Category Archives: View

View 830 Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

“Today, I can announce that our review is complete, and that the United States will pursue a new strategy to end the war in Iraq through a transition to full Iraqi responsibility.

This strategy is grounded in a clear and achievable goal shared by the Iraqi people and the American people: an Iraq that is sovereign, stable, and self-reliant.

[W]e will work to promote an Iraqi government that is just, representative, and accountable, and that provides neither support nor safe haven to terrorists.”

“We are leaving behind a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq.

Barrack Obama
December 14, 2011
Fort Bragg, North Carolina

I subscribe to several newspapers, and I read most of them at the breakfast table. Today I was amused to see the difference in headlines on the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal. The Times proclaimed:

Justices give EPA a win on emissions

Supreme Court upholds rules curbing greenhouse gases from power plants

David G. Savage

The Obama administration’s drive to regulate global-warming gases won a surprising victory in the Supreme Court on Monday with the support of two conservative justices.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Antonin Scalia joined the court’s moderates and liberals in a 7-2 vote to uphold most of an Environmental Protection Agency rule that requires new or rebuilt factories and power plants to use the “best available technology” to limit their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

Because these “major polluters” are already required to obtain clean-air permits from the government, the EPA is justified in adding greenhouse gases to the list of restricted pollutants, Scalia wrote for the court.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-supreme-court-power-plants-20140610-story.html#page=1

All of which is fairly depressing. Then I turned to the Wall Street Journal. There was nothing about the decision on the front page. Nothing. That was a bit startling. Then I turned to the editorial page:

A Constitutional Tutorial for Obama

The President doesn’t possess ‘an unheralded power’ to rewrite laws.

The Obama Administration’s abuse of executive power is emerging as this Supreme Court term’s defining theme, and on Monday the Justices applied some basic constitutional law to the White House’s anticarbon agenda.

In Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA, the Justices feed several major climate regulations into the wood chipper. "When an agency claims to discover in a long-extant statute an unheralded power to regulate a significant portion of the American economy," the majority observes, "we typically greet its announcement with a measure of skepticism."

The ruling amounts to an overdue correction to Massachusetts v. EPA, the 5-4 ruling in 2007 that held greenhouse gases can be "pollutants" under clean air laws that were written decades before the carbon panic. That decision wrongly rewrote the Clean Air Act, but it was also always narrower than liberals made it out to be and never the license for policy rewrites that became the EPA’s interpretation.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/a-constitutional-tutorial-for-obama-1403562504

Which should give you a clear idea of the quality of American main stream journalism.

The fact that Scalia wrote the opinion ought to be a clue that it would not be quite so pleasing to President Obama as the Times seems to think.

The Court, as is its usual practice, decided rather narrowly, and some of the key laws implementing Cap and Trade were not involved in this case; narrowly the EPA has been given a power, but as the Journal concludes:

The Court did still preserve 7-2 the Mass. v. EPA prerogative to regulate carbon in other contexts, such as requiring new or substantially modified power sources to install "best available control technology." But the ruling says this authority is not "unbounded," which suggests the Court is warning EPA to tread carefully when exercising "extravagant statutory power over the national economy."

That could include the rules for existing power sources that the EPA rolled out earlier this month. They are grounded in an obscure catch-all clause of the Clean Air Act that wasn’t before the Court in Monday’s case. Section 111(d) runs only a few hundred words, yet the EPA is claiming unprecedented authority to command the states to create cap-and-tax programs or otherwise ration energy use. A less willful Administration would heed this warning and restrain its ambitions, but this one refuses, so the High Court will have to keep issuing Constitution 101 tutorials.

In any other Administration, such a Supreme Court smackdown on so important a regulation would also invite more media scrutiny of executive overreach. When the 2008 Boumediene decision gave terrorists the right to make habeas corpus challenges to their detention, the story was that the High Court was reining in a power-mad President.

Mr. Obama’s regulatory abuses are far more corrosive to the Constitution than anything George W. Bush did on war powers, but the press corps has barely noticed. Maybe it will start now that the Supreme Court is calling out President Obama’s lawbreaking.

I would be inclined to accept the WSJ interpretation. Of course the Attorney General and the Democrats in general will have the Times view.

Iraq

http://www.strategypage.com/qnd/iraq/articles/20140624.aspx

As clear and concise timeline and evaluation of the ISIS and Iraq as I have seen; and as accurate as known.

