Wednesday, January 14, 2009
War Crimes
So what exactly is our story with the bombs and civilians injuries? Are we the most evil element in the world, as the Evil and Stupidity Front claims, from Professor Noam Chomsky and Jos×™ Saramago, through Ahmadinejad and Nasrallah, and up to some of the moviemakers and authors, among us too, that agree that Israel commits crimes against humanity?
A short historical reminder. This time we won’t say a word about Muslims that butcher Muslims. We got used to it. The Muslims, especially in the eyes of the Left, are the retarded kids of the world. From them there is no need to demand responsibility, morale, international law. They are allowed.
Iran controls the Hezbollah, and also develops nuclear weapons, and also announces that it wants to wipe Israel off the map.
These are just declarations, the members of the Evil Front will tell us, those signed on various petitions. If we will just turn over the second cheek, Ahmandinejad and Nasrallah will send us flowers.
We’ve been in this situation before. We have the right to prevent it from recurring.
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Israel's Cold War with Iran
The defeat of any of Iran's proxies is always a good thing. It weakens Iran's ability to project its power beyond its borders, and it drains Iran of the money and, crucially, the manpower to cause havoc in the Middle East. For example, how many Iranian Quds Force intelligence officers—its elite corps of terrorist organizers—were chewed up in Iran's failed attempt to establish the Mahdi Army as its theocratic puppet regime in Baghdad? Those are losses from which Iran will not easily recover.
But it is also correct to point out that, on a larger strategic scale, the defeat of Hamas is not a major defeat for Iran:
On Sunday, Iranian analyst Amir Taheri reported the conclusions of a bipartisan French parliamentary report on the status of Iran's nuclear program in Asharq Alawsat [a London-based Arabic-language newspaper]…. The report asserts that this year will be the world's final opportunity to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons…. [I]t is possible that Iran ordered the current war in Gaza for the same reason it launched its war in 2006: to divert international attention away from its nuclear program….
And if this is the case, then even if Israel beats Hamas (and I eat my hat), we could still lose the larger war by again having allowed Iran to get us to take our eyes away from the prize.
This is a good reminder that the real story is not the war against Iran's proxies, but the war against Iran. Glick's conclusion is a warning about the danger of fighting that war with a Cold War strategy, striking only at the proxies and never at one's real opponent. Israel may be constrained by its small size from waging war against Iran directly, so it may have no choice in fighting a slow and indirect Cold War (though it could still do so far more effectively).
But the United States has no such excuse.
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Bombs Are More Precious Than Children
[HT:PW]
Imagine a music video teaching kids that bombs are more precious than children. This is not fantasy - this is the message of an actual Hamas TV music video. After a five-year-old finds out that her mother wore a bomb belt to a suicide terror attack, she sings: ''Now I know what was more precious than us.'' She then swears to follow in her mother's footsteps, as a suicide bomber.
[Israel's 'partners in peace']
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American public backs Israel firmly in war with Hamas
As Palestinian casualties mount in the Gaza Strip, the American people are squarely behind Israel and overwhelmingly think that using force against Hamas is appropriate, according to a new McClatchy/Ipsos poll.
Forty-four percent of Americans support Israel's use of force, while only 18 percent considered Hamas' use of force appropriate. Fifty-seven percent think that Hamas is using excessive force, while only 36 percent said Israel was.
When it comes to who's to blame for the latest Middle East crisis, Americans blame Hamas hands down: Forty-four percent said Hamas, 14 percent said Israel and 29 percent said they weren't sure. Nine percent said both, and 4 percent said neither.
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All Military Services Meet or Exceed December Recruiting Goals
WASHINGTON, Jan. 12, 2009 – December was a recruiting success for all active-duty and reserve-component U.S. military services, which all met or exceeded their goals, according to a Defense Department news release issued today.
“All services continue to meet or exceed their active-duty recruiting goals, thanks to the tremendous efforts of our recruiters, and those who continue to step up and serve, it speaks volumes for the dedication and loyalty of our nation and its volunteers."In addition, the active Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force all exceeded December retention goals, and as all six Guard and Reserve forces also met or exceeded their December recruiting goals.
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Red-State Army?
Since 1970, the population of the United States has grown by about 50 percent, from roughly 200 million to 300 million. Over the same period, the number of active-duty armed forces has fallen approximately 50 percent, from 3 million to 1.4 million. A far smaller percentage of the citizenry now serves in the military.
The residential patterns for current veterans and the patterns of state-level contributions of new recruits to the all-volunteer military have a distinct geographic tilt. And tellingly, the map of military service since 1973 aligns closely with electoral maps distinguishing red from blue states.
Over the past four decades, which states have disappeared from the top 10? California, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Illinois, all big blue states that have voted Democratic in the past five presidential elections. These states and another blue state, New York, which ranked 12th in 1969, are among the 10 states with the lowest number of post-Vietnam vets per capita...
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The dark side of Galileo
[meanwhile, in Europe...]
