Well, what about catastrophic global cooling or something

New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming AlarmismNew NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism

By J. Taylor

NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth’s atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.

Study co-author Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite, reports that real-world data from NASA’s Terra satellite contradict multiple assumptions fed into alarmist computer models.

“The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show,” Spencer said in a July 26 University of Alabama press release. “There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans.”

In addition to finding that far less heat is being trapped than alarmist computer models have predicted, the NASA satellite data show the atmosphere begins shedding heat into space long before United Nations computer models predicted.

The new findings are extremely important and should dramatically alter the global warming debate.

Scientists on all sides of the global warming debate are in general agreement about how much heat is being directly trapped by human emissions of carbon dioxide (the answer is “not much”). However, the single most important issue in the global warming debate is whether carbon dioxide emissions will indirectly trap far more heat by causing large increases in atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds. Alarmist computer models assume human carbon dioxide emissions indirectly cause substantial increases in atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds (each of which are very effective at trapping heat), but real-world data have long shown that carbon dioxide emissions are not causing as much atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds as the alarmist computer models have predicted.

The new NASA Terra satellite data are consistent with long-term NOAA and NASA data indicating atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds are not increasing in the manner predicted by alarmist computer models. The Terra satellite data also support data collected by NASA’s ERBS satellite showing far more long wave radiation (and thus, heat) escaped into space between 1985 and 1999 than alarmist computer models had predicted. Together, the NASA ERBS and Terra satellite data show that for 25 years and counting, carbon dioxide emissions have directly and indirectly trapped far less heat than alarmist computer models have predicted.

In short, the central premise of alarmist global warming theory is that carbon dioxide emissions should be directly and indirectly trapping a certain amount of heat in the earth’s atmosphere and preventing it from escaping into space. Real-world measurements, however, show far less heat is being trapped in the earth’s atmosphere than the alarmist computer models predict, and far more heat is escaping into space than the alarmist computer models predict.

When objective NASA satellite data, reported in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, show a “huge discrepancy” between alarmist climate models and real-world facts, climate scientists, the media and our elected officials would be wise to take notice. Whether or not they do so will tell us a great deal about how honest the purveyors of global warming alarmism truly are.

The plan was to kill people, sir

The Banality of Evil

by Wendy McElroy

A headline from the UK Guardian reads "US soldier admits killing unarmed Afghans for sport."

"The plan was to kill people, sir." That is what Jeremy Morlock respectfully told an army judge about his participation in a "kill team" of soldiers in Afghanistan who targeted harmless civilians and then staged the corpses to look like dead insurgents. Members of the kill team took trophy photos of the murdered civilians; some kept body parts as mementos.

The foregoing describes evil. The word is not in fashion, perhaps because it is too closely associated with the evangelical right, or perhaps because it has been overused to the point of exhaustion.

What do I mean when I refer to an act as evil?

When I use the word, it is within the Randian framework of an action that is profoundly antilife and inflicted without just cause. By the word evil, I refer exclusively to human behavior that is intentional — not accidental and not coerced.

I agree with psychiatrists that bad behavior caused by mental conditions, such as schizophrenia, does not qualify; I disagree with those who discount free will and ascribe all malevolent behavior to such mental or emotional disorders. Just as some people make the intentional and uncoerced choice to be dishonest, others choose to destroy innocent life for profit or pleasure. Mankind has a vast range of preferences, and some people will always embrace those at the extremes.

And yet it is difficult to reconcile the photographs of a clean-shaven, all-American Morlock with the Morlock who sat so calmly in a courtroom and respectfully described the vicious murder of innocent people for sport.

For that matter, how can you explain the other soldiers in the kill team, or those who actively covered up for them?

Grappling with the issue of evil is nothing new to me. In that struggle, two authors in particular have been valuable: Hannah Arendt and Henry David Thoreau.

Hannah Arendt

In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) the German-American political theorist Hannah Arendt opened a unique window through which to gaze upon evil. Jewish by birth, Arendt escaped Nazi Europe in 1941 and later became a naturalized American citizen. In 1961, on behalf of the New Yorker magazine, Arendt reported on the Jerusalem trial of Adolph Eichmann, a high-level bureaucrat who had been instrumental in administering the Nazi death camps.

