Tuesday, January 17. 2006
From a post by Bill Quick on the future of the political parties: We still have three classes, but they are vastly different from the Marxian concept. We have a producing class, a consuming class, and a political class. There are overlaps, of course, and much movement from one to the other, but, in general, the three divisions work. I suspect my readers will find my enshrinement of politicians into a class all their own to be the most surprising, but what else can you call it? More than 21 million people are employed by government at all levels in the US, by far the single biggest classification of employment in this country. Government workers comprise about 15 percent of the total work force, and exert a significant effect on the political culture of the nation as a whole. The reason for this is simple: Government workers neither produce nor consume in any sense relevant to classical notions of capitalism. Every penny they "earn" is taken from the pockets of those who actually produce things. Every penney they spend returns to those pockets. Their "consumption" is perfectly balanced by their "production," and hence, like corporate taxes, they are an artifact that exists only in a theoretical sense. Yet this shell game permits them a lifestyle in general better than any similar group of their counterparts in private industry, and so their deeply vested interest is in the continuation of the state, and is, hence, a political interest. They are the political class to a far greater and more meaningful extent than those who dabble in politics for reasons of ideology. Further, some segments of the political class - and not just elected politicans - are beginning to show one of the historical markers of any class - their class status is becoming hereditary.
Read the whole thing at Daily Pundit. (his links weren't working so you must scroll down.)
Friday, January 13. 2006
A Must-Read Our server was ill with the avian flu this morning so I couldn't post this piece by Anderson at City Journal earlier. It is titled The Plot to Crush Rush and O'Reilly, and he touches on all of the critical free speech issues which are raised by campaign finance "reform," the covert roles of Soros and The Pew Foundation, blogging, and the media. And of course that chump John McCain. It is an extremely important and disturbing piece for anyone who believes that free political speech matters. I won't even bother quoting from it. Just Read it.
Get Used to Loony Partisanship Between the behavior of the senators at the "Alito-McCarthy" hearings, and this report of the NYT's encouraging and approving attitude towards Clinton's wiretapping program, it is finally time to announce that we are officially in election season. Of course it began with Bush's Katrina, ran through the NYT's sudden change of heart about wiretapping, and very recently Bush's mine safety failure. From now on, ANYTHING bad that happens is a Bush-Repub failure. The most wacked fantasies of Blame Bush will be realized. Anything good that happens will be ignored (eg the booming economy, the successes in Afghanistan and Iraq, the absence of terror attacks in the US, the spread of freedom around the world). The MSM, especially the NYT and LAT, and the Globe are all obviously on board for "regime change." With the MSM providing the dark bass line and the ominous background beat, the Dem politicans and pundits will pound the tune incessantly: Repubs are scary because ____. Repubs don't care about people or children because ____. Repubs are evil because ______. The whole purpose of the Alito hearings was to repeat these themes on TV. "Silly season" has begun. Take it all with a grain of salt, or your blood pressure and migraine problems will rapidly worsen. For your health, here's a good place to start: Cancel your NYT, LAT, Boston Globe - and give up on TV "news." Trust the blogs.
Thursday, January 12. 2006
A Late Alito Limerick Entry (took me all day to write, but I have a day job) There once was a senator named Teddy. If drinks were to be served he was ready, But said his nemesis Dubya, "I'll send Alito to trouble ya! "We find your defeat to be heady!"
NY Times Loved Clinton's Wiretaps. Hmmmm. From American Thinker: "The controversy following revelations that U.S. intelligence agencies have monitored suspected terrorist related communications since 9/11 reflects a severe case of selective amnesia by the New York Times and other media opponents of President Bush. They certainly didn’t show the same outrage when a much more invasive and indiscriminate domestic surveillance program came to light during the Clinton administration in the 1990’s. At that time, the Times called the surveillance “a necessity.”" Enough said? More tomorrow.
Paul Berman's new book: Euro-leftys A plug for the excellent new book by my college classmate Paul Berman, Power and the Idealists. It's about how Europe's Leftist elite came to power. Excerpted from an excellent review in Seattle's The Stranger: How did Western Europe come to be ruled by monolithic ideologues? Short answer: the "'68ers," which is what Europeans call those who came of age in the radical movements of the 1960s, revering Mao and reviling the U.S. as Nazi Germany's successor. Remarkably, after the protests were over, an extraordinary number of '68ers—those who'd stood on the barricades denouncing the system—ascended into positions of political and cultural power, shaping a New Europe (and an EU) in which the anti-Americanism of the barricades became official dogma. Paul Berman's absorbing, elegantly written Power and the Idealists recounts the political journeys of three of the most influential of these '68ers. Joschka Fischer, once head of the militant group Revolutionärer Kampf (Revolutionary Struggle), became German foreign minister in 1998. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a leader of the May '68 Paris demos, now sits in the European Parliament. And Dr. Bernard Kouchner, boy Communist, went on to found Doctors Without Borders in 1971 and to serve as an EU and UN official. The ultimate point of Berman's 100-page opening chapter is that ethnic cleansing in Kosovo compelled these three to move "from radical leftism to liberal antitotalitarianism"—that is, to reject their longtime view of the U.S. as the world's supreme menace and support NATO action against Milosevic. Many '68ers, Berman suggests, made the same move.