David Couvillon

Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; Chef de Hot Dog Excellance; Avoider of Yard Work

For those interested in this situation this is just what Colonel Couvillon says it is: but do understand that ‘concise’ is a relative word. This would not have been considered lengthy when I was in graduate school, but in these days of the Internet and half page summaries of centuries and millennia, it is long enough indeed.

An example is this summary of the present dilemma facing the corrupt and semi-competent Iraqi regime:

There have been growing calls in Iraq for the government to build the kind of oil-fueled welfare state that exists next door in Saudi Arabia. But Iraq has more people and pumps less oil than Saudi Arabia, so there is more incentive for Iraqis to take any job and hustle in a way that Saudis have not had to for generations. But that’s not enough. Iraq has a more effective education system than Saudi Arabia but Iraqis with skills tend to flee the country because of the corruption and high crime rate. Not enough educated Iraqis, who occupy most of the management jobs, are willing or able to address the damage done by rampant corruption. Too many people are willing to gut an essential logistical or maintenance task in order to steal some money meant to get important things (like national defense) done. This is especially true in the government bureaucracies, and that includes the military. Some Iraqis understand how this works and want it changed but the officials in power are more interested in stealing. There’s a popular realization that the corruption is a key problem but so far there have not been enough senior government leaders willing to risk assassination and personal financial loss to move decisively against the problem. This corruption has a direct impact on the growing of Islamic terrorist violence because the stealing cripples the security forces by leaving the soldiers and police unpaid and unsupplied.  If the Shia do not get organized they will see the better organized (even when it comes to corruption) Sunni minority once again be in control and the Shia will again be poor and living in fear of Sunni retribution for real or imagined misbehavior.

The report continues:

The U.S. has told the Iraqi leaders that if they do not take effective action to deal with the Sunni Islamic terrorists the U.S. will do so and that will be at the expense of the Iraqi politicians who created the current mess. One unpleasant side effect of all this is that the U.S. is now under pressure to attack ISIL in Syria as well. While this could be construed as aiding the Assad government it isn’t because ISIL has been openly fighting other rebel groups in Syria since January. Everyone hates ISIL.

This places more belief in the determination of the current President than I have: in my judgment President Obama wants out of Iraq, and since whatever he does will leave behind a mess that can be blamed on President Bush, there is no need for the US to carry out any real attempt to reform Iraq. Any actual reform is unlikely to succeed, there is a good chance that replacing Maliki will bring up someone worse, and that can be blamed on President Obama, not President Bush.

ISIL has taken Mosul, but so far has not strictly enforced Sharia in this key city, but there will be considerable pressure from the ISIS leadership to do so. Mosul is of crucial importance to the viability of any Sunni state in Mesopotamia. ISIS control of Mosul is not certain: the Kurds want the city and its oil refineries, and have a reasonable claim to it; but then there are Arab non-ISIS Sunni who have an even older claim to the city and its oil. It is possible that the non-Arab Kurds, nominally Sunni (“Compared to infidels, Kurds are Moslem”), can come to some compromise division of the oil revenues of the city, but that would require agreements entered from reason and not passion: something not very common in the area.

One must never forget that Jordan has a high stake in the outcome of these civil wars. In 1958 when Faisal II (Hashemite cousin of Hussein of Jordan) was still King of Iraq, there was a short lived attempt to federate the two monarchies as the United Arab Kingdom; this in answer to Nasser’s short lived federation of Egypt and Syria as the United Arab Republic. The Hashemites were the legitimate Protectors of Mecca from classical times down to the British conquest of the area in World War I. The British eventually were influential in giving the Arabian peninsula as a partly united area to Ibn Saud, displacing the Hashemites from their position of Sharif of Mecca that stemmed from the times of the Prophet. The Hashemites were compensated with the Kingdoms of Jordan and Iraq. There are clan and family ties between members of the Sunni ruling class in Jordan and their counterparts in Iraq.

In the time of Richard Lionheart the Moslem world was divided into factions and engaged in civil wars to the benefit of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. The Crusader Kingdom with its outlying fortresses looked to be stable. Then Saladin the Kurd united the Kurds, and with the aid of his (Aryan, no Arab) Kurds united the warring Arab factions against the invaders. Jerusalem was retaken by the Arabs. Of course European intervention in the Middle East, and particularly into Mesopotamia, was much more difficult in those times; but it remains expensive. Our intervention into Iraq might have turned a profit had the goal been conquest and levying tribute in the form of oil on Baghdad; but we had more noble ambitions.

