Canard Season: On the Economic Impact of Operation Iraqi Freedom

Via QandO, comes this devastating deconstruction at The American Thinker of the oft-repeated meme that the Iraq War was responsible for the ballooning deficits under which our economy now labors. The general idea has been that Teh Eeevil Booosh had squandered our Nation's wealth on his Massive Boondoggle (for the enrichment of the Oil Companies, the Military-Industrial Complex, or any other of a host of popular bogeymen). And so, the 'reasoning' goes, it is hypocritical in the extreme for Conservatives to now decry the deficits which we now endure under our Democratic Administration and (for now!) Congress.

Bunk. Pure, unadulterated bunk. Have a peek at the chart, below.

Notice anything about the years? Specifically, recall which party was in charge of Congress from 2003 through 2007. Notice anything about the deficit trend lines during those years? How about right after?

The less I say here, the higher the probability that you will read the whole thing. And you should read the whole thing. The author cites the Government's own numbers (i.e., this isn't something cooked up at the Heritage Foundation  or somesuch). It is a bit of much-needed perspective, particularly as we approach the time when we get to decide who writes the next set of budgets.

Dog Bites Man: Media Moguls' Dollars Skew Hard to Port

From the files of the Utterly Unsurprising comes this report of the political contribution tendencies among the denizens of the MSM. Given the spectacle of leg-tingling hagiography to which The One was treated during the 2008 election cycle, this kind of falls in the "water is wet" category of reportage. If you'll pardon the expression, here's the money quote:

Senior executives, on-air personalities, producers, reporters, editors, writers and other self-identifying employees of ABC, CBS and NBC contributed more than $1 million to Democratic candidates and campaign committees in 2008, according to an analysis by The Examiner of data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

The Democratic total of $1,020,816 was given by 1,160 employees of the three major broadcast television networks, with an average contribution of $880.

By contrast, only 193 of the employees contributed to Republican candidates and campaign committees, for a total of $142,863. The average Republican contribution was $744.

And, lest one malign the source (the Washington Examiner is hardly Liberal-friendly), these stats were drawn from the Center For Responsive Politics, whose invaluable site opensecrets.org, is widely considered  unimpeachable in its non-partisan objectivity.

Just a little food for thought, for the next time Fox News is raked over the coals for Rupert Murdoch's political contributions. That is, if one were inclined to be --dare I say-- Fair and Balanced.

Maliki Handed his Hat?

From the WaPo comes this bit of bad news for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Back in March, you'll recall, Maliki's State of Law coalition fell just short of former PM Ayad Allawi's Iraqiya bloc in the national elections, and long weeks have dragged into months while the various groups have wrangled to work out who would get to form the new government. Now Maliki's State Of  Law party appears to have lost the support of the Iraqi National Alliance, an (Iran-endorsed...) coalition of religious Shiite parties which had backed Maliki's claim to power.

Without INA backing, Maliki just doesn't have a chance, and he should recognize this. Allawi appears to have pretty much shed his previous stigma of "American Puppet" among Iraqis, and holds great promise in bringing Sunnis more actively and productively to the table. Necessary as they were overall (if at times heavy-handed in the execution), Maliki's aggressive de-Baathification steps have never been forgiven amid a large swathe of the Sunni population. Allawi's broadly secular, trans-sectarian appeal is as much the thing for today's Iraq as Maliki's nails in the Baath Party coffin were for the Iraq of four years ago. Allawi is also a very vocal and credible opponent of Iranian influence in Iraqi affairs (and, despite some recent brave noises along these lines, Maliki just hasn't been able to close that sale with the Iraqi people for whom Tehran is not popular). Kurdish former President Talabani is one of Allawi's closest friends, which appears likely to be reflected in relations between Arab and Kurdish blocs in an increasingly coalitionist government..

Maliki is being obdurate, and Iraq is suffering as a result. This is not to say that he does not have a legitimate case. He just might. That’s not the point. A true statesman would see that this protracted stalemate is the ultimate “broken window” in the neighborhood, and it’s signaling to the agents of chaos that they have their own window of opportunity.

After initially low expectations, Maliki has impressed me on more than one occasion with his tenacity and mettle. It is a shame to see him appearing to regress in what most observers agree is a strenuous and increasingly ignoble-seeming effort to cling to power, at the expense of the stability of his nation.

He should let Allawi have another turn at the tiller, soak up the goodwill from taking that high road, and use it to try again the next time around.

That’s what people do in a republic.

There's Just No Appeasing Some People

Ran into this story in the CSM which, okay, I'll have to admit it, schaded my freude something fierce.

Remember those hapless American hikers who were scooped up last year on the Iraqi-Iranian border, and remain in Iranian custody on suspicion of espionage? Well, it seems the Iranians have a pretty shoddy way of treating their useful idiots:

In an ironic twist, Iran appears to have arrested a trio of passionate young Americans who espouse some of the same causes as Iran itself, particularly taking a stand against United States and Israeli aggression.