Wednesday, January 11. 2006
 Very Scary
If one were to believe the hyped-up silliness going on at Capitol Hill, you'd be very very afraid of this dweeby nice fellow with his minivan and good looking family. At the risk of saying what everyone already knows, Alioto Alito will be confirmed. What has been going on has been red meat and pandering to the Dem base, thus Alito is being smeared with implications of the usual racist, anti-environment, fascist, corrupt, plutocrat-lover, child-hater, woman-hater, etc. etc. The lack of respect is beyond belief, and I am not surprised Alito's wife had enough of it. If anyone takes this seriously, they are in la la land.
Law Clinics Excerpted from Heather MacDonald at City Journal: "Democratic senators have repeatedly questioned whether Samuel Alito is in the legal "mainstream" during the opening days of his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. To see what the "mainstream" means for the legal elites in the Democratic party, look no further than the law school "clinic." These campus law firms, faculty-supervised and student-staffed, have been engaging in left-wing litigation and advocacy for 30 years. Though law schools claim that the clinics teach students the basics of law practice while providing crucial representation to poor people, in fact they routinely neither inculcate lawyering skills nor serve the poor. They do, however, offer the legal professoriate a way to engage in political activism--almost never of a conservative cast. A survey of the clinical universe makes clear how politically one-sided law schools--and the legal ideology they inculcate--are. 
In the last few years, law school clinics have put the Berkeley, Calif., school system under judicial supervision for disciplining black and Hispanic students disproportionately to their population (yes, that's Berkeley, the most racially sensitive spot on earth); sued the New York City Police Department for its conduct during the 2004 Republican National Convention; fought "gentrification" (read: economic revitalization) in urban "neighborhoods of color"; sued the Bush administration for virtually every aspect of its conduct of the war on terror; and lobbied for more restrictive "tobacco control" laws. Over their history, clinics can claim credit for making New Jersey pay for abortions for the poor; blocking job-providing industrial facilities; setting up needle exchanges for drug addicts in residential neighborhoods; and preventing New Jersey libraries from ejecting foul-smelling vagrants who are disturbing library users." Read entire.
How many Cuban spies are there in America? It will be hard to find out since we are not to engage in eavesdropping. I suppose we have to wait a couple of decades before we find out. "A Florida college professor and his wife, a university administrator, face charges that they acted as covert agents for Cuba's communist regime for more than two decades.Florida Professor, Wife Spied for Cuba For Decades, an Indictment Alleges - January 10, 2006 - The New York Sun - NY Newspaper 2005 was a very bad year for democracy in Latin America. Hugo Chavez has managed to inspire and influence more than one nation to follow in his footsteps and I believe a lot of it has to do with bribes. He has a great deal of money and oil at his disposal and he is buying as many governments as he can. In Bolivia, Peru and Nicaragua, he has had success and he his Castro alliance is being felt in Argentina as well. Read more on the Latin American Annus Horrendus here:FrontPage magazine.com :: A Latin Crisis by Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu
Tuesday, January 10. 2006
In a Ruined Country: Samuels on Arafat and Palestine David Brooks selected the above-named essay about how Arafat destroyed Palestine as one of the best of 2005. It is now briefly available here at The Atlantic online. A couple of quotes: "In a largely traditional society Arafat stood out because he was self-made, the symbolic incarnation of a people that owed its continued existence to him. Decades before he began to show his age in public, his lips trembling, his hands shaking, his belly distended—even then he was known as the Old Man. His speeches were laundry lists of slogans and exhortatory phrases such as "Ya jabal ma yahzak reeh" ("O mountain, the wind cannot shake you!") and "Li-l-Quds rayyihin, shuhada bi-l-malayyin" ("To Jerusalem we march, martyrs by the millions") interspersed with Koranic verses. The symbolic leader of the Palestinian nation spoke with a pronounced Egyptian accent. His lips flapped when he spoke. To some, the combination was irredeemably comic. He distinguished himself within the Palestinian national movement by his boundless energy for the cause, alqadhiya, which might also be translated as "the case," a term appropriate to a proceeding in a courtroom. One of the peculiarities of the nation that Arafat created was that it was founded on a festering grievance rather than any positive imagination of the future; the worse things were in the present, the stronger the Palestinian case became. For the diplomats of the European Union, whose dream of creating a new kind of political organization that would rival the United States for global influence was burdened by the historical guilt of colonialism and the Holocaust, the image of the Jew as oppressor that Arafat offered the world was both novel and liberating; the State of Israel would become the Other of a utopian new world order that would be cleansed of destructive national, religious, and particularistic passions." and: "The amounts of money stolen from the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian people through the corrupt practices of Arafat's inner circle are so staggeringly large that they may exceed one half of the total of $7 billion in foreign aid contributed to the Palestinian Authority. The biggest thief was Arafat himself. The International Monetary Fund has conservatively estimated that from 1995 to 2000 Arafat diverted $900 million from Palestinian Authority coffers, an amount that did not include the money that he and his family siphoned off through such secondary means as no-bid contracts, kickbacks, and rake-offs. A secret report prepared by an official Palestinian Authority committee headed by Arafat's cousin concluded that in 1996 alone, $326 million, or 43 percent of the state budget, had been embezzled, and that another $94 million, or 12.5 percent of the budget, went to the president's office, where it was spent at Arafat's personal discretion."