I quoted this before the Bush I invasion, as well as after 9/11 :

John Quincy Adams on American Policy:

Whenever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.

Fourth of July, 1821

If we intend to abandon this principle it is important that we understand the consequences, and also the requirements. It will not be cheap – and it will require that we learn the principles of rule without the consent of the governed. That has historically been a skill that Republics have regretted allowing their Legions to learn.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 830 Monday, June 23, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

I was on TWIT yesterday (http://twit.tv/show/this-week-in-tech/463 ) and it was a pretty good show if you’re interested.

The Wall Street Journal today has a very interesting opinion piece by Nicholas Wade, a long time science writer, who was once one of the editorial writers for the AAAS’s Science; in other words, he was once one of the spokespersons for Big Science. He was also once a science opinion writer for the New York Times. His establishment credentials are utterly solid, and he was on the side of Big Science in most controversies.

Race Has a Biological Basis. Racism Does Not

Many academics are in the awkward position of rejecting Darwin’s theory of evolution in human populations.

Nicholas Wade

From the day it was published in 1859, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection has never ceased to discomfort people. Clerics in the 19th century repudiated his account of human origins. Today Darwin is implicitly rejected by the many social scientists and other academics who deny that there is a biological basis to race.

Most people who hate racism oppose it as a matter of moral principle, before which all other considerations are irrelevant. Not so social scientists. For many decades they have founded their opposition to racism on a specific scientific condition, namely that race has no biological basis and is solely a social construct.

This formulation is proclaimed on the websites of major social-science organizations. "Race is about culture, not biology," states the American Anthropological Association. Too bad that it’s incorrect, but that’s not the worst of it. The social-science creed has permeated the thinking of most college campuses so deeply that race, in the genetic sense, has become a taboo word. This has serious consequences for the advance of knowledge.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/nicholas-wade-race-has-a-biological-basis-racism-does-not-1403476865

Note the mild tone. But what Wade is saying, as politely and as nicely as he can, is that the social sciences are Voodoo Sciences as I have long been saying. Of course a large part of the population believes this now. Worse, the silly assertion that race does not exist is not strongly challenged by the real sciences, leaving much of the population to wonder just how reliable, how “real”, the “real sciences” are. It is now clear that tenure and promotion and the quest for government grants are stronger attractions than a quest for truth. Anyone watching a basketball game will understand that races exist and skill sets relevant to basketball are not distributed equally among the races; and that’s hardly cultural.

Wade has another book

Nicholas Wade Become a fan

Author, ‘A Troublesome Inheritance’

 

Five Critics Say You Shouldn’t Read This ‘Dangerous’ Book

The book’s starting point is the abundant evidence from the genome that human evolution didn’t grind to a halt thousands of years ago. Rather, evolution has proceeded vigorously throughout the recent past and almost certainly up until the present day.

If that’s the case, then might that be something that historians and economists should pay attention to? Could evolution have had a role in major but still unexplained events, such as the transition from hunter-gathering to settled life some 15,000 years ago, or even those of just 250 years ago, such as the Industrial Revolution?

That’s the question explored in my book. Surely it’s a logical one, and one worth asking.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nicholas-wade/five-critics-say-you-shouldnt-read-this-dangerous-book_b_5507633.html

Wade cautiously approaches the notion that there are differences among the races of man, but carefully avoids the real question raised in The Bell Curve

This is discussed in detail by Ron Unz.

Does Race Exist? Do Hills Exist?

