Obama's Friends Tend to Be a Bit Passionate

William Ayers and Barak Obama are the type of "associates" who do each other favours. That is simply how things are done among men of blood, so to speak.

In February 1970, my father, a New York State Supreme Court justice, was presiding over the trial of the so-called “Panther 21,” members of the Black Panther Party indicted in a plot to bomb New York landmarks and department stores. Early on the morning of February 21, as my family slept, three gasoline-filled firebombs exploded at our home on the northern tip of Manhattan, two at the front door and the third tucked neatly under the gas tank of the family car. (Today, of course, we’d call that a car bomb.) A neighbor heard the first two blasts and, with the remains of a snowman I had built a few days earlier, managed to douse the flames beneath the car. That was an act whose courage I fully appreciated only as an adult, an act that doubtless saved multiple lives that night.

I still recall, as though it were a dream, thinking that someone was lifting and dropping my bed as the explosions jolted me awake, and I remember my mother’s pulling me from the tangle of sheets and running to the kitchen where my father stood. Through the large windows overlooking the yard, all we could see was the bright glow of flames below. We didn’t leave our burning house for fear of who might be waiting outside. The same night, bombs were thrown at a police car in Manhattan and two military recruiting stations in Brooklyn. Sunlight, the next morning, revealed three sentences of blood-red graffiti on our sidewalk: FREE THE PANTHER 21; THE VIET CONG HAVE WON; KILL THE PIGS.

For the next 18 months, I went to school in an unmarked police car. My mother, a schoolteacher, had plainclothes detectives waiting in the faculty lounge all day. My brother saved a few bucks because he didn’t have to rent a limo for the senior prom: the NYPD did the driving. We all made the best of the odd new life that had been thrust upon us, but for years, the sound of a fire truck’s siren made my stomach knot and my heart race. In many ways, the enormity of the attempt to kill my entire family didn’t fully hit me until years later, when, a father myself, I was tucking my own nine-year-old John Murtagh into bed.

Though no one was ever caught or tried for the attempt on my family’s life, there was never any doubt who was behind it. Only a few weeks after the attack, the New York contingent of the Weathermen blew themselves up making more bombs in a Greenwich Village townhouse. The same cell had bombed my house, writes Ron Jacobs in The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. And in late November that year, a letter to the Associated Press signed by Bernardine Dohrn, Ayers’s wife, promised more bombings.

As the association between Obama and Ayers came to light, it would have helped the senator a little if his friend had at least shown some remorse. But listen to Ayers interviewed in the New York Times on September 11, 2001, of all days: “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” Translation: “We meant to kill that judge and his family, not just damage the porch.” When asked by the Times if he would do it all again, Ayers responded: “I don’t want to discount the possibility.”

Though never a supporter of Obama, I admired him for a time for his ability to engage our imaginations, and especially for his ability to inspire the young once again to embrace the political system. Yet his myopia in the last few months has cast a new light on his “politics of change.” Nobody should hold the junior senator from Illinois responsible for his friends’ and supporters’ violent terrorist acts. But it is fair to hold him responsible for a startling lack of judgment in his choice of mentors, associates, and friends, and for showing a callous disregard for the lives they damaged and the hatred they have demonstrated for this country. It is fair, too, to ask what those choices say about Obama’s own beliefs, his philosophy, and the direction he would take our nation. _City-Journal

Obama has never worked an honest day in his entire life. Yet he has had plenty of time to make some very interesting friends along the radical path. Being a messiah means never having to say you are sorry. For yourself, for your friends, for anything at all.

Foolish and Forever Barbarians, Russia: Who Will Mourn Your Passing?

On the historical eve of the passing of the Russian people through demographic disappearance, Vladimir Putin is sewing the seeds for lasting blood feuds against Russia, among its neighbors. Putin's foolhardy invasion of Georgia, and the subsequent brutal occupation and ethnic cleansing by Russian soldiers and their paramilitary/terrorist allies, seals the fate of the eternally barbarian people from Rus.

Russia’s invasion of Georgia has unleashed a refugee crisis all over the country and especially in its capital. Every school here in Tbilisi is jammed with civilians who fled aerial bombardment and shootings by the Russian military—or massacres, looting, and arson by irregular Cossack paramilitary units swarming across the border. Russia has seized and effectively annexed two breakaway Georgian provinces, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. It has also invaded the region of Gori, which unlike them had been under Georgia’s control. Gori is in the center of the country, just an hour’s drive from Tbilisi; 90 percent of its citizens have fled, and the tiny remainder live amid a violent mayhem overseen by Russian occupation forces that, despite Moscow’s claims to the contrary, are not yet withdrawing.

...“They came and asked us for wine, but first we had to drink it ourselves to show that it was not poisoned. Then they drank the wine themselves. And then they said to leave this place as soon as possible; otherwise they would kill us. The Russians were looking for anyone who had soldiers in their home. If anyone had a Georgian soldier at home they burned the houses immediately.” _MichaelTotten/CityJournal

The US is establishing a permanent military presence inside Georgia, with likely airfields for fighter aircraft to be built soon. American destroyer ships have entered the Black Sea to assure Georgian control of Georgian seaports. Russia has created the perfect pretext for permanent US military bases in Georgia--which coincidentally will have the effect of further tightening a noose around Iran.

On Saturday the US ambassador to Georgia said they had decided to continue training the Georgian army in a full-time programme.US 'security guarantee'

During the Soviet era, Krtsanisi military base outside Tbilisi was home to the Red Army. Now it is US soldiers who are in charge and, according to the US Ambassador in Tbilisi Richard Miles, they are in Georgia to stay. _BBC_via_MSimon

Russia is losing half its population every 40 to 50 years. There will be no Russia by the end of this century, for it is certain that more prolific neighbors from Muslim central Asia will claim whatever they wish, and a resurgent China will lay claim to huge portions of Eastern Siberia for its oil wealth.

