We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Mark Safranski is elaborating at his defense issues blog Zenpundit on the problems raised by R2P, Right To Protect, or what I termed “Transnational Elites Uber Alles,” for intervention on humanitarian grounds against those nation’s rulers who our liberal elites dislike.
…it extends the uncontrolled reach of liberal elites within our government to act regardless of our laws or popular will….Transnational self-elected elites making “the world safe for democracy” or for their own supremacy?
Regimes who are not in disfavor with our liberal elites, however oppressive, get off more lightly.
In the first part of a five-part series, R2P is the New COIN, Safranski says:
…like the rise of pop-centric COIN, it will be an electrifying idea that has the potential fire the imagination of foreign policy intellectuals, make careers for its bureaucratic enthusiasts and act as a substitute for the absence of a coherent American grand strategy.
Neither COIN nor R2P are strategies. Unlike COIN, however, which is a set of tactics that may be applicable in some circumstances in pursuit of strategic goals (even if those goals may be arguable), R2P doesn’t have any operational tactics. R2P is more a clarion call to action, including actions that are contrary to US laws or popular will, in pursuit of internationalist goals for global governing as defined by transnational elites.
Further, R2P is cloaked in humanitarian rhetoric that allows liberal elites to preen, displaying their caring feathers, regardless of their ignorance of the military, regardless of the cost-benefit to US national security, and regardless that it isn’t their children being sent into harm’s way.
Lastly, R2P is reactive, not prescriptive of avoiding future threats to US security as a strategy must be. Much the same coterie who want to raise R2P to dominance over US foreign and military policies are largely dismissive of severely hobbling US allies or hollowing our military.
The second part of Safranski’s series is R2P is the New COIN: Slaughter’s Premises, Anne-Marie Slaughter being a prominent intellectual proponent of R2P. Slaughter defines a state as legitimate, effectively governed, only if it provides social goods to its populace, regardless of other sources of cohesion or democratic means of choosing leaders. Illegitimate states are targets for R2P, US core security interests aside.
Safranski writes me that Part 3 will focus on Authority and International Law, R2P resting upon amorphous, internationalist rule proposed to override US laws, Part 4 on Sovereignty, discussing the radicalness of R2P proponents’ program to replace nation states’ independence, and Part 5 on Legitimacy, Networks and Power, discussing the undemocratic, oligarchic views of the R2P proponents.
I suggest you read all five parts if you want to be up on the intellectual fad trotted forward to undermine US sovereignty and core security interests.
At the request of the Ohio Department of Insurance, benefit consultants Milliman, Inc. prepared an estimate of the impact on coverage and rates of ObamaCare when major provisions take effect in 2014.
660,000 are forecast to lose their group coverage from employers. A 735,000 increase in individual coverage is forecast. The percentage of all covered with some type of government coverage is forecast to increase to 31% from 20% in 2010.
Although the percentage of residents with coverage could rise by about 7.9%, the price of individual health insurance coverage might rise about 55% to 85%, excluding the impact of medical inflation, the Milliman consultants predict.
“This is primarily driven by the estimated health status of the new individual health insurance market and the expansion of covered benefits,” the consultants say.
The new tax credits are supposed to help individuals earning less than 400% of the federal poverty level pay for coverage, but U.S. residents with incomes over 400% of the federal poverty level who are in the individual market would have to pay for the coverage out of their own pockets.
Then add in the additional taxes within and caused by ObamaCare. High price to pay, huh. Hope there's any Change left in pockets.
H/T: Hot Air: "the Senate Budget GOP today releases this video to unmask a budget gimmick popularly employed by Democrats as they call for more spending on investment in “education, innovation, clean energy and infrastructure.”
KC Johnson, history professor at my alma mater, describes the lack of intelligent consideration by the faculty there:
...groupthink has the effect of producing more extreme versions of the common assumption. It stands to reason, therefore, that campuses with unusually one-sided faculties will feature more frequent episodes of extremist assertions. Such certainly seems to be the case at my own institution, Brooklyn College...
Read it all. If there's a terrorist incident on campus, call a faculty member, not the NYPD.