A Pattern of Suicidality from the NYT (and the Left in general) This time, about Avian Flu. A quote from an excellent and well-researched piece by Miller at TCS: "It is not surprising, therefore, that commentaries about avian flu often miss the mark. For example, a New York Times editorial, “The Flu Moat,” decried wealthy countries’ “me, first” attitude toward a possible pandemic of H5N1 avian flu, because “[t]he best hope of stopping a pandemic, or at least buying time to respond, is to improve surveillance and health practices in East Africa and Asia, where one would probably begin.” "
Great idea. Let's get the US and the UN to reconstruct Asian civilization from the ground up, before we worry about the bird flu! No doubt our tender concern would be welcomed with open arms. The NYT, echoing the societal-suicide themes of the Left, feels compelled to adopt a passive stance towards threats of all sorts. The Left wanted to stay out of WW2 until Germany invaded their precious totalitarian Russia. It was "Better Red than Dead" and "Ban the Bomb" during the Cold War. With crime, it was "root causes" not enforcement. With terror, we get the "root causes" thing again - good idea - let's offer Al Zarquawi free therapy. Do I hear "Better Islamic than Dead" yet? And guns in the house? Forget it - "guns go boom." With immigration, it's "don't enforce the law." With Al Quaida wiretaps, it's "Let's stop wiretapping terrorists." I could go on and on. And it always turns out to be wrong. Perhaps Americans should all just do a Jim Jones deal, or march cheerfully into the gas chamber? What is this remarkably consistent pattern of self-destructive passivity in the face of danger all about? People used to talk about "liberal guilt" (the psychotically grandiose and/or solipsistic notion that everything is ultimately our fault), and maybe it is that for some people. More commonly today, people talk about "liberal anger": an anger coming from God knows where which is self-directed. Some shrinks think it comes from a "fraidy cat" mentality. Our Maggie's Farm Analyst generously opines that it is about "denial." Others, like Horowitz (who ought to know) assert that the Left contains an anarchistic impulse, deriving from the fantasy that The Revolution will be more quickly born out of chaos than by the stepwise stealthy method that has been going on since the 1930s. My feeling is that a society that doesn't have the confidence or the will to confront and address dangers to its well-being and traditions doesn't deserve to survive. But we do. I am in favor of walls, moats, guns - whatever it takes.
Monday, January 9. 2006
New Orleans Will it be politically possible to rebuild New Orleans in a rational manner? Kelman at HNN: "The call now for improved levees is predictable. Joe Canizaro of the mayor's commission worries that nobody will return until they "feel safe." He's right. But what if people feel safe yet aren't? Before Katrina, disaster amnesia and denial allowed people to ignore the danger. Past disasters, says engineer Robert Bea of the University of California, Berkeley, were "alarm bells, but New Orleans kept hitting snooze." The city now has to rethink flood control. Like most engineers, Bea is certain that levees can be constructed to withstand a Category 5 storm. "It's just a matter of political will and funding," he says. But the funding isn't pocket change; the project requires billions. No one knows where that money will come from. While President Bush has promised the Feds will pay for levee repairs, he hasn't made the same promise about levee improvements. If the money is found, the political will must be sustained across fifteen years, the time needed to build levees to a Category 5 standard. " Read entire.
