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Friday, March 18, 2011
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Give the Peace Prize Back, Barack
By Alan Caruba
As the Middle East begets one insurrection after another against the oppression that has been endemic to the region for centuries and as Japan faces the worst nuclear energy disaster since Chernobyl, the President of America and Commander-in-Chief is Absent Without a Leave (AWOL).
Barack Hussein Obama is the first President of the United States who received a Nobel Peace Prize just for showing up. It is a mark of how debased this once prestigious international prize has become. He should give it up.
In the past, the Peace Prize went to Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 for negotiating an end to a Russian-Japanese conflict and to Woodrow Wilson in 1919 for his efforts to create the League of Nations. Its value began to fall off the cliff when it was given to Jimmy Carter in 2002 and Obama in 2009. In between, it was awarded to former Vice President Al Gore and the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change in 2007.
It is an ancient axiom that power is lost when power is not exercised. Osama bin Laden seriously misread the U.S. when he referred to it as “a weak horse”, an Arab way of saying it could be attacked with impunity. George W. Bush responded by bombing the hell out of Tora Bora in Afghanistan and then by invading Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein. Bin Laden has been in hiding ever since and his top lieutenants keep getting whacked.
Obama’s approach to foreign affairs has been to misunderstand and denigrate the role of America in a dangerous world. Daniel Henninger of The Wall Street Journal calls it “The Collapse of Internationalism” because the failure to lead has demonstrated the uselessness of the United Nations, its Security Council, NATO, the European Union, and the Arab League when it comes to facing down a psychopathic despot like Libya’s Quadaffi and, of course, the same was true regarding Saddam Hussein.
This is how big wars occur.
Recent history bears out the failure to take action against Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, against Adolf Hitler prior to his invasion of Poland, to anticipate the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, and now the inevitable acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran.
This is what happens when an administration’s policy makers are all “intellectuals” who have spun out hypothetical views of the world that have no relationship to history or present realities.
This is what happens when, despite our present financial woes, the most powerful nation on Earth has reduced its naval and air power, and asks its military to engage in nation-building while fighting our enemies. What is needed are entirely separate, highly trained units devoted to that task.
This is what happens when “foreign policy” involves wasting billions of taxpayer dollars on the United Nations and billions more in so-called “foreign aid” to nations that do not like us, nor support us in times of crisis and need.
Libya, said Henninger, “was a test case, and what we have seen is that a world in which the U.S. doesn’t unmistakably lead is a world that spins its wheel, and eventually the wheels start to come off.”
The U.S. is not, as Obama believes, just one more nation among others or that it is not the single most exceptional experiment in democracy and freedom.
Just as Americans must organize to resist and survive Barack Hussein Obama over the next two years, having come to realize how utterly incompetent he is, other nations are wondering what will occur without the leadership the U.S. has always provided in the past, including two world wars, several smaller ones, and the containment of the former Soviet menace.
The presidency is much more than frequent trips to the golf course, predicting the outcome of the NCAA tournament, and an ill-timed visit to Rio. It is a dangerous place filled with people like Quadaffi and others of his ilk.
© Alan Caruba, 2011
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
The EPA's Fantastic Clean Air Fictions
By Alan Caruba
Reading the Environmental Protection Agency’s news releases is a trip into the world of science fiction, of fantastical assertions and predictions that have no relationship to reality. The EPA is a most wicked assemblage of alleged scientists and political appointees whose sole purpose is to economically burden the industrial, commercial, and agricultural sectors of the nation in every way possible.
Most reporters covering environmental issues these days are so brainwashed and brain dead they never actually question the drivel that the EPA shovels on a daily basis. The latest is a March 16 release “EPA Proposes First National Standard for Mercury Pollution from Power Plants.” The key words here are “power plants”, the 24/7 generators of the electricity we all depend upon.
By burdening power plants with unnecessary costs the EPA drives up the price of electricity and are thus able to make a better case for “renewables”, the worst, most unreliable and most unaffordable producers of electricity, wind and solar power. In the process, they get to demonize coal-burning plants that produce fifty percent of the electricity.
The opening paragraph of the EPA release is a staggering 100-plus words in length, two run-on sentences that would earn any high school English student a failing grade.
“WASHINGTON – In response to a court deadline, today the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed the first-ever national standards for mercury, arsenic and other toxic air pollution from power plants. The new power plant mercury and air toxics standards – which eliminate 20 years of uncertainty across industry – would require many power plants to install widely available, proven pollution control technologies to cut harmful emissions of mercury, arsenic, chromium, nickel and acid gases, while preventing as many as 17,000 premature deaths and 11,000 heart attacks a year. The new proposed standards would also provide particular health benefits for children, preventing 120,000 cases of childhood asthma symptoms and about 11,000 fewer cases of acute bronchitis among children each year. The proposed standards would also avert more than 12,000 emergency room visits and hospital admissions and 850,000 fewer days of work missed due to illness.
The assertions made on behalf of the proposed rule, one that the EPA has waited eleven years to slip by the public, are so absurd that it is testimony to how stupid the EPA thinks the public is.
It is an aggregation of statistics without any citation of their source, all intended to drive home the horrors that Americans have allegedly been living with and fanciful health threats the rule will allegedly prevent. How can anyone know or even predict how many “emergency room visits” are attributable to mercury, arsenic, chromium, nickel, and acid gas emissions? And who among you knows the actual amounts? The facts put the lie to this fear-mongering and the EPA’s own monitoring data provide them!
The release continues in this fear-mongering vein, blandly stating that “Toxic air pollutants like mercury from coal-and-oil fired plants have been shown to cause neurological damage, including lower IQ, in children exposed in the womb and during early development.” So this new rule is all about saving unborn and infant children from the horrible coal-and-oil plants. How much government regulation is attributed to protecting children? A lot! Where is the proof offered by the EPA for this assertion? Not stated.
Again, if these emissions are such a dire health hazard, why did it take eleven years for the EPA to take action? The answer to that is that this EPA is operating within the most Leftist, power-grabbing administration in the history of the nation. It is under the control of a known socialist, Carol Browner, the President’s energy and environmental czar, and her sock puppet, Lisa Jackson, the Director of the EPA.
If you want to learn the truth about the state of the nation’s air quality and the lies being told by the EPA, you should read Steve Milloy’s 16-page analysis, “EPA’s Clean Air Act: Pretending air pollution is worse than it is”, posted to Junkscience.com on March 9, 2011.
“The EPA relies on health studies that exaggerate harm and economic studies that understate regulatory costs in order to maintain the fiction that its ever-more stringent regulations are providing meaningful public health benefits,” says Milloy. He then cites studies of particulate matter in 32 Midwest and Eastern states covered by the Clean Air Transport Rule that demonstrate how meaningless the EPA assertions are.
“There is no tangible scientific evidence that current air quality standards are not already more than sufficiently protective of public heath. Data has been hidden from the public by the agency and by a clique of EPA-funded researchers.”
You’re being duped. You’re being robbed. The utilities affected by this new regulation only want “certainty” regarding how much they will have to shell out for the unnecessary mediation measures that will be required. The bill will be paid by energy consumers who have no choice.
© Alan Caruba, 2011
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Making Too Many Americans Stupid
By Alan Caruba
We’ve all encountered them. The people manning the check out line in the supermarket, the fast-food restaurant, all the way up the line to those in management who can’t even manage themselves let alone anyone else. They are an entire class of Americans, the irretrievably stupid ones or, to be kind, the ones whose ignorance began early and never improved.
Let it be said there are a lot of very smart Americans and I am not talking about the PhDs, but the ones who chose to become engineers, architects, physicians, and other endeavors that require serious study that never really ends. There are others in the arts and literature. You know who you are.
America’s problem is America’s schools.
Naturally, we all look for someone or some system to blame for a large slice of the population that does not measure up.
As someone who passed through elementary, middle and high school in the 1940s and 50s, I continually hear from others of my generation who praise a merciful God for the education they received when they compare it with their grandchildren’s lack of the most basic skills, reading, writing and arithmetic.
I read The Wall Street Journal every day because it is quite likely the only newspaper left in America that is not written and edited by chimpanzees.
