by David Steven | Oct 20, 2008 | North America
Andy McCarthy:
Obama professes a love for this country. One needn’t doubt his sincerity to grasp that what he loves is a vision of America, not America as she is. The object of his affection is not our Unum [as in E Pluribus Unumh- the motto on the US seal], the glorious inheritance we Many cherish through generations past, present, and (one prays) future. For The One, that One earns only disdain. Eroding it has been his life’s work.
Move through Obama’s career as a community organizer, his embrace of ACORN, his radical associations: the common denominator is a purpose to break down the Unum at its foundations, what he calls the “grass-roots.” For America, he plans an atom bomb. Or, to be precise, an atoms bomb: countless communities in cities and towns across the land, organized along the Marxist principles of Saul Alinsky into socialist enclaves. Each atom smothers the individual freedom and enterprise that have defined the American character, replacing them with welfare states that prize dysfunction and reward the rabble-rousers.
To be sure, there is an Unum that Obama sees. It is in his mind’s eye — clearer on the horizon now than when he began his project 23 years ago. It will arrive when the atoms reach critical mass and finally devour the hollowing carcass of our present society…
For Obama and his allies, capitalist democracy is an abject failure, habituated to racism, relentless in its materialism. It is an ironic critique: The senator and his fellow travelers are driven by nothing if not a crass materialism: They see themselves entitled to society’s benefits without the burden of its toils. They are, moreover, such prisoners of their own racism — have you ever heard anyone else describe his own grandmother as “a typical white person”? — that race has become their unified field theory for all of life’s disparities. It is a stubborn theory, heedless of the fact that, in our free society, members of all races, ethnicities, and economic classes move up and down the ladder of opportunity by the yardstick of merit.
Obama will tolerate no such yardstick. He derides the very core of what makes American society exceptional: individual liberty. Freedom. “We have this strong bias toward individual action,” Obama ruefully told De Zutter — and note the crafty shift: his choice of the amorphous action instead of the value-laden freedom, lest the listener realize just what is at stake. “You know, we idolize the John Wayne hero who comes in to correct things with both guns blazing. But individual actions, individual dreams, are not sufficient. We must unite in collective action, build collective institutions and organizations.”
Of course, we already have collective institutions and organizations. They are the branches of a limited government, designed by our Constitution precisely to promote individual liberty and national security. They are the churches, synagogues, PTAs, neighborhood clubs, and other social organizations by which each citizen may freely set the balance between his personal fulfillment and his interaction with fellow citizens. They are the arts, the sports arenas, the charities, the congeries of fulfillment for those who know the personal is not the political. That is American democracy, ourUnum.
In this article for the National Review, McCarthy – a former federal prosecutor who led the case against the 1993 WTC bombers – weaves together every insane, paranoid, and self-serving myth (racial, ideological and otherwise) about who Obama is and what he plans for America. You should read the whole thing and weep.
Ross Douthat has a good take on the wilderness his fellow right-wingers are driving themselves into. They should all take time to see what happened to the British left, after Thatcher drove it insane. Or compare the dark night of the Tories, after Blair accomplished the same trick.
Once you start frothing at the mouth and ranting in public, it’s a long hard road before you’re fit to be in polite company again…
by Charlie Edwards | Oct 20, 2008 | Influence and networks, Middle East and North Africa, South Asia
The soldier-scholar General Petraeus is launching a major reassessment of U.S. strategy for Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and the surrounding region, the result of which will be a new campaign plan for the Middle East and Central Asia.
Two major themes have emerged from some of the initial brainstorming:
1. A Government-led reconciliation of Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan and Pakistan,
2. Leveraging diplomatic and economic initiatives with nearby countries that are influential in the war.
Interestingly:
In appearances this month in Washington, however, Petraeus has sought to manage expectations of any repeat of the Iraq performance in Afghanistan – often suggested by Republican presidential candidate John McCain – stressing that Afghanistan is not Iraq, and that while some concepts are “transplantable,” Afghanistan has daunting challenges likely to require a far lengthier effort.
As befits a soldier-scholar Petraeus is now recruiting a brain trust of advisers, to join his Joint Strategic Assessment Team – led by a longtime adviser, Col. H.R. McMaster. Experts will be handpicked from State Department, Pentagon and other civilian and military officials as well as from outside. To begin with the 100 people, will be split into six subregional teams, tasked with investigating the root causes of insecurity in the region with the goal of finding solutions that integrate military action, diplomacy and development work. Experts currently touted to join the assessments group include: Shuja Nawaz, Ahmed Rashid, and Clare Lockhart.
by David Steven | Oct 19, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Cooperation and coherence
Imagine you’re advising China or India – or perhaps a poorer developing country such as Ghana – on their preparations for the climate change negotiations in Copenhagen. What sort of deal should these countries be prepared to accept? What would seem fair?