President Obama's path to reducing deficits is being laughed off as playing politics with demagoguery while deficits widen. But, according to Obama, "this is not class warfare; it's math."
This year, households making more than $1 million will pay an average of 29.1 percent of their income in federal taxes, including income taxes and payroll taxes, according to the Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank.
Households making between $50,000 and $75,000 will pay 15 percent of their income in federal taxes.
Lower-income households will pay less. For example, households making between $40,000 and $50,000 will pay an average of 12.5 percent of their income in federal taxes. Households making between $20,000 and $30,000 will pay 5.7 percent.
That doesn't include the higher charges paid by middle-class and wealthier retirees for Part B Medicare, nor the lesser amounts received by them from Social Security relative to prior incomes or contributions.
One of the areas targeted by the tax-more crowd is capital gains. There's no recognition of the extra risks involved in investing, that much of the gains represent inflation, or that much or all of the amounts invested were already taxed.
Then, there's the false assertion that the middle class suffered most during the better pre-recession period.
No. In the seven years from 2001-2007 (inclusive), not only did the middle class get at least its fair share of overall income growth, the income gap between the rich and the middle class actually got smaller. In an apparent paradox, the same Census Bureau database that told us that median household income was essentially unchanged in 2007 versus 2000 also tells us that the middle class enjoyed a higher income growth rate than did either the overall economy or the rich—and therefore that their income gap versus the rich had actually decreased.
President Obama may be appealing to his base, largely made up of those who pay little or no taxes already, but is cementing the attitude of those who are productive who see him as further undermining and stalling economic recovery.
The International Monetary Fund just downgraded the economic outlook for the US (and Europe). Yeah, higher taxes should fix that, huh?
Upon our Constitition's ratification, Dr. Benjamin Rush -- one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence -- commented, " 'Tis done. We have become a nation." We had crafted procedures and rules and limitations by which we could come together in civil discourse. That didn't mean we had created nirvana nor ended disagreements nor guaranteed only the best politicians.
For those of you unplugged into the right-wing conspiracy that President Obama's AttackWatch.com is supposed to combat by your neighbors, friends, children reporting you for speaking against the new Reich, here's a sample of the reactions:
For those of you who watch Falling Skies: "I, for one, am honored to be recruited as an informer by our new insect overlords."
For you Dos Equis drinkers: ""I don't always report on my neighbors, but when I do, I use #AttackWatch." -- Stay snitchy, my friends..."
For you joiners: "Oooo, can I be a Neighborhood Block Captain? Do we get a uniform? When will you post the new rewards system?"
For those nostalgic for the 1920s or 1930s: "will the coming show trials be streamed? Can we recant our thoughtcrimes via Twitter, or must we appear in person?"
The preamble to the Constitution lists several reasons for it, including providing for the common defense. It is the only one listed for which the federal government is uniquely essential.
Yet, while our defense expenditures are already being heavily trimmed, it is likely that they will be virtually gutted. Fifty percent of the budget cuts are supposed to come from 20% of our federal spending. Meanwhile, the threats abroad have not only not receded but are growing.
It is disgraceful that the Republican candidates for the nomination didn’t get into this, while spending two hours repeating clichés and arguing how much wall to have along the Mexican border. Yes, the domestic issues are pressing and very important, but to ignore the global threats, the denuding of our military capabilities, the added burdens on our already heavily burdened volunteers, and our responsibilities to defense is deplorable.
Read about what the Republican Chair of the House Armed Services Committee has to say. A sample:
I am afraid that once again, we are sliding back to a place we pledged never to return to, and are repeating the mistakes of a September 10th America. As we begin to emerge from a long, tough fight, this should be the time to reset and rebuild our military. Instead, we are lowering our gloves. At a time when our military is falling into disrepair, we have laid out over half a trillion dollars in projected cuts to Pentagon spending. I cannot understate how dangerous these defense cuts have become.
Apparently, the Republicans vying for the nomination can understate, indeed ignore it. I’m not feeling safer tonight.
And, Jennifer Rubin, also at the Washington Post called the debate A foreign policy horror show : "It’s time to figure out if any of these guys and gal are up to the job of commander in chief."