Sunday, January 8. 2006
Further thoughts from Auster on the Steyn Piece: "We need to face the possibility that the left-liberal citizens of the West really do hate our civilization and really do desire that it come to an end. True, they may not be completely consistent (and certainly not consciously explicit) about this, since they still want their material comforts and familiar way of life to continue, for the time being. Nevertheless, civilizational surrender and suicide is the true end toward which Western liberals are moving. That chilling thought came to me as I was reading over the last paragraph of my critique of Mark Steyn’s New Criterion article, in which he stated as a conclusive fact that much of the West is going to disappear and be taken over by Islam in our life times..." It's remarkable to me that was the first time that the ever-thoughtful Auster entertained such an idea. Read entire here.
Saturday, January 7. 2006
Proof? So what? Now that we have proof that Saddam was supporting and protecting terror, will there be a change in tone from the defeat-America crowd? No. Because the whole thing is about partisan attack, and nothing more.
Friday, January 6. 2006
The Mark Steyn Piece - Responses Blogs and talk shows have been all over Steyn's provocative piece in the WSJ this week, which we noted here. It's rare for a columnist to create such a stir. Here are a few reactions I felt were interesting: A quote from Smith at American Thinker: As I read Steyn’s words, I recalled the conclusion of agnostic Charles Murray in his book Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Science 800 BC to 1950. In the last chapter Murray discusses the role of transcendental goods in creating an environment for human accomplishment, the declining rate of accomplishment over the last 150 years when compared to population growth and the apparent lack of great art, music and literature in the 20th Century. Confucianism and Aristotelianism along with the great religions in the world were for grownups, requiring mature contemplation of truth, beauty, and the good. Cultures in which the creative elite are not engaged in that kind of mature contemplation don’t produce great art. Steyn demonstrates that in Europe’s case, a culture that dwells only upon the here and now can’t seem to produce much of anything, much less works of art, music and literature to transcend the ages. Writing solely of future artistic and scientific accomplishment, Murray is far more optimistic. He likens the period from the Enlightenment to the end of the 20th century as a sort of adolescence of the human race from which the elite will soon emerge with the adult realization that their parents were smarter than they ever thought they were.
Auster put some time into a serious rebuttal of Steyn, in a series of comments. One quote: First, notice that Steyn is no longer making Western decadence, statism, PC, and lack of confidence the source of the crisis. Now he’s saying that Muslims themselves, opposed to the modern world, and expanding rapidly both in their home countries and in the West (“the fastest-breeding group on the planet”) are enough to destroy our civilization. And he's saying that there’s nothing we can do about this, unless he means to suggest that the only way we can survive the Muslim challenge is not by merely restoring a healthy native fertility level, but by surpassing the Muslims’ extremely high fertility rate and becoming the “fastest-breeding” group on the planet ourselves. Since the idea of Westerners breeding like Muslims is absurd, Steyn’s argument comes down, once again, to pure defeatism. YARGB, reacting to the Auster piece, asks: "do we have a right to expect more from writers like Steyn, by way of specific ideas about how Europe can save itself from welfarism and economic and demographic decline? Is it good enough to write despairing articles saying it's time to write-off Europe? Do we not owe Europeans, not only recognition of their great problems, but also a spirit of willingness to help them save themselves, if they emerge from present crises willing to throw off the current elites and the insanity of the bureaucratic monoliths they are presently building? Finally, can we North Americans hope to maintain our culture without the trans-Atlantic ties that have always been integral to who we are?"
And, finally, in a Letter to the Europeans by Hanson: The world is becoming a more dangerous place, despite your new protocols of childlessness, pacifism, socialism, and hedonism. Islamic radicalism, an ascendant Communist China, a growing new collectivism in Latin America, perhaps a neo-czarist Russia as well, in addition to the famine and savagery in Africa, all that and more threaten the promise of the West. So criticize us for our sins; lend us your advice; impart to America the wealth of your greater experience — but as a partner and an equal in a war, not as an inferior or envious neutral on the sidelines. History is unforgiving. None of us receives exemption simply by reason of the fumes of past glory.