She opened the trial's transcript in order to examine a sadistic monster, but she closed it without finding one. Like his fellow Nazi Heinrich Himmler, who went from being a chicken farmer to heading the notoriously brutal SS, Eichmann seemed to be an ordinary man with a talent for carrying out orders. Arendt coined a term — the "banality of evil" — partly as a way to describe Eichmann's demeanor during the trial, in which he denied all responsibility for the mass murders on the grounds that he was just following orders; he was obeying the law.

In page after page, Eichmann evinced no guilt, malice, or insanity. Indeed, as a man on trial, the most remarkable emotion he displayed was a tendency to brag; Arendt called bragging "the vice that was Eichmann's undoing" because it led him to speak of atrocities that he had not been ordered to commit. To Arendt, it seemed Eichmann would rather die as a war criminal than live as a nobody.

Prisoner in Dystopia

Coal Mine Operator Ronnie Bryant Goes Galt

We can have jobs and lights that come on when we flip the switch, or we can have sanctimonious liberal horse crap. We can’t have both forever.

Via The Blaze.

At a recent kangaroo court hearing, Lilliputian bureauweenies and the thuggish cretins who elect our left-wing government raked industry over the coals for the supposed crime of providing Americans with jobs and electricity. At last one of the people holding our world up had had enough. Atlas Shrugged really is coming true — here’s what he told the crowd (transcript via David McElroy):

“My name’s Ronnie Bryant, and I’m a mine operator…. I’ve been issued a [state] permit in the recent past for [waste water] discharge, and after standing in this room today listening to the comments being made by the people…. [pause] Nearly every day without fail — I have a different perspective — men stream to these [mining] operations looking for work in Walker County [Alabama]. They can’t pay their mortgage. They can’t pay their car note. They can’t feed their families. They don’t have health insurance. And as I stand here today, I just … you know … what’s the use? I got a permit to open up an underground coal mine that would employ probably 125 people. They’d be paid wages from $50,000 to $150,000 a year. We would consume probably $50 million to $60 million in consumables a year, putting more men to work. And my only idea today is to go home. What’s the use? I don’t know. I mean, I see these guys — I see them with tears in their eyes — looking for work. And if there’s so much opposition to these guys making a living, I feel like there’s no need in me putting out the effort to provide work for them. So as I stood against the wall here today, basically what I’ve decided is not to open the mine. I’m just quitting. Thank you.” 

Prepare the printing press

Read China’s Lips

By Stephen S. Roach

The Chinese have long admired America’s economic dynamism. But they have lost confidence in America’s government and its dysfunctional economic stewardship. That message came through loud and clear in my recent travels to Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, and Hong Kong.

Coming so shortly on the heels of the subprime crisis, the debate over the debt ceiling and the budget deficit is the last straw. Senior Chinese officials are appalled at how the United States allows politics to trump financial stability. One high-ranking policymaker noted in mid-July, “This is truly shocking… We understand politics, but your government’s continued recklessness is astonishing.”

China is no innocent bystander in America’s race to the abyss. In the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990’s, China amassed some $3.2 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves in order to insulate its system from external shocks. Fully two-thirds of that total – around $2 trillion – is invested in dollar-based assets, largely US Treasuries and agency securities (i.e., Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). As a result, China surpassed Japan in late 2008 as the largest foreign holder of US financial assets.

Not only did China feel secure in placing such a large bet on the once relatively riskless components of the world’s reserve currency, but its exchange-rate policy left it little choice. In order to maintain a tight relationship between the renminbi and the dollar, China had to recycle a disproportionate share of its foreign-exchange reserves into dollar-based assets.

Those days are over. China recognizes that it no longer makes sense to stay with its current growth strategy – one that relies heavily on a combination of exports and a massive buffer of dollar-denominated foreign-exchange reserves. Three key developments led the Chinese leadership to this conclusion:

First, the crisis and Great Recession of 2008-2009 were a wake-up call. While Chinese export industries remain highly competitive, there are understandable doubts about the post-crisis state of foreign demand for Chinese products. From the US to Europe to Japan – crisis-battered developed economies that collectively account for more than 40% of Chinese exports – end-market demand is likely to grow at a slower pace in the years ahead than it did during China’s export boom of the past 30 years. Long the most powerful driver of Chinese growth, there is now considerable downside to an export-led impetus.