Mr. Bauer, an Arabic-speaking journalist, had previously exposed pitfalls in the US strategy in Iraq. His fiancée Sarah Shourd was teaching Iraqi refugee children in Syria, where an estimated 2 million Iraqis fled during the US-led war in their country. And their college friend Josh Fattal had fought to get military recruiters off United States campuses.

Kinda conjures images of scorpions and frogs, no?

Well, at least they'll be well-prepared for their captivity by all the time they've spent as political prisoners in the US for their...oh...wait.


Perhaps the most frustrating part of all this is the near-certainty that when these imbeciles finally are released, they will just turn around and blame it all on the Americo-Zionists' misdeeds making the wise and beneficent Iranians all crotchety.


Here's hoping the Iranians are not clever enough to be making use of this prison term for the purpose of turning mere addle-brained adolescents into actual operatives....

Nazi Smears Old & Busted? Whip Out the Race Card!

[by Mr.Hengist]

Let me just start this off by saying that "race relations", as they used to be called when I was a boy, are of no interest to me. I was raised in a racially colorblind household, and, come to think of it, I can't recall ever having seen even mild racism in my nuclear or extended family. I attended colorblind schools with a variety of peoples of different races, and so forth. As a result of this upbringing I believe that racism is just wrong. This was an issue to press with my parents' generation, and my parents in particular, and press they did. As for me, well, waging eternal war against racism is just not my bag.

Here in America, the advocates of racial equality won, thankfully. I was born at a time when the first inter-racial kiss on Star Trek was a notable event, and what seemed generations away back then has, after a generation or two, come to pass: we have a black* POTUS, as well as black Congressmen, Governors, Mayors, CEOs, and so forth. America has come a long way, yadda yadda yadda. The color barrier has been broken and racism dare not show its face in polite society. However, I'm of the opinion that racism has not been and never will be eliminated; we waged a world war trying to eliminate the f'ing Nazis and yet there are still admirers of that abomination to this day; racism, likewise, will endure. It usually takes some generations to make societal changes like these. We should neither sanction racism by law nor countenance it personally. I don't make friends with bigots, and I keep myself from slapping them.

I find myself in good company on the American Right. In the midst of my political conversion during the Spring and Summer of 2003, I found myself visiting rightwing blogs for reasons wholly unrelated to politics and, to my surprise, I found paraphrased there the famous quotation of Martin Luther King Jr. from his "I Have a Dream" speech, to the effect that he wished for a nation that would judge people not on their skin color but the content of their character. I found it on several different rightwing blogs, actually, and it took a while before I came to believe that, rather than simply being than a cudgel with which to beat the hypocrisy out of their ideological enemies, it was indeed, as it appeared: an expression of genuine desire. After a couple of years of reading rightwing blogs, columns, and publications, I came to realize upon reflection that not only was racism absent from the places I visited on the Right, but also absent too was the soft bigotry of low expectations to which I had become accustomed in my previous life as a Liberal (not that I shared it at the time, but it's so pervasive on the Left that I'd come to hardly notice it).

Accusations of racism, however, are cudgel in the hands of Liberals. They're also big on calling us Nazis, notwithstanding the irony. Racists, like Nazis, have no legitimate currency in our realm, and no say in our national debate. That's why they demonize us by calling us these names; not because it's true, but because they would have their idological competition eliminated from the debate without having to address our arguments on merit. We end up having to defend ourselves from these scurrilous attacks which in turn reduces the time we can spend talking about the flawed policy and wrongdoings of our opponents and it taints our image in minds of the gullible and uninformed. It's a despicable political tactic.

You'll want proof, of course. By way of example I give you Rush Limbaugh, who was most recently pilloried when he tried to buy an ownership stake in a football team. The Left used one of Alinsky's tactics (see "Rules for Radicals"): "Pick the Target, Freeze It, Personalize It and Polarize It". The Left set their sights on Limbaugh and opened up with all guns blazing - blanks. The quotes used against him were either fabricated or decontextualized. That was the best they could do, and bear in mind that Limbaugh has been broadcasting for the last twenty-five years. That's an hour or two a day, five days a week, most of the year, year after year, and despite the vast wealth of material through which they are free to comb for examples to bolster their charge, again, this is the best they can do. If, like me, you think as serious an accusation as racism should be backed up by evidence, then that's not just weak tea, that's homeopathic tea, but then, Liberals neither require proof to make accusations against their political opponents, nor do they see this as being a problem.

All this brings me to my pet piñata of a dinosaur media columnist: Eugene Robinson of the WaPo, and his latest column, "Obama needs to stand up to 'reverse racism' ploy" (WaPo - July 22, 2010 - A19). Let's start with the title, which calls out the "reverse racism ploy" of the Right. "Reverse racism" is sort of like racism, but in reverse. It's when people of other ethnicities are accused of racism - other than white, of course. That is to say that racism, as defined by the Left, is when whites discriminate against people of other ethnicities, so the reverse of that would be when people of other ethnicities discriminate against whites (or, occasionally, ethnicities other than their own). Racism is, by their definition, exclusively the province of white people; racism, when exhibited by non-whites, is the reverse of that. "Reverse racism" is, therefore, a divisive and racist term itself (it's a racist term, in that they have a special term for wrongdoing by a particular racial group). Congratulations, Eugene! Right out of the gate, you've beclowned yourself.