After "claiming" the entire Arctic for mineral exploration, Russia will be lucky to actually control as much as one fourth of its current land area after another 60 years. And who will mourn for lost Russia, after its renewed barbarian behaviour? Habits of conquest and pillage developed over hundreds of years will apparently never be put aside peacefully. It is coming down to selecting the best way to limit the losses when Russia does finally disintegrate.

Russia Now Holds Europe by the Short Hairs

Russian has plowed through Georgia, destroying bridges, burning crops, and ethnically cleansing Georgians from their land. But besides an attempt to depose the Georgian president, Putin's goal was to produce schock, awe, and eternal energy dependency in the minds of European countries. The energy pipelines through Georgia are now within reach of Russian-sponsored terrorists, which means that Russia can shut down most of Europe's energy on a whim. Europe needs to come up with alternatives quickly, if it does not wish to become an energy thrall to the new Russian tsar.

Thanks to Russia's invasion of Georgia on Aug. 8, Georgia's role as a secure energy transit point to Europe has been shattered. Russia has made clear it can make Georgia a puppet state if it wishes, and will almost certainly recognize the independence of the breakaway region of South Ossetia. Suddenly the risk premiums on oil and gas pipelines that pass through Georgian soil went through the roof. Some analysts are already predicting the death of the Nabucco project, whose construction was to begin in 2010.

So much for Europe's energy diversification plans. New, independent pipelines from Central Asia seem like a lost cause. With Georgia reined in, Moscow's grip on energy supplies to Europe must be close to complete. You have to wonder whether a Kremlin filing cabinet contains a plan that had laid out this very scenario a decade ago.

What is Europe to do? Time for Diversification Plan B. A big part of the plan would have to see Europe turning the Mediterranean into mare nostrum - our sea - as the Romans called it in the empire years. The North African countries of Libya and Algeria, and Syria in the Eastern Med to a lesser extent, have vast, undeveloped oil and gas fields.

Energy companies with an appetite for political risk have been pouring billions into these countries. One of them is Petro-Canada, which is already hauling 50,000 barrels of oil a day out of Libya and has targeted the country for significant growth. Algeria's gas reserves are mammoth. Last year, Italy and Algeria agreed to construct a 900-kilometre pipeline to take Algerian gas to Sardinia, then on to the Italian mainland. Other pipelines will have to be built. Speed is of the essence, because Gazprom's ambitions are boundless. Last month it offered to buy all of Libya's gas exports.

Mediterranean gas cannot be the entire solution. Europe will have to rethink its nuclear strategy. Germany and Spain have committed to phase out nuclear power. Surely, that strategy will have to be reversed. Italy has no nuclear power plants. That will have to change, too.

A few nuclear plants are under construction in Europe after a moratorium that began with the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986. The number will have to soar if Europe is to take energy diversification seriously.

Coal might make a big comeback, too.....
_globe&mail_via_BennyPeiser

None of this energy blackmail would be possible, if not for Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer's eternal crusade against American energy production. The insanity of the US Democratic Party's approach to energy, combined with an out-of-control faux-environmental and trial lawyer gang, have made the western world relatively easy to blackmail. If not for the military might of the US and a president willing to use it to secure energy supplies, every tinpot dictator with oil underground would be blackmailing the energy consumers of the developed world--not just Russia, Iran, and Venezuela.

Russia Makes More Enemies Just When it Needs to be Making More Friends

Russia's blundering invasion of Georgia has exposed Moscow's leadership for neo-imperialists and thugs. The good thing about Putin's miscalculation is how well it exposed the EU's "soft diplomacy" for the idiocy that it is. Putin respects the EU's soft diplomace as much as he respects doormats and toilet paper. But he would have been much more clever to make the EU think otherwise for a while longer.

The price that Russia is paying for the invasion of Georgia is increased isolation. The major regional powers of the modern world are the US, China, the EU, Russia, India and Japan. Since the Georgian invasion, Russia has had strained relations with the US and Europe, and no major friends. Russia is a large Asian power, stretching to the Pacific Ocean, but the three most important Asian powers, China, India and Japan, do not have close or trusting relations with it.

Of the six world powers, or groups of powers, Russia is seen as the least reliable, the least friendly.....Russia is increasingly isolated from its “near abroad”. To Georgians, Ukrainians or citizens of the Baltic states, Mr Putin's Russia appears to be following a “bad neighbour policy”. For the Russian voter, Putinism may appear to be reasserting Russia's position in the world; to its neighbours, Russia is now an ugly threat....

Russia has essential interests in common with the West. Global trade, a stable European market for oil and gas, resistance to Islamic terrorism, avoidance of military conflict, investment in modernisation. It was hoped that Russia and the West could build on these interests to cement good relations and strengthen the global economy.

The first European reactions to the invasion of Georgia showed that Europe hoped to protect this co-operative policy. Had Russia limited the Georgian operation to the protection of South Ossetian refugees, but kept troops out of Georgia proper, a co-operative policy might have been maintained. Instead, there has been broad Russian aggression against Georgian territory.

The delay in the ceasefire and the extension of the invasion far beyond the boundary of South Ossetia has created a very different climate, made worse by threats to target nuclear weapons against Poland and, it appears, Ukraine as well.