Second, the costs of the insurance premium – the outsize, largely dollar-denominated reservoir of China’s foreign-exchange reserves – have been magnified by political risk. With US government debt repayment now in play, the very concept of dollar-based riskless assets is in doubt.

In recent years, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and President Hu Jintao have repeatedly expressed concerns about US fiscal policy and the safe-haven status of Treasuries. Like most Americans, China’s leaders believe that the US will ultimately dodge the bullet of an outright default. But that’s not the point. There is now great skepticism as to the substance of any “fix” – especially one that relies on smoke and mirrors to postpone meaningful fiscal adjustment.

All of this spells lasting damage to the credibility of Washington’s commitment to the “full faith and credit” of the US government. And that raises serious questions about the wisdom of China’s massive investments in dollar-denominated assets.

Finally, China’s leadership is mindful of the risks implied by its own macroeconomic imbalances – and of the role that its export-led growth and dollar-based foreign-exchange accumulation plays in perpetuating those imbalances. Moreover, the Chinese understand the political pressure that a growth-starved developed world is putting on its tight management of the renminbi’s exchange rate relative to the dollar – pressure that is strikingly reminiscent of a similar campaign directed at Japan in the mid-1980’s.

However, unlike Japan, China will not accede to calls for a sharp one-off revaluation of the renminbi. At the same time, it recognizes the need to address these geopolitical tensions. But China will do so by providing stimulus to internal demand, thereby weaning itself from relying on dollar-based assets.

With these considerations in mind, China has adopted a very transparent response. Its new 12th Five-Year Plan says it all – a pro-consumption shift in China’s economic structure that addresses head-on China’s unsustainable imbalances. By focusing on job creation in services, massive urbanization, and the broadening of its social safety net, there will be a big boost to labor income and consumer purchasing power. As a result, the consumption share of the Chinese economy could increase by at least five percentage points of GDP by 2015.

Toxic green madness

Keystone ­versus green Keynesianism

Keystone jobs should matter more to Obama than green theology

By Peter Foster

You’d think that a government with an increasingly severe unemployment problem would be desperate to approve a project that would provide 20,000 ­direct jobs, even if that government does have ­bigger — but related — things on its mind this week.

While the alleged Aug. 2 drop-deadline for raising the U.S. government’s US$14.3-trillion debt ceiling is obsessing Washington, the State Department’s final review of TransCanada Corp.’s $7-billion Keystone XL pipeline, which is due two weeks later, is arguably almost as symbolically significant for the direction of the American economy, at least as long as Barack Obama occupies the White House.

There were certainly no references to energy in President Obama’s address to the U.S. nation on Monday night, save for the ritual swipe at oil company executives. Despite talk of compromise, the President effectively reaffirmed his apparently unshakeable belief that government spending is the route to a better society, and that all that’s holding him back from leading the march is those “millionaires and billionaires” who refuse to shoulder their share of the burden.

Mr. Obama portrayed himself as the defender of senior citizens versus owners of corporate jets, and of secretaries who pay higher tax rates than their hedge-fund-managing bosses (class warfare ammunition supplied by Warren Buffett).

He implied that his opponents want a land without education, new roads or food inspection. Citing slavery, economic justice and Thomas Jefferson, Mr. Obama made that trademark pinch-fingered gesture with which he indicates his grasp of the most minute detail of his own utter rightness.

However, House Speaker John Boehner quickly followed with a brief but devastating deflation of the notion that the President was the Great Compromiser. If there was a crisis, said Mr. Boehner, it was of the President’s own creation. Moreover, he noted, “Balance” in Mr. Obama’s Washington means: “We spend more, you’re taxed more.”

Despite the fact that both tax increases and further Keynesian “stimulus” now appear non-starters, Mr. Obama’s comprehension of where productive jobs originate still seems shaky. This is obvious from his devotion to a globally thermostatic green industrial strategy, which is the main reason for his administration’s foot-dragging over Keystone XL. The line, it is claimed, would not merely entrench the U.S. economy’s dependence on fossil fuels, but its attachment to “dirty” ones at that.

