View 756 Wednesday, January 02, 2013

Salve Sclave.

The year end fiscal cliff madness has abated but hardly ended. The President has more money to spend, and not much in the way of restrictions on how to spend it.

The history of Western Civilization includes that period when Parliaments wrested the Power of the Purse from the King, and used that to temper absolute monarchy. We are witnessing another act in that drama; those who thought that it ended in 1688 or 1787 underestimated the staying power of the Old Kings. True, these kings have limited terms of office – so far. But they enjoy a great retirement. George W Bush may not have as elaborate a palace as Diocletian built for himself at Split, nor quite so large a bodyguard, but he hardly lives in discomfort. Clinton has little to complain about. And we are just moving into the new era in which the President shuts down entire cities so that he can enjoy a round of golf, while fleets of aircraft stand by at his beck and call. And when he rides in triumph he does not have to endure the whispered reminders that he is but a man.

The fiscal crisis will continue. Taxes go up. Debts go up. Spending goes up. Bunny inspectors get raises, and expansions of their authority. New regulations come forth.

Salve Sclave.

I have this:

Totally disgusting and totally Islamic.

Cleric Issues Fatwa Allowing Gang Rape of Syrian Women "http://www.radicalislam.org/news/saudi-cleric-issues-fatwa-allowing-gang-rape-syrian-women"

This is PURE Islam at its "finest". When will our head in the sand leaders realize we are fighting Satan’s Avatars on Earth in an ultimately genocidal conflict, theirs or ours. We don’t have the option of sitting out the game.

The link leads to a site with an obvious point of view, Google points to a number of other sites with much the same information. I have seen nothing to indicate that any other cleric has commented on this.

We are certainly engaged in a cultural war. Assuming moral equivalence between the Soviets and the West was a major factor in prolonging the Seventy Years war. Of course the cultural war between Islam and everyone not in the House of Islam has gone on for a lot longer than Seventy Years. Mustapha Kemal Ataturk sought to bring Turkey into the liberal secular West by forbidding Islamic rule in Turkey and enforcing toleration of non-Islamic religions. A secular state was built into the Turkish Constitution and the Army was charged with enforcing that. This is coming to an and, and Turkey is becoming more and more an Islamic state although my Jewish sources tell me that there are no problems for teen age Jewish tourists, at least in the largest cities, and Christian communities in Turkey continue to flourish.

Egypt after the fall of Hosni Mubarak has systematically eliminated the Christian communities that have existed in Alexandria and other Egyptian cities for centuries.

The West has cultural weapons of mass destruction which work on all cultures including our own. In the US it is still considered barbaric for the male members of a family to murder a female relative because she has been raped (and therefore dishonors the family), although it happens as do murders of girls who have abandoned an arranged marriage; but it’s rare enough here. Perhaps more frequent in other places in the West.

Of course it is not a cultural war if one side believes that diversity requires acceptance of everything.

This is not the first crisis of western civilization, nor the first time that much of the civilization has become libertine. Interestingly, Charles Murray finds that much of the American middle to upper class continues to practice the old virtues – monogamous marriage, hard work and ‘Protestant ethics’ work values, religious attendance and thrives; but in Murray’s words, they do not preach what they practice. They preach a form of extreme tolerance, but since more and more they live in communities isolated from the consequences of losing the culture war, they may not know just what the fruits of diversity may be.

But we remain in a culture war.

I suppose it is time to search for a new strategy for those who favor the old republic. Clearly the leadership of the nation does not.

We see the trends.

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/special/oldissue.html 

I now have this:

Correction re "gang rape fatwa"

Dear Mr. Pournelle,

The story you just posted is based on a photoshopped tweet circulated by Syrian regime supporters, and picked up by a Lebanese satellite channel. On his actual Twitter account, the sheikh in question’s reaction was: "A tweet containing an evil fatwa attributed to me – and the liar was so ignorant that he exceeded the 140 character limit! I have denied it on Twitter and Facebook, yet Bashar’s channels are still spreading it!" (translated from:

https://twitter.com/MohamadAlarefe/status/285242319404421120/photo/1

). For an English-language retraction by one of the first English sources to spread it, look at http://www.alternet.org/world/exhibit-how-islamophobic-meme-can-spread-wildfire-across-internet.

The dynamics are not difficult to understand. Muhammad Al-Arifi is a vocal supporter of the Syrian armed opposition, so the Syrian government smears him (and, please note, a story like this is as much a smear in the Middle East as it would be in the US). The resulting smear happens to fit beautifully into the worldviews of groups all across the ideological spectrum – from lefty feminists in the case of AlterNet to right-wing Zionists in the case of RadicalIslam.org – so it gets published without much fact-checking. But interpreting the Syrian civil war, of all things, as part of some age-old conflict between Islam and the West is a recipe for serious misunderstandings.