In a world of global trade, Russia cannot afford to be isolated. No doubt the Kremlin hawks are riding high now. Yet as Sir Robert Walpole said of a mid 18th-century war: “They now ring the bells, but they will soon wring their hands.” _Timesonline

Of course Putin is slicing off his own nose to spite his face. He is adding miscalculation to miscalculation. Is anyone in a position of leadership within Russia capable of recognising the increasingly suicidal course that Putin has set for the country? If so, they are afraid for their lives, so they remain silent.

Russia is underpopulated for the size of its territory as it is, but considering Putin's ambitions--on top of the crashing demographic decrease of ethnic Russians--and Russia will simply be unable to defend its borders within a few decades.

If Russia were a friend to anyone in the world, perhaps it could rely on its neighbors for mutual aid and protection, like Canada does with the US. But almost all of Russia's neighbors have been turned into enemies, except perhaps China. And China is only biding its time until it can seize Russia's immense Siberian mineral wealth.

And so we see the mindlessly self-defeating nature of Putin's macho gesture against the Georgians. The fallout is just beginning.

Barak Obama Exposed By His Own History

The baby Senator from Illinois, Barak Obama, enjoys being something of a cypher. His soothing and hypnotic public voice as a presidential candidate is significantly at odds with his actions as community organizer and state legislator from South Side Chicago's mean streets. Obama would rather keep his legislative and activist record a secret--at least until after the election. Stanley Kurtz investigated Obama's record as public servant in Illinois, and his expose in The Weekly Standard is worth a read for anyone who wants to understand their choices for November.

...extensive and continuous coverage in both the Chicago Defender and the Hyde Park Herald presents a remarkable resource for understanding who Obama is. Reportage in these two papers is particularly significant because Obama's early political career-the time between his first campaign for the Illinois State Senate in 1995 and his race for U.S. Senate in 2004-can fairly be called the "lost years," the
period Obama seems least eager to talk about, in contrast to his formative years in Hawaii, California, and New York or his days as a community organizer, both of which are recounted in his memoir, Dreams from My Father. The pages of the Hyde Park Herald and the Chicago Defender thus offer entrée into Obama's heretofore hidden world.

What they portray is a Barack Obama sharply at variance with the image of the post-racial, post-ideological, bipartisan, culture-war-shunning politician familiar from current media coverage and purveyed by the Obama campaign. __WeeklyStandard

It is easier for me to understand now why Obama doesn't mind being perceived as a Rorschach ink blot--vague and shifting. In Obama's case, it is far better to be seen as ambiguous than to be known for what one actually is.

Can Obama Be a Messiah to Black Males?

There is a sense of optimism among many US blacks regarding the so-far successful candidacy of Barak Obama. This ecstatic burst of utopianism extends well beyond the US black community into Europe--even to Islamic terror organisations--but it is US blacks whose hopes are elevated to the most rapturous levels.

If Obama could do anything to help black males in the US, perhaps it would be worth it to elect him president just for that. What are the challenges?

In examining graduation rates, the report finds a national graduation rate for black males (47 percent) that is 28 percentage points lower than the graduation rate for white males (75 percent). In ten states, the difference in graduation rates for black males and white males is 30 percentage points or more...In addition to low graduation rates, black males also have "consistently low educational attainment levels, are more chronically unemployed and underemployed, are less healthy and have access to fewer health care resources, die much younger, and are many times more likely to be sent to jail for periods significantly longer than males of other racial/ethnic groups," according to the report. _Source_via_JoanneJacobs

As a group, black males are the chronic statistical laggards of US society. Can Barak Obama do anything at all to help them? The problem is vast and begins at a very early age.

In the country as a whole, the number of Black students in Special Education classes is disproportionately high and the number in Gifted/Talented programs is disproportionately low. The number of Black students, particularly Black male students, who receive out-of-school suspensions and are expelled is also disproportionately high. _Source_via_JoanneJacobs

A quick look at the chart above shows that as bad as young black males are doing in school, their sisters--born of the same parents, raised in the same homes, and eating the same foods--are actually doing fairly well.

Why are black girls doing reasonably well by comparison? Black girls, in contrast to the boys, get pretty good grades, go to college at decent rates and graduate from college at very good rates, earning degrees as twice the rate of men. _Source_via_JoanneJacobs

Black males are staggeringly over-represented in the prison population--44% of prisoners, and only 5% or so of the population (black males of prison age). The overall IQ average for American blacks is 85. That is 1 standard deviation below the overall mean of roughly 100. It very possible that the black male average IQ is even less than the overall US black average IQ, looking at comparative life success.

We know that executive function (EF) is more important than IQ for life success, although EF lacks a comparably accepted metric to IQ, so it is more difficult to compare EF statistics. EF can be improved by training (Posner, Rothbart), which should be done not much later than age 6. Even so, EF--like IQ--is highly heritable, so that there are limits to what training can do. Still, better trained than not.

Finally, if Barak Obama becomes US President next January, will the IQ's and EF's of black males magically and instantly normalise? Will we see abrupt drops in criminal and delinquent behaviour from black males? Will black males suddenly begin succeeding in school--from kindergarten through college? Will the exaggerated strut of young black males suddenly have a full complement of efficacy and competence backing it up?

Probably not. Not immediately, and not for a very long time. Then what will become of all of the magical expectations floating around the messianic candidacy of Barak Obama?

Obama has no substantive achievements, no particular experience or accomplishments to prepare him for the challenges he would face as chief executive of the world's only superpower. But never mind all that. Born of a white mother, raised largely by a white family, and only absorbing the victimist culture of black America secondhand--what has prepared Obama to pull black males out of the incredibly deep hole they are in?

Booby-Trapped Highways in Iraq

Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) have been the main cause of death for coalition troops in Iraq. Multiple patrol and supply convoys are always traveling from place to place in Iraq, and no road can be assumed safe. What are the counter-measures?