Keystone XL is currently designed to carry 700,000 barrels per day of diluted bitumen from the Alberta oil sands to the refineries of the Gulf coast, thus pushing out oil from less reliable sources, such as Venezuela. The line has been fought every step of the way by well-funded environmental non-governmental organizations, ­ENGOs, who have unleashed a vast campaign of disinformation, and even slapped a fatwa on Alberta tourism. They have been helped by the blanket coverage that recent pipeline spills have received, even though the incidence of such spills has been declining for decades relative to the size of the system. The cost of such spills (the bill for the cleanup of the Enbridge leak in Michigan will be more than US$500-million) is surely more than enough incentive to avoid them. Meanwhile, Keystone XL is the safest and most sophisticated pipeline ever built.

Ultimately, the ENGOs’ target is the oil sands themselves, which the green movement has chosen as a wonderfully anti-photogenic symbol of environmental devastation. The diluted bitumen that would be transported via Keystone XL has been demonized as “toxic sludge” that would eat through steel and pollute the Ogallala aquifer. Such claims are without foundation.

Admittedly, the ENGOs’ job has been made easier by the oil industry’s — not to mention Ottawa’s and Alberta’s — sloth in cranking up their defence, which is still less than stellar. The latest snafu occurred last week, when Canadian Environment Minister Peter Kent announced a new comprehensive environmental monitoring program for the oil sands, but apparently forgot to check who was going to pay for it.

The Harper government is, nevertheless, a stout supporter of Keystone XL, although it is also keen to cut domestic regulatory barriers to projects that would serve other foreign markets for oil-sands oil, such as Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline to the West Coast.

One would imagine that any sensible U.S. administration would be keen to secure as much Canadian oil as possible, even without the promise of pipeline jobs. However, at a time when the U.S. economy is losing the employment battle, the administration is still in thrall to environmental alarmism. Meanwhile, if the U.S. government receives a downgrade from ratings agencies, it will have little or nothing to do with the failure to raise the debt ceiling. Rather, it will be the consequence of an administration devoted to doubly toxic green Keynesianism.

Demanding dependency

From working class to incapacitated class

How radical activists shifted from viewing the working classes as powerful to pitying them as pathetic.

By Patrick Hayes 

Criticisms of the government’s ‘fit for work’ welfare tests betray a view among radical campaigners that, far from having the capacity to forge a living for themselves or even change the world, many working people are only fit for a sickbed.

Official UK government statistics released yesterday showed that, of the 1.3million Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) – formerly Incapacity Benefit – claims made between October 2008 and November 2010, only seven per cent of people attempting to claim incapacity benefits were actually deemed too ill to work. A further 17 per cent were categorised as fit for ‘work-related activities’ and a total of 39 per cent were deemed to be fully capable of working.

Many on the left have reacted strongly to these findings. The general secretary of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) Brendan Barber argued that this ‘much tougher’ test is cynically ‘designed to save the government money by excluding more people… These figures certainly don’t suggest that thousands of disabled people are suddenly “trying it on”’.

The vast majority of claimants probably weren’t ‘trying it on’. Following advice from government officials, many were undoubtedly led to believe they were genuinely incapable of working. And, without question, a proportion of them suffer from conditions that prevent them from doing so. But Barber’s comments assume that the individuals being ‘excluded’ from state support are allgenuinely disabled and unable to work. This fails to explain why, over a period of decades, the number of people claiming incapacity benefits has rocketed in a way that can’t possibly be explained by increasing numbers of people becoming ill.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the numbers of men claiming incapacity benefits rose sharply, increasing almost every single year, from 463,000 in 1981 to 1,276,000 in 1999. Tellingly, a significant proportion of these claims came from areas of the country which had seen a hollowing out of productive industries, and the jobs that they provided. As observed previously on spiked, it’s not feasible that so many people have actually fallen ill. Rather ‘the welfare state was cynically soaking up these people, desperately attempting to offset their potential political anger at being unemployed by inviting them to view their predicament as a health-based problem instead’.

Instead of being seen to be deprived of work by social and economic factors – such as factories closing down and the government lacking a strategy for economic growth - the jobless were instead recast as physically or mentally incapable of working. It’s understandable that some, not least those who have been led to believe they are incapacitated, now find it jarring to hear the government backtrack on this and redefine what it is to be incapacitated. But the extent to which some on the left have reacted to welfare reforms, viewing the unemployed as suffering from health-related problems, incapable of surviving without state help, jars even more.