Jonathan Tobin chimes in at Commentary's Contentions blog, The GOPs Foreign Policy Void: "...the Republicans are in danger of throwing away one of their party’s greatest strengths."
The debate among Republicans over the 2012 presidential nominee seems to divide between those favoring management skills and those favoring inspiration.
Americans have oscillated between the two. Eisenhower = management; Kennedy = inspiration; Johnson = neither; Nixon = management; Ford = neither; Carter = neither; Reagan = inspiration; Bush (Senior) = management; Clinton = inspiration; Bush (Junior) = management; Obama = inspiration.
These aren’t “pure” characterizations, but rather what aroused the balance of electorability. It was the persona that was the characterization of the nominee.
This may, or not, be applicable to 2012, but I tend toward thinking it very well may be.If so, then, that may explain my leaning toward Romney (and Pawlenty before he dropped out).
On the other hand, one can as well posit that Obama = neither, in which case the oscillation would favor inspiration. That might favor Perry.
On the other hand, the theory may be worthless. The test of a theory is in its simple predictive power. 2012’s election will tell. Regardless, however, internecine battles -- as opposed to civil discussion and debate -- among Republicans will weaken the 2012 chances of defeating Obama. That is a proven theory.
Comments?
From the Comments thus far, let me make this clearer: I'm talking about the persona or characterization at election time, not what comes after.
In California, most cars are from Japan. But, after that, Fords are the most popular. I've driven a 2000 Taurus for the past 12-years. Good, comfortable, reliable sedan. The other day, my neighbor traded in for a Ford, saying she wanted to buy American. There's also another reason that Fords are popular the past few years:
My friend Mark Safranski, at his blog Zenpundit and contributions elsewhere (like Small Wars Journal), provides some of the best digestions of complex matters of national security policies and debates that a layperson can find.
Safranski has turned his attention to R2P, Right To Protect, as its advocates term it. It is the liberal internationalists’ concept of how US foreign policy ought to be. R2P reflects limitations of the US abilities to militarily intervene elsewhere as perceived by our liberal elites but raises our humanitarian impulses selectively by them to justify certain interventions, again, as they perceive which to be worthwhile. Further, R2P raises hazy international law or consensus of international liberal elites to supremacy over national law or consensus.
One of R2P’s main propounders, Anne Marie Slaughter, even advocates each US agency and members of our judiciary to act independently of Executive or Congressional oversight or law to conform to the consensus of foreign liberal elites. Slaughter is not just someone blathering. Slaughter was Dean of Princeton's influential Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs from 2002–2009 then from 2009-2011 she served as Director of Policy Planning for the United States Department of State, now back at Princeton. Slaughter’s thinking is telling in the pieties mouthed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama as they ignore US laws, ignore Syria’s worse repression and threat as they intervene in Libya, and extol a hostile majority in the UN to undeserved credence. Slaughter isn’t alone. Obama administration insiders Samantha Powers and Susan Rice are R2P foxes in the henhouse.
As Safranski sums up:
Slaughter is a revolutionary who aspires to a world that would functionally resemble the Holy Roman Empire, writ large, with a diffusion of power away from legal process ofstate institutions to the networking informalities of the larger social class from whom a majority of state and IGO officials are drawn, as a global community.
At first glance, disaggregating the state and granting at least a measure of sovereignty to its component parts might appear to weaken the state. In fact, it will bolster the power of the state as the primary actor in the international system…Giving each government institution a measure of legitimate authority under international law, with accompanying duties, marks government officials as distinctive in larger policy networks and allows the state to extend its reach.
Actually, it extends the uncontrolled reach of liberal elites within our government to act regardless of our laws or popular will.
Safranski comments:
R2P will require the imposition of policy mechanisms that will change the political community of the United States, moving it away from democratic accountability to the electorate toward “legal”, administrative, accountability under international law; a process of harmonizing US policies to an amorphous, transnational, elite consensus, manifested in supranational and international bodies. Or decided privately and quietly, ratifying decisions later as a mere formality in a rubber-stamping process that is opaque to everyone outside of the ruling group.
Who is to say that there is not, somewhere in the intellectual ether, an R2P for the environment, to protect the life of the unborn, to mandate strict control of small arms, or safeguard the political rights of minorities by strictly regulating speech? Or whatever might be invented to suit the needs of the moment?