...Up to 80 percent of US casualties during the past two years of the conflict had been caused by IED attacks. In 2006, some road patrol units in Anbar province were discovering or setting off up to 10 IEDs each night patrol while covering less than a mile of roadway...

[But] Investment in "alien-looking" mine-detection equipment by the U.S. military, combined with increased funding for Iraqi police and army units, has cut the number of improvised explosive attacks in the past year in the northern part of the country from 6,000 a month a year ago to less than 500 this month.

Fully 75 percent of IEDs (improvised explosive devices) emplaced in parts of Iraq are now being discovered before they explode, the US Army said.

...To combat the explosive tire, engineer battalions now use several pieces of newly developed equipment that have little use outside of bomb discovery. The first looks like a mating of an industrial road-grader and a pawn-shop robotic arm.

Called a 'Husky', the South African-made mine detector allows its single operator to control a 20-foot-long robotic arm with a camera and two-pronged claw at the end to find out what is inside an abandoned tire, all at a safe distance. The occupant of the Husky sits 12 feet above the ground in a blast-proof cab.

In this case, the tire was holding an anti-tank mine, probably Italian or Chinese-made, containing enough explosives to seriously damage a vehicle if it ran directly over it.

To destroy the tire bomb, the Army has come to depend on an even more outlandish, but highly effective piece of equipment – the Talon – a robotic remote-controlled tread vehicle with an on-board video camera to verify and then destroy the IED without putting humans in harm's way. The Talon can then use a small robotic arm to carry counter-charges, in this case, two sticks of C-4 explosive with a time-fuse. _LWJ

Militaries are typically unwieldy bureaucracies (like all government bureaucracies) that are slow to adjust to changing threats. When a threat becomes as large and enduring as IEDs became in Iraq, however, even the military had to respond. Whether the new anti-IED technologies are more responsible for safer roads than the improved living conditions in Iraq, can be debated. Both are important.

The threat of IEDs along roadsides is merely an extension of the roadside ambush that can be traced all the way back to the stalking of watering holes by predators, waiting for prey to come and drink. Primitive humans placed snares along known pathways and flightways of unwary birds and small mammals.

Every road on Earth is subject to IEDs and mines. Iraq is a world battlefield, where tactics from the world jihad are being pitted against counter tactics from civilised countries. Civilised countries do not always win such confrontations. Such running battles depend upon the willingness to strike while the iron is hot. Any civilisation that is too slow or reluctant to confront a ruthless enemy puts itself in needless danger.

Senator Obama Likes the Mahdi Army's Chances

If Barak Obama is elected US President, the Mahdi Army and other criminal/terror groups in Iraq will have it made. The people of Iraq will simply have to go back to being irrelevant peasants--as they have always been in Obama's eyes.

At the peak of the militia’s control last summer, it was involved at all levels of the local economy, taking money from gas stations, private minibus services, electric switching stations, food and clothing markets, ice factories, and even collecting rent from squatters in houses whose owners had been displaced. The four main gas stations in Sadr City were handing over a total of about $13,000 a day, according to a member of the local council.

“It’s almost like the old Mafia criminal days in the United States,” said Brig. Gen. Jeffrey W. Talley, an Army engineer rebuilding Sadr City’s main market.

Um Hussein, a mother of 10 in Sadr City, the largest Shiite district in the capital and one of the poorest, said her family’s fuel bill had dropped so far that she could afford to buy one of her daughters a pair of earrings with the savings. Others interviewed listed simpler purchases that had now become possible: tomatoes, laundry detergent, gasoline.

One young man said that even though his house was right across from a distribution center that sold cooking gas, he was not allowed to buy it there at state prices, but instead was forced to wait for a militia-affiliated distributor who sold it at higher prices.

“We had to get our share of the cooking gas from Mahdi Army people,” Um Hussein said. “Now, everything is available. We are free to buy what we want.”

Before, the Mahdi Army controlled the 12 trucks that made daily deliveries of cooking gas canisters for the district, because the leader of the Sadr City district council, who was affiliated with the militia, was the one who handled the trucks’ documents.

“We had no idea when they were coming or where they were going,” the council member said, referring to the trucks.

Those who questioned the militia’s authority were dealt with harshly. A gas station worker from Kadhimiya recalled a man in his 60s being beaten badly for refusing to pay the inflated gas price last year. _NYT

Criminal extortion looks the same, whether it is being done by the Mahdi Army, the Sandinistas, Hugo Chavez' FARC, Vladimir Putin, Kwame Kilpatrick, Evo Morales, or Robert Mugabe. The cheap punk way of oppressing ordinary people is the way of the criminal thug.

Obama comes from the Chicago south side, a haven for criminal thugs and extortionists. Perhaps he has a soft spot in his heart for thugs such as the Mahdi Army, or considers them "his type of people?"

Iran Suffers a String of Explosive Setbacks

Iran is the main fomenter of terrorism in the middle east. The monkey Ahmedinejad and the mad mullahs supports terrorism in Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, Gaza, and various other parts of the middle east, including Saudi Arabia. It is only fitting and proper that Iran itself be increasingly targeted for sabotage and the old boom-boom.

The explosion took place in the Tehran suburb of Khavarshahar as the military convoy left a munitions' warehouse controlled by the Revolutionary Guards. According to reports received by Western officials, the convoy was taking a consignment of military equipment to Hizbollah, the Shia Muslim militia Iran supports in southern Lebanon, when the explosion occurred.

Senior Revolutionary Guard commanders immediately imposed a news black-out following the explosion, even though it could be heard throughout the capital Tehran, and no details of the incident have so far appeared in the Iranian media.