As Guardian columnist John Harris wrote recently, our ‘flexible labour market and increasingly brutal welfare system are now so constructed that even if you are doing well, it is perfectly possible that you could fall ill’. We are all potentially vulnerable individuals who would face a nasty, brutish and short existence under the new system of welfare support. Riffing on the National Lottery slogan, Harris claims we are all fragile and potentially facing a life of ‘terror’ under the benefits system: ‘it could be you’.

This sense of utter dependency on the state for support is exemplified in the recent protests held against Atos Healthcare, the French-owned private company contracted by the government to carry out tests to see if someone should receive ESA. They carry banners declaring that, by deciding some people on benefits are actually capable of working, Atos is effectively committing murder, undertaking ‘unlawful killings’, ‘making money out of misery’ and depriving people of their ‘freedom’. Atos’ very name, according to one MP, generates a sense of ‘fear and loathing’ among those applying for benefits.

Although there are aspects of Atos’ bureaucratic ‘computer says no’ approach to assessing whether people are deserving of benefits that have been rightly criticised, the hysterical casting of Atos as ‘killers’ reveals an underlying attitude toward the people who are being assessed. Since when did people gain ‘freedom’ by demanding that the state support them? When did it become the role of progressives to emphasise the incapacity of working people?

Historically, working-class people were seen as active, decent, strong and capable of running their lives and of changing society. Now they are instead seen as incapable and in need of defence from harm and harassment. If the state doesn’t offer sufficient support and protection, so the protesters argue, then it’s leaving helpless working people for dead.

In other words, working-class people are weak and are in need of big, strong defenders like the trade unions. Once upon a time, the workers were seen as a force that could seize control of society; now, the working classes are increasingly seen as in need of nursing.

The Taxi Driver

Don’t turn Norway into Europe’s 11 September

Sections of the European liberal elite are trying to make moral mileage out of this rampage just as shamelessly as the right did with 9/11

By Brendan O’Neill 

When it was reported on Friday that there had been an explosion and an horrific mass shooting in Norway, many observers assumed that al-Qaeda or some other radical Islamist group had struck at the heart of peaceful Scandinavia. ‘Norway’s 9/11’, said the front page of the Sun on Saturday, with the subheading: ‘“Al-Qaeda” massacre.’ Yet when it was revealed that the alleged bomber and shooter is a Norway-born, blonde-haired, farm-owning Aryan, observers quickly bought into the idea that we were faced with something very different from an al-Qaeda attack. This wasn’t ‘Norway’s 9/11’ after all, but something more akin to Columbine-on-steroids, a right-wing madman letting off steam in a most barbaric fashion. As one Norwegian police official put it: this was ‘probably more Norway’s Oklahoma than its World Trade Centre’.

Yet this simplistic categorisation of contemporary terror assaults - where violent outbursts get slotted into files marked ‘Radical Islamist Fury’ or ‘Right-Wing Anger’ - makes too fine a distinction between acts that are actually very similar. Just because something like 7/7 in London was executed by men with dark hair and brown skin who claimed to be fighting on behalf of the Muslim ummah, while the bombing of Oslo and massacre on Utoya were carried out by a white guy who claimed to be protecting European Christian culture, that doesn’t mean these are diametrically different actions. What they have in common is far more important than what separates them. And, stripped of their pseudo-political garb, what unites today’s various terror tantrums, what makes these kind of people possible in the first place, is a very powerful culture of estrangement in modern society.

In much of the media, particularly amongst the respectable broadsheet press, there was a palpable sense of relief when it was revealed that the alleged killer is white with far-right tendencies. This means he is the kind of person we can unambiguously hate. Where Islamist terror attacks, from 9/11 to 7/7, induce in some liberal observers torn and tortured feelings, where they want to condemn the violence but also feel the need to explain it as a natural reaction to evil Western foreign policy, Anders Behring Breivik is someone they can despise in an uncomplicated way. This means that while the attacks may not be ‘Norway’s 9/11’, they could well be the cultural elite’s 9/11 - in the sense that this is an act which the influential liberal classes may seek to politicise in an opportunistic fashion, to make moral mileage out of, in the same way that the right did after 11 September 2001.