Well, there is such in the “intellectual ether”, as in this example from William Magnuson, lecturer on international law at Harvard, and a graduate of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs:
While it is undoubtedly true that the loss of life is a greater harm than the loss of free speech rights, the major arguments (moral, legal, and consequential) in favor of the responsibility to protect doctrine apply equally to free speech as to crimes against humanity. Freedom of speech is a fundamental right. The widespread suppression of speech may cause us to doubt that state sovereignty is worthy of respect under Rawls’s and Walzer’s discussion of well-ordered societies. An obligation to intervene to protect free speech may persuade states to refrain from muzzling the media or jailing dissidents.
Transnational self-elected elites making “the world safe of democracy” or for their own supremacy? How many have children serving in the military, I wonder. Just look at how few in our State Department were willing to serve in civilian reconstruction in Iraq or Afghanistan. Yeah, “leading from behind”, as in Groucho Marx saying, “follow me, you go first,” making a tragic joke of core national interests in security that are actually recognized by average Americans, substituting instead rationalizations for scattered interventions although nice not essential and frittering away our lives and resources.
Added: Mark Safranski posts on this post, adding the key conclusion:
This is not an argument over whether genocide is bad and should be prevented or the positive good of Western liberal societal values but rather over how power will be exercised in our name, for what reasons and by whom. Any good ends sought under a putative R2P doctrine can be done today if the political will for intervention is present. That will is crystalized when the ends, ways and means are scrutinized in open, free, debate under our constitutional norms, not by a self-appointed vanguard.
Also, read Saints Go Marching In in The National Interest: (H/T: American Power blog's Donald Douglas)
. The conclusion:
As Libya shows, war and utopia should not be mixed up. War is too serious, utopia too unserious, for that.
The other day I went into my favorite Mexican restaurant, favorite because it doesn't serve the usual Americanized border food of just tacos and burritos but real(er) Mexican food. I had the goat meat soup, lifting with my hands the flesh covered bones to chew on. Mexican chicken soup is particularly tasty, so I suggested to the owner adding chicken feet to nibble on. He replied that it was also a favorite of his, we both remembering a restaurant in Ensenada that served it and was always packed with locals and foreigners (like my father and me, who like other poor people in our youth made good use of every part of the chicken), but has been displaced by tourist food for the nearby cruise ship port.
There's a post that is circulating that humorously and realistically describes the staples of immigrant Jewish foods. I grew up on them all, and delight when I make some of them or rarely find a restaurant that gets one right. My boys dig in and ask why they haven't had more of this. I joke that McDonalds is not named McDonaldwitz. Many complain that such foods are cardiac arresters. I just finished a series of extensive heart tests, the cardiologist surprised that my heart is much younger than I am.
Returned home at 3:45 P.M. yesterday from pitching for Little League batting practice. Garage door opener did not work. No electricity. Only carry car key, so got house key from secret hiding place. Told all not to open refrigerator for any reason. Got out my 1950's AM transistor radio and tuned to local news station. No one had a clue; just lots of jabber. Got out my 9 flashlights and camping lantern, plus battery powered Jack-o-Lanterns. Gavin (6) is ecstatic that it's Halloween and wants to go trick-or-treating. Supper is room-temp cans of Spaghettios. Yummy. Radio says that school is cancelled for Friday. The boys are even happier. They're deprived of snow days and hurricane days here in San Diego. Kids on my block all playing in the street. No parents mention any regret at missing President Obama's re-run of sameo-sameo speech. Radio says that a worker in Arizona power company tripped something or other during routine maintenance that cascaded throughout western Arizona, Imperial and San Diego counties, southern Orange County, and northern Baja Mexico. Spokesperson for power company at news conference says that the lack of building power plants and power lines (while not mentioning the envirocrazies) makes the power grid more vulnerable. Electricity returned to my area at 3-minutes to 10 P.M. Wife immediately looks for the TV listings so she doesn't miss the ten-thousandths rerun of Law And Order. I finish a spy novel and go to sleep.
If you want to know the one word missing from President Obama's speech, guess, than click here for the answer.