When Americans think Europe, it's green parties and granola, not death from above. But a recent think tank report accuses the European Space Agency of plotting to use its Galileo satellite and other space programs to dominate the "high ground" of space.
The paper raises concerns about the "creeping militarization" of space and the potential for an inter-NATO arms race in the name of "EU security." It also highlights the roles played by the European military-industrial complex.
The Transnational Institute, a Dutch think tank ("a worldwide fellowship of committed scholar-activists"), charged in a report titled From Venus to Mars.
Galileo was designed to end dependence on America's Global Positioning System, which is controlled by the U.S. Department of Defense -- an agency that also has a final say in who gets to play with it. Galileo was initially pitched as a civilian project -- an economic stimulator, with the promise of 150,000 new jobs and billions in contracts for European companies.
That's smoke, according to the report's author, Frank Slijper. "While Galileo is generally presented as a genuinely civilian programme, it now appears highly militarized," he said.
Galileo could allow [enable] European armies to independently deploy GPS-guided munitions similar to those currently used by the U.S. and risks becoming the navigation system for European wars of intervention. [how do they know future wars will be of 'intervention'?] (Videos)"The public denial of these important capabilities shows how much Brussels and many European capitals are afraid to tell the public that Galileo is to become an extremely important tool in future warfare by European military forces"
[why? Could it be that after decades of news articles written just like this one - where anything end everything regarding their ability to physically defend themselves is worded with the most negative connotation - has brainwashed the masses into considering all things martial as bad? Were we dependent on another nations GPS for our armed forces we'd be demanding immediate rectification - but in Europe they need conceal the 'real' reason? Force? How barbaric - leave that to the Americans. Fine - but it will be at our discretion, not 'global government's]
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Colombian president pleased with U.S. award
BOGOTA, -- The Colombian ambassador to the United States said on Monday that Colombian President Alvaro Uribeis pleased with the award he will receive on Tuesday in Washington.
Carolina Barco said the government of George W. Bush will award Uribe the "Medal of Freedom," which is the highest-level civil award given by the United States. Uribe will be the first Latin American president to get it.
[but he can't get a free trade agreement out of congress]
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Beijing looks at Hillary as ally
"Efforts by the People's Republic of China and other countries to gain foreign policy influence by illegally contributing foreign money to U.S. political campaigns and to the Democratic National Committee through domestic conduits." That was the subject of a 1997 Warning Memo from FBI Director Louis Freeh to Attorney General Janet Reno.
In short, the attempt by Beijing's security services to gain "foreign policy influence" over the Clinton administration is confirmed by the director of the FBI. Something in excess of 100 people caught up in the illegal campaign contributions to Mr. Clinton, Al Gore or the DNC were convicted or fled the county and a preponderance of them had Beijing connections... [snip]
Old news to some, perhaps, but arguably relevant as the Senate Foreign Relations Committee begins to consider the nomination of Sen. Hillary Clinton, New York Democrat, to be secretary of state. For example, even now long-range Chinese rockets fired by Hamas target Israeli civilians and may threaten the nuclear facilities in southern Israel.
Since the State Department is the chief enforcer of American anti-proliferation laws, the Chinese Communist Party and its security services will want a State Department inclined to be accommodating and not confrontational on issues - such as arms smuggling...
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Professor refutes global warming theory
Physics professor William Happer GS ’64 has some tough words for scientists who believe that carbon dioxide is causing global warming.“This is George Orwell. This is the ‘Germans are the master race. It’s that kind of propaganda,” ... “Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Every time you exhale, you exhale air that has 4 percent carbon dioxide. To say that that’s a pollutant just boggles my mind. What used to be science has turned into a cult.”
Happer served as director of the Office of Energy Research in the U.S. Department of Energy under President George H.W. Bush and was subsequently fired by Vice President Al Gore, reportedly for his refusal to support Gore’s views on climate change. He asked last month to be added to a list of global warming dissenters in a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee report. The list includes more than 650 experts who challenge the belief that human activity is contributing to global warming.“I have spent a long research career studying physics that is closely related to the greenhouse effect, for example, absorption and emission of visible and infrared radiation, and fluid flow,” he said in the statement. “Based on my experience, I am convinced that the current alarm over carbon dioxide is mistaken.”
Happer cited an ice age at the time of the American Revolution, when Londoners skated on the Thames, and warm periods during the Middle Ages, when settlers were able to farm southern portions of Greenland, as evidence of naturally occurring fluctuations that undermine the case for anthropogenic influence.“[Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration] was exactly the same then. It didn’t change at all, so there was something that was making the earth warm and cool that modelers still don’t really understand.”
The problem does not in fact exist, he said, and society should not sacrifice for nothing.