In the March 15 edition, in the Greater New York section, there was an article, “Student’s English Misses the Mark” by Barbara Martinez. “More than a third of New York City students who entered first grade in 2003 identified as English language learners couldn’t pass an English-language proficiency test last year when they were in the seventh grade, according to Department of Education data.”
Let me share a family story. My father was born in 1901 to two Italian immigrants, both of whom knew they could not speak English well enough to teach it to their son. They also knew he would learn it when he went to school. Once there, the teacher sat him beside a bilingual student and, rather swiftly, my father acquired fluency without any special tutoring or multi-million dollar program. In time, he would put himself through college, working during the day and attending NYU at night. He would become the youngest Italian-American to pass the CPA exam in New Jersey.
“Of New York City’s 1.1 million school children, 153,338 or 14% are classified as English language learners. The Department of Education spent more than $250 million on extra instruction for them in 2009. About 20% of students have come to the U.S. in the past two years, but nearly 70% who have received six years or more of services were born here.”
Are these children all stupid? Are they all retards? No! What’s stupid is the educational system that cannot do for them what my father was able to do without any help other than another student his own age!
I have been thinking about education in America while reading a book that is both entertaining because of its felicitous writing and depressing because of what the author imparts. “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accident Academic” by Professor X ($25.95, Viking) is a look into the bowels of probably every community college in America and probably quite a few four-year universities.
“Fully 50% of community college students drop out before their second year and only 25% manage to finish the two-year program in three years.” Let that soak in. Of those that made it through four years, 66% left with considerable debt, the top 10% owing $44,500 or more; 50% owing at least $20,000.
Too often, these schools of so-called higher education are just money-mills producing debt-ridden human sausage.
What Professor X discovered upon becoming an adjunct, a position filled by people like himself with a Master’s in English Literature who needed an additional source of income to pay the mortgage and other bills, was this: “College is difficult even for highly motivated students who know how to write papers and study for exams, My students had no such abilities. They lack rudimentary study skills; in some cases they are not even functionally literate.”
How does anyone pass through twelve years of schooling and still remain illiterate, unable to read or write English so poorly that it would allow them to perform only the most unskilled job available?
By 2004, there were nearly 17.5 million students enrolled in colleges of every description. “Everybody goes to college now, though not everybody graduates”, says Professor X. “No one is thinking about the larger implications, or even the morality, of admitting so many students to classes they cannot possibly pass.”
Why were Professor X’s students filling the seats in the classroom? A lot were there because many jobs these days require an associate degree as the ticket to employment. “We have a vague feeling that the world would run more smoothly, more efficiently, more professionally if every worker had some college under his or her belt.”
The bottom line is that America’s schools have been failing one generation after another since around the 1960s when the teacher’s union got a firm grip on local schools and on the U.S. Department of Education.
Those students were not necessarily less eager or less equipped to learn, but our schools more often resemble minimum security prisons and are burdened with so much political correctness that the joy of learning has been squeezed out of them.
The schools are making too many potentially smart people stupid.
© Alan Caruba, 2011
Monday, March 14, 2011
Five Dead Jews
By Alan Caruba
For the same reason it is difficult to comprehend what will surely be a large loss of life following the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan, it is hard to grasp that, halfway through the last century, when I was a child, Nazis killed six million Jews for being Jews.
The mind rejects such insanity. We recoil from such barbarity, but we can understand what it means when a family of five is slain in their beds while they slept. That is what happened to the Fogel family in their home last Friday in the West Bank settlement of Itamar. They were killed for being Jews.
The victims were Rabbi Udi Fogel, 36, who taught at the Itamar yeshiva; his wife, Ruth Fogel, 34. Yoav, age 11. Eldad, age 4. And tiny baby, Hadas. Eldad was stabbed in the heart. His baby sister had her throat cut. The others died in a similar fashion.
Their blood-soaked bodies were found by their sister, Tamar, age 12, when she returned home that evening and mercifully spared were Roi, age 8, and Yishai, age 2, as they slept in another room.
There is a fence around Itamar, but for whatever reason, it was scaled and when the guards, alerted by a motion detector, found no evidence of a breach, they assumed some animal had set it off. They were wrong.
The animals, the killers, were a team of Hamas murderers and, when word of the murders spread throughout Gaza, candy was given out to children there to celebrate.
This occurred in an Israel now regularly called an “apartheid” nation for seeking to defend itself against a people, the so-called Palestinians, who have refused to recognize its nationhood for more than sixty years. It is a nation isolated and under attack in the United Nations despite the fact that organization supposedly exists to peacefully resolve issues, not stoke the fires of hatred as it does.
News of the murders was given a tepid rebuke by Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad who denounced “violence by any quarter” without the specificity of naming Hamas.
In a phone call to PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu made it clear that terrorism was not going to restructure the settlement map on the West Bank and, to back it up, Israel announced it would authorize the construction of 500 new homes in West Bank settlements, 100 for each of the murdered Fogels.
There is a particular irony in the murder of the Fogels. They had originally lived in Gaza and had moved to Itmar in 2007 when, under former Israeli PM Ariel Sharon, they were among the Israelis who were forcibly removed by their own nation in order to provide Palestinians a strip of land on which to build a state of their own.
Instead, the Palestinians used Gaza as a forward line of war to fire hundreds, if not thousands, of rockets into Israel. It took Operation Cast Lead in December 2008 to dampen their enthusiasm for that. By then, Hamas had driven the Palestinian Authority out of Gaza at gunpoint.
DEBKAfile, an Israeli news agency, noted that the attack was “the first of its kind in years. Hamas websites hailed the murder as ‘heroic’, without taking any responsibility.”
The murders come at a time when Rep. Peter King is holding congressional hearings on the threat of radicalized Muslims in America who pose a threat to our lives. He has been attacked for putting the spotlight on this threat despite the fact that we are now almost a decade passed 9/11 and there have been the Fort Hood murders, as well as a series of attacks, planned, foiled, and near misses, in the past decade.
The Israelis are not so naïve, so fearful to face the truth about Islam in general and the Palestinians in particular. They are not so politically correct they will not say words like “terrorism” or “Islamic jihad.” They are not led by idiots like Obama’s National Security advisor who thinks the Muslim Brotherhood is a “secular” organization.
Light a candle for the Fogels. Say a prayer for the Fogels. They are your family too.
© Alan Caruba, 2011
For the same reason it is difficult to comprehend what will surely be a large loss of life following the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan, it is hard to grasp that, halfway through the last century, when I was a child, Nazis killed six million Jews for being Jews.
The mind rejects such insanity. We recoil from such barbarity, but we can understand what it means when a family of five is slain in their beds while they slept. That is what happened to the Fogel family in their home last Friday in the West Bank settlement of Itamar. They were killed for being Jews.
The victims were Rabbi Udi Fogel, 36, who taught at the Itamar yeshiva; his wife, Ruth Fogel, 34. Yoav, age 11. Eldad, age 4. And tiny baby, Hadas. Eldad was stabbed in the heart. His baby sister had her throat cut. The others died in a similar fashion.
Their blood-soaked bodies were found by their sister, Tamar, age 12, when she returned home that evening and mercifully spared were Roi, age 8, and Yishai, age 2, as they slept in another room.
There is a fence around Itamar, but for whatever reason, it was scaled and when the guards, alerted by a motion detector, found no evidence of a breach, they assumed some animal had set it off. They were wrong.
The animals, the killers, were a team of Hamas murderers and, when word of the murders spread throughout Gaza, candy was given out to children there to celebrate.
This occurred in an Israel now regularly called an “apartheid” nation for seeking to defend itself against a people, the so-called Palestinians, who have refused to recognize its nationhood for more than sixty years. It is a nation isolated and under attack in the United Nations despite the fact that organization supposedly exists to peacefully resolve issues, not stoke the fires of hatred as it does.
News of the murders was given a tepid rebuke by Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad who denounced “violence by any quarter” without the specificity of naming Hamas.
In a phone call to PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu made it clear that terrorism was not going to restructure the settlement map on the West Bank and, to back it up, Israel announced it would authorize the construction of 500 new homes in West Bank settlements, 100 for each of the murdered Fogels.