Let's move on to the body of the text:

"After the Shirley Sherrod episode, there's no longer any need to mince words: A cynical right-wing propaganda machine is peddling the poisonous fiction that when African Americans or other minorities reach positions of power, they seek some kind of revenge against whites."

Leaving aside the false pretense that Robinson or Liberals have up until now been mincing words, the "right-wing propaganda machine" is what Leftists imagine to be the rightwing equivalent of their own propaganda machines. Like, say, JournoList, in which Liberal journalists and academicians colluded to coordinated smears of their political opposition and spike stories which made their side look bad. They imagine that since they work together in this way, their opposition must as well, and having imagined it to be possible, they suppose that it's probable, and having supposed that it's probable, they conclude that it must be true, and so with the speed of a caffeinated ferret they know to be true that which they've only imagined. Proof is no longer necessary for Leftists to delude themselves. At any rate, the target of Andrew Breitbart's posting of the clips of Sheley Sherrod was not her; it was aimed at the group to which she was speaking, the NAACP. The NAACP, which is working together openly with the openly racist "Nation of Islam". This was in response to the NAACP calling out racism in the Tea Party, citing now-debunked accusations of racism (see Power Line's "Don't leave it to Cleaver", parts 1 through 17).

This was not, however, an accusation that when "minories reach positions of power, they seek some kind of revenge against whites." What it illustrated was that the NAACP, which hosted the event, applauded and gave approval to Sherrod's recounting of her tale of when she racially discriminated against a white farmer, not doing all she could to help him (when she was working for a non-profit). She states that she was of the opinion that he should seek help from "one of his own kind." She went on to say that she had since come to believe that poor whites are also worthy of her help. Middle class and rich whites should still, presumably, be helped "by their own kind." (in her own semi-coherent words, "That’s when…it was revealed to me that it’s about poor versus those who have. And not so much about white — it is about white and black — but it’s not, you know…it opened my eyes." )

"A few of the purveyors of this bigoted nonsense might actually believe it. Most of them, however, are merely seeking political gain by inviting white voters to question the motives and good faith of the nation's first African American president. This is really about tearing Barack Obama down."

This had nothing to do with POTUS Obama. The fact that this Marxist racist worked for the USDA was something of an embarassment to the Obama Administration, and she was fired for it. Now they've apologized for that, since, I guessing, they're of the opinion that if you're a Marxist racist, and not just a plain old racist, that's OK.

"With the Obama presidency, though, has come a flurry of charges -- from the likes of Breitbart but also from more substantial conservative figures -- about alleged incidences of racial discrimination against whites by blacks and other minorities. Recall, for example, the way Obama's critics had a fit when he offered an opinion about the confrontation between Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and a white police officer. Remember the over-the-top reaction when it was learned that Justice Sonia Sotomayor had once talked about how being a "wise Latina" might affect her thinking."

Well, no, there haven't been a flurry of charges about incidents of racial discrimination against whites by blacks and other minorities. Robinsons WaPo readers are not expected to doubt this despite having little recollection of any such thing, but rather his assertion alone, in their minds, will make it so. He imagines it, and so he asserts it, and on that basis they believe. His examples?

There's the Gates/cops incident, in which Gates threw a tantrum, ranting and shouting about how he was being racially harassed when the police came to protect his home from burglars. They had asked him to step outside of the house, which is a standard police procedure which removes a person from any potential threat in a dwelling; even if a homeowner insists from within their own house that everything is OK, the police will ask them to step outside and say the same thing, just in case the homeowner is being coerced by, say, somebody behind the door, holding a gun on him. The problem with what POTUS Obama did was that, before any investigation, and before all the facts were known, Obama characterized the police as having acted "stupidly." This was unpresidential and possibly racially motivated, as Gates is black and the police were mostly white, but not provably so. That was the attitude, by and large, of the Right on this flap; it was Gates who was the primary object of scorn on the Right, for playing the race card, and POTUS Obama a distant second for inappropriately injecting his uninformed opinion on an issue of minor national significance - and, predictably, automatically siding with the black guy screaming "Racism!"

Then there's the then-nominee for the SCOTUS Sotomayor, who made an arguably racist statement in a 2001 speech to law students at the University of California at Berkeley: "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life." That remark was less about wise Latinas as it was about how white men are not as wise or fair as Latinas.

That should have disqualified her for the nomination to the Supreme Court. Don't think so? Fine, let's try a little thought experiment. Imagine the SCOTUS nominee of a Republican POTUS had said the following: "I would hope that a wise white man with the richness of his experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a Latina who hasn't lived that life." Kinda pops out at ya now, doesn't it?