...The Revolutionary Guards' investigation into last weekend's explosion is understood to be looking into the possibility that it was caused by sabotage. Iran has suffered a number of unexplained explosions in recent months, including an explosion at a mosque in Shiraz, which had been holding a military exhibition, and another incident at a missile site that killed dozens of Iranian technicians. _Telegraph

Of course, it couldn't happen to a nicer terror state. Here's hoping for more of the same.

Do Russians Love Their Children Too? They Don't Have Any Children! How Can They Love What They Don't Have?

This is a lovely little anecdote from Reason's Ron Bailey, from the days of Yeltsin's Russia:

Cirincione pointed to the near miss that occurred in 1995 when Norway launched a weather satellite and Russian military officials mistook it as a submarine launched ballistic missile aimed at producing an electro-magnetic pulse to disable a Russian military response. Russian nuclear defense officials opened the Russian "football" in front of President Boris Yeltsin, urging him to order an immediate strike against the West. Fortunately, Yeltsin held off, arguing that it must be a mistake. _Reason

Back in the days of overt nuclear standoff, pop singer "Sting" sought to reassure anxious westerners by reminding them that no doubt Russians love their children too. They wouldn't start a nuclear war just for the heck of it.

But now that Russians are not having children, and the ethnic Russian population is shrinking by nearly half with each generation, what is the Russian's attitude on nuclear war? They have 2,000 live nuclear warheads aimed at the west, on a hair-trigger.

What would it take to set it off? Somebody saying something mean about Vladimir Putin? You never know. Read Ron Bailey's final installment from the Global Catastrophic Risks Conference at Oxford.

Obama Proposes Powerful Civilian Security

"We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we've set," he said Wednesday. "We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded." _ChicagoTribune

Taking a page from the playbook of other charismatic and powerful leaders in history, US presidential candidate Barak Obama is considering the formation of a civilian security force just as strong and well-funded as the US military. A strong, well indoctrinated civilian uniformed force of otherwise unemployed youth, might present an imposing presence on the streets and neighborhoods of America.

Obama has long wished for an organisation that would provide opportunities for "youth service" for young people. Giving youth a sense of purpose and belonging to something larger than themselves, is an important goal for an Obama administration.

Chairman Mao made good use of such a force in China's Cultural Revolution, as did Pol Pot in his forced collectivisation of Cambodia. The former USSR had its Pioneer Youth organisation, which provided for a seamless link between the Soviet secret police and everyday Soviet families and schools. Even the much-scorned Hitler of Nazi Germany was able to make efficient use of such a youth force for many years.

If a leader is charismatic enough to provide a focal point for youthful idealism, large numbers of otherwise idle youth might be attracted to national service--particularly if they were paid, and were given the power to punish others less ideologically pure.

The only question that remains is which crucial cause should Obama pursue first after his inauguration? The destruction of the fossil fuel industry, or the creation of the new civilian organisation as powerful and well-funded as the US military? What to call it? The Obama Youth Movement, perhaps?

H/T Infowars via email tip.

The Further Unraveling of Hugo Chavez

Hugo Chavez is unhappy. It seems that oil giant Exxon refuses to accept Chavez' theft of billions of dollars of oil production infrastructure that Exxon built. Chavez is accustomed to getting his way, and is quite capable of throwing a temper tantrum or two whenever his aims are thwarted.

MARACAIBO, July 13 (Reuters) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said on Sunday oil prices could hit $300 per barrel if U.S. oil company Exxon Mobil again freezes Venezuelan assets in a dispute over a nationalized oil project.

Exxon (XOM.N: Quote, Profile, Research) won court orders freezing $12 billion in assets held by Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA after the OPEC nation took over a multi-billion dollar oil project, heightening tensions with the United States and helping to raise oil prices.

A London court later overturned Exxon's temporary asset freeze, but Chavez said the company could seek further action against Venezuela.

"If they freeze us there will be no more oil for the United States, and the price will go to $300," Chavez said during a televised meeting with Caribbean and Central American leaders as part of an energy cooperation scheme called Petrocaribe.

Chavez also said oil prices were being influenced by a "speculative bubble", the collapse of which could send prices as low as $70 per barrel. _Source

Chavez is clearly talking out of three sides of his mouth, hoping desperately to score points with one strategy or another. Perhaps the recent failures of his allies--the narco-terror group FARC-has Hugo feeling a bit on edge lately. You might even call the rather clownish and rotund Latin dictator a bit paranoid.

Paranoid or not, in predicting $300 a barrel oil prices, Hugo Chavez makes the best argument yet for his ouster. He continues to destroy the civic and social infrastructure of his country, along with the oil infrastructure that would have meant so much to a more free and democratic Venezuela. Chavez also demonstrates how the term "low life third world leader" can be both redundant and an oxymoron.

When the Call of the Whino Fills the Air

Why do affluent people whine so much? There seems to be a competition between developed nations and semi-developed nations such as Russia, to see whose population can whine the loudest. The epidemic of whining has been commented upon in the US:

"We have sort of become a nation of whiners. You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline," said the former Texas senator. "You've heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession." __CNN

It is talked about in the UK:

Complaints and the people who make them are often seen as confirmation of the new miserabilism - a condition that led an outburst from Tom Harris MP asking why everyone is so bloody miserable in a world where in the UK at least, we have a lot to be grateful for. __Source

Chronic complaining is becoming an art form in Europe, Japan, South Korea, Canada. Where would the growing army of attorneys, "journalists", activists, "diversity" consultants, pseudo-environmentalists, doomers, and hobby-wankers be without this clamoring culture of complaint? You can understand why the vocational whiners whine. It's their job--they get paid for it! But why do so many people devote so much of their spare time and mental energy to dwelling on the "empty space" in their glass, completely ignoring the abundant liquid sustenance?

