Links and Minifeatures 2009 03 25 Wednesday

Here is the difference between Israel and its Arab enemies

Well, one of them anyway:

When terrorists kill Israeli women and children with bombs or missiles, they regard it as a triumph worthy of celebration; sweets are passed out; the terrorists themselves are venerated as martyrs. When Israeli soldiers deliberately kill Arab women and children, on the other hand, most Israelis regard it as a disgusting aberration, and a legal investigation is launched.

I cannot believe I'm reading this:

South Africa bars Dalai Lama from peace conference

But because the Dalai Lama isn't being allowed to attend, it is now being boycotted by fellow Nobel Peace prize winners retired Cape Town Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former president F.W. de Klerk as well as members of the Nobel Committee.

"It is disappointing that South Africa, which has received so much solidarity from the world, doesn't want to give that solidarity to others," Nobel Institute Director Geir Lundestad told The Associated Press in Oslo, referring to the decades-long fight against apartheid.

The government of South Africa is saying the Dalai Lama visit would be too high in profile, and disrupt the peace conference. Why? He's never disrupted anything peaceful before.

ANC (the current ruling party of South Africa) spent lots of effort getting people to divest from and boycott South African goods in the seventies and eighties, among many other things. This divestment and boycotting was against our own best interests, but we did it to help them win a voice in their government - a voice which turned out to be the dominant one. And they can't host an exiled leader of a conquered (now) province who doesn't want nearly what the ANC asked for and got out of the world - only to stop the persecution and repression of his people, not a voice in the government?

Seems to me there's a biblical story with more than a grain of universal truth about that, and for that matter a different one in the Koran as well. Just because I'm not a Christian or Moslem doesn't mean I can't or shouldn't concede their wisdom when it is appropriate. Even just the Golden Rule of "treat others as you would like to be treated" is directly applicable. Shame on President Kgalema Motlanthe and the ANC heirarchy, shame! The men who won the Nobel Peace Prize for bringing the change to South Africa have bowed out of the conference on the basis of this development. Anyone who feels like a badly used tool because of this is entirely justified, and until the ANC makes amends, I think we ought to boycott South Africa again.

Nobody can be entirely free while others are enslaved as the Tibetans are. We helped the majority of South Africans win their political voice, and this is how they pay that debt forward? Shame!

More of how Obama going to save our foreign policy after Bush and make everybody like us: Obama Upsets Sarkozy With Letter to Jacques Chirac

Even the French got tired of Chirac. Sarkozy has been their president for almost two years now. While Bush was president, the French called Sarkozy "The American" and his popularity is pretty high. Now that Obama has written to his predecessor, who knows? This is act that would be about equivalent to Valdimir Putin and Hu Jintao writing to George Bush - out of office and a member of the opposing political party - looking forward to working with him over the next four years.

Obama keeps this up, and he might as well change his name to Larry Harmon, because he's going to be synonymous with Bozo

Talking ourselves to death: Obama must get tough on an increasingly dangerous Iran

Well, if we don't want to end up as a radioactive wasteland

Every U.S. administration since 1979 - yes, including the last one - has reached out to the Iranians. To adopt President Obama's inaugural metaphor, every open hand has met a clenched fist. It is the same dismal story with five years of efforts to curb Iran's nuclear ambitions.

It is not that the Iranians don't want to talk - they do. That's all they want to do, play for time. They seek the technical know-how that will give them the breakout capability to produce nuclear weapons in a short period. They are in the midst of producing stockpiles of low enriched uranium. They are adding centrifuges faster than the UN Security Council can step up the pressure and are learning about the art of connecting a large number of centrifuges to a vast amount of pipe work, while maintaining everything in a vacuum.

Simultaneously, they are enhancing their ability to launch long range ballistic missiles, a potential delivery system of nuclear weapons. What madness it is to empower Iran to do what it most likes to do - hold hostages, in this case the entire region.

The Economic Contradictions of Obama-ism

The Obama budget envisions an explosion of economic growth as the country recovers from the current recession--more than four percent a year from 2011 through 2013. This will supposedly be sufficient to halve the $1.75 trillion deficit it projects for 2009. But there is something off here. Many of the policies Obama and his team are pursuing, cap-and-trade being the most obvious, are likely to interfere with growth in exactly the sectors in which the United States will need it. If the goal is growth, as it should be, the role of government should be to determine ways in which its conduct can fuel that growth. And that is precisely what Obama is not doing.

Ladies and gentlemen, business does not end up paying taxes - its customers do. Otherwise it can't stay in business. These costs are passed along to us in the form of higher prices. Higher prices mean lower sales. Lower sales mean fewer jobs. Fewer jobs mean fewer people have the money to pay those prices, meaning they are spread between fewer people and the cost per person goes up again. It also further raises the tax burden on the rest of us when those people who would have had jobs, but don't, mean the government has to raise taxes again so those of us who still have jobs can pay what they need paid. At a certain point, a business will shut down completely, meaning that not only does nobody have a job there, it doesn't have owners or managers either, and its products are no longer available.