Remember, these are Eugene Robinson's cited examples of false charges of racism by the Right against POTUS Obama.

He goes on:

"Before Sherrod, the cause celebre of the "You Must Fear Obama" campaign involved something called the New Black Panther Party. Never heard of it? That's because it's a tiny group that exists mainly in the fevered imaginations of its few members. Also in the alternate reality of Fox News: One of the network's hosts has devoted more than three hours of air time in recent weeks to the grave threat posed by the NBPP. Actually, I suspect that this excess is at least partly an attempt by a relatively obscure anchor to boost her own notoriety."

Robinson will not let his lack of comprehension of the arguments of his opponents stand in the way of his characterizing them as being frivolous or malevolent - a pitch-perfect Liberal. In this case, what has the Right outraged has less to do with the New Black Panther Party than the Department of Justice. The New Black Panther Party is, indeed, a tiny group of violent racists who are, on the whole, of little consequence. During the 2008 election two of them, one armed with a billy club, were stationed just outside a polling station, and were intimidating voters. It was a clear violation of law, and regardless of the merits of the case, the DOJ had the case won through a default judgement, had they but taken it. The New Black Panthers did not show up, nor did they send representative council, and so would have lost the civil suit filed against them by the DOJ had only the DOJ accepted it. Deliberately, they did not do so, and it is the contention of J. Christian Adams (and initially corroborated by two of his colleagues, now a third) that it is the internal policy of the DOJ that the voting rights laws will not be enforced in the defense of white voters. The Right has a problem with that. So should the Left, but they don't. Instead, they mischaracterize these allegations and their political opposition.

The last thing the Left wants is to have a serious discussion with their political opposition about the future of this country and Liberal vs. Conservative policies. Instead, as always, they seek to eject their opposition from the discussion by manufacturing accusations of racism against them. Granted, when your ideas are as bankrupt and divisive as theirs, it's understandable why they would like to avoid that debate, even if it means throwing serious accusations of evil around. It's understandable, and shamefully so.

Shame on Eugene Robinson, shame on the Left, and shame on you willing Liberal dupes who live in your Liberal bubbles. You will never understand your political opposition, or have a coherent political discussion with them, until you start to listen to what they have to say for themselves. When you let fools like Robinson (or the busted ThinkProgress) explain the Right to you instead of actually listening to the Right, you end up sounding incoherently disconnected from reality and dishonest.

* Regarding my usage of the word "black" instead of the more PC "African-American": yes, that's right, I still say "black". I know, I know, black people aren't actually black, they're brown, in the same way that I'm not white. As inaccurate as these hues are in describing our relative pigmentation, they are a more accurate description of the thing we're talking about than the term "African-American". There are lots of black people who are not from and have never been to Africa, just as there are lots of people who are fishbelly white who actually live there, and, perhaps just as confoundingly, black people who were born in, say, Canada are not, obviously, African-American. As far as our use of language goes, black beats colored beats negro beats darkie beats the-n-word-I-can't-say-because-I'm-white-even-if-I-do-so-in-contempt-of-it, but African-American is just silly and so I generally avoid it.

Vectors

Care of the Belmont Club, comes this vid of a remotely-operated quad-rotor platform. Some truly impressive software enables it to execute maneuvers which are downright balletic in their nimbleness. Check it out.




This is some pretty extraordinary stuff, and begs the question of why the frack we don't have piloted vehicles with this sort of architecture. Their superiority over conventional high, open-rotor designs is obvious, in terms of maneuverability and range of safe operating environments. Four shrouded ducted fans could propel a vehicle, for example, through forest canopy in ways that would turn a conventional helo into a shrieking mass of falling metal and several high-velocity flying swords. Sure, you couldn't autorotate in the event of an engine failure, but you could probably compensate for the loss of one engine, and a ballistic parachute system would be simpler to implement than in a typical rotorcraft for catastrophic faults.

All that aside, the possibilities for reconnaissance and surveillance (not to mention kinetic urban engagements) are just as obvious. Armed with ordnance and/or cameras and sensors, one or ten of these little suckers would vastly increase the potential situational awareness of troops in complex areas of operation. They could scoot through windows or doors (or tunnel hatches), and scope out those pesky blind corners with the greatest of ease. Packing a grenade, they could be very effective in breaking the ice...


Of course, on that latter point, Richard Fernandez at the above-linked BC post has some things to say about the law of unintended consequences with respect to the current administration's efforts to close both prominent and clandestine facilities for the holding of captured baddies. In essence, by foreclosing on options for detention and interrogation of high-value targets, the emphasis has, perforce, moved decidedly in the direction of liquidation (everything must go!). Despite international hand-wringing on the "legality" of targeted assassinations via drone strike, there really is little alternative for dealing with those who draw breath all-but solely for the purpose of doing us harm.

Come hellfire or high-waterboarding, somebody is going to be offended by our efforts to defend ourselves against murderous miscreants. There is no simple solution to the dilemma. It is at least useful, however, to reflect on the distal implications of our decisions when it comes to fighting our  foes.