There is a particular irony in the murder of the Fogels. They had originally lived in Gaza and had moved to Itmar in 2007 when, under former Israeli PM Ariel Sharon, they were among the Israelis who were forcibly removed by their own nation in order to provide Palestinians a strip of land on which to build a state of their own.
Instead, the Palestinians used Gaza as a forward line of war to fire hundreds, if not thousands, of rockets into Israel. It took Operation Cast Lead in December 2008 to dampen their enthusiasm for that. By then, Hamas had driven the Palestinian Authority out of Gaza at gunpoint.
DEBKAfile, an Israeli news agency, noted that the attack was “the first of its kind in years. Hamas websites hailed the murder as ‘heroic’, without taking any responsibility.”
The murders come at a time when Rep. Peter King is holding congressional hearings on the threat of radicalized Muslims in America who pose a threat to our lives. He has been attacked for putting the spotlight on this threat despite the fact that we are now almost a decade passed 9/11 and there have been the Fort Hood murders, as well as a series of attacks, planned, foiled, and near misses, in the past decade.
The Israelis are not so naïve, so fearful to face the truth about Islam in general and the Palestinians in particular. They are not so politically correct they will not say words like “terrorism” or “Islamic jihad.” They are not led by idiots like Obama’s National Security advisor who thinks the Muslim Brotherhood is a “secular” organization.
Light a candle for the Fogels. Say a prayer for the Fogels. They are your family too.
© Alan Caruba, 2011
Obama's Endless Energy Lies
By Alan Caruba
For anyone who follows energy issues, the President’s press conference on Friday was a breathtaking example of his ability and willingness to lie about America’s energy needs and reserves while obfuscating his administration’s relentless attacks on the nation’s coal and oil industries.
Even if we give Obama the benefit of the doubt by saying he is being “misinformed” by advisors, it does not alter the fact that he has, since the days of his campaign in 2008, made no secret of his intention to undermine America’s oil and coal industries while encouraging greater use of the two forms of energy, wind and solar power, that are of the least value in the real world. Neither would exist without massive tax incentives and subsidies or mandates that require their use.
Obama’s lies are so easily refuted one might think he would hesitate to tell them, but he is undeterred by the truth.
Claims that his administration is approving drilling permits were disputed by the Governor of Alaska, Sean Parnell, in a March 3rd Wall Street Journal editorial. “…Alaska and the Gulf states have been blocked from developing America’s oil by politically driven federal policy…In Alaska, an oil company can buy federal leases, spend over $3 billion in permitting and capital costs, apply for an air permit from the Environmental Protection Agency, and then wait for five years and still have no permit.”
Obama’s claim that his administration is looking at oil leases that have not been developed into drilling sites obscures the fact that, despite billions invested in them by companies prepared to explore and extract oil, his administration has pursued a policy of stalling such efforts.
His claim that America has only two percent of the proven oil reserves of the world’s oil is just a flat-out lie. The Congressional Research Service recently released a report asserting that the U.S. has at least 17 percent of the world’s oil. And that is just the amount known to exist domestically and offshore.
In a March 11th statement by Thomas Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research said that “The CRS found that there is likely to be a combined 164.1 billion barrels or 8.5 times as much as the president alleges.”
It is Obama whose policies are driving up the cost of a gallon of gas at the pump. When one considers that U.S. oil is always cheaper per barrel than imported oil, Americans are being robbed, not by oil companies, but by White House restrictions on oil production.
This is a President who, in January 2008, campaigning for the office, told the San Francisco Chronicle that his cap-and-trade plan would cause electricity rates to “necessarily skyrocket.” The Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, told the Wall Street Journal that same year that “Somehow, we have to figure out how to boast the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe” which was paying $10 a gallon!
The Obama energy plan is devoted to bankrupting Americans and bankrupting America.
As Nansen G. Saler, president and CEO of Quantum Reservoir Impact, Houston, asked in a March 9th Wall Street Journal commentary, “How do we go from where we are today—importing about 20% of our daily energy supply—to where we want to be in 2026, perhaps even (as) an energy exporter?”
Imagine that? The U.S. as an energy exporter? Imagine the thousands of jobs that represents? Imagine the revenue that represents to a nation in its present financial crisis? Imagine the savings at the pump?
In 1960, the writer Mary McCarthy was being interviewed by Dick Cavett and was asked which writers she thought were over-rated. She named three, one of whom was Lillian Hellman, a well known Communist sympathizer. McCarthy replied that “everything she writes is a lie, including the ‘and’ and ‘the.’ It sparked a great literary controversy, but I was reminded of it while listening to Obama.
This President, blathering about “energy efficiency”, electric cars, high speed trains, thousands of acres covered by wind turbines and solar farms, and all the other pipedreams that represent a Green agenda, is deliberately misleading Americans while his administration, instead of “winning the future”, is killing the future for America..
© Alan Caruba, 2011
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Global Warming, R.I.P.
By Alan Caruba
Have you noticed that you rarely hear “global warming” mentioned on radio or television and the term rarely occurs any more in the print media?
One reason is that it has been replaced with “climate change” and the other reason is that the only people talking about climate change seem to be leaders of governments like the United States or Australia.
To borrow a line from Shakespeare, I come to bury global warming, not to praise it.
An early and unrelenting skeptic from the days it first debuted in the late 1980s, I rather instinctively knew that the only warming occurring was the same natural warming that always follows a cooling cycle; in this case the warming that began in 1850 after the Little Ice Age that began around 1300.
It never made sense to me that “industry” should be blamed for pumping massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere when the amount of CO2 was a minuscule 0.038 percent with far greater amounts of hydrogen and oxygen that protect the Earth from becoming the galactic equivalent of a toasted marshmallow.
Then, too, like oxygen, all life on Planet Earth is dependent on CO2, a gas that the Environmental Protection Agency is actually calling a “pollutant.” That is so absurd that I was confident people would laugh the whole “theory” out the door when it was first proposed. But that was over two decades ago.
The end didn’t begin until November 2009 and the release of thousands of “Climategate” emails between the meteorologists supplying the bogus data that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) used to generate the greatest hoax of the modern era.
Not since the discovery of the “Piltdown Man” had so many scientists allowed themselves to be taken in by a complete fabrication; one based entirely on falsified computer model data. Worse still, many climbed on board the global warming bandwagon to reap some of the billions in grant money involved.
The fact that “global warming” was generated by the United Nations should have been the red flag that something was not just wrong about it, but that it hid an agenda aimed at Western industrialized nations.
I think global warming gained credibility as much from the support of the leaders of Western nations as from the great difficulty skeptical scientists encountered in gaining any traction against it. To this day President Obama still prattles on about the need for solar and wind power to replace fossil fuels in order to avoid “climate change” from their use.
The current Prime Minister of Australia is busy trying to impose a carbon tax on that nation. The British have dug themselves a deep hole by embracing windmills instead of coal mines. Billions have been wasted by Spain and Germany on alternative energy sources.
The anti-energy agenda will have devastating affects on life in the West. Electricity consumers in the United Kingdom were recently told by the CEO of the country’s grid operation that, by 2020, they will have to get used to having no electricity for periods during the day and night. This will put the U.K. on par with North Korea. And the U.S. is not far behind if it does not quickly reverse current energy policies.
In the U.S., the leading voice for “global warming” became the former Vice President Al Gore who, following his defeat for the presidency ,set about becoming a multimillionaire with all manner of “global warming” projects and enterprises. He would eventually win an Oscar for his documentary and a Nobel Peace Prize that was shared by the IPCC. Today, however, Al Gore is a joke.
The legacy of “global warming” has been the decades-long attack on U.S. energy sources until today our vast resources of coal and oil remain in the ground instead of being available as the price of oil increases due to troubles in the Middle East and the cost of electricity increases due to laws mandating that utilities must buy from wind and solar electricity producers who would be out of business by next week without those government mandates.
The public acceptance of the “global warming” hoax has waned even as the mainstream media has tried to hide the truth. The rise of the Internet has seen to that and other more pressing, real challenges are shoveling dirt onto its grave. 9/11 refocused public attention on a real threat. The 2008 financial crisis still holds the nation in its grip.
And a President whose first two years have generated massive resistance now only occasionally references “climate change.”
