid to admit to them.

Obama’s half-hearted announcement of his purported attempt to win a second term as president tends to support my suspicions that he has no intention of being the Democratic nominee next year. I think he’s looking for an excuse not to run, just as the Democratic elders are looking for an excuse to run someone else.

Eager to reach the wrong conclusion

Newsflash: men trained, equipped, and paid to break things and kill people not infrequently do bad things. However, it is educational to see the way the documentary evidence is used in an attempt to support the precise opposite of what it suggests:

The material that historian Sönke Neitzel uncovered in British and American archives is nothing short of sensational. While researching the submarine war in the Atlantic in 2001, he discovered the transcripts of covertly recorded conversations between German officers in which they talked about their wartime experiences with an unprecedented degree of openness. The deeper Neitzel dug into the archives, the more material he found. In the end, he and social psychologist Harald Welzer analyzed a total of 150,000 pages of source material….

The Holocaust is generally mentioned peripherally in the conversations between German soldiers that have now been viewed in their entirety for the first time. It is only mentioned on about 300 pages of the transcripts, which, given the monstrosity of the events, seems to be a very small number. One explanation could be that not many soldiers knew about what was happening behind the front. Another, much more likely interpretation would be that the systematic extermination of the Jews did not play a significant role in the conversations between cellmates because it had little news value.

A much more likely? interpretation? That is a completely absurd and illogical conclusion. The fact that the Holocaust is only mentioned on 300 of the 150,000 pages is actually conclusive evidence that relatively few Wehrmacht soldiers knew much about the Final Solution, unless the author, Jan Fleischhauer, seriously wants to try to claim that the exhaustive references to the sexual availability of women in the interview documents were of substantive news value.

But of course, “one-fifth of one percent of the Wehrmacht knew” is a just slightly less dramatic and excitingly revisionist than “the Wehrmacht knew”.

Fake budget cuts

Not only were the $38 billion in spending cuts merely an insignificant fraction of the $1.5 trillion deficit, which is $330 billion larger than the previously estimated $1.17 trillion estimate, but at least some of that $38 billion doesn’t actually represent a cut in spending:

A close look at the government shutdown-dodging agreement to cut federal spending by $38 billion reveals that lawmakers significantly eased the fiscal pain by pruning money left over from previous years, using accounting sleight of hand and going after programs President Barack Obama had targeted anyway.

Such moves permitted Obama to save favorite programs — Pell grants for poor college students, health research and “Race to the Top” aid for public schools, among others — from Republican knives. And big holes in foreign aid and Environmental Protection Agency accounts were patched in large part. Republicans also gave up politically treacherous cuts to the Agriculture Department’s food inspection program.

The full details of Friday’s agreement weren’t being released until overnight as it was officially submitted to the House. But the picture already emerging is of legislation financed with a lot of one-time savings and cuts that officially “score” as savings to pay for spending elsewhere, but that often have little to no actual impact on the deficit.

In other words, they “cut” money that had already had not been spent as planned, while committing to new expenses. It’s just more of the usual accounting smoke and mirrors; the bi-factional ruling party plays its game to keep the media and public entertained as the Fed continues attempting to put out the fire by pouring more gasoline on it.

UPDATE – Apparently the cuts are even more modest than anyone had imagined: A comparison prepared by the CBO shows that the omnibus spending bill, advertised as containing some $38.5 billion in cuts, will only reduce federal outlays by $352 million below 2010 spending rates. The nonpartisan budget agency also projects that total outlays are actually some $3.3 billion more than in 2010, if emergency spending is included in the total.