After all, as the video so clearly shows, thrust in any given direction must be balanced by opposing counter-thrust. We really don't have all that much room to maneuver.

"Socialism vs. Capitalism" and the BP Mess

[by Mr.Hengist]

One of my favorite columnist piñatas at the WaPo, E.J. Dionne Jr. (co-king with Eugene Robinson for that title), has written another column that could use a few whacks with the Mr.Hengist stick. Going by the promising title, “Gulf oil spill offers a lesson in capitalism vs. socialism” E.J. sounds a herald of trumpets for his fisk-worthy beclowning. Let’s have at it!

So who is in charge of stopping the oil spill, BP or the federal government?

Ooh! Ooh! I know! British Petroleum, unless and until the federal government takes over. OPA Section 4201 amended Section 311(c) of the Clean Water Act provides the POTUS (delegated to the USCG or EPA) with three options:

- Federalize the spill and perform an immediate cleanup.
- Direct the spiller's cleanup activities.
- Monitor the spiller's cleanup efforts.
Furthermore, the USG determines the level of cleanup required.
[PDF link & H/T Mark Levin]

See? That’ wasn’t so hard. E.J.’s not so sure, though:

The fact that the answer to this question seems as murky as the water around the exploded oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico suggests that this is an excellent moment to recognize that our arguments pitting capitalism against socialism and the government against the private sector muddle far more than they clarify.

That is to say that E.J. Dionne and his liberal readers are muddled because they are ignorant of the federal statutes relevant to this issue, but that's no impediment to their expressing the usual righteous indignation and outrage. In this case, E.J. seems to be suggesting a socialism vs. capitalism cage match. Don’t think his cheerleading of socialism makes it OK to call him a socialist, though. We know how socialists hate to be called socialists. Some kind of hate crime, or racism, or something.

E.J. continues:

Many tragic ironies are bubbling to the surface along with the oil. Consider the situation of Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, a Republican conservative who devoutly opposes the exertions of big government.
"The strength of America is not found in our government," Jindal declared in his response to President Obama's February 2009 address to Congress. "It is found in the compassionate hearts and the enterprising spirit of our citizens."
But with his state facing an environmental disaster of unknown proportions, Jindal is looking for a little strength from Washington. His beef is that the federal government isn't doing enough to help. "It is clear we don't have the resources we need to protect our coast," he said this week, expressing his frustrations with "the disjointed effort to date that has too often meant too little, too late."
You can't blame Jindal for being mad. But will he ever acknowledge that "compassionate hearts" were not sufficient for coping with this catastrophe?

Here’s a pretty obvious strawman that E.J. offers because, well, he knows his readers are unlikely to spot it. Liberals, who crow about their unique appreciation of nuance, seem to think that the Conservatives are anarchists when they advocate “limited government,” as if to snidely say, “You want Federal disaster relief? Hypocrite wingnuts, whatever happened to ‘getting government off the backs of the people`?”

The quote from Gov. Jindal was hardly ironic, though; it was in response to POTUS Obama’s Feb 24th, 2009 address to Congress, noting that during the Katrina rescue efforts an un-named bureaucrat tried to prohibit a volunteer sea rescue effort for lack of insurance and registration. Sort of like how the EPA tried to block BP from using a dispersant it had already approved. BP was using a lot of it, you see, and the EPA was suddenly concerned that it was toxic, so they ordered BP to find another one. The EPA expressed no advice which one they had in mind, if any, or how to instantly procure it in large volumes. That is to say, the petulant and meddlesome EPA had no alternative to offer but they nevertheless ordered BP to instantly find and apply an alternative. In contrast, little girls only wish for ponies. Gov. Jindal and right-wingers only wish the government would step out of the way when they aren’t being constructive, which was the point he was making a year ago, and that point is just as relevant today.

Did he ever ask BP how prepared it was for something like this? Or was he just counting on the company's "enterprising spirit"?

Gov. Jindal probably didn’t ask BP how prepared it was for something like this because, after all, that was the responsibility of Federal agencies like the EPA and the MMS, which is to say that he had no authority in such matters. Federal authorities did not, of course, leave disaster response preparations entirely up to private corporations, or at least they weren’t supposed to do that, but the BP spill has revealed that both industry and government were woefully unprepared. Dionne would do well to ask, for example, why the Federal government had no fire booms on hand, despite a Federal plan dating back to 1994 that called for their immediate use when dealing with a major Gulf oil spill.

For its part, the Obama administration has not sent a consistent message. On Sunday, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar proclaimed outside of BP's headquarters in Houston: "If we find they're not doing what they're supposed to be doing, we'll push them out of the way appropriately."
Not according to Adm. Thad Allen, the national incident commander. Speaking the next day at the White House, Allen observed: "To push BP out of the way, it would raise a question: Replace them with what?"
Exactly. While Allen may not be a political philosopher, he spoke with the sophistication of one during an interview with CNN.