Fascism, Islamism, and Anti-semitism Loconte in Weekly Standard. A quote: "Hardly anything has infuriated certain critics of the Bush Administration more than the president's vocabulary to describe the war on terrorism. Bush warns of an "axis of evil," in which rogue nations collude with Muslim extremists to acquire nuclear weapons. He regards Osama bin Laden and his cadre of suicide bombers as "evildoers." He compares the theology of radical Islam to that of European fascism and "all the murderous ideologies" of the twentieth century. Intellectuals and others reject this talk as sophomoric and supremely arrogant-just another manifestation of Bush's cowboy diplomacy. Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor in the Carter Administration, voices a typical note of contempt: "We have increasingly embraced at the highest official level what I think can fairly be called a paranoiac view of the world." Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that these same critics remain mostly mute over the stunning remarks of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Two weeks ago the Iranian president shocked Western leaders when he claimed that the Holocaust was "a myth" created by Jews and "Zionist historians." This followed a previous slander against Israel as "a tumor" to be "wiped off the map"--or, at best, relocated to Europe. "Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation's fury," Ahmadinejad told the Organization of the Islamic Conference. His anti-Semitic tirade comes as the Iranian leader continues to defy the United Nations to pursue a nuclear weapons program. "I thought, my God, he's a Nazi," a German resident told Knight Ridder. "I couldn't believe that again the world was faced with a Nazi as a head of state. It's beyond comprehension." "
Thursday, January 5. 2006
Blame Bush Blame Bush! is one of our favorite satirical blogs, but, with increasing frequency, it is difficult to decide whether statements by the press and the Dems are satirical or genuine. Michelle pointed out this one today - an editorial today in the NYT on the mine accident, which could very well have been posted on Blame Bush. You see, Bush was too busy helping his pals in Big Coal get rich to care about the miners, when he knew darn well that this accident was coming. The press is going to make the Blame Bush! blog obsolete, if it has not already done so. The next time an editorialist gets diarrhea, I will await its being blamed on Bush's relationship with Big Fiber.
Steyn on the War, Population, Multiculturalism, Tolerance, and the Masochism of the West From It's the Demography, Stupid, in the WSJ: "That's what the war's about: our lack of civilizational confidence. As a famous Arnold Toynbee quote puts it: "Civilizations die from suicide, not murder"--as can be seen throughout much of "the Western world" right now. The progressive agenda--lavish social welfare, abortion, secularism, multiculturalism--is collectively the real suicide bomb. Take multiculturalism. The great thing about multiculturalism is that it doesn't involve knowing anything about other cultures--the capital of Bhutan, the principal exports of Malawi, who cares? All it requires is feeling good about other cultures. It's fundamentally a fraud, and I would argue was subliminally accepted on that basis. Most adherents to the idea that all cultures are equal don't want to live in anything but an advanced Western society. Multiculturalism means your kid has to learn some wretched native dirge for the school holiday concert instead of getting to sing "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" or that your holistic masseuse uses techniques developed from Native American spirituality, but not that you or anyone you care about should have to live in an African or Native American society. It's a quintessential piece of progressive humbug. Then September 11 happened. And bizarrely the reaction of just about every prominent Western leader was to visit a mosque: President Bush did, the prince of Wales did, the prime minister of the United Kingdom did, the prime minister of Canada did . . . The premier of Ontario didn't, and so 20 Muslim community leaders had a big summit to denounce him for failing to visit a mosque. I don't know why he didn't. Maybe there was a big backlog, it was mosque drive time, prime ministers in gridlock up and down the freeway trying to get to the Sword of the Infidel-Slayer Mosque on Elm Street. But for whatever reason he couldn't fit it into his hectic schedule. Ontario's citizenship minister did show up at a mosque, but the imams took that as a great insult, like the Queen sending Fergie to open the Commonwealth Games. So the premier of Ontario had to hold a big meeting with the aggrieved imams to apologize for not going to a mosque and, as the Toronto Star's reported it, "to provide them with reassurance that the provincial government does not see them as the enemy." Anyway, the get-me-to-the-mosque-on-time fever died down, but it set the tone for our general approach to these atrocities. The old definition of a nanosecond was the gap between the traffic light changing in New York and the first honk from a car behind. The new definition is the gap between a terrorist bombing and the press release from an Islamic lobby group warning of a backlash against Muslims. In most circumstances, it would be considered appallingly bad taste to deflect attention from an actual "hate crime" by scaremongering about a purely hypothetical one. Needless to say, there is no campaign of Islamophobic hate crimes. If anything, the West is awash in an epidemic of self-hate crimes. A commenter on Tim Blair's Web site in Australia summed it up in a note-perfect parody of a Guardian headline: "Muslim Community Leaders Warn of Backlash from Tomorrow Morning's Terrorist Attack." Those community leaders have the measure of us. Radical Islam is what multiculturalism has been waiting for all along. In "The Survival of Culture," I quoted the eminent British barrister Helena Kennedy, Queen's Counsel. Shortly after September 11, Baroness Kennedy argued on a BBC show that it was too easy to disparage "Islamic fundamentalists." "We as Western liberals too often are fundamentalist ourselves," she complained. "We don't look at our own fundamentalisms." Well, said the interviewer, what exactly would those Western liberal fundamentalisms be? "One of the things that we are too ready to insist upon is that we are the tolerant people and that the intolerance is something that belongs to other countries like Islam. And I'm not sure that's true." Hmm. Lady Kennedy was arguing that our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people's intolerance, which is intolerable. And, unlikely as it sounds, this has now become the highest, most rarefied form of multiculturalism." Read entire. It's the kind of masterpiece essay that inspires deep humility in every blogger, and it's an excellent summary of Steyn's view of the world. Kinda makes ya wonder why FDR didn't visit a Japanese restaurant after Pearl Harbor.