The upshot of this is that if you tell me you want economic growth, but what you do is enact policies that restrict growth and encourage constriction of the economy, I know which of the two contradictory positions I believe. And no matter how many cheerleaders you have, there comes a point when it's going to get through to even the most religious followers of Obama-ism.

BLAME WASHINGTON MORE THAN WALL STREET FOR THE FINANCIAL CRISIS (it's eighty two pages, but worth reading)

Michael Barone:

But I have noticed what I think is a paradox in the Geithner plan. He is asking the most unregulated parts of the financial system--hedge funds, private equity firms--to bail out the most regulated part of the financial system--the banks. With government help, or subsidy, of course. But of course the government isn't really regulated either, is it? Except, I suppose, through the political process.

Democrats like Barack Obama and Barney Frank, at least on the campaign trail or in sound bites, have portrayed the financial crisis as the product of deregulation. The solution, they say, is more regulation. In that vein Frank, one of the brainiest members of Congress, is proposing that the Federal Reserve become a regulator of systemic risk, with the power to regulate firms that because of their size or strategic position are of systemic importance.

Obama wants to be more European? Then maybe he should listen to the President of the EU: EU Presidency: Obama Plans 'a Way to Hell'

He slammed the U.S.' widening budget deficit and protectionist trade measures -- such as the "Buy America" -- and said that "all of these steps, these combinations and permanency is the way to hell."

Q and O with some good perspective:

It is also important to understand that "cutting the deficit in half" is a mask for the fact that it means he'll still be running up a record deficit of over 600 billion a year. That is not progress in deficit reduction or "fiscally responsible" government. But it sounds good when thrown out there in a sound bite

Yes, Bush was horrible in that he spent waaayyyy too much. I and many others in the libertarian and conservative camps said so repeatedly. But Obama has already left Bush's spending record that in the dust, and he's less than three months into his term. Not to mention "tu quoque" is an attempt to divert attention from Obama's indefensible deeds, rather than an actual defense of them, and a nasty strike against any claim to leadership ability that Obama might make. He's not a leader; he's an inciter of the mob.

Headed toward extinction?

Darwinism presupposes, and modern biology teaches, that all organisms breed to the limit of their available resources. Yet starting in the world's richest, best-fed nations during the 1970s,and now spreading throughout the developing world, we find birthrates falling below the levels needed to avoid long-term, and in many instances, short-term, population loss. The phenomenon has spread beyond Europe and Asia to Latin America.

Once upon a time, there were two primary reasons why people had kids. The first was survival of their personal gene pool, the second was old age insurance: someone to personally take care of them when they are too old to work any more. Social insurance programs worldwide together with increasing personal wealth have largely eliminated that second reason, vastly reducing the effective benefits of having children. Furthermore, in modern society the personal costs of having children are skyrocketing - not just money but time, constraints upon personal desire (I and my wife have at least four sets of free movie tickets her employer has given her, sitting in the desk drawer unused for years. It isn't that we don't want to go to free movies, it's that the constraints associated with the kids are preventing us), constraints upon personal space, etcetera. Everyone who has kids lives with this fact every day. Is it any wonder that people are looking at their individual costs and benefits of having children, and deciding to have fewer of them, or none at all?

(Let me say this, though: raising two children is the most rewarding and most important thing I will ever do in my life)

The children of a society, though, are its true future wealth. It is intellectually trivial to reverse the economic conditions that are causing birth rate to fall. It's simply a matter of finding the will, and find the will we must, because as Japan is discovering and China will soon, if there aren't enough workers in the next generation to pay for the social insurance programs, those social insurance programs will have no choice but to reduce benefits or even be eliminated entirely. Standards of living will slip as there aren't enough workers to run all the needed specializations in the economy. You take it from there.

By the way, our low savings rate as a society is also coupled with generous social insurance.

Memo to the prez: No free lunches

Now we are told that all those ambitious budget plans to overhaul health care, education, energy and taxes are going to cost one heck of a lot more than President Obama told us they would. At least the Congressional Budget Office says so, and while there may be some give in their estimate that we will have to borrow $9.3 trillion over the next 10 years if they go into effect, there is not much room to argue. Actually, one probably should bet on that estimate being conservative.

Does this really astound anyone? Not if they have been paying attention to initial estimates attached to initiatives dating back to the establishment of Social Security and then Medicare, whose sponsors' original cost estimates were a fairy tale designed to get them adopted. What is astounding is that the new president seems to believe he can accomplish this by increasing the bite on only the top 5 percent of taxpayers while giving the other 95 percent a cut.