The global warming corpse is not quite dead, but dead enough for now. The question is what new fraud will the United Nations and environmental organizations perpetrate? The “acidification” of the world’s oceans? “Species extinction” or “Invasive species”? Be assured, the UN mafia is at work on something.
© Alan Caruba, 2011
Japan is the Worst Case Scenario
Japan is now the global example of the worst case scenario in which everything that can go wrong has gone wrong.
When a nuclear plant servicing an equivalent area of a U.S. state blows up and moves toward meltdown, even Russia’s Chernobyl begins to shrink by comparison. For the nuclear energy sector, it’s a meltdown of another kind as few people will want to see another one built any time soon.
One astonishing side note to the disaster is the way Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada forced the shut-down of a multi-billion dollar Yucca Mountain repository for U.S. nuclear waste.
In the age when television cameras are everywhere, the people of the world got a firsthand look at what it looks like when a tsunami hits. As it plowed down buildings and everything else in its way, the devastation is so vast that the mind struggles to comprehend it.
You can rebuild buildings, roads, bridges, railroads and such, but restoring confidence in the future will take a generation or two for Japan. Meanwhile, the economic losses defy calculation.
What Japan tells us is that all the early warning systems are no match for the sheer power of natural forces. If the Yellowstone Park caldera, the largest potential volcano in the U.S. should explode, it would have a comparable affect and there isn’t a damn thing that can be done about it.
At the heart of the Japanese disaster is the loss of man-made power, the electricity that allows a modern nation to function, to keep its lights on and everything else that requires electricity. Not all the solar farms and wind turbines in the world could ever begin to provide the vast amounts of power generated by coal, natural gas, or—yes—nuclear facilities. And don’t forget the hydroelectric power that literally transformed the West.
There is a stark contrast between President Obama’s pledge to assist Japan in every way and his failure to assist the Libyan forces battling one of the worst dictators in northern Africa, a man with a forty-year history of oppression and even terrorism that was directed against America.
Largely unnoted is the way the Pacific Rim is demonstrating the primacy of geological events. From Christchurch in New Zealand to northern Japan, the Earth is literally moving under the feet of millions. The prospect of volcanic eruptions increases. The likelihood of more earthquakes increases. Tsunamis threaten.
Meanwhile, in the U.S. an economic earthquake looms. A $14 trillion deficit threatens to sink the nation and probably take a few others with it. Why does it always take a death or two at a dangerous intersection before the town installs a stop signal?
If you want a worst case scenario in America, you need only wait and watch as neither the White House, nor the Congress does anything serious to address this fate.
© Alan Caruba, 2011
Friday, March 11, 2011
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Liberals Attack America's Security
By Alan Caruba
“Exactly thirty years after Bolshevism consumed St. Petersburg and Moscow, it created a firestorm in Hollywood and Washington, D.C. In October 1947 the U.S. Congress held dramatic hearings on the subject of Communist infiltration in Hollywood.”
Now, decades after repeated attacks on U.S. embassies, U.S. Marines in Beirut, the USS Cole, and, of course, nearly a decade since 9/11, Rep. Peter King is holding hearings on Islamic radicalization in America, the kind that led to the murder of soldiers at Fort Hood and which The Wall Street Journal identified as “more than 50 known cases, involving about 130 individuals, in which terrorist plots were hatched on American soil.”
The similarities between the 1947 House Committee on Un-American Activities and Rep. King’s hearings are remarkable and, in both cases, the mainstream media played an extraordinary role in depicting them as a witch hunt. That metaphor was used by playwright Arthur Miller when he wrote “The Crucible” and Miller’s application to join the Communist Party of United States of America was one of the items the Committee made public.
Along with revelations that many Hollywood scriptwriters were CPUSA members, sworn to obey Russia and their Soviet masters and that a number of Hollywood stars had been duped by Communists to lend their names to anti-American activities has long been subsumed by a relentless campaign to depict the Committee as Un-American, not those working to undermine America. At the heart of that campaign, then and now, was the mainstream media and those in academia.
Liberals will always embrace totalitarian governments and movements. From Jane Fonda to former President Jimmy Carter, liberals have always seen America as the enemy and worked to further the aims of our enemies.
The opening quote to this commentary came from “Dupes”, a book by historian Dr. Paul Kengor that reveals not only the names and activities of Communist dupes in America from the years just following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia to the present day.
That history has been largely re-written by the many liberals in the nation’s media and in its colleges and universities. Among the most famous advocates of the Soviet Union were leading academics and, today, the revolutionaries of the 1960s, including some who bombed U.S. facilities, are found on America’s campuses, indoctrinating new generations.
To give you an idea of how great the threat to America truly is, Rep. King and his family have been protected, according to the Associated Press, by “round-the-clock security” provided by the New York Police Department and the Nassau County, N.Y. police.” Capitol police secured the congressional hearing room and surrounding areas, as well as his office.”
And, then, true to the media agenda to undermine and disparage the current and past hearings, the Associated Press report noted that “Critics have likened them to the McCarthy-era hearings investigating communism.” Bingo!
You would have to have read the March 10 Wall Street Journal editorial to learn that, among the efforts by jihadists to attack America being investigated, there were “plots to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, an office tower in Dallas, a federal court house in Illinois, the Washington, D.C. metro, and the trans-Alaska pipeline.”
“Most of these schemes were foiled at an early stage, though the Times Square bomber failed only at the moment of ignition. The worst attack was Major Nidal Hasan’s November 2009 murder of 13 soldiers at Fort Hood.”
And the White House response in all these cases was, “Do not jump to conclusions.” The Obama administration’s Department of Homeland Security, led by Janet Napolitano and the Attorney General, Eric Holder, have choked on the words “Muslim terrorist” or even the word “terrorism.”
If you want to see how the purpose of these hearings will be twisted, you need only pay heed to the top ranking Democrat on the committee, Bernie Thompson of Mississippi, who said he believes the hearings could be used to “inspire terrorists.”
Only terrorists don’t need to be inspired by a U.S. Congressional Committee. They are already inspired by the Koran, the Muslim holy book.
© Alan Caruba, 2011
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
The Party's Over
By Alan Caruba
We all see the world through the prism of where we live. Most of us live in the cities and suburbs. From the early 1940s when my parents moved to the picture postcard town of Maplewood, N.J. that is where I grew up and have spent most of my life.
Maplewood is a quick half hour train trip into downtown Manhattan and is a bedroom community for many executives that work there. It is famous for its many tree lined streets, manicured lawns, and homes, many of which were built starting around the 1920s after the Erie Lackawanna made it a regular stop. Its school system was renowned. It’s still a beautiful town and its village shopping area was the setting for scenes in the film “One True Thing.”
When the property taxes on my home there continued to rise, myself and many other senior citizens who had lived in the township elected to move. My older brother had already set up house in Florida, God’s waiting room, but I elected to move one town over into a swanky new apartment complex, allowing me to make the short drive into the “village” of town every day to purchase sundries and get what, for me, passes for exercise.
What struck me today was the way the small office building in which my CPA’s firm is headquartered is bereft of any other firms. It used to house a photographer’s business and one that sold insurance. I left off my 2010 tax records. Across the street a take-out food store had closed its doors. The town’s pet store had departed not long ago.
As I walked toward my car I realized that yet another gift shop had bit the dust. Other shops, too. One of the town’s busiest real estate firms had a window filled with pictures and descriptions of homes for sale. My former home where I had lived for more than sixty years had changed owners twice in seven years.
The short drive back to my apartment complex included passing homes with for-sale signs, too numerous to ignore.
When the phone rings these days it’s usually one of a small circle of longtime friends. One of them runs a longtime, successful enterprise that matches people of differing expertise with reporters needing some quick information and insight, a quote on some subject. Talk radio and TV producers use it to find guests.
Over the twenty-seven years I have known my friend he went from running the business from his apartment to a large office with a full staff. He now runs it from his apartment and it is a virtual business. His directory of experts is print-on-demand for those who request a copy and many of the computer and web services he uses are provided from Bangalore, India.
Like a fish in water, it occurred to me that I haven’t met face to face with any of my clients in years. We communicate mostly via email or occasionally on the phone. I am trying to remember when I last put on a suit and tie. I can’t.