Yours sincerely

Lameen Souag

Once again another reason for not covering breaking news.  On the other hand, some news is never broken although everyone in the intelligence community and for that matter the major press knows it. There is no definitive agreement on just who can issue a Fatwah. Interesting that you know all this while Snopes remains non-committal. Thank you.

It remains important fact that the cultural differences between the West and Islam are great. The West is expected to tolerate and forgive nearly any action taken in the name of Islamic honor; but the favor is not reciprocal either in the East or in the West. The culture war is important because at its heart is the most important question of politics: “Whom does the army obey?” The Great Bill of Rights and the Constitution are supposed to have settled that for England and the United States, and the various revolutions, risings, reconstitutions, new constitutions, changes of dynasties, more risings of the 19th and 20th Centuries are supposed to have settled the matter for the rest of the West. Clearly they did not.

Few men have ever given their lives for a standard of living, and most think it foolish to risk one’s life for someone else’s standard of living. Yet armies do exist and those who have soldiers who will dare all generally win against those who fight for money. But that is for another day and another essay. Meanwhile, the west continues to degrade, and Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses looks more and more relevant.

Happy New Year.

View 756 Monday, December 31, 2012

Happy New Year

I don’t do topical news, and it’s just as well. After the President gave his smirking press conference to spike the ball on having forced a tax settlement without any spending reductions he then threw in more insults to Congress. If he intended to end negotiations he could not have done a better job. There are those who say this is exactly what he intended.

Of course there never was much chance of actual spending cuts: in Washington there is an automatic increase in spending unless some action is taken to “cut” the appropriation. Last February the House passed a bill to eliminate this feature, but it was never even voted on in the Senate, and would not have survived a veto from President Obama in any event. http://cnsnews.com/news/article/house-votes-eliminate-automatic-spending-increases-budget

In theory the sequestration will bring about an actual cut, but it’s not likely – mostly it’s a decrease in the increases that the different departments will get. But as I understand it, there may be some actual honest to God cuts in a few cases. One of those will be missile defenses, but there is considerable discretion in the military cuts of about $55 Billion in a base (note that the base has a built in rise) of about $550 Billion. This looks accomplishable: the US spends more on military power than the rest of the world combined, and I don’t see anyone planning an invasion of the United States. The military is not the first line of defense against another 9/11 style attack. It is in theory the first line of defense against activities like the Fort Hood massacre, but I don’t think military budget cuts or increases will have much effect there: what’s needed is a military attitude toward that threat, and that doesn’t cost much. Had all the officers and senior noncoms been armed, Major Nidal Hassan would have been shot down before he could kill and wound so many of his comrades. But the military apparently is being told to be more concerned about Hassan’s beard and with not offending the Muslim community.

We are going over the cliff, which means that each of us will owe about $2000 more in taxes than you planned to pay – assuming that you pay taxes, which I suspect that most non-student readers here do. Those who don’t wish they could. It is not clear whether we will have to actually pay that extra tax. The President keeps trooping up representatives of the middle class – I assume they are actually tax payers, although how he selects those who stand with him when he delivers his post campaign speeches is not known, and I haven’t been clever enough to find out through Google or Bing. Since there was cheering when he slammed the Republicans I presume this wasn’t an actual press conference with actual journalists, although there may have been bloggers. In any event I do not think that even those privileged to stand behind him as he read from the teleprompter would welcome the coming tax increases.

The cost of cutting back taxes to 2012 rates will be that there be no “tax cuts” for those making more than $200,000, and that the new higher rates on “the rich” will be permanent. This may bring in as much as $100 Billion over the next few years, although it’s unlikely – predictions of increased revenue do not take account of probable efforts to avoid those taxes through shifts on spending patterns. It may bring an increase in charitable donations. If your income is more than $200,000 this year this might be a good time to make charitable donations, particularly if there is any chance that the donation may influence school selection committees or have other such effects.

But the drama is not over.

I note that there is frantic last minute activity in Congress, but I also note that it is more devoted to “turning off the sequester” which is the only real spending cut in the future. No one is looking at fraud and waste, bunny inspectors, government activities we would be better off without. Soak the rich is now the goal for a lot of Democrats. By “the rich” is generally meant those whose income is salaries and bonuses, people paid through stock options for engaging in high risk enterprises, etc. People who move money around in circles generally find ways to defer income in ways that don’t get hit with “income” taxes. And of course there are many perks that come with wealth but which don’t look like income.

The President wants to pound the rich. He doesn’t care what that does to investment climates. And no one is going to make any cuts to entitlements.

At some point, one would suspect, the American people will have had enough; but that will take a while. And Congress gets a raise. Their staffers get a raise. Government employee pensions continue to rise, and the courts are now saying that cities can’t stop paying into pension funds even if they go bankrupt, and the idiots who bought city bonds have less claim on a bankrupt city’s money than the pensioned off employees. Salve Sclave.