Every time I hear about one of Obama's social engineering programs and the allegedly low costs for it, I can't help but think, "and then Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Great Pumpkin will hand out free manna and ambrosia to everyone!"

Dreaming of President Petraeus and an American Surge

You and me both, sir. You and me both.

Even the possibility of this is very good news: Scientists in possible cold fusion breakthrough

Researchers at a US Navy laboratory have unveiled what they say is "significant" evidence of cold fusion, a potential energy source that has many skeptics in the scientific community.

The scientists on Monday described what they called the first clear visual evidence that low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR), or cold fusion devices can produce neutrons, subatomic particles that scientists say are indicative of nuclear reactions.

Twenty years ago a couple of guys thought they had something, but nobody could reproduce their results. Cold Fusion has therefore acquired kind of a voodoo reputation in the scientific community. If this is really cold fusion, it has the potential for immense (and fairly portable) energy sources, and petroleum engineers become the guys who make interesting plastics and OPEC diminishes in importance (and income) by a factor of 10 at least.

On the other hand, don't break out the champagne yet

Paul Padley, a physicist at Rice University who reviewed Mosier-Boss's published work, said the study did not provide a plausible explanation of how cold fusion could take place in the conditions described.

"It fails to provide a theoretical rationale to explain how fusion could occur at room temperatures. And in its analysis, the research paper fails to exclude other sources for the production of neutrons," he told the Houston Chronicle.

The acid test will be if anyone else can reproduce their results. Expect that to take a while.

Obamateurism of the Day

Obama: It took us a couple of days because I like to know what I'm talking about before I speak.

So after the two days of research to find out what he's talking about, he didn't know that his own Treasury Secretary asked for the language that allowed the bonuses to be paid? Obama doesn't want previously written contracts to be honored? He doesn't want the people who just might know enough to protect the taxpayer's $180 billion (and climbing!) investment in AIG to stay, at a cost of $165 million, less than one tenth of one percent of the amount taxpayer's have at risk? Economic insanity.

Furthermore, Mr. "Constitutional Law Professor" is completely clueless about the fact that both bills of attainder, that target one specific person or group, and ex post facto laws such as the confiscatory tax he was calling for are explicitly prohibited in the Constitution?

There are many excellent reason for those prohibitions, by the way. Our founding fathers had experience with them via the british, and knew they were a far more fertile avenue of legally destroying political enemies (or anyone!) than anything else. To use a comparison, the Fourth Amendment protects against the manufacturing of evidence, while if Bills of Attainder or ex post facto or both were constitutional, there would be no need to manufacture evidence because the people in change could take down anyone, at any time, for any reason that struck them as sufficient.

Or is Mr. "Constitutional Law Professor" fully cognizant of that prohibition and intentionally trying to destroy those protections? I'd rather attribute it to stupidity, but he's supposed to be one of the smartest guys we've had as President. You can't have it both ways: Either he's terminally stupid about something he's supposed to be an expert on, or he is intentionally attacking two of the most important protections of constitutional liberties.

Or, of course, he doesn't mean a word of it and is politically grandstanding for the benefit of his ignorant supporters and whipping them into a frenzy for whatever purposes he may have. Take your pick, but I think that one is more reprehensible than stupidity, and gives directly attacking major constitutional protections a run for its money.

On the same subject, via Instapundit, an interesting article from Mark Steyn:

We have a president who shows no instinct for economic issues; a Treasury Department that, in a supposed crisis, is just one designated fall guy rattling around an all but empty building for whose senior positions no one has even been nominated; and thug legislators-for-life who bear far more direct responsibility for this mess posing as champions of da liddle guy in order to extend their already disastrous "oversight" ever deeper into the private sector. Things are going to get a lot worse.

The full letter Mr. Steyn references is here. Mind you, this is a one sided editorial, but it paints a compelling picture that he has earned that money and is entitled to it, ethically as well as contractually.

As opposed to the ignorant words of fomenting the rabble from Mr. Obama and his allies.

Those more I see of President Obama, the more I hope to discover something impeacheable for which even the Democratic Congress will have no alternative but to vote him out of office. Joe Biden may be stupid, but he doesn't have the ability to inspire millions of ignorant morons, which means the damage he would do is far more limited.

Why Toddlers Don't Do What They're Told

"For example, let's say it's cold outside and you tell your 3-year-old to go get his jacket out of his bedroom and get ready to go outside," Chatham explained. "You might expect the child to plan for the future, think 'OK it's cold outside so the jacket will keep me warm.' But what we suggest is that this isn't what goes on in a 3-year-old's brain. Rather, they run outside, discover that it is cold, and then retrieve the memory of where their jacket is, and then they go get it."

I would take issue with the proposed solution, though.