It is not that they lack a sense of purpose--not exactly. They have made whining their overriding purpose in life, rather than creating something productive, or solving real world problems. Why would anyone misdirect their precious and limited resource of time to self-fulfilling predictions of doom, harassment, and chronic complaint? Why cannot these avocational doom-wankers find a constructive purpose for their lives?

You have to go deeper, and ask why so many people in the affluent world are not actually "growing up." To understand the answer to that question, you need to understand childhood development better than most current schoolteachers, parents, and child psychologists understand childhood development. Is that possible, you ask? Actually, it is not even difficult. But it will require a lot of reading and objective observation of people--children, adolescents, and adults--in their natural environments. Learn to suspend judgment and try to see what is happening at all levels--social, brain development, psycho-emotional development, and on the level of executive funtion and practical skills.

That is largely what this blog is all about. The next level cannot be formed out of the psychologically neotenous baby boomers. And for every generation since them that has been trained in a neotenous and academically lobotomous way, the way out of that morass is oh, so, hard.

Because that is the shortage we are facing: a shortage of well trained and educated humans with self-reliance and a sense of purpose. Not a shortage of energy, food, health care, money, or anything else the media drones on about. We have a shortage of people--particular kinds of people. We have enough whining clones to populate the entire solar system. What we need are purposeful, independent, innovative-to-the-need-at-hand, well trained, and emotionally mature people who are willing to work hard for what they want.From a previous post at Al Fin

A Preview for America? Trillionaires in Zimbabwe

Where do you find the most trillionaires of any place in the world? In Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe. Mugabe has been the darling of the socialist world since he took power in an election validated by Jimmy Carter. In terms of quantity of money, Mugabe has made Zimbabweans very wealthy indeed.

The country that has produced the most trillionaires in history isn’t America, but Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. The Wall Street Journal describes what it is like to dine out on the town. “Buying anything is a ‘bizarre experience,’ said Lucy Chimtengwende from Bulawayo, who spent $12 U.S. on lunch recently, with the bill in local currency being an astonishing 1.1 trillion Zimbabwe dollars.” Inflation has been given a whole new meaning in Zimbabwe, whose currency has depreciated ten billionfold in twelve years, a rate that threatens to exceed the bounds of the database field sizes that the bank’s software developers thoughtlessly assumed would be enough. Consider the travails of a man who simply wanted to buy groceries. __Belmont Club

Mugabe knows how to promise the world to his supporters. And he has delivered a world to them. The third world, in its most degraded form.

Mugabe is much like Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in that he knows how to appeal to the lowest instincts of the mob. That ability, and a bit of presto-changeo at the ballot box, can keep a person in power for a long time.

Tell the people what they want to hear, then when elected make them so dependent upon your government that they're afraid to speak out or propose a change.

Fairy Tale Futures and Camelots in the Air

Barak H. Obama has not served even half a US Senate term. In fact, he has been running for US President for most of the time he has been the baby Senator from Illinois, so he still has to ask directions to the Senate washroom. Remind me again: what is the basis for Obama's claim to your vote?

...since he doesn’t have much of track record, his objective signature is scant. Obama isn’t running on his record in Chicago or the Senate. He is running on the future, which incidentally hasn’t happened yet. __BelmontClub

If you can create the image of a wonderful future in the minds of voters, the reality does not actually matter. At least, not until after the election, when your supporters start to understand that they've been taken for yet another ride, by yet another political huckster. Like the thirty-something liberated woman who'd been saving herself for "the right guy," waking up time and again to empty wine bottles, a mussed bed, and foggy, hungover memories of yet more broken promises to add to her collection.

Before it is all over, Obama's positions on the issues will have been plotted over so many different coordinates that even Bill Clinton will begin to wonder how the baby Senator gets away with it. No mystery, Bill. They just have to truly want to believe in the myth. You remember the myth, don't you?

Suddenly, Half of Europe Disappears--Poof, Gone!

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In 50 years, half the population of many European countries will simply disappear--puff! gone. Why have Europeans stopped having babies, and why does everyone in Europe seem to be avoiding the issue?

For the first time on record, birthrates in southern and Eastern Europe had dropped below 1.3. For the demographers, this number had a special mathematical portent. At that rate, a country’s population would be cut in half in 45 years, creating a falling-off-a-cliff effect from which it would be nearly impossible to recover.

...In Germany, where the births-to-deaths ratio now results in an annual population loss of roughly 100,000, Ursula von der Leyen, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s family minister (and a mother of seven), declared two years ago that if her country didn’t reverse its plummeting birthrate, “We will have to turn out the light.”

...“But you can’t go on forever with a total fertility rate of 1.2. If you compare the size of the 0-to-4 and 29-to-34 age groups in Spain and Italy right now, you see the younger is almost half the size of the older. You can’t keep going with a completely upside-down age distribution, with the pyramid standing on its point. You can’t have a country where everybody lives in a nursing home.” Read the rest at the __NYT

A Europe without children? Europe dispensed with its military infrastructure decades ago, in favour of allowing the US to carry the weight. Other once-vital parts of its infrastructure are going by the wayside one by one.

Welfare states need workers to pay into the system, to provide for all the trusting retirees who assume the system will always be there for them. The challenge for Europe--in the face of both low fertility rates and rising emigration of its brightest and most talented--is to keep the top-heavy bureaucracies running, the infrastructure maintained, and the productive sector producing. Unfortunately, it is the productive sector that seems to be shrinking the most quickly.