To say that the Obama administration “has not sent a consistent message” understates the revisionist history in which they’ve been engaged. The Federal government has been relying on the entirety of the oil industry to address this problem, not just BP.

"What makes this an unprecedented anomalous event," he said, "is access to the discharge site is controlled by the technology that was used for the drilling, which is owned by the private sector."
So there you have it: "Do something!" citizens shout to a government charged with protecting the environment in and around a Gulf of Mexico that is nobody's private property. Yet the government, it seems, can't do much of anything because the means of stopping the flow of oil are entirely in the hands of a private company. BP was trusted to know what it was doing with complicated equipment that, it would appear, it either didn't understand very well or was willing to use recklessly.

There is nothing to stop the Federal government from researching and developing drilling and disaster mitigation technologies. The Federal government relies on private industry because that’s where knowledge and expertise are to be found; or, to put it another way, we don’t rely on the Federal government to do much of anything because they don’t know what they’re doing. It’s not true to say that “the means of stopping the flow of oil are entirely in the hands of a private company” because it was not the means, but the responsibility, which was handed off to private industry. There are some early indications that this responsibility was mismanaged by BP, but I trust that the future investigations will shed more light on that.

The technology used is controlled by a private company because they've paid to own or lease it. If we had to rely on the Federal government to provide this technology we'd solve the problem of their not having access to it, but to what end? They don't have the expertise to utilize it in any meaningful way, and more than likely the problem would be moot because the technology simply wouldn't be available for use in the first place. Innovation is not a strong suit of government, to say the least.

Deep water drilling is a relatively new and not well-understood technology. Off-shore drilling is easier and has an excellent safety track record, and drilling on land is easier and safer still, but we are left with deep water drilling because, as Charles Krauthammer sums it up,

Environmental chic has driven us out there. As production from the shallower Gulf of Mexico wells declines, we go deep (1,000 feet and more) and ultra deep (5,000 feet and more), in part because environmentalists have succeeded in rendering the Pacific and nearly all the Atlantic coast off-limits to oil production. (President Obama's tentative, selective opening of some Atlantic and offshore Alaska sites is now dead.) And of course, in the safest of all places, on land, we’ve had a 30-year ban on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
So we go deep, ultra deep -- to such a technological frontier that no precedent exists for the April 20 blowout in the Gulf of Mexico.

We need energy, period. We get most of our energy from oil, unfortunately. Unfortunately, alternative “green” energy sources are technological toddlers requiring many more years of development to be practical on a large scale, if they can get there at all. That leaves us with oil.

There’s also nuclear power, which is now safe, efficient, and environmentally manageable. Environmental foolishness has kept us from building the nuclear power plants we’d need to dramatically reduce our reliance on oil, and one of the first acts of the Obama Administration was to kill the future American nuclear power generation by closing the best place to safely store the waste: Yucca Mountain.

In short, this environmental mess is the indirect result of environmentalist prohibitions that were supposed to protect the environment. Nice work, greenies!

E.J. goes on,

Belatedly, the Obama administration has realized that citizens can never accept the idea that their government is powerless.

It takes years of brown-nosed shilling for Democrats to be able to write a sentence like that without a trace of embarrassment. As for me, I just threw up a little in my mouth.

"Deregulation" is wonderful until we discover what happens when regulations aren't issued or enforced.

This is an excellent example of rhetorical disingenuousness. E.J. Dionne does not believe that deregulation is wonderful. What’s more, Dionne seems oblivious to the question of how to get effective enforcement of existing regulations. Certainly, it’s not enough just to have regulations, but when Dionne advocates ever more regulations it’s often the case that existing relevant regulations have had lax enforcement, and the solution to that is certainly not more regulations. Perhaps we should put this another way: when regulatory bodies fail, why do Liberals always insist on more regulation instead of questioning their own faith in the regulators?

Everyone is a capitalist until a private company blunders. Then everyone starts talking like a socialist, presuming that the government can put things right because they see it as being just as big and powerful as its Tea Party critics claim it is.

I’m charmed by this line in E.J.’s piece. Here’s a good example of what we call “The Liberal Bubble”. “Everyone starts talking like a socialist” as far as E.J. knows, and that’s a function of his ignorance of what his political opposition has to say. Furthermore, we who want a smaller government also believe that government competence is inversely proportional to its size. The Tea Partiers are right: our government is very powerful, and bigger than it ever has been, but it is neither particularly competent nor efficient.

In this BP debacle, only fools believe that our government can fix the problem, but believe they do and so they cry out for government to “do something.” The government has no solution, and the people with the best shot at fixing it, the oil industry, have pooled resources and are hard at work trying to come up with one. That’s why I don’t begrudge POTUS Obama going golfing and taking vacations while this operation is underway; it’s not as if he could personally do anything or exercise any of his authority in a way that would do any good. What I do resent is his mouthing of platitudes, as in, “We will not rest until this well is shut, the environment is repaired and the cleanup is complete,” because all it amounts to is, “blah, blah, blah.”