Russia and the Ukraine: It's not about gas or money - it's about rebuilding the Russian Empire The below article is from Stratfor Geopolitical Intelligence, a subscription service at Strategic Forecasting, Inc., at www.stratfor.com (with permission): During the past few weeks, Russia and Ukraine have been arguing over the terms of their natural gas supply contracts.
Under previous arrangements -- struck in efforts by Moscow to influence the outcome of Ukraine's presidential election in 2004 -- Russia's state-owned monopoly Gazprom supplied Ukraine with natural gas at the rate of $50 per 1,000 cubic meters. But Russia's preferred presidential candidate, Viktor Yanukovich, lost the 2004 election to the pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko. That loss, combined with Russia's hopes of raising income levels in general (or, switching "to a market basis," in Gazprom-speak) prompted Moscow to demand payments of $230 per 1,000 cubic meters from Ukraine -- terms Kiev refused. Gazprom then sliced its exports to Ukraine on Jan. 1, triggering a European uproar. Because Europe also depends heavily on Russian natural gas -- with 80 percent of those supplies transiting Ukraine -- the Russian cutoff hurt Europe rather than Kiev.
On Jan. 4, Moscow and Kiev settled the matter by agreeing to a compromise five-year contract. Under terms of that deal, natural gas from the Central Asian states of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan will be transported through Russia, making up a mix that would supply Ukraine at a rate of $95 per 1,000 cubic meters. Any Russian gas fed into that mix will be sold at Gazprom's full rate of $230.
From a strictly commercial standpoint, all now seems right with the world. The Central Asians, who previously were able to sell natural gas only to the heavily subsidized Russian market, now have gained a significant export market for their supplies; the Ukrainians have substituted a mere doubling in prices for what would have been a fourfold increase; and the Europeans have their natural gas supplies re-established.
But that is not the really interesting -- much less important -- part of what has just occurred. When the crisis first erupted, it centered on Russia's desire to reassert influence directly in Ukraine; but as the game has played out, it has come to center on Russia's ability to use Europe as a lever.
The Ukrainian Keystone
From the beginning, the natural gas spat has been about much more than a few (billion) dollars in annual energy sales. This squabble is over the orientation of Ukraine between West and East, and ultimately over the ability of Russia to regenerate its geopolitical fortunes.
Ukraine's “Orange Revolution” was a seminal event in the Russian mind -- a jarring development that ranks second only to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991. Russians view the Soviet collapse as the day they lost their empire, and they fear that history may mark the Orange Revolution as the day that Russia degraded past the point of no return.
Viewed from any angle, Ukraine is critical to the long-term defense and survival of the Russian state. This is not about ethnic kin, although eastern Ukraine does host the largest Russian community in the world outside of Russia. Even before the Soviet era, Ukraine was integrated into the industrial and agricultural heartland of Russia; today, it not only is the transit point for Russian natural gas to Europe, but actually is a connecting point for nearly all the country's meaningful infrastructure between East and West -- whether of the pipe, road, power or rail variety. 
Read the rest, below. It is an excellent view of what Russia is concerned about these days.
Continue reading ""
Wednesday, January 4. 2006
French Imperialism
At the risk of repeating herself, Gwynnie just has to comment on the News Junkie’s post “France (properly) tries to defend their constructive colonial heritage”
Gwynnie asks us to note, not counting lost conquests in Europe by the Emperor Napoleon (Libs & Eurotrash: note the connection: “Emperor” -> “Empire” -> “imperialist”) that France, with 212,600 square miles and a population of 42,000,000, conquered and controlled colonies with a land area of 4,300,000 sq. miles and aggregate population of 65,000,000.