Recommended reading:

The Global Baby Bust
Europe's Baby Bust
A Return to Pastoral Europe?
Birth of an Empire
Fiscal Policy and Fertility in the US

Previously published at Al Fin

Olympic Paradise in Beijing: Streets Clean & Mean

China means to clean its Beijing streets before the Olympics this summer. There will be no dissent, no narcotics, no prostitution, and no religion too. This is Beijing 2008, and the oligarchy of the CCP intends for the games to be a showcase for its own special kind of enlightened dictatorship.

A helpful “legal guide” tells foreign athletes, officials, reporters and spectators how to behave. In addition to shunning narcotics, weapons and counterfeit currency, they should abjure “subversive activities” or the “display of religious, political or racial banners”. __Economist

Comparisons to the 1936 Berlin Olympic games are inescapable. Both events meant to showcase the inevitability of an authoritarian way of life. Supremacist ideology and racial attitudes acted out via the ages old tradition of peaceful international athletics.

Beijing might be smarter to focus on providing clean food, water, and air for the summer games. Preventing dissent and disorder will be next to impossible. All the world's media will be on hand, plus armies of videobloggers and freelance video journalists--some with only their video cell phones to capture the mood.

Until recently, Chinese authorities could feel free to beat bloggers to death for reporting on roadside demonstrations against the authorities. If the CCP gets too heavy-handed in the international circus of the Olympic games, the stain on its reputation will be harder to remove.

Madrasas for Leftists: PC Universities Doomed?

There once was a time when the university environments of North America were not ones of indoctrination and brainwashing, as they often are now. Professor Alan Kors remembers those days:

I was taught at Princeton, in the early 1960s—in history and literature, above all—before the congeries that we term "the '60s" began. Most of my professors were probably men of the left—that's what the surveys tell me—but that fact was never apparent to me, because, except in rare cases, their politics or even their ideological leanings were not inferable from their teaching or syllabi. Reasoned and informed dissent from professorial devil's advocacy or interpretation was encouraged and rewarded, including challenges to the very terms of an examination question.

...In grad school at Harvard, while a few dates left in the midst of dinner on discovering my free-market and hawkish politics, and while I did get thrown out of a party for opposing, when asked, Eugene McCarthy's view of Vietnam (this should have been a warning), the classroom remained open and, by design, intellectually pluralistic....When I went off on job interviews, I was not once asked a question, ever, about my worldview, but only about my historical research and notions of teaching. Politics were simply not in the category of appropriate inquiry.

...What has changed? In terms of the university in loco parentis, which has been restored and expanded with a vengeance, the revolution has been breathtaking....From diverse motives of ideological sympathies and acute awareness of who can blackball their next career moves, they have given over the humanities, the soft social sciences and the entire university in loco parentis to the zealots of oppression studies and coercive identity politics. In the latter case, it truly has been a conspiracy, with networking and common plans. In the former case—the professoriate and the curriculum—it is generally, with striking politicized exceptions, a soft tyranny of groupthink, unconscious bias and self-inflated sense of a mission of demystification. Most of the professors I meet are kind, indeed sweet, and certainly mean no harm. It is profoundly sad to see what they have become.

There also has been, compounding academic problems, a dumbing down of the professoriate that quite numbs the mind—best seen not in the monographs that earn people their degrees, but in the egregious nonsense, crude meta-theorizing, self-indulgence and tendentious special pleading that are not merely tolerated without criticism, but rewarded at the highest levels.

...Academia also has become a place where professors can achieve the highest rewards, except in the protected fields, for acting out their pathologies. In higher education, to paraphrase the Woody Allen stand-up line, we increasingly send our students to schools for learning-disabled and emotionally disturbed teachers....

Academics, in their own minds, face an almost insoluble problem of time. How, in only four years, can they disabuse students of the notion that the capital, risk, productivity and military sacrifice of others have contributed to human dignity and to the prospects of a decent society? How can they make them understand, with only four years to do so, that capitalism and individual- ism have created cultures that are cruel, inefficient, racist, sexist and homophobic, with oppressive caste systems, mental and behavioral? How, in such a brief period, can they enlighten "minorities," including women (the majority of students), about the "internalization" of their oppression (today's equivalent of false consciousness)? How, in only eight semesters, might they use the classroom, curriculum and university in loco parentis to create a radical leadership among what they see as the victim groups of our society, and to make the heirs of successful families uneasy in the moral right of their possessions and opportunities? Given those constraints, why in the world should they complicate their awesome task by hiring anyone who disagrees with them? __WSJ__via_BelmontClub

In fact, Kors is understating the case--pulling his punches. The reality of the modern university is worse than he describes.

Richard Fernandez thinks that the age of academic indoctrination may be nearing its end. He draws that reassurance from J. Richard Gott's "doomsday argument. It is an interesting argument, related to the "anthropic principle" argument in nature. Thought-provoking, but not conclusive.

I sincerely hope that Fernandez (aka "Wretchard") is right. Universities of indoctrination are spewing out minds that are increasingly incapable of standard reasoning and logic. Too often a graduate of a liberal arts or social science program has never been exposed to divergent points of view--never learned to confront intelligent and reasonable people whose deeply held and closely reasoned ideas differ substantially from their own. Naturally he goes out into the world believing that all right-minded persons will believe as he does, and that all others are either dishonest, corrupt, or stupid.

All of that, before his pre-frontal lobes have even completely myelinated--before his powers of judgment have even come close to maturing. How could he possibly know better, unless someone at some point was willing to force him to delve deeply into diverse disciplines of thought and reason?

As Kors explains in his piece above, those halcyon days of intellectual diversity in the university are as good as gone. But is Fernandez right in supposing that this monolithic thought structure, this incompetence, this intolerance, is soon to meet its doom?