When I turn on the television news or listen to it on the radio, what I really hear is that everyone is waiting for the megalith we call the federal government to come up with a budget and to fund its function for another two weeks!
When a nation cannot operate in a predictable, rational way, it forces people to put a lot of ordinary decisions on hold.
That’s why a great swath of businesses is just waiting for someone to buy something. The ones that provide goods that are essential, food, toilet paper, things to keep the house clean, medications, are okay, but anything that is non-essential is moving far more slowly. Even the catalog operations that depend on moving all manner of household items are slashing their prices. The $10 “rehab exercise ball” is now $6.00. The $14 “ratchet pruner” is now $8.00.
I used to go to a nearby mall to purchase things. Now I go on the Internet and they are delivered in two or three days at most. The most extraordinary business in America is the delivery business, whether it’s Fedex or UPS.
As the price of gasoline goes up, reflecting the turmoil throughout the Middle East as it recedes further into its dark ages people are going to travel less. Visiting grandma will be by iphone. The huge business of trade conferences will be hard hit. In turn, hotels, airlines, and tourism will feel the affect.
Nobody has any idea how America will pay off the huge debt it has acquired—the bulk of it in just the last two years—and still Congress critters argue over cutting pitifully small pieces of it.
We have huge government departments and agencies that should simply be shuttered, along with their matrix of duplicated and overlapping programs that suck up millions, if not billions, annually. It won’t happen.
There is a lull in the life of the nation. Shops are closing. Homes are going unsold or foreclosed or both. Everything looks “normal”, but it isn’t. The party’s over.
© Alan Caruba, 2011
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
The Mysterious Middle East
By Alan Caruba
I don’t think anyone knows what’s going to happen in the Middle East and that includes the people who live there as well as those who have ruled them despotically for decades, if not centuries.
The bad news about the Middle East is that all this rioting, insurrection, et cetera, has very little to do with “freedom” and everything to do with its peoples wanting Sharia law and mullah control. In that area of the world that is what Islam preaches and what Muslims want. When you have to pray five times a day, there's not a lot of time left over for an objective understanding of the world.
Muammar al-Gadhafi is doing what one would expect him to do. He’s trying to stay alive and to keep his hold on the oil riches of Libya. To accomplish this, he will kill as many Libyans as necessary. We tend to forget that despots in Syria and Iraq, the late masseurs Hafez al Assad and Saddam Hussein, slaughtered thousands of their own people to gain and retain power. One can only guess at the death toll in Iran.
Egypt gave the impression of being a not too horrible place to live, so long as you lived in America or somewhere else. The military essentially owned Egypt and everyone else there resents it. What do we want in Egypt? Stability. Therefore we want the military to stay in power since most of its officers were trained by U.S. military and we give them over a billion a year not to attack Israel. Again. And get whipped. Again.
Only at this point there is no stability in Egypt and typically everyone at the bargaining table wants a piece of whatever wealth there is to be had. The Muslim Brotherhood wants a return to the seventh century as soon as possible.
The real action will be in Saudi Arabia where the wealth really exists and has been carefully tended by the “royal” family of Saud. They have worked closely with America because, oddly enough, we are the only major power they trust. We need their oil. If it takes every carrier, destroyer and cruiser we have in that part of the world, plus a lot of Marines, Army, and Air Force, you can bet we will ensure they stay in power and in the oil business.
The other Gulf States are strategic U.S. assets. We park our Navy in Bahrain. We do a lot of business in Abu Dubai. We want the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait to keep pumping oil and sending it to us. They want to avoid being taken over by Iran.
Nobody, but nobody knows how Iran will end up. A lot depends on whether a whole generation of young Iranians can stage a successful revolution, drag the ayatollahs into the streets, and hang them from telephone poles. So long as the nut jobs remain in power they will get nuclear weapons and force everyone to bomb the crap out of them.
Not mentioned at this point is Pakistan, a failed state beset by the Taliban with whom it has tried to maintain good relations despite the threat they present. Pakistan remains insanely afraid India will sneak in one night and reclaim their territory. It has nuclear weapons that the U.S. and all other nations want to ensure do not become the property of either al Qaeda or Iran. Islam is killing Pakistan.
There are three wild cards at this point, Lebanon, Jordan, and Yemen. The first two have large Palestinian populations. Lebanon is now controlled by Iran and Syria via Hezbollah. Jordan’s fallback position is the Bedouin tribes that support its king, but there is increased clamoring in the streets because that’s what Palestinians do.Yemen like other Arab states is in turmoil and only military analysts pay it much attention. Then there is Somalia, pretty much "Apache country" because no one who goes there comes back alive.
Lastly, there’s Afghanistan, a nation that has been unsuccessfully invaded by great powers who never learn one of the first lessons of history, never invade Afghanistan.
If you harbor the illusion that the White House, Department of State or the Pentagon has the slightest idea what is happening in the Middle East or what will happen in the Middle East, you are mistaken. And they are currently led by the most pro-Islam President in the history of the nation.
No one knows. Everyone wishes they did.
© Alan Caruba, 2011
Monday, March 7, 2011
Why Obama Will Be Defeated in 2012
By Alan Caruba
To this observer, the likelihood of Barack Obama being reelected in 2012 is so remote that I can safely predict it will not happen. Of course, as is commonly said, two weeks, let alone two years, is a long time in politics and all manner of events could intervene, but if one follows the trends in place, he will be a one term president.
Recall that Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush were one term presidents for differing reasons. Despite a genuine victory when U.S. led forces drove Saddam Hussein’s army out of Kuwait, Bush 41 was savagely attacked by a hostile press throughout the campaign and his term in office. The former WWII hero was called a “wimp” and, when he did accede to raising taxes, he sealed his own fate. As to Carter, he was seen by all to have been a monumental failure.
Almost weekly the incompetence and sheer arrogance of President Obama has been manifest since he took the oath of office. I recall an interview in which he expressed the opinion that he might well be a one term president and I thought that odd at the time.
In retrospect, it seems to me now that he always knew that his radical socialist agenda would likely ensure his defeat for a second term. Obama was and is the "Manchurian candidate", put into the Oval Office to achieve as quickly as possible the completion of a Socialist/Communist agenda.
To put it another way, the destruction of the capitalist economic system that has been the foundation of America’s great wealth and power has always been the goal of the Left. To achieve this, Obama installed 32 “czars” in the White House, most of whom were not vetted by Congress, nor are answerable to it. They promulgate policies and regulations while by-passing congressional oversight. It's one thing to have advisors and quite another to have co-conspirators.
One has to reach back to the Clinton years to recall how soundly rebuffed “Hillarycare” was as the initial attempt to take over the health care industry in America. One needs to recall how Hillary Clinton fought through the primaries until her only opponent was Barack Obama and how, after he had secured the Democratic Party nomination, the plum assignment of Secretary of State was given to her; two peas from the same Alinsky pod.
On top of the financial crisis that too conveniently began as the 2008 campaigns were coming to an end was the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—Obamacare—that was taken off the shelf and, this time, forced through a Democrat controlled Congress, often with bribes, often with a lot of brutal political arm twisting. And the response, even before it became law a year ago was the sudden rise of the Tea Party movement.
The next response came in the 2010 elections that returned political power in the House to Republicans and narrowed the Democrat majority in the Senate. And that is why Barack Obama will be defeated in 2012.
Another factor that will contribute to his defeat has been his support for the gangster tactics of public service unions in Wisconsin and the runaway members of its legislature. Opposition to the public sector unions has been on the rise in the nation as more voters became aware of how they have bankrupted virtually every State with salaries, pensions and healthcare plans that exceed those of taxpayers who are expected to pay for them.
Then there are the events in the Middle East and Obama’s uncertain response to them. The immediate impact will be a rise in the cost of gasoline at the pump and that is something that everyone can grasp. Add to that Obama’s attack on the nation’s energy industries, coal, oil, and natural gas, and you have the perfect storm for a president whose popularity is dropping.
In the past two years during which upwards of twenty million Americans lost their jobs, the unseemly and frequent vacations by the President or by his wife have not been well received by those less fortunate and, it should be said, less ostentatious. Dictating what Americans should eat while dining on spare ribs reminded many of the First Lady’s caloric hypocrisy.