Hello? Americans are imperialists? The sordid French details:
The French Colonial Empire· Canada· Acadia · Louisiana· Terre-Neuve (Newfoundland) including the Iles-de-la- Madeleine and Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, the only territory in North America left today under French sovereignty.· Saint-Domingue (today's Haiti).· Guadeloupe, including la Désirade, Dominica, La Frégate, Marie-Galante, Saint Bartholomew, Saint Martin, les Saintes and a few other rocks.· Martinique, including Saint Lucia and Tobago · Grenada has also been French for some time.· French Guyana.· Alep, · Hatay (Alexandretta), · Lebanon, · Syria and the Sanjak of Damas and the Jabel Druze (Souaida). These territories are included today in the modern states of Syria and Lebanon.· Cheik Said's Territory on the Yemenite coast.· In the Far East, Annam and Paracel islands, · Cochinchina, (Viet Nam)· Laos· Cambodia · Tonkin. · Canton, Nanking or Shanghai. · Hankéou, His-men, Kouang-Tchéou-Wan and Tien-Tsin.· India - The French Crown ruled between 1742 and 1763. After this date, various smaller territories and enclaves remained under French sovereignty until the 1950s:o Pondichéry (1673-1954) o Chandernagor (1686-1951) o Mahé (1721-1954) o Karikal (1738-1954) o Yanaon (1751-1954) o Balassar o Cassimibazar o Calicut o Dacca o Goréty o Jouqdia o Masulipatam o Patna o Surate · Senegal · Mauritania · French Guinea (now Guinea) · Côte d'Ivoire · French Sudan (now Mali) · Niger · Dahomey (now Bénin) · Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) · Togo · Gabon · Middle Congo · Ubangui Shari (now Centrafrican Republic) · Chad · Cameroon · Algeria· Morocco (protectorate)· Tunisia (protectorate)· Djibouti.· Réunion · Mauritius · Seychelles islands· Madagascar · Comoros· New Caledonia· Wallis and Futuna islands · New Hebrides (now Vanuatu).· French Polynesia (still an overseas territory of the French Republic)
When do we call it Treason? From Human Events: "America spends $40 billion per year on intelligence operations aimed at discovering our enemies’ secret activities. All our enemies have to do is subscribe to the New York Times and, for as little as $4.65 per week, they can discover most of our secret operations -- at least as long as a Republican is President."
We are now two weeks into the artificial brouhaha engineered by the Times when it exposed that the National Security Agency (NSA) had been authorized by the President to monitor the international phone calls and emails of terror suspects within the US. Despite the best efforts of the Times and its backup singers in the mainstream media, this revelation has not resonated as scandalous with the American people. A Rasmussen poll released December 28th revealed that 64% of Americans believe that the NSA should intercept such international communications. This was the majority opinion among Republicans (81%), Democrats (51%) and Independents (57%) alike. A mere 23% thought the NSA should be prohibited from such warrant-less monitoring. And 68% of respondents said they were following the NSA wiretapping story closely, so the President’s critics cannot blame ignorance for the rejection of their arguments by the citizenry. Indeed, the respondents understood very well that President authorizing such eavesdropping to assess national security threats is not new or unusual -- only 26% were misinformed enough to think that Bush was the first President to do so.
Tuesday, January 3. 2006
The Suicide Theme Kimball, in a New Criterion piece entitled "After the Suicide of the West": "The terrorist attacks of 9/11 gave us a vivid reminder—but one, alas, that seems to have faded from the attention of many Western commentators who seem more concerned about recreational facilities at Guantanamo Bay than the future of their towns and cities. For myself, ever since 9/11, when I think about threats to democracy, I recall a statement by one Hussein Massawi, a former Hezbollah leader, which I believe I first read in one of Mark Steyn’s columns. “We are not fighting,” Mr. Massawi said, “so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you.” " His piece is the intro for a series on culture wars, here. And Sowell, "Serious or Suicidal?", on the world's view of Iran and their nukes.