TWEET from skateboarding superhero Tony Hawk: "Is a blackout in North County a way to force the pseudo-hippies to see what it's like to truly 'go green?' Panic on the streets of Leucadia."
The unemployment rate in California is 12%. Remember that California is the only state in the last election that sent more Democrats to its legislature. The San Diego Union-Tribuneeditorialized today:
Adding new burdens on private employers when unemployment has been 11 percent or more for more than two years is a really bad idea. Adding new burdens on local governments at a time when the revenue crisis threatens their ability to provide basic services is a really bad idea.
Yet that is just what the Legislature has been doing this year, and at a more rapid pace than ever.
2012 doesn't look any better, indeed worse, due to the gerrymandering that will likely increase the Democrats' count in the legislature to a super-majority, letting them run even more wild.
Even cartoon characters are having a rough time, now trying to rob convenience stores:
According to the report, "The clerk -- who was unfamiliar with the Gumby character -- thought the incident was a prank and did not report it until 6 a.m. when the store manager came in." The online version deleted this description in the print newspaper: "Gumby is tall and green, with a wedge-shaped head." Yeah, that ought to help find him.
Maggie's Farm pinup girl Marianne sent me this video this morning to WAKE UP my day, and it certainly did. It is from a Japanese movie, school girls doing a rousing version of the classic swing era Sing, Sing, Sing. Unfortunately the embed is disabled at Youtube, but just click this link and get your day jumpin'. Crank up the sound and swing.
In 1994, in southeastern Turkey, a Kurdish shepherd discovered the remains of one of the most astonishing archeological finds of our times. Göbekli Tepe
19-foot columns expertly carved out of stone, decorated with sculpted animals that do not and may never have lived in the region have baffled the German archeological team who came to unearth this spectacular find. The scientists estimate that the structures at this site are between 11,000 and 12,000 years old.
This would be 8,000 years before Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids were built!
When I was a kid, in the years after WWII, all the boys learned and sang the words to the military branches' anthems. For your children or grandchildren who haven't, you might want to share this video, thanks to Gene Simmons (KISS).
Last year, at the invitation of Family Security Matters, I penned a reflection on 9/11 that focused on my experience with the first 10-years of my son’s life, 9/11 With My Son. This year I told the editor I had nothing to add. However, I do, but rather from others.
My son Jason, now 11, has the habit of taking a subject that interests him and applying himself to becoming the world’s greatest expert. He did that with the Titanic, and then the Harry Potter series, and now with 9/11. The underlying theme seems to be the magnitude of the events and their impacts. The sinking of the Titanic belied the security of technology in the face of a natural iceberg. The unfolding of Harry Potter’s adventures belied the safe childhood we parents struggle to create as children face supernatural evil. 9/11 combines these elements. 9/11 belies the security that we thought insulated America from the bloodthirsty hatred rising to pure evil that we thought only happened remotely in a disconnected elsewhere.
Several prominent blogs have featured links to an essay in the New York Times by Edward Rothstein, Amid the Memorials, Ambiguity and Ambivalence. Instead of our media and the cultural elites it celebrates being confused or even searching for American guilt, Rothstein suggests, “a Sept. 11 commemoration might well be a celebration of democratic culture’s enduring presence.” John Podhoretz at Commentary’s Contentions blog calls Rothstein’s essay, “The most important essay you’re likely to read this week,” for its critique of “the conversion of 9/11 from an act of wanton destruction and murder to a moment requiring an examination of our own sins.”
Roger Kimball, editor of the New Criterion, celebrates its 30th anniversary by offering an essay that delves deeper that Rothstein’s restricted newspaper word count. In this, Roger Kimball’s New Criterion exhibits its unique value. As Roger Kimball writes in his introductionto the 30th Anniversary Issue,
We have endeavored to provide a home for vigorously written cultural criticism while also building an institution of critical dissent. The two go together. At a time when culture and intellectual life are everywhere beholden to the imperatives of political correctness, even insisting on clear prose seems a daring provocation….Similarly, simply telling the truth about a whole host of controversial subjects is regarded as a challenge to the reigning pieties of established opinion.