Mostly, though, it has been the accumulation of lies about virtually all aspects of his political agenda that now comprises a record that will be mined by whoever is chosen to run against him in 2012.
There are still, however, two more years to go and Barack Hussein Obama and his “czars” can do a lot of damage if not thoroughly reined in by Republicans in Congress. Americans have little choice other than to survive Obama at this point in time. And we will.
© Alan Caruba, 2011
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Cholesterol, It's Good for You
By Alan Caruba
Before you start to feel superior as you look back at the myths of ancient Rome, Greece or other civilizations, you might just want to give some thought to the myths we live with today because they can lead you to waste a lot of money and even put your life at risk.
The greatest myth of recent times has been “global warming”, but we know now that the only global warming was an entirely natural cycle that began in 1850 as a response to five centuries of extremely cold weather. That warming cycle ended in 1998 as the Earth swung back into a new, natural cooling cycle now setting all kinds of records for low temperatures, increased blizzards, and such.
Let us examine a myth even closer to home for anyone who has concern for their personal health. Dr. Ernest N. Curtis, MD, has a wonderful new book out, “The Cholesterol Delusion” ($13.99, Dog Ear Press, Indianapolis, IN, softcover) that draws on his decades as a physician and his extensive research surrounding the “Cholesterol Theory” that equates “too much” cholesterol with heart disease, damage, and death. Simply put, the theory was based on “virtually nonexistent evidence.”
“As the years went by, I continually counseled my patients to eat what they liked, ignore their cholesterol levels, and avoid cholesterol-lowering drugs like the plague.”
Dr. Curtis received his B.A. in Biological Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley, and his M.D. from the University of California, Irvine. After a residency in internal medicine and a fellowship in cardiology, Dr. Curtis entered private practice in Long Beach, California where he has practiced for the last 32 years.
You get to see a lot of patients in more than three decades and empirically it was obvious to Dr. Curtis that a wide range of factors impacted atherosclerosis, a degenerative disease involving large and medium sized arteries, coronary artery and heart disease, and myocardial infarction, otherwise known as a heart attack. The least of these factors was cholesterol.
Patients who never smoked, watched their diet closely, got exercise and thought clean thoughts still died from heart attacks.
Ironically, my late Mother, who taught the art of haute cuisine, gourmet cooking and dining, had come to the same conclusion as Dr. Curtis entirely on her own and told her students to ignore all the warnings about cholesterol. She passed away at age 98!
She had learned, as Dr. Curtis notes, that “Cholesterol is one of the most vital and important biochemical compounds in nature. It is a major component of every cell in the body. All cells are enclosed by a membrane that keeps the contents of the cell intact and regulates everything that enters or leaves the cell. All cell membranes are composed of cholesterol and cholesterol-control compounds. Brain and nerve tissue contain the highest proportion of cholesterol in the body.”
Why would anyone want to lower the amount of cholesterol in their body when it is known to perform one of its most vital functions?
As far back as 1925, “it was found that the body manufactured most of its own cholesterol and that in fact the body manufactured several times more cholesterol than was consumed in the diet.”
“Contrary to popular opinion, the major source of this vital compound known as cholesterol,” notes Dr. Curtis, “is our own bodies rather than our diet.”
There is, in fact, no “good” cholesterol or “bad” cholesterol; low or high density lipoproteins. “In reality the only difference is the lipoprotein, the carrier.” The difference between them as regards coronary heart disease is 0.13% or thirteen one hundredths of one percent. That is so minuscule that it cannot even be considered a risk factor.
The cholesterol myth exists because too many physicians accepted it despite ample scientific studies disputing it. It exists because “heart attack” is the easiest thing to which to ascribe a cause of death on the certificate that must be provided. Physicians cannot list “old age” as a cause, nor is there any wiggle room for more complex explanations. The result is a statistical attribution to heart attack that far exceeds actual causes of death, including the obvious, old age.
The danger is that the statin drugs being prescribed today to lower cholesterol can cause damage to the liver or the skeletal muscles. Not only are they expensive, they are unnecessary. Side affects can cause death. A single low-dose aspirin probably does more for heart health than all the statin drugs combined.
Let me close by asking that you pay a lot more attention to all the television advertisements about various pharmaceutical drugs. In particular, pay attention to the “side affects” information provided. If a drug has more side affects than the disease or condition it is supposed to cure, a red flag should go up and caution is advised.
A sensible lifestyle will enhance and prolong your life. Too much of anything is a bad idea. Ignoring long established science and favoring the latest fear-mongering “theory” can kill you.
© Alan Caruba, 2011
Before you start to feel superior as you look back at the myths of ancient Rome, Greece or other civilizations, you might just want to give some thought to the myths we live with today because they can lead you to waste a lot of money and even put your life at risk.
The greatest myth of recent times has been “global warming”, but we know now that the only global warming was an entirely natural cycle that began in 1850 as a response to five centuries of extremely cold weather. That warming cycle ended in 1998 as the Earth swung back into a new, natural cooling cycle now setting all kinds of records for low temperatures, increased blizzards, and such.
Let us examine a myth even closer to home for anyone who has concern for their personal health. Dr. Ernest N. Curtis, MD, has a wonderful new book out, “The Cholesterol Delusion” ($13.99, Dog Ear Press, Indianapolis, IN, softcover) that draws on his decades as a physician and his extensive research surrounding the “Cholesterol Theory” that equates “too much” cholesterol with heart disease, damage, and death. Simply put, the theory was based on “virtually nonexistent evidence.”
“As the years went by, I continually counseled my patients to eat what they liked, ignore their cholesterol levels, and avoid cholesterol-lowering drugs like the plague.”
Dr. Curtis received his B.A. in Biological Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley, and his M.D. from the University of California, Irvine. After a residency in internal medicine and a fellowship in cardiology, Dr. Curtis entered private practice in Long Beach, California where he has practiced for the last 32 years.
You get to see a lot of patients in more than three decades and empirically it was obvious to Dr. Curtis that a wide range of factors impacted atherosclerosis, a degenerative disease involving large and medium sized arteries, coronary artery and heart disease, and myocardial infarction, otherwise known as a heart attack. The least of these factors was cholesterol.
Patients who never smoked, watched their diet closely, got exercise and thought clean thoughts still died from heart attacks.
Ironically, my late Mother, who taught the art of haute cuisine, gourmet cooking and dining, had come to the same conclusion as Dr. Curtis entirely on her own and told her students to ignore all the warnings about cholesterol. She passed away at age 98!
She had learned, as Dr. Curtis notes, that “Cholesterol is one of the most vital and important biochemical compounds in nature. It is a major component of every cell in the body. All cells are enclosed by a membrane that keeps the contents of the cell intact and regulates everything that enters or leaves the cell. All cell membranes are composed of cholesterol and cholesterol-control compounds. Brain and nerve tissue contain the highest proportion of cholesterol in the body.”
Why would anyone want to lower the amount of cholesterol in their body when it is known to perform one of its most vital functions?
As far back as 1925, “it was found that the body manufactured most of its own cholesterol and that in fact the body manufactured several times more cholesterol than was consumed in the diet.”
“Contrary to popular opinion, the major source of this vital compound known as cholesterol,” notes Dr. Curtis, “is our own bodies rather than our diet.”
There is, in fact, no “good” cholesterol or “bad” cholesterol; low or high density lipoproteins. “In reality the only difference is the lipoprotein, the carrier.” The difference between them as regards coronary heart disease is 0.13% or thirteen one hundredths of one percent. That is so minuscule that it cannot even be considered a risk factor.
The cholesterol myth exists because too many physicians accepted it despite ample scientific studies disputing it. It exists because “heart attack” is the easiest thing to which to ascribe a cause of death on the certificate that must be provided. Physicians cannot list “old age” as a cause, nor is there any wiggle room for more complex explanations. The result is a statistical attribution to heart attack that far exceeds actual causes of death, including the obvious, old age.
The danger is that the statin drugs being prescribed today to lower cholesterol can cause damage to the liver or the skeletal muscles. Not only are they expensive, they are unnecessary. Side affects can cause death. A single low-dose aspirin probably does more for heart health than all the statin drugs combined.