Nick Stern sidles up to these questions in his paper – Key Elements of a Global Deal on Climate Change. His starting point is that global emissions need to drop to around 20 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents (and then further to around 10GT CO2e in the decades that follow) – that’s around 2 tonnes of CO2e in 2050 for each of the world’s 9 billion people or so.
Stern believes that there is no choice but for countries to converge on this per capita average:
This target for per capita emissions by mid-century is so low that there is little scope for any major country to depart significantly above or below it. If one or two large countries were to manage only to reduce emissions to, say, 3T or 4T per capita, then it would be difficult to see which other major grouping of countries would be able to get emissions close to zero: and the global target would be unlikely to be reached.
So…let’s imagine the Americans have accepted this logic (suspend belief for a moment) and have a proposal for reducing their emissions from over 20T today to Stern’s 2T by 2050. They enter the negotiating room expecting other countries to do the same.
How would you advise China, India or Ghana to respond? They start from a very different point – around 5T per Chinese citizen, 2T for an Indian, and maybe around 1/2 tonne for a Ghanaian.
Now, as Stern admits, for them, simple convergence would be a pretty rough deal.
All major groups getting to 2T/capita is a pragmatic approach and not a strongly equitable one. It takes little account of the greater per capita contributions of the developed countries to the historical and future contributions to the stock of GHG emissions.
My instinct would be to urge the Chinese, Indians and Ghanaian to forgo what might be a fun, but ultimately unproductive, squabble about historical emissions. Be magnanimous about the past, I’d suggest. Instead focus on what really matters – who’s going to be allowed to emit what over the next forty years.
Because however far Chinese, Indian or Ghanaian emissions are allowed to increase before they start to drop towards 2T – its absolutely certain that their total emissions between now and 2050 (on a per capita basis) will be significantly lower than America’s.
In other words, there’s no trajectory that can be drawn that gives these countries a fair share of the next generation emissions ‘cake’.
So what deal would you advise them to strike?
by David Steven | Oct 19, 2008 | Global system, North America
In case, you missed it – do read Andrew Lahde’s glorious farewell to the world of high finance. Lahde – the man who once boasted that his hedge fund has the “top-rated performance for all hedge funds in the universe” – has made a stack from betting that a credit crunch ‘tsunami’ (his word) was on the way.
Now he’s had enough:
Recently, on the front page of Section C of the Wall Street Journal, a hedge fund manager who was also closing up shop (a $300 million fund), was quoted as saying, “What I have learned about the hedge fund business is that I hate it.” I could not agree more with that statement. I was in this game for the money. The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America.
There are far too many people for me to sincerely thank for my success. However, I do not want to sound like a Hollywood actor accepting an award. The money was reward enough. Furthermore, the endless list of those deserving thanks know who they are.
Lahde’s letter ends with a plea for the legalisation of marijuana and the use of hemp as an energy source. And he also floats a ‘modest proposal’ for an open-source project to work out what government is really for…
On the issue of the U.S. Government, I would like to make a modest proposal. First, I point out the obvious flaws, whereby legislation was repeatedly brought forth to Congress over the past eight years, which would have reigned in the predatory lending practices of now mostly defunct institutions. These institutions regularly filled the coffers of both parties in return for voting down all of this legislation designed to protect the common citizen. This is an outrage, yet no one seems to know or care about it.
Since Thomas Jefferson and Adam Smith passed, I would argue that there has been a dearth of worthy philosophers in this country, at least ones focused on improving government. Capitalism worked for two hundred years, but times change, and systems become corrupt. George Soros, a man of staggering wealth, has stated that he would like to be remembered as a philosopher. My suggestion is that this great man start and sponsor a forum for great minds to come together to create a new system of government that truly represents the common man’s interest, while at the same time creating rewards great enough to attract the best and brightest minds to serve in government roles without having to rely on corruption to further their interests or lifestyles. This forum could be similar to the one used to create the operating system, Linux, which competes with Microsoft’s near monopoly.
I believe there is an answer, but for now the system is clearly broken.
I’m in… Anyone else?
by Alex Evans | Oct 17, 2008 | North America
Amid the general consensus that all three of the Presidential debates were notable principally for their tedium, it emerges that McCain and Obama just needed to find the right format. Not podiums; not sitting; not town-hall; no, it’s stand-up comedy where the real contest was to be found in this election. Both candidates spoke at the Al Smith memorial dinner in NYC last night; both are laugh out loud funny in places.
McCain (part 2 here):
[youtube:http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=6bhvIvYrsQo]
Obama (part 2 here):
[youtube:http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=NXKaAQ-6BiU]