Michael Lewis leads off the New Criterion September issue with America resumed: 9/11 remembered, The first entry in its series "Future tense: the lessons of culture in an age of upheaval." Lewis explores the whys behind the cultural confusion that Rothstein highlights. One must, must, read it all, for its exploration of how America’s arts have failed to capture the transformative lessons of 9/11. Some excerpts:
[T]he most vital cultural legacy of any war—or any great national trauma, for that matter—is intangible. It is the comprehensive way it changes our shared attitudes and assumptions, our collective sensibility. Changes in the collective sensibility, being invisible, usually do not reveal themselves until they are expressed in action…. Questions of art and culture seldom are directly involved in a national trauma; they belong to the shadow realm in which great events are digested and replayed after the fact, much as a dream imaginatively rehearses the happenings of the day….
Admittedly, the September 11 Memorial helps give focus and voice to the nation’s sorrow. But sorrow is only one tone in the spacious emotional register of a nation, and there are others, such as resolution, defiance, and even fury, that at certain times might be more appropriate. A person who could grieve but not snarl or even bite would be a strangely limited creature, and the same is true of a nation. Yet, after September 11, the public was given copious outlets only for its sorrow and none at all for its fury. (One must make the necessary exception for country and western music.).
When it came to addressing the harder and more fiery sentiments of the public, the cultural apparatus acted as bridle rather than spur, and rather nervously at that. Anything that might serve to focus national rage, such as showing films of the burning towers and plunging victims, was swept from the airwaves after a few days, only to be shown in short, carefully edited passages during the occasional anniversary broadcast or documentary. This was rationalized as a measure to spare bereft family members further grief, but it is much more the sense that such imagery was deemed incendiary, and likely to stoke the flames of public wrath, as if the most urgent danger—and the only danger—facing America was the prospect of mass mob violence against American Muslims….
The buildings and institutions that were targeted on that day were chosen as symbols of American national identity; those who were murdered were not collateral casualties but were killed in their capacity as Americans. The entire framework of the attack was a deliberate and focused assault on those objects that stood for the American government and American capitalism… But if the context of the event was explicitly American, this was precisely the terrain on which the arbiters of American culture—at least a substantial faction—felt themselves uneasy. Feelings of national solidarity, the sense of personal participation in the fate of one’s nation-state, have so long been disparaged as jingoism that even those artists who felt unaccountable patriotic stirrings found themselves utterly unable to make artistic use of them.
When one comes eyeball to eyeball with a shocking and malignant truth, but is unable to speak frankly and openly about it because of a taboo, one must resort to distortion, evasion, and self-deception….
Yet another lesson of culture after September 11 is that one must not fret or mope. This is hardly the first time that a sizable branch of the cultural establishment has failed to draw the appropriate lessons from new events. Yesterday’s radicals become today’s purveyors of the conventional wisdom and tomorrow’s sclerotic academicians….
Those revelations, administered in the most brutal manner conceivable, have reshaped the collective consciousness of the nation. But they have done so with very little help from art, which through the ages has been the most effective instrument for focusing the cultural consciousness, for framing its questions and concerns in the lucid terms without which no national conversation is possible…. But it is also because of a taboo, imposed gradually and imperceptibly over the past few decades, about expressing strong emotions in national terms—other than that of grief. This offers more concern, for a culture that cannot express, and make sense out of, the longings and passions of the people that sustains that culture cannot remain vital….
Last year, my son Jason offered this comment on what he’s learned from 9/11: “I’m glad the US has people who will fight so another 9/11 or worse doesn’t happen again.” This year, Jason adds: “There are heroes who help others escape. There are greater heroes who rise up regardless of dangers, as the police and firefighters did in the Towers.” Jason adds, "Screw al-Quaida." My son watches and listens to all the cultural detritus on TV and radio. Despite the best worst efforts of the profiting cretins he is exposed to, my son Jason’s quest to understand the facts of disasters and the best of people has independently led him to the conclusions that Rothstein and Lewis bemoan our cultural elites avoiding.
As long as there are Americans growing up like my son, and those like Rothstein, Kimball and Lewis helping to straighten out the confusions of their parents, our fears may be overblown and our hopes encouraged.