Friday, December 30. 2005
John Lott in NRO: You don't have to live next to the United States to see how hard it is to stop criminals from getting guns. The easy part is getting law-abiding citizens to disarm; the hard part is getting the guns from criminals. Drug gangs that are firing guns in places like Toronto seem to have little trouble getting the drugs that they sell and it should not be surprising that they can get the weapons they need as well. The experiences in the U.K. and Australia, two island nations whose borders are much easier to monitor, should also give Canadian gun controllers some pause. The British government banned handguns in 1997 but recently reported that gun crime in England and Wales nearly doubled in the four years from 1998-99 to 2002-03. Crime was not supposed to rise after handguns were banned. Yet, since 1996 the serious-violent-crime rate has soared by 69 percent; robbery is up 45 percent, and murders up 54 percent. Before the law, armed robberies had fallen 50 percent from 1993 to 1997, but as soon as handguns were banned the robbery rate shot back up, almost to its 1993 level. The 2000 International Crime Victimization Survey, the last survey completed, shows the violent-crime rate in England and Wales was twice the rate of that in the U.S. When the new survey for 2004 comes out later this year, that gap will undoubtedly have widened even further as crimes reported to British police have since soared by 35 percent, while those in the U.S. have declined 6 percent. Australia has also seen its violent-crime rates soar immediately after its 1996 Port Arthur gun-control measures. Violent crime rates averaged 32-percent higher in the six years after the law was passed (from 1997 to 2002) than they did in 1995. The same comparisons for armed-robbery rates showed increases of 74 percent. During the 1990s, just as Britain and Australia were more severely regulating guns, the U.S. was greatly liberalizing individuals' abilities to carry firearms. Thirty seven of the fifty states now have so-called right-to-carry laws that let law-abiding adults carry concealed handguns after passing a criminal background check and paying a fee. Only half the states require some training, usually around three to five hours. Yet crime has fallen even faster in these states than the national average. Overall, the states in the U.S. that have experienced the fastest growth rates in gun ownership during the 1990s have experienced the biggest drops in murders and other violent crimes. http://nationalreview.com/comment/lott200508190817.asp Canadian blogs point out that the US must be exporting our violence because we don’t have nearly as much now: Writes Herschblogger in The Other Club: Bah-nanada The Drudge Report today linked to this story: USA is exporting its violence to Canada, says Canadian PM... Lo and behold, Prime Minister Martin must be right, because in 2004 Canada’s rate of violent crime per 100,000 people was 946. That same year, continuing a decline that began in 1994, the US recorded 465 violent crimes per 100,000. Not only that, but US Homicide rates recently declined to levels last seen in the late 1960s and have been stable since 2000. While gun ownership is up, US rates of nonfatal firearm crime have declined since 1994, reaching the lowest level ever recorded in 2004. Violent crime in general has also declined in the US. Where did all this crime go? To Paul Martin, Prime Minister of a country where the national homicide rate increased 12% in 2004, the answer is obvious – it was exported to Canada. It must be NAFTA, the North American Firearm Trafficking Arrangement. Toronto Mayor David Miller is facing the fact that gun deaths have doubled in his city since 2004 and won’t be left out of any scapegoating: "The U.S. is exporting its problem of violence to the streets of Toronto," he said. http://otherclub.blogspot.com/2005/12/bah-nanada.html
 CANADIAN POLLUTION
Our Green Canadian friends have a Dirty Little Secret - their only source of wealth comes from the oil sands of Alberta which much be mined through pumping water into drill shafts, and the view from Google Earth shows 18-20 miles of settling ponds for the used, polluted water -- on the banks of a river. For Google Earth users, the location is 57 deg, 2 min North by 111 deg, 37 min West. Gwynnie cannot wait for Paul Martin to declare that the US is exporting pollution to Canada the same way he said the US is exporting crime!
Wednesday, December 28. 2005
 War vs. Law Enforcement
It is simple. Either we are at war with Jihadist Moslems who have proven that killing Jews and Christians, and destroying Western Civilization, is their goal, or we are facing a simple law enforcement problem. The first World Trade Center bombing, in 1993, should have put us on adequate notice, because that was the Pearl Harbor of the Jihadists: it was a declaration of war by an organized enemy which was stateless, but supported by a number of states and tolerated by a number of witless European states. Thanks to America's pathetically lax and undemanding citizenship or immigration policies, we now have countless Jihadists, and Jihad supporters, in the US who would be delighted to see millions of us infidels die horrible deaths. To deny that, or to ignore that, is suicidal. I don't even know why the Jihadists which have been caught are facing criminal charges. They should be in military tribunals and, if they are US citizens, should be charged with treason. As should the Washington leakers, even if they are Senators. All or most Americans are criminals in big or small ways - whether caught or uncaught, we have all screwed up, driven drunk, had a bar fight, finessed a tax item, exercised bad judgement, or gone totally to the dark side, as every cop knows. But still loyal Americans, mainly, who would be happy to take up an M16 on our shores to repel invaders. We all have some basic values, even if we mess up due to personal weakness. Treason to country is an entirely different deal. As is being an enemy of our country. That's why we have firing squads. And that is why we have to track them down. The Founding Fathers never really anticipated this kind of enemy: they lived in an age of Honor, but traitors to the Crown - all of the Founding Fathers - knew, and accepted, that hanging would be their fate if they lost the war. That was part of the deal. Our modern-time traitors need to know this too, and be confronted with the hangman. It's not a joke, even in a free country. Freedom is not free. And may I repeat another cliche: the Constitution is not a suicide pact. If you are a US citizen, and supporting or assisting US enemies in a war (regardless of how you may feel about it), you are a traitor. If you hate us, move to France or South Africa or Saudi Arabia or Russia. Please. You will find happiness there. (Image from a painting by Pisanello)
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