Indeed, it is striking the extent to which, post-Utoya, left-leaning observers are already adopting the role normally played by the right in the wake of Islamist terror attacks. That is, they’re ratcheting up the politics of fear, only over the rise of far-right violence rather than radical Islam, and are pinning the blame for these actions on ‘backward European attitudes’ in the same way the right pins the blame for Islamist terror on ‘backward Muslim culture’. So one liberal observer said, almost with a sense of glee, certainly relief, that the attacks in Norway show that the threat to modern society comes not from Muslims but from ‘the heart of darkness [that] lies buried deep within ourselves’, within the ‘white Nordic male’. He said the attacks highlighted xenophobic attitudes in Norway, ‘the rage with which Islamophobia is being spread’. Another commentator blamed the violence on Norway’s ‘racist demons’: ‘Many Norwegians don’t want their idyll spoiled, by either joining the EU, or by turning multicultural - and it is this nativist side of the country that has now turned horrifyingly murderous.’

It is grotesque to depict Breivik as some kind of inevitable product of Norwegian culture, of the Norwegian people’s apparently ‘nativist’ and selfish attitudes. Such collective guilt-mongering, where one cold-blooded killer is seen as an expression of an entire people’s warped national traits, is just as objectionable as when elements on the right claim that something like 9/11 or 7/7 are the logical end results of backward Islam and the outlook of its billion-odd barmy adherents. What we are witnessing post-Norway is a PC exploitation of an act of terror. The prejudices of the right following Islamist terror attacks have been replaced by the equally problematic prejudices of the cultural elite. So all the chattering classes’ pet fears - from their belief that a great number of ordinary people in Europe are xenophobic to their hatred of anyone who is anti-EU (Norway has been slated for ‘not wanting to join the EU’) - are starting to get an airing on the back of these violent assaults. Where the right blames isolated acts of al-Qaeda terror on Islam, the cultural elite blames an isolated act of right-wing terror on ‘raging’ Islamophobia. But is it really any more progressive to locate the origins of modern terrorism in the apparently backward beliefs of the white European hordes than it is to find it in the strange habits of the brown Muslim mob?

The speedy moralisation of the Norway attacks, the shameless liberal aping of what the right does after Islamist assaults, suggests that the political classes’ primary instinct post-terror is to score points. Because if they were to put aside their already-existing prejudices and look at modern-day terror tantrums in a cool-headed fashion, they would surely note that there is not that much difference between what Breivik did in Norway on Friday and what Mohamed Atta did in New York on 9/11 or what Mohammad Sidique Khan did in London on 7/7. All of these terror attacks, executed by educated and not poor young men, seem driven by an extreme sense of estrangement. Indeed, for all of Breivik’s rambling complaints about multiculturalism, where he allegedly declared war against that political ideology and its ‘cultural Marxist’ cheerleaders, the most striking thing is how much his outlook, like that of the 7/7 attackers, seems to have been moulded by the estrangement-inducing politics of multiculturalism.

Some commentators, including us at spiked, have argued that acts such as 7/7 are more an extreme expression of the multicultural outlook than they are a traditional form of Islamic fundamentalism. Multiculturalism’s celebration of identity over solidarity, its promotion of the politics of self-pity and victimhood, of a perception that minority identities are continually under threat from the post-colonial and xenophobic attitudes of both society’s rulers and its native masses, found its most fanatical expression in the London bombings. In the bombers’ extraordinary levels of self-pity, combined with their arrogant belief that their Muslim identity gave them the right to hector the British throng, we got a glimpse of how far the multicultural ethos can be pushed. Breivik, for all his anti-multicultural pretensions, is not that different. Indeed, it is remarkable how much his so-called critique of multiculturalism seems bound by the parameters of multiculturalism itself.