By Ron Unz

All too many socially-conditioned Americans have absorbed the Lewontin-Gould mantra that “Race Does Not Exist” which from a scientific perspective is roughly similar to claiming that “Teeth Do Not Exist” or perhaps “Hills Do Not Exist,” with the latter being an especially good parallel. It is perfectly correct that the notion of “hill” is ill-defined and vague—what precise height distinguishes a pile of dirt from a hill and a hill from a mountain?—but nevertheless denying the reality or usefulness of such a concept would be an absurdity. Similarly, the notion of distinct human races—genetic clusters across a wide variety of scales and degrees of fuzziness—is an obviously useful and correct organizing principle, and one which was probably accepted without question by everyone in the history of the world except for deluded Americans of the last fifty years.

http://www.unz.com/runz/does-race-exist-do-hills-exist/

Whether anything will come of this is not known. Few graduates of any school at any level in the United States have been taught about Stalin and Lysenko. Many are till taught that the Marxist Stephen Jay Gould was a competent scientist, not a Marxist transmission belt of the Party line. Few have been taught how Marxism and Communist theory dominated American universities during some of the Cold War. Thus the notion of “official science” in the US isn’t well understood – although the Climate Change True Believers are beginning to make that manifest. The Social Sciences are not the only Voodoo Sciences in 2014.

But the result is cynicism about all science. The American people are not well educated and as time goes on that condition will only get worse. The Social Sciences are now largely taken over by Voodoo, as are many of the “humanities.” Now the Biological Sciences are pressured to adopt the official lines and act as if there is no evidence in opposition to them. The official position that heredity is unimportant compared to culture, that environment always trumps nature, is imposed on more and more students, many of whom have no idea that they are being deceived.

Out in the real world, the citizens wonder.

This got lost in the swim here, but it remains very relevant:

California Republicans Vote to Restore “Bilingual Education” <http://www.unz.com/runz/california-republicans-vote-to-restore-bilingual-education/>

After almost seventeen years history may be about to repeat itself in California politics, though perhaps with a strong element of farce. Late last week, the Senate Education Committee voted 8-to-0 <http://www.latimes.com/local/political/la-me-pc-calif-senate-panel-advances-bill-to-restore-bilingual-education-20140430-story.html> to place a measure on the November 2016 ballot repealing Prop. 227 and restoring “bilingual education” in California public schools. The long-dormant Language Wars may be returning to American politics, and based on the early indicators, the G.O.P. may have totally abandoned any support for English in the schools, with not a single Republican casting a No vote on the proposal.

Although many might be surprised by this political alignment, I am not. When I launched my “English for the Children” initiative effort in 1997 to replace California’s failed system of Spanish-almost-only “bilingual education” with intensive English immersion, I sought to avoid the political partisanship that could easily taint a project touching upon delicate ethnic issues. As matters turned out, I got my wish, and our campaign was among the most bipartisan in state history, being opposed by nearly every prominent Democrat and also nearly every prominent Republican.

Requiring that English be taught in public schools was opposed by the Chairman of the state Republican Party and the Chairman of the State Democratic Party, as well as all four party leaders in the State Senate and Assembly. President Bill Clinton came out to California to campaign against us. All four candidates for governor, Democrat and Republican alike, denounced the measure and together starred in a powerful television spot urging a No vote <http://www.unz.org/Pub/EnglishForTheChildren-1998-00046> , ranked by many as the best advertisement of that election cycle. We were opposed by every California union, every political slate, and almost every newspaper editorial board, and were outspent on advertising by a ratio of 25-to-1. But despite this daunting array of influential opponents, our initiative still passed with one of the largest political landslides of any contested measure in state history, winning over 61 percent of the vote.

As is traditional with California initiatives, our critics hoped to win in the courtroom what they had lost at the ballot box and bilingual advocates immediately sued to block the law. However, in the weeks that followed, four separate federal judges ruled in favor of Prop. 227 and the law that had passed in the June vote began to be implemented statewide as the new school year began in September. All of California’s thousand-odd school districts were required to teach young immigrant children in English as soon as they started school, though some bitterly resisted and dragged their feet.

The consequences were quite remarkable. Although nearly every state newspaper had editorially opposed the change in educational policy, once their journalists began visiting the schools to report the results of such a sweeping educational transformation, the many dozens of major media stories produced were uniformly glowing, with teachers, parents, and children all very happy with the change, and everyone surprised how quickly and easily the students were learning English in the classroom.

The following year, academic test scores for a million-plus immigrant students in California rose substantially, confounding naysayers and putting the story back on the front pages of the major state newspapers <http://www.onenation.org/article/english-only-test-scores-up/> . And in 2000, immigrant test scores continued their rise, leading to a front-page story in the Sunday New York Times <http://www.onenation.org/article/test-scores-rise-surprising-critics-of-bilingual-ban/> and major coverage in the rest of the national media. The founding president of the California Association of Bilingual Educators publicly declared that he had been wrong for thirty years <http://www.onenation.org/opinion/i-believed-that-bilingual-education-was-best-until-the-kids-proved-me-wrong/> and bilingual education didn’t work while English immersion did work, becoming a born-again convert to “English” and appearing on CBS News and the PBS Newshour to make his case.