Let me close by asking that you pay a lot more attention to all the television advertisements about various pharmaceutical drugs. In particular, pay attention to the “side affects” information provided. If a drug has more side affects than the disease or condition it is supposed to cure, a red flag should go up and caution is advised.
A sensible lifestyle will enhance and prolong your life. Too much of anything is a bad idea. Ignoring long established science and favoring the latest fear-mongering “theory” can kill you.
© Alan Caruba, 2011
Saturday, March 5, 2011
Duped! Relentless Marxist Deception
By Alan Caruba
“The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But, under the name of ‘liberalism’, they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.” Norman Thomas, former U.S. Socialist Party president candidate
Those of my age—I am in my seventies—have a strong recall of the Cold War, fought from the end of World War Two in 1945 until the fall of the infamous Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. We grew up knowing that the Communists—Marxists—were the enemy.
All throughout that period, American liberals—Leftists—did what they could to ridicule efforts to rid the government of Communists, attacked those like Sen. Joseph McCarthy who spoke out against them, defended the likes of Fidel Castro who turned Cuba into a prison-state, and worked to “improve” U.S.-Soviet relations.
A book I wish everyone would read, liberals and conservatives alike, “Dupes” by Paul Kengor, went into a second printing in January of this year (ISI Books, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Wilmington, DE). Kengor, a PhD, is a professor of political science at Grove City College. His book runs just over 600 pages, all thoroughly documented, and tells the history of the effort to impose communism on America and worldwide, dating back to the Bolshevik revolution in 1917.
One of the characters in the book is Whittaker Chambers, a former Soviet spy who came to realize how evil Communism was and who revealed how the administrations of Roosevelt and Truman were shot through with spies and those cooperating with the Soviet Union, the most famous of whom was Alger Hiss, a high-ranking State Department official. Richard M. Nixon first came to public notice as a Senator from California who ran on an anti-Communist platform.
“While Communists make full use of liberals and their solicitudes, and sometimes flatter them to their faces, in private,” wrote Chambers, “they treat them with that sneering contempt that the strong and predatory almost invariably feel for victims who volunteer to help in their own victimization.”
Socialism has had a long, hard time establishing itself in America and has mostly been the gift of the Democratic Party that held control of Congress for forty years until that grip was broken in 1995. Despite that, Bill Clinton was reelected and, halfway through George W. Bush’s second term, congressional power returned to the Democrats.
Then, in 2008, a virtually unknown Senator who had not even served a full term, who had no paper trail of documentation regarding his life, who had written two memoirs that hinted at his far Left upbringing and associations, was elected President. Putting it bluntly, Americans were duped.
As Kengor points out, Americans “in poll after poll, year after year, have described themselves as ‘conservative’ over ‘liberal’ by a margin of roughly two to one, by approximately 40 percent to 20 percent.”
The political environment of America is conservative, but it has been the growing number of independent voters that have determined election outcomes. That says something about the disappointment that both political parties have created with their emphasis on enlarging the federal government, excessive spending, questionable wars, and general indifference to the voters.
The independents also reflect the sudden emergence of the Tea Party movement that occurred to protest Obamacare. They and others have swung back toward conservative candidates electing Republican governors in New Jersey and Virginia, a Republican Senator from Massachusetts, and sent Allen West and Marco Rubio to Congress from Florida, along with a host of candidates supported by the Tea Parties.
Independents along with conservatives in America have been demonstrating a level of political resistance to senseless spending and the rough-shod imposition of leftist legislation that suggests the 2012 elections will “save” America from Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and their far Left minions.
The election of Barack Obama was the result of the greatest act of political deception in the modern era. It was aided by a news media that not only ignored all the obvious signs that Obama was a denizen of the far Left, but was surrounded, not only by Leftists, but Communists like Van Jones whose Apollo Alliance helped write Obama’s budget-bursting $800 billion ‘stimulus’ bill.
The revolutionaries of the 1960s had mostly migrated to positions in higher education where they could influence a new generation, oblivious to the carnage that has always accompanied a Communist revolution, killing millions. Younger Americans in 2008 meant that those aged 18 to 29 made up nearly one in five voters or about twenty-five million ballots. They preferred Obama by a margin of more than two to one, 66 percent to 32 percent. They had no memory of the Cold War.
Seeking to dupe Americans Obamacare was an act of raw political power that ignored the same widespread rejection that an earlier version, dubbed “Hillarycare”, had encountered. “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it,” said then Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Its purpose was to completely socialize healthcare in America.
Americans, old and young, must not be duped again. The very future of the nation depends on the actions of a Republican-controlled House in the years remaining as America’s first Marxist President works his way, seeking always to make dupes of us all.
© Alan Caruba, 2011
Friday, March 4, 2011
The Peace of Israel
There is one nation in the Middle East that is not roiling in anarchy, rioting, and internal warfare. It does so without oppressing its citizens. It encourages and protects the practice of all religions. That nation is Israel.
The other Middle Eastern and North African nations, all predominantly Islamic, have discovered that Islam, despite its grip on the minds and souls of Muslims, does not preclude the universal human desire for freedom, for hope of a better life.
It seems that no one lacks for a reason to hate Jews, but if one steps back from the shouting and the insane claims that Jews and Zionism are responsible for everything and control everything, Israel seems to have made multiculturalism actually work.
Israel, whose official languages are Hebrew and Arabic, is home to more than seven million people, 76% if whom are Jewish and 24% are mostly Muslim, but include Christians, Bahai, and probably every other faith known to God and man.
The latest news, according to a report in the March 4th Wall Street Journal, is that Israel is weighing a new plan for a provisional Palestinian state, an offer of temporary borders within which the Palestinians could establish a nation of their own.
The problem, of course, is that the Palestinians have rejected this obvious solution for more than sixty years and are, themselves, divided between the Palestinian Authority and the radical Hamas that only wants to utterly destroy Israel and its Jewish citizens.
The French have France, the Greeks have Greece, the Turks have Turkey and all manner of self-identifying groups have their own nations, but for many worldwide the Jews are not supposed to have their own nation or to live in the land in which their ancestors have lived for 3,500 years ago.
When Muhammad began to piece together Islam, naming himself as a new prophet, he instructed the first Muslims to face Jerusalem when they prayed. After Arabian tribes of Jews refused to convert, he slaughtered their men, sold their women and children into slavery, and ordered Muslims to face Mecca instead.
The Jews, however, have some good news to celebrate because on March 3rd there was a report of Pope Benedict XVI’s new book, “Jesus of Nazareth—Part II” in which he asserts “a sweeping exoneration of the Jewish people for the death of Jesus Christ.” Given Jesus’ paternity, faith, and apostles, all Jewish, that is surely welcome news.
In 1965, the Second Vatican Council document, “Nostra Aetate”, initially affirmed that Jesus’ death could not be blamed on the Jews as a whole at that time or today. Pope Benedict’s reaffirmation of that Catholic truth should be bigger news.
In a world in which more than a billion Muslims are eager to establish a universal caliphate, mostly by the use of terror on the Earth’s other five billion inhabitants, the Pope’s book is a candle of sanity in the darkness.
Pope Benedict, forced to join the Hitler Youth, witness to the Holocaust, has made improving the Church’s relations with Jews a priority of his pontificate. He has visited the Auschwitz Nazi death camp in Poland and Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial where he prayed for the souls of those killed for the “crime” of being Jewish.
In contrast, Islam makes death the punishment for the “crime” of converting to any other faith. That is surely a measure of how thoroughly evil it is. In Pakistan a Christian government minister was murdered this week. In Germany, a Muslim convert killed U.S. service members, and every day mullahs tell Muslims that suicide/homicide killing is a holy act. In America, the current regime refuses to use words like “terrorism” or “jihad.”
It takes clarity and courage for non-Muslims to identify the threat to their faith and their lives. Benedict’s predecessor, Pope John Paul, was instrumental in shining a light on a comparable threat, Communism, aiding in the downfall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union. An earlier Pope, Pius XII, used his powers to resist the rise and reign of Nazism.
It is a good thing to be a Catholic. It is a good thing to be a Christian. It is a good thing to be a Hindu or a Buddhist. It is a good thing to be a Jew.
The same cannot be said of those who embrace terror, murder, and death as their path to paradise.