But the truth is that we have disempowered government and handed vast responsibilities over to a private sector that will never see protecting the public interest as its primary task. The sludge in the gulf is, finally, the product of our own contradictions.

When I read this kind of sloppiness I’m reminded of how often I think that Liberals live in a make-believe world of their own, dark fantasies. We haven’t “disempowered” government; in fact, government oversight and power has steadily been on the increase over the course of decades. There is no power that government needs which it does not already have which would speed the solution to this mess.

Disappointingly, Dione does not deliver on his “capitalism vs. socialism” promise so I won’t belabor the point, but hard-core socialist countries like the former Soviet Union and present-day China have environmental histories that are unqualified large-scale disasters. I’ll give Europe credit for having a good environmental record in general, generally on a par with our own, but need I remind E.J. Dionne that “BP” stands for British Petroleum?

Crucibles

Via Instapundit, and the newly-bookmarked, likely to be frequently-visited H+ Magazine, I encountered this fascinating article on the role of Israel in the formation of our technological civilization, and in its future development. It begins thusly:

Imagine this sci-fi scenario: A small tribe with unique literature, customs and myths believes they’ve been “chosen” for a glorious destiny. But they’re driven out of their native land, forced to wander the globe for aeons, persecuted and annihilated, until they’re impelled by a utopian novel to return to their homeland. They name their new city after the inspirational book and their country becomes a technological powerhouse... but still, they’re surrounded by enemies. They wage eternal war, they hover between hope and apocalypse… their contributions to humanity are astounding but they continue to fear total extinction.

 The tiny nation of Israel has had a disproportionately huge impact on the states of an astonishing variety of extremely cutting-edge technologies practically since its inception. It is still the world standard on water treatment (its drip irrigation techniques were revolutionary, and allowed it to make the desert bloom in a way which would have made Frank Herbert's mouth...well...). Its contributions to renewable energy technologies, robotics, medical tech, and a host of other highly advanced fields of knowledge have made this nation, though smaller than New Jersey, into a little laboratory for the future. Consider these data:

 The first cell phones were developed at the Israeli branch of Motorola. The majority of Windows NT and XP operating systems were developed by Microsoft Israel. Pentium MMX chip technology was designed at the Israeli Intel. Both the Pentium 4 and Centrino processors were designed by Israelis. Dov Moran, an Israeli, invented the flash disk. Voice mail technology? Israel. AOL Instant Messenger? Israel. Highest percentage of home computers in the world? Israel. Highest ratio of university degrees? Israel. Highest per capita number of scientists and technicians in the workplace? Israel. (145 per 10,000 — second is USA with 85). Techno-progressive President Shimon Peres recently declared, “the future is in nanotechnology.” Israeli universities advance research in cutting edge fields like cognitive neuroscience, cellomics, telomerase, etc. etc.

 Long ago, I read a short story by Theodore Sturgeon, called A Microcosmic God, in which a scientist creates a species of tiny, intelligent, short-lived organisms, and presents them with problems which they must solve, often for the sake of their own survival (for example, he introduces a mechanism which will crush them unless they come up with an impenetrable force field...so they do. After all, they see him as a kind of God figure). In the conclusion of his H+ article, author Hank Hyena links the embattled state of Israel to other fast-growing, innovative societies of the past, stating that:

In my opinion, Israel (like South Korea) will be a tiny giant in the world of the future. Both nations have risen triumphantly from near-nothingness in the last sixty years. Although Israel is miniscule and threatened by opposition, it has used this challenge as motivation for advancement. Israel’s diminutive size and gargantuan progress is reminiscent of the small vibrant city states of history, such as classical Athens (rivaled by Sparta, Thebes and Corinth), medieval Florence (opposed by Venice, Milan, Genoa, Pisa and Siena), the Warring States of China (forward leaps in philosophy, metallurgy, government, law and military strategy), Swahili seaports (Mombasa, Malindi, Kilwa, Sofala, Zanzibar, and Mogadishu competed economically as their cosmopolitan cultures blossomed), plus myriad other mighty dwarfs that performed phenomenally under pressure.

 A central tenet of evolutionary dynamics (at various scales, including genetic algorithms within computers) is the importance of selective pressures to guide the process of blind variation and selective retention which makes evolution such an immensely powerful problem-solving engine. Given such pressures, evolving systems sample the problem space in massively parallel fashion, trying and discarding myriad potential solutions before zeroing in on the one which is nearest-to-optimal.

In the case of Israel, one would be hard-pressed to envision a more demanding problem space in which to sink or swim. Of course, adversity does not invariably lead to brilliance, and the author cites some other factors (e.g., an early influx of highly-educated immigrants from Russia and Europe) which have propelled Israel to its current prominence in the advancement of human civilization. But the fact is that Israel has had to innovate at a breakneck pace in order to preserve its very existence. Operating under relentless existential threats, and with very few allies (at least initially: the US was not a significant supporter till after 1973 or so), the nation of Israel has functioned as a sort of crucible for the emergence of novel approaches to a wide variety of problems.