During the first four years following the passage of Prop. 227, the academic performance of over a million immigrant schoolchildren taught in English roughly doubled <http://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/CA-Test-Results-DEC-02-2.pdf> , while those school districts that stubbornly retained their bilingual education programs showed no improvement whatsoever. English-learners in English immersion classes academically outperformed their counterparts in holdover bilingual education programs in every subject, every grade level, and every year, racking up performance advantage of 80-to-0.

The political trends showed a similar trajectory, with Arizona voters passing an almost identical ballot measure by an even wider 26 point margin in November 2000 and the electorate of Massachusetts, arguably America’s most liberal state, favoring “English” by a colossal 32 point landslide in 2002, incidentally putting supporter Mitt Romney in the governorship as a political side-effect <http://www.unz.com/article/how-i-made-mitt/> . Then in 2003, Nativo Lopez, one of California’s most diehard remaining backers of bilingual education, was recalled from office in Santa Ana by Latino parents <http://www.onenation.org/article/santa-ana-s-parents-revolt-in-favor-of-english/> outraged over his opposition to “English,” losing by a 40 point margin in America’s most heavily Latino immigrant major city.

With that last landslide vote over a decade ago in America’s most heavily Latino immigrant city, resistance to “English” completely crumbled and bilingual education largely disappeared from schools in California and much of the rest of the country while even the term itself almost completely vanished from public discourse or media coverage.

For decades since the 1960s, denunciations of bilingual education had been a staple of conservative campaign rhetoric—the so-called “language wars”—but with the provocative educational policy having disappeared, the rhetoric eventually followed and fewer and fewer elected officials or political activists even remembered that the program had once existed. A couple of years ago, Peter Brimelow, editor of the leading anti-immigration webzine VDare.com, included a rare denunciation of bilingual education in one of his columns, but felt compelled to explain the meaning of the term, which may have become unfamiliar to his younger anti-immigrationist readers.

Meanwhile, virtually all immigrant children in California quickly and easily learned English as soon as they entered school, and no one thought the process difficult or remarkable. Whereas for decades bilingual education theorists had claimed that it took seven to ten years for a young child to learn English—a totally insane claim that was ubiquitous in our schools of education—everyone now recognized that just a few months was usually time enough, with the new goal being for Latino children to learn English in pre-school <http://www.unz.com/runz/as-never-was/> and therefore become fully English-proficient before they even entered kindergarten.

And inevitably, the Prop. 227 educational revolution has produced a generation of mostly bilingual young adults. After all, a large fraction of California Latinos are raised in Spanish-speaking households, and learn that language as children. Meanwhile, they now learn to read and write and speak mainstream English as soon as they enter school, while often continuing to speak Spanish at home with their parents and other family members. Thus, millions of younger Californians have ended up with complete fluency in both languages, effortlessly switching between the two, as I have personally often noticed in Palo Alto, a town in which perhaps half the ordinary daily workers are Hispanic in origin.

One reason this educational revolution has attracted so little ongoing attention is that it merely served to align instructional curriculum with overwhelming popular sentiment. Even a decade or more ago, while the policy was still under sharp political dispute, numerous state and national surveys had indicated that nearly 80% of all Americans <http://www.onenation.org/2000polls.htm> supported having all public school instruction conducted in English, with these massive supermajorities cutting across all ideological, political, ethnic, and geographical lines, and support among immigrant Hispanics being especially strong <http://www.onenation.org/0105/maypoll.htm> . Indeed, I am not aware of any contentious policy issue whose backing was so totally uniform and overwhelming.

But politics abhors a vacuum and although almost everyone else has forgotten the topic of bilingual education over the last dozen years, the small number of bilingual zealots have remained just as committed as ever to their failed dogma. I doubt that there ever numbered more than just a few hundred hardcore bilingual activist supporters among California’s population of over thirty million, but their years of unopposed private lobbying and spurious academic research have now borne fruit. California politicians are hardly deep thinkers and term limits ensured that few of them had been prominent in public life during the late 1990s. Hence the 8-to-0 committee vote to reestablish bilingual education in California.