Happy New Year

An example of modern political debate:

Demand a Plan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrJjlPH1dqo&feature=player_embedded

View 755 Thursday, December 27, 2012

The media seem determined to mock the NRA for the view that “the main deterrent to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” but I see no error in the statement. As to the suggestion of having armed personnel at the schools, surely that is a local matter. In Los Angeles the immediate policy reaction of the Mayor and Chief of Police was to instruct patrol officers to once a day at some random time go to each school campus in their patrol area. I don’t know if we have enough resources to implement this, but we can hope so, and it certainly seems like a reasonable idea.

I also note that had the active duty officers at Fort Hood been wearing sidearms, far fewer people would have been harmed when Major Hassan smuggled in a pistol and began firing randomly at his comrades in what is officially described as a work place incident rather than a terrorist act. I recall that my youth, officers and senior non-commission officers were always armed when they went out in public: it was just part of the uniform. In England the Sam Brown belt and Webley revolver were a common sight in the World War II era. Given the size and weight of the Webley the Sam Brown belt was very nearly necessary. Now one might limit this to combat branch officers and sergeants, in which case the argument is that if you trust these people to lead your kids into harm’s way you have no business saying they are not trustworthy enough to be armed in public.

When I was a University of Washington campus policeman for a short time, that officially made me a Washington State Policeman, and it was understood that even off duty we were law enforcement officers. We were permitted to carry weapons off duty although I did not. I don’t recall any untoward consequences of this policy (nor any advantages either). It does seem reasonable to find ways to put good guys with guns in places that bad guys might bring guns.

Of course what most people want is another law. Once guns are banned, I presume we will have to worry about regulating hatchets and machetes.

We daily lurch toward the fiscal cliff, and no one makes any practical suggestions.

I know how we could save $12 Billion a year with a positive effect on the economy, without having to do a thing: let the subsidy to wind power generation expire. It was abolished ten years ago with 31 December 2012 as the expiration date. It costs $12 billion in direct subsidies. The amount of energy generated by wind is small, but letting the subsidy expire won’t cause any shut down of existing mills. Windmill operating costs are low enough that once built they can make some profit – but not enough to amortize the capital costs of building them in the first place. But the ones we have are already built. The end of the subsidy will actually bring about a drop in the costs of energy. Lower energy costs are always a better economic stimulus than any “stimulus program” ever has.

I have no predictions about what happens next. My guess is that Obama will allow us to go over the cliff, and thus expose every American family to a couple of thousand dollars tax hike; then he will come as the savior with the “Obama Tax Cut” which will be essentially the restoration of the expiring Bush Tax Cuts applied to 95% of the population. Everyone will cheer Obama and curse Bush.

I suspect though that we will get emergency legislation to restore the wind power subsidies as part of the Obama Tax Cut. I sure hope I’m wrong, but I doubt it.

I have dental appointments. Managed to knock out a tooth when I fell and bashed myself a few days ago. All’s well, I am more embarrassed than hurt, and the swelling has gone away on my lip leaving me with no more than a magnificent black eye. And it’s lunch time.

For those interested in more information on wind energy subsidies, former Senator Gramm has a Wall Street Journal article at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324481204578179373031924936.html?mod=googlenews_wsj including some specific numbers.

I have been looking for federal employees whose jobs should be redundant in that we don’t need done that which they are doing. Some are doubly redundant – we’d be better off if they weren’t doing it. One group are those who hounded Dr. Peter Gleason to his death over his peer-reviewed articles pointing out a useful off-label use for Xyrem, whose label use is for narcolepsy. The six federal agents who handcuffed him and the entire prosecutorial team involved might be better employed as bunny inspectors.

The government does a lot of expensive things that either don’t need doing or which actually cause more harm than good. It would make a certain amount of sense to identify these and leave them out of appropriation bills. The money saved might not be very great – although the wind energy subsidies certainly involve real money, a hundred billion here and a hundred billion there really does add up to real money – but even a few million saved is worth saving. Particularly if the effect is to stem the flow of information. As it happens I knew the Glendale dentist whose speculations about the effects of aspirin on his patients led to Big Medicine reconsidering aspirin’s use in heart cases; and I was witness to some of the humiliating treatment he received at medical conferences when he simply tried to get them to consider his theory.

In my judgment the FDA assumes that American citizens are dolts, not free citizens, and assumes powers it should not have. I can very well appreciate the usefulness of enforcing truth in labeling. I can defend the notion that the FDA can require drug dispensers to say “The use of this product for purposes other than those listed as approved is done at the risk of the patient, and we think this stuff is likely to kill you or do something awful to you. Just as I can accept that if a product advertises itself as genuine snake oil it ought to contain oil squeezed out of a snake. I have no objection to labels that say The FDA believes that if you take this stuff you are out of your ever-loving blue-eyed mind, and God have mercy on your soul. But to jail a doctor for telling a medical conference that he has evidence that the stuff is useful is a job not worth doing.

You can’t protect free people from everything. Attempts to do so can lead to bad results. But then science fiction readers have thought about this for a long time.