Society--in the form of the news and entertainment media, popular culture--has bonded itself to the PC worldview monoculture of the universities. Government bureaucracy increasingly adopts the same forms, and the bureaucracies of corporations and non-profit foundations have been increasingly moulding themselves according to PC intolerance.

There is no doubt that civilisation is attempting to transition from a religion-dominant culture to a secular-dominant culture. But it is not that easy. Society abhors the moral vacuum of the "middle ground." Secular morality has not truly stepped into the gap to provide a firm foundation for sound child-raising or a decent society. Leftist ideology has attempted to fill the void via many universities and much of the media, but for some reason, it has only done half the job. It has torn down most of the traditional moral icons of the civilisation, but its own moral forms have not been widely taken up by the society at large.

So instead of a culture confidently stepping out into the wide-open future, you see a fearful and insecure society full of self-doubt, questioning its own right to exist in the face of widespread poverty and misery elsewhere in the world. Entire nations are shrinking into the moral void, choosing anti-natalist ideas or going after comfort and security instead of taking risks on a wider future.

The human extinction movements are merely the extreme end point toward which a large part of the university educated are shuffling. Choosing to avoid children, or avoiding marriage altogether are other points along the same scale.

The quasi-suicidal carbon hysteria movement is a mere symptom of the basic intellectual nihilism that has followed university graduates into the culture at large. The true problem underlying the symptom is an inability to test hypotheses and theorems. If the hypothesis meets the long-term requirements of your ideology, put your emotions behind the idea, avoid the rational testing stage altogether, and use all the tools of human persuasion in your bag to put the idea over.

There are many other symptoms of the underlying problem, and it would be nice if we could deal with them all, one by one. That will be left to others, such as FIRE. Al Fin's emphasis will continue to focus on efforts to bring the "next level" into reality. The dumbing down of university students and graduates--and thus the dumbing down of society in general--does not help Al Fin's task.

Derived from a previous posting at Al Fin

Who Elected These Insane Fools?

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Fuel prices are high enough in the US to squeeze budgets of families and corporations. The mood is grim in many parts of the country, and people are looking for someone to blame. What we are seeing now resembles nothing so much as a lynching mob. And the US Congress has witlessly placed itself firmly front and center--following an invalid and obsolete ideology. An ideology that threatens to sink the US economy. More and more people are seeing what the Congress is doing, and they do not like it even a little bit.

...they are against business, against investments in domestic energy supply and for aggressive carbon controls... __Source

High oil prices are beginning to cook up a dangerous inflationary brew. By the time the next president is settled into office, the inflationary trend could be irrevocable--if Congress continues down its current slippery slope.

No profits. No exploration. No drilling. And no domestic oil with which to correct our dependence on foreign oil and thus provide a measure of security to a nation that runs on oil. __Source

Obama, McCain, and the Democratic Party dominated US Congress are all pointing the finger at big oil companies. But a rapidly growing proportion of US voters can clearly see that it is Congress itself that is limiting the options of the American economy. Even a national media that is sycophantic toward Obama and the Democratic Party cannot stop the groundswell of awareness by the public, of how the Congress is shutting off US energy options.

The stupidity of the current Congress rests upon fashionable leftist idiocies of catastrophic greenhouse warming and antipathy toward big business and big oil companies. As long as the public's attention is diverted from congressional suicidal insanity, the Congress can get away with almost anything. But now, people are hurting, and they are starting to see who is really to blame.

No More Gazas

The war in Iraq is beginning to look less like a war and more like a rough-around-the-edges peacekeeping mission. Prematurely removing peacekeepers from the fragile and still-volatile country would, in all likelihood, reignite the war that is finally winding down. _Commentary

Senator Obama is painting himself into a blatantly irrational position on Iraq--but he genuinely has no choice. Based upon the people who have propelled him to his current front-runner candidate position, he must play the hand he has already dealt himself.

Obama must declare Iraq a "quagmire" and a "disaster", regardless of the actual situation in the real country of Iraq. It is the fictional country of "Iraq" that matters now--the country in the minds of Obama voters. As long as that fictional country is a deepening quagmire, a perpetual disaster, Obama's future as the next President Carter is assured.

Naturally, the same logic applies to Obama's position on global warming. Here, Obama's job is much easier, since global warming catastrophe hype has always been based upon computer models and fudged temperature data. If your theory is based upon fictitious numbers under the control of partisans, with the wink-wink support of "science" journalists, the theory is never in any real danger. Still, more rational people who are able to put the pieces together can easily see the absurdity in IPCC claims. These more rational people also have voices, in this new media age. Obama will need to stick with his media friends, and avoid more rational critical minds.

The current graphic image of abysmal failure is Gaza. Violence is the only export from that sad enclave of bitter religionists, full of hatred that flows from one generation to the next. Sadly, the policies that Obama promotes for Iraq are exactly the policies that would guarantee making a "Gaza-like" land of perpetual hate out of Iraq. Obama's wooly minded followers believe this is already the situation in Iraq, so they feel there is nothing to lose. How pathetically deluded.

Obama's candidacy has never truly been about logic or reason. Rather it has always been about emotion, and feelings. Obama's practised oratory is capable of moving weak-minded individuals emotionally, and that is all he needs to do for them to make them believe.

Generations of dumbing down in schools and universities--shifting from rational thought to emotional supremacy--has spawned this flock of willing dupes. They will vote and they will imagine they have done something fine.

Behind the scenes, the damage control specialists will be working overtime, often in vain. Disaster often creeps up on a society just when it thinks it set all its ducks in a row.