In reviewing the last twenty years of domestic policy battles in America, the replacement of bilingual education with English immersion in our public schools may rank as just about the only clear success for policies traditionally advocated by conservatives and Republicans—at least no other obvious example comes to mind. Meanwhile, the disastrous political choices made by California Republicans during the 1990s <http://www.unz.com/article/how-the-republicans-lost-california-wsj/> have placed what was once the most powerful Republican state party in America on the very edge of irrelevance and a descent into minor-party status.

For California Republicans to back the restoration of failed bilingual education programs would probably mark the final nail in their coffin, and rightfully so.

Ron Unz

The Education Establishment was conquered by the Voodoo Sciences a long time ago. Unfortunately if you can believe in all the tenets of the modern Voodoo Sciences, you can believe in anything. No one seems to be teaching that you should believe in evidence.

In the last century (1988) I concluded:

The Voodoo Sciences

Jerry Pournelle

When the social scientists are challenged as unscientific, their usual plea is that their subject matter is very complex and thus the methodology of physical science won’t work. This is an interesting argument, but it would carry more weight if students of social science knew something of physical science’s methodologies. Granted that the "social sciences" have an intrinsically more difficult job; is this any reason to abandon the tools of science?(4)

In summary we have: novelists, who are only required to make you believe their stories are or could be true. Advocates and Lawyers, who are required to present all the evidence that helps their clients, but have no obligation to go find evidence that falsifies their theories; and scientists who are required to make falsifiable hypotheses; seek evidence that shows their theories to be false, or at least say what evidence would falsify their theories; and to account for all the evidence known, whether favorable to their theories or not.

Many scientists today are at best advocates, and sometimes don’t even rise to the level of a good novelist. NASA and academia are full of voodoo scientists even in the hard sciences. This is very disappointing.

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/science/voodoo.html

Alas I have no real reason to change that opinion now.

Portugal was able to make the goal that tied the game with the United States in “extra time.”  This is not the same as overtime in a basketball game.  Extra time is discretionary with the officials, to make up for time used in substitutions, getting injured players off the field, and other play stoppages: the big game clock is not stopped for that. Instead an official uses whatever means he chooses (including his own memory if that’s what he chooses) to determine a time from a couple of minutes to considerably more, in even number of minutes, to be added to game time.

Studies have shown that statistically there is a lot more extra time added when the home team is losing than when it is winning.  This is a considerable home team advantage.  The Football associations are aware of all this, but there seems to be no movement to change it.  Of course Portugal probably has no great favor among the officials in Portuguese speaking Brazil.

The talk is about the children heading for the United States.  The consensus seems to be that when Obama deferred enforcement of the part of the dream act requiring proof that you were brought here long ago has made it very attractive to send your kids here.

Now of course this is an opportunity to create Janissaries, slave soldiers; they can say if they enlist at age 18 and remain in service until age 48, at which point they can leave, or they can stay another ten years (if wanted) and get a pension.  History shows there are a lot of disadvantages to this practice, but no one in Washington has read any history.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 829 Saturday, June 21, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

“Today, I can announce that our review is complete, and that the United States will pursue a new strategy to end the war in Iraq through a transition to full Iraqi responsibility.

This strategy is grounded in a clear and achievable goal shared by the Iraqi people and the American people: an Iraq that is sovereign, stable, and self-reliant.

[W]e will work to promote an Iraqi government that is just, representative, and accountable, and that provides neither support nor safe haven to terrorists.”

“We are leaving behind a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq.

Barrack Obama
December 14, 2011
Fort Bragg, North Carolina

Conversation on Putin’s Logic

Anyone who is interested in Russia, Putin, or geopolitics will find this conversation to be worth their time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IL8cNo0Lusw

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

It is a good elementary introduction to political realism about Russia, and anyone in need of that will find it valuable. My inclination is against conversational formats like that, because you can read a lot more in less time than it take to “watch” (mostly listen, there are no illustrative video clips). I do wish that the media news talkers would watch it, because a bit of realism would be good for them.