© Alan Caruba, 2011
Thursday, March 3, 2011
"Warning Signs" Passes 500,000 page views
That's a lot of page views by my calculation for an individual's blog (who isn't a celebrity, politician, or TV personality). So, I will take a moment to brag and then return to the job of examining the world we share and trying to make sense of it for myself and for you. Stay tuned!
The Newt-ster
By Alan Caruba
Fox News announced that Newt Gingrich will not be providing his observations on political events and personalities insofar as he is now regarded as running for the presidency.
Newt announced his intentions on Thursday, March 3. Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota is expected to jump in soon enough. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney will and my thought at this early stage is that the Republican Party is in desperate need of a candidate who can actually win.
I always had the feeling that Sen. John McCain won the 2008 primary campaign mostly because he wasn’t one of the other candidates, one of whom was Romney. McCain crossed the aisle so often to cooperate with Democrats in the Senate that he must have worn a path there. And then he picked Sarah Palin to be on his ticket as vice president.
Please, let’s not have a repeat of that disaster. At least, in 2012, the novelty of an Afro-American candidate will have dissipated in the wake of every foot-in-mouth statement and insane public policy that a single, sitting President could accumulate halfway through his first and last term in office.
Let me say that Gingrich, intellectually, is head and shoulders above anyone else in the race. In terms of pure brain-power, he has a real grasp of most issues.
The Newt-ster, however, has some problems.
Newt’s current wife, Callista, is his third. He divorced the first two and had, shall we say, some fidelity problems. The real problem for me is an image I cannot shake from my mind, the one of Newt and Nancy Pelosi together on a couch in a television commercial discussing “climate change” and his support for the cap-and-trade scheme that would have been a huge tax on all energy use.
Politicians who get too close to the Giant Green Light of environmentalism tend to get soft in the head over critical issues. To his credit, these days Newt is talking about the need to drill for oil and repeal of the horrid Obamacare Act.
I don’t frankly trust or have much use for any politician who fell for or still speaks about “climate change.” The reason you haven’t heard much about it is that everyone short of Al Gore has disowned the hoax. And Gore even said he thought ethanol was a bad idea!
The Newt-ster arrives at his announcement with a ton of political baggage. While he is forever in the pantheon of Republican heroes for the overthrow of Democrat control of the Congress in 1994 after forty years in the political wilderness and lauded for engineering the overhaul of the federal welfare system.
He was also famously blamed for the 1995 government shutdown. That, however, was Clinton’s decision. The news media hung it on Newt. In 1997 he was censured for ethics violations and his resignation was tendered the following year. Suffice to say, his years as Speaker were difficult and one has to wonder, assuming lessons learned, whether the presidency must be even less kind were he to be elected.
I have little doubt that the Newt-ster could wipe the floor with Barack Obama in any debate. He is articulate, has a strong grasp of history from his days as a professor, and I still don’t think he can win for all the objections cited and for those that will surely jump up and bite him in the months ahead.
I long ago concluded that one has to be somewhat delusional to want to be President. There is a level of egocentricity required that most normal men lack. The Newt-ster wants to be President very badly. He has devoted every day since he first ran for public office to that goal and now, at age 67, he has to go for it or risk being too old later on.
I predict that the Obama-loving mainstream media will chew him up and spit him out. He has been through that inferno and survived, patiently writing books, building a political organization, giving speech at the right places to the right groups, but I think the Republican Party would throw him overboard the minute New Jersey Governor Chris Christie relented and said he would accept the nomination.
I like the Newt-ster. I just don’t want him to run.
© Alan Caruba, 2011
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Is America Slip Sliding into Decline?
“Slip sliding away, slip sliding away. You know the nearer your destination, the more you're slip sliding away.” -- Simon and Garfunkel
The song keeps running through my mind as I watch America lose its former influence in world affairs as well as its economic power. Both are slip sliding away. In the wonderful world of punditry, a lot of us are trying to figure out where the nation is going and for now how events in the Middle East will play out.
As always, history provides a template by which to judge present times. A similar period occurred when the British Empire began its decline. At its peak it was so vast it was said “the sun never set” on it. By the 1920s, a quarter of the Earth’s land mass and its population composed the empire.
And then it all began slip sliding away.
Britain was among the winners of World War One. Its empire expanded into the Middle East to incorporate parts of the former Ottoman Empire. Britain, however, had lost the cream of an entire generation of its young men.
By the end of World War Two, England’s wealth and yet another generation had been severely diminished. Former colonies clamored for independence. The Empire shrank as independence was granted to India, Burma, and former African colonies.
.Other forces were at work to undermine the influence of both the United Kingdom and the United States. In the 1950s, a military coup in Egypt stirred ideas of an Arab confederation of states. It ultimately failed, but it set in motion ideas of nationalism.
In 1945, Winston Churchill was unceremoniously replaced by Clement Atlee, a socialist and a leader of the Labor Party. For the next six years Labor nationalized the nation’s coal mines, civil aviation, cable and wireless services, gas, electricity, railways, road transport and steel. The National Health Service, comparable to Obamacare, was introduced. In short, the British destroyed what was left of their economy by embracing the worst system for creating wealth known to man.
While Great Britain and America recognized the Soviet Union as the great threat to freedom after World War Two, both nations continued to incorporate socialism into their governmental structures and systems. In the U.S. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid would swallow up and redistribute vast portions of wealth until they represented half of all the spending at the federal level. As government grew, the growth of civil service unions drained the coffers of State treasuries.
The people of the Middle East, under the sway of various monarchies and despots, developed a deep resentment of the West in general, but initially for the British. Entire nations, new colonies, had been created in the Middle East to ensure access to its huge reserves of oil and natural gas.
America did not become an empire in the British sense of the word, but it did become the world’s policeman, its navy keeping sea lanes protected and open, engaging in a series of conflicts during and after the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Our Navy that in 1998 fielded sixty ships now has only twenty actively at sea.
In the 1950s, the conflict in Korea ended in a stalemate. In the 1970s, Vietnam became the first major defeat the U.S. had experienced. Too many casualties, no end in sight, Congress finally pulled the plug. It altered the way other nations perceived the world’s only superpower. Military successes in Iraq have done little to improve our standing in the world as the war in Afghanistan drags on in a fashion reminiscent of Vietnam.
Responding to environmental claims, America began to restrict access and use of its vast national reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas. Prosperous nations are those that use the most energy in many ways, but the U.S. not only stopped the building of new refineries, the development of new coal mines, and exploration of new oil fields, but also thwarted the growth of the nuclear power industry. By February 2011, parts of Texas were experiencing rolling blackouts.
In a thousand different ways, an ever growing matrix of obstacles and regulation encumbers American industry, agriculture, and the development of new business enterprises with high technology was an exception. Its hardware, however, is made in Asia, not America.
The American economy was being hollowed out from within and beyond its shores with a combination of illegal immigration and “out sourcing” of jobs in an effort to remain competitive.
Largely unnoticed until the 1979 Iranian revolution, an Islamic fervor was growing in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere among its 1.3 billion adherents.
It exploded in America on September 11, 2001 though the U.S. had sustained many earlier attacks on its embassies and on the USS Cole.
It is exploding in Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Yemen, Libya, and Bahrain. If history is any guide, these rebellions will be put down with a brutality that is also endemic to the region. The notion that these nations should be ruled by Sharia law is appalling, opening the door to a barbaric, ancient system of law more suited to the 7th century than the 21st century.
America’s influence is slip sliding away because it is presently led by a weak and hostile President, increasingly believed to be either a Muslim or sympathetic to Islam; a Marxist, ruefully acknowledged to be a complete enigma with no available documentation regarding his past or legitimacy to hold the office.
It is also under an entirely new kind of warfare. Its financial structure has been attacked and the crisis of late 2008 gives evidence of that.
Weakness or the perception of weakness invites attack. America is a great, but wounded nation being led by a president who shrinks from its superpower responsibilities and wants to spend its way out of debt; an impossibility. He must be endured for two more years while the Republicans in Congress neuter his ability to do more damage.
When it repairs itself, renewing its fundamental values, restoring its Constitutional limits, America will still have to stand guard against the forces of darkness within and beyond its gates.
© Alan Caruba, 2011
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