Say what you will about the primordial standoff between Israel and its neighbors. But this is an indispensable nation with untolled gifts for the future of humanity. Amid all the hue and cry, it is useful to remember this from time to time.

Please do read the whole thing.

Standards and Practices

Andrew Klavan (who, as it turns out, wrote the screenplay to one of my favorite movies that no one has heard about: A Shock to the System), posted an editorial over at the City Journal, in which he talks about the Left's particular genius in demonizing its opposition. The way he lays it out is quite pithy in a way that will make leftists fume and squirm, and conservatives shrug and say "yeah? And?"

Leftists will blacklist you—and then if you complain, they’ll attack you for whining. They will call you a racist and compare your leaders to Hitler—and then if you return the insult, they’ll scream about the decline of civility. They will do everything in their power to cut you off from media and artistic outlets—and then when you create outlets of your own, they will savage them for their bias. Like the mobster in a Raymond Chandler novel, they will beat your teeth out, then kick you in the stomach for mumbling.

The sheer slipperiness of the Left's confiscation of the public discourse would be admirable in its Machiavellian efficiency...if the health of the Republic were not so badly endangered by it. Still, you kind of have to give it to the gifted con man who is able to frame the situation in such a way that no responses outside that frame appear as reasonable or even possible. That is, till you realize that you have just signed away your life's savings.

Nowhere is the dominance of the Left's meme tampering more evident than in the entertainment business, where Conservatives like Jon Voight, Adam Baldwin, Dennis Hopper (!), Janine Turner (!!), Kelsey Grammer, and a smattering of others perform a careful dance, like operatives behind enemy lines, operating by multiple reports athwart plausibly-deniable blacklists (Klavan claims to have the goods on those, but won't spill, because it would violate trusts and pretty much annihilate his ability to make a living. Take his statements accordingly...but do take note of the status of the above-mentioned careers...). At the viewer level, the product is a ceaseless slurry of Liberal blue food, as ideologically diverse as a Womyn's Studies course at Bryn Mawr:

More than a dozen movies attacking the war on terror without shading or nuance, but not one film that said simply “We’re heroically right and they are villainously wrong.” Not one film exposing the lies and excesses of environmentalism. Not one in which, say, a brave radio talker battles the mainstream media on behalf of white boys wrongly accused of raping a black girl. There are some narratives—evil corporations, American military abuse, desperate housewives, victimized minorities—that are acceptable and others—the glories of capitalism, America’s defense of liberty, fulfilled homemakers, race-baiting con men—that are not, despite their truth and the fact that the majority of the audience approves them.

 Klavan's prescription is a wise one: Don't wait around for Liberal Hollywood and the Left-leaning MSM to catch an attack of fairness. To quote Malcolm Reynolds, that's a long wait for a train that never comes. Rather, let the Right and Center-Right...hell let the actual center place a much greater emphasis on the pursuit of a presence in the cultural landscape for their own ideas. Let films and books and TV shows get produced and discussed which reflect something other than the "America's bad, m'kay?" attitude which so pervades the pap leaking from the Hollywood Hills. Don't ape the tactics of the Left by huffing and puffing about their product, but strive to compete in an open marketplace (gods know, the movies could scarcely do more poorly at the box office than pretty much all of the the GWOT-bashing flicks coming out of Hollyweird in the last few years!). Use the free market to promote the free market, in other words!

But, as Klavan entreats, "it would be nice, for purposes of discussion, if we could all begin by acknowledging the obvious."

Sauce: Goose, Gander

Just sat through 11 minutes of video (posted and duly re-posted on the Facebook walls of some friends) in which an Obama-supporting chap interviewed a succession of Tea Partiers, highlighting a certain lack of resolution in their data. Pause for popcorn:



Sorta like if Jay Leno's "Jaywalking" segments were produced at MSNBC, right? Not the most stellar performances of wonkery from the lumpen non-wonkers.

But it reminded me of something. Let's see....



Oh yeah! That was it.

So, what's the take-away from this little exercise in compare-and-contrast? Well, that would kinda depend on  your chosen set of goggles, now wouldn't it? Is it an indication of how much more [insidiously] effective Right-Wing media outlets are in promoting a set of talking points? Is it a sign of the Left-Wing Media's emphasis on emotionally salient but factually-unfurnished memes? Is it a simple matter of (Camera One) Tea partiers' brainwashed vacuity? (Camera Two) Obama supporters' blinkered adherence to the cult of their Dear Leader's personality?

Is it an indication of how the granularity of much-needed data gets sand-blasted in an environment of entrenched partisanship, such that individuals on  both sides (not to mention all the other possible "sides") are deprived of the means (or even the vague sense that there is a need) to flesh out their wafer-thin comprehension of Very Important Stuff?

And where in this process might we situate the act of promulgating one of these clips in the absence of the other?