Putin is a Russian patriot. He rose from a minor KGB bureaucrat, just high up enough to be part of the Nomenklatura, to Yeltsin’s protégé and heir in well under ten years. He was better aware of the problems Russia faced than most, and had far more energy and verve than others around him. Perhaps a bit too much zeal. During his rise from political aide to protégé to heir of the ‘democratic’ faction of Russia following the collapse of the USSR, he was forcibly made aware of the unreliability of US and NATO promises regarding Russian interests. The Kosovo War in which the United States bombed Serbia to force the Slavic Serbian government to hand over the province to Albanian illegal immigrants, coupled with the usual Russian belief that the West is anti-Slavic, helped form his views of Russian need for buffer states between Russia and NATO.

Little that the West has done since then would have changed his view that the West, and particularly the United States, has a consistent foreign policy other than a bias against Russia; possibly this comes from the legacy of the Cold War, but all his experience points to that. The US doesn’t know its own interests, but it tends to thwart those of Russia, including the legitimate interests of the power that has stood between the Asian hordes and Europe for a very long time.

Baghdad hasn’t fallen.  The US is not yet fighting in Iraq.

It is lunch time.  Tonight I will post a full mail bag.  It’s about time.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 829 Friday, June 20, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

"Reflections: an established corridor controlled by Iran from Iran to Syria is not in any western interest, and not in the interests of Jordan or any other Sunni. ISIS is not our friend, but it is not much of a friend to Iran either. "

The best we can hope for at this moment is to keep Persian ground forces out of Iraq. Should they move into Iraq, the Turks and Saudis will be tempted to become (more) ‘involved.’ The ISIS would be stalled here and the tri-partite schism of Iraq will be established. With that, ISIS, will not have the strength to make incursions into Shia-Iraq/Persia; or the Kurdish Territory; and, certainly not Turkey. That leaves Jordan vulnerable, which in turn threatens Israel.

s/f

Couv

David Couvillon

Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; Chef de Hot Dog Excellance; Avoider of Yard Work

Agreed, but the matter remains complex.

Jordan and Lebanon are more important to Western interests than Syria. It happens that Shiite and Kurdish Iraq has most of the oil; Sunni Iraq has little as I understand it. The Kurds were able to exclude Maliki’s tax collectors from their areas; it will be interesting to see what happens to Mosul, long desired by the Kurds, but part of Saddam’s Arabification program. For the moment the Kurds are satisfied with Sunni (ISIS) occupation of Mosul and will not help Maliki’s ineffective army retake the city, but I am sure the matter is under consideration. Mosul has some oil, but is critical to the Kurds because of the refinery and pipeline to Haifa. While Kurds are not fervent Sunni (“Compared to infidels, Kurds are Moslem”), they are not going to tolerate a Shiite regime in Mosul if they have any ability to prevent it. Now they have that ability, and will likely support some kind of Sunni rule in Mosul so long as it is not so fanatic as to declare the Kurds heretics. It is extremely unlikely that the Kurds will encourage, or even tolerate if they have the ability to prevent it, Iranian ground troops in Iraq.

It is also in our interest to encourage religious tolerance in the Middle East. Historically that has also been very much in the interests of the tolerating regimes: the Christian and Jewish communities in Syria and Egypt were important to their economies in the centuries in which tolerance was a policy, as for instance after the Lionheart/Saladin truce. Under Sharia law “People of the Book” are explicitly tolerated but must pay a tax. Polytheists and atheists are not tolerated at all by Sharia law, and children of a Moslem father and non-Moslem mother are required to become Moslems or be executed. There are no other alternatives, not even exile.

Of course Kurdish/Turkish relationships are themselves questionable; but since the once very formidable Turkish Army has been subjected to purges of its Kamalist professionals in favor of sympathizers to the Islamist regime, just how formidable the Turkish Army is just now is not entirely clear.

Saladin the Kurd united the Moslem Middle East as Sultan using his Kurdish loyalists as the core of his Sultanate. Kurdistan is not so united in 2014, and neither Shiite Iran nor Sunni Turkey wants to see a United Kurdistan. (About half the Middle Eastern Kurds do not live in Iraq, and they have conducted a low key guerrilla war against Turkey and Iran for decades.)

Iraqi Kurdistan continues to be friendly toward the US but wary of believing in American promises; that at least is the best estimate I can gain from my sources.  If anyone knows better I would appreciate the input.

More on this later. It’s lunch time.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.