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About Exxon's 'support' of Carbon Taxes
It's a sad commentary when CEOs have to support things that aren't in their interest, solely to survive. That's certainly the case with Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson, who in a speech said a carbon tax would be a "more direct, a more transparent and a more effective approach" than many of the current plans for curbing greenhouse gases, including the cap-and-trade approach favored by President-elect Barack Obama."My greatest concern is that policymakers will attempt to mandate or ordain solutions that are doomed to fail,"
Like cap-and-trade. Or new Environmental Protection Agency rules that essentially seek to regulate everything in our economy that uses carbon-based fuel. Since 85 percent of our energy comes from carbon-based fuel, that means the entire economy.
Take last fall's Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPA) by the EPA, which the new president has vowed to implement. ANPA sounds innocent, but cutting C02 output by 70 percent, as Congress has mandated, won't be easy. The costs will be enormous and could wreck our economy:
• According to Global Insight, ANPA could cost the United States nearly $7 trillion in real output, or about $650 billion a year.For the record, as the world shivers through a second frigid winter in a row, the United States is already cutting back on its CO2 output:
• Meanwhile, 800,000 U.S. jobs would be lost annually for several years.
• According to Energy Department data, from 2000 to 2006, per capita output of C02 in the United States plunged 4.7 percent.
• Meanwhile, it increased by 3 percent in Europe, and this despite Europe already having energy taxes five to 10 times what they are in the United States.
Source: Editorial, "Carbon Tax: The Lesser Of Two Evils," Investor's Business Daily, January 12, 2009.
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Old Left Versus New
The one consolation we can take from the financial crisis is that it does seem to be suppressing or delaying the most dangerous campaign on the left: the push for a cap or tax on carbon dioxide emissions. This is the one leftist proposal that would be most effective at making an economic downturn permanent, because sabotaging industrial production is precisely the purpose of the global-warming crusade.
The New York Times reports on the many campaign promises the Obama team has hinted they might delay because of the financial crisis. Of these, the most prominent is cap-and-trade energy rationing. The Obama administration may be too busy with its Old Left program of central planning and public-works giantism to focus on the New Left agenda of anti-industrialism...
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The Federal Department of Economic Recovery
The biggest evasion of Obama's speech is that he is hiding what is essentially an ideological program—a resurrection of the ghost of socialism—as a rejection of ideology. He warns us that we must not "rely on the worn-out dogmas of the past" (by which he means free-market economics) and he calls on both parties (by which he means Republicans) "to put good ideas ahead of the old ideological battles."
Yet it is not easy to guess Obama's own basic ideological commitment: that "only government can provide the short-term boost necessary to lift us from a recession this deep and severe. Only government can break the vicious cycles that are crippling our economy."
Obama's premise is that only government can guide and manage economic activity. Only a Federal Department of Economic Recovery can bring back prosperity. This is the most ideological of ideological positions, an "ism." The name for it is "statism," a belief in the central role of the state in controlling the economy.
I am most definitely not an opponent of "ideology." Ideas and principles can capture important truths, and those basic truths become even more necessary in an emergency, not less. The principles of individual rights and free-market economics, for example, would help us to remember the supremacy of the individual over the state and the moral and practical superiority of a free economy over central planning—the hard-won lessons of the past century. These principles would help us to understand how government got us into this crisis and how we can get out of it.
But of course there are other ideas that are "worn-out dogmas" that have demonstrated their failure again and again. And those are the statist ideas that social democrats are now trying to revive...
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Government Incompetence Presented in High-Def
We'll find no greater example of what happens when the government runs any non-military operation that requires coordination, business acumen, technical skill, financial management and inventory control than we've seen in the "digital transition." In this arena, the government has once again made the Three Stooges look like the U.S. Marine Corps Silent Drill Team.
[health care anyone?]
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The Case for Bigger Government
The part of today's frenzy of stimulus that ought to depress you the most is its ideological component. The advocates of socialism are invigorated and self-confident in a way I have not seen in more than 20 years. They are taking a few months of supposed failures of the free market and using them to argue that two decades (and, more broadly, two centuries) of the achievements of capitalism were just an illusion.
For example, since the 1980s, "tax and spend" has been an effective all-purpose epithet against the left. But now the NYT is criticizing Obama's monstrous public works boondoggle on the grounds that it doesn't tax and spend enough.
The article dismisses the prosperity created by capitalism as illusory. In a flashback to arguments that haven't been prominent in decades, it talks glowingly about how the US lags behind those oh-so-advanced European countries and holds up sclerotic European socialist economies as models of prosperity.
Most strikingly, the author proposes a plan openly aimed at increasing income taxes from 18% to 25% of the economy and presents this as "the case for big government."
In the recent wave of financial panic, a very great evil that had been suppressed—but never eliminated—is resurrecting itself.
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Analysis: Obama stresses dire economy
WASHINGTON -- In hard times, the man in the Oval Office usually is the cheerleader-in-chief, looking ahead optimistically. Not Barack Obama, who is taking office full of gloom and doom about the nation's economy, warning that things are dire and bound to get worse.
That helps him sell his economic program and sets a low bar for measuring his success...
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