In his claim that he wanted to protect ‘white Christian identity’ from being overrun and crushed by an external powerful force - in this case Muslim immigrants - Breivik is merely indulging in an alternative form of multiculturalism. In different ways, both the 7/7 bombers and Breivik express the same sense of cultural paranoia, of cultural siege and victimhood. In recent years the right-wing critique of multiculturalism has ironically been shaped by the ethos of multiculturalism itself. From the English Defence League (which Breivik apparently had contact with) to authors who fret about Muslim immigration into Europe, there has been an attempt by right-wing elements to transform whiteness and Christianess into threatened identities, under siege from an almost colonialist tidal wave of Otherness. This sounds remarkably similar to the outlook of radical Islamists. Both groups accentuate and advertise their victim status and effectively compete for the respect of the overlords of identity-management in the multiculturalist elite. Where right-wingers warn of the rise of ‘Eurabia’, Islamists fret about the return of Christian crusaders; where right-wing activists claim their ‘white identity’ is not being accorded respect, Islamists claim their ‘Muslim identity’ is treated badly. The outlook of both groups is informed very powerfully by the victimology and craving for recognition inherent in multiculturalism.

Breivik’s alleged hatred of multiculturalism actually seems to be driven by a belief that it does not sufficiently respect his cultural identity; his violent act can be seen as a crazy, barbaric attempt to expand the remit of the politics of multiculturalism. (This is not to argue, by the way, that the EDL or anti-immigration thinkers bear any responsibility for Breivik’s violence. They do not.)

What ties something like 7/7 to the Norway attacks is today’s specific culture of estrangement. The nurturing of cultural particularism, the promotion of self-obsession over socialisation, of individual identity over collective citizenship, can create a sometimes volatile atmosphere. It can give rise to social envy, identity-based competition, a profound sense of cultural disconnection. Modern terrorism looks like the most extreme expression of these problems. Indeed, for all their grand political talk, it is notable that both the 7/7 cell and Breivik launched attacks, not against their alleged enemies (Western imperialists and Muslim crusaders respectively), but against the everyday inhabitants of their own societies. Theirs is a haughty violence of estranged rage, rather than anything to do with traditional political outlooks. Their tantrums have more in common with the outlook of Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver, though on a far more terrifying scale, than they do with the politics of the past.

Who is this stranger?

Our Ten-Trillion-Dollar Man

by Victor Davis Hanson

Borrowing Is No Longer Stimulus?

The Congressional Budget Office not long ago forecast that Barack Obama’s $1 trillion-plus annual deficits — scheduled over the next decade — would result in almost another $10 trillion in aggregate debt. Going back to the pre-Bush tax rates this time won’t balance the budget. Slashing discretionary spending will not. So large has the splurge become, and so hooked are the constituencies of federal money, that massive cuts to entitlements necessary to stave off financial implosion may well prompt Greek-like protests.

That staggering sum was apparently conventional wisdom until the November 2010 election. But now there is fear that at some point in the future, Obama will not be known as the first African-American president. Nor will he be cited even as the hope-and-change phenomenon of 2008. Instead, posterity shall know him as the single greatest borrower in American presidential history, a novice who nearly wrecked the U.S. economy by borrowing over $4 billion a day without any feasible proposal how to pay back such a vast sum — taking a post-recession recovery and turning it into a stagflationary mess. In the third year of his tenure, Obama is still left only with “Bush did it” as an explanation of what went wrong.

Obama has managed the nearly impossible: the greatest peacetime deficits in U.S. history — about $1.5 trillion per year — in his first three years achieved almost no economic expansion. Instead, unemployment is chronic and stays over 9.2%; growth is stagnant; gas is sky-high — and the president seems stunned that none of what he had promised came to pass. All his liberal nostrums have been tried and been found wanting. There is no successful EU model, no winning blue-state statist paradigm for guidance.

Remember that his key advisors — Goolsbee, Orszag, Romer, Summers — have now quit and did not last even three years, their policies orphaned by the very parents who spawned them. Even the president joked that “shovel-ready” was a joke. When he evokes “stimulus” and “investment,” in response, we do not even think “borrowing” and “taxes,” but rather “he’s clueless again.” The old argument that we simply did not borrow enough (say, $5, $6, $7 billion a day?) is laughable beyond the point of caricature, given that the administration followed the Bush record of record peacetime debt. The only mystery is whether the massive Obama borrowing was a product of incompetence, a poorly thought out gorge the beast way of increasing taxes and redistributing income, or a more cynical effort at creating a permanent constituency of millions of new food stamp recipients and federal workers. Or more than that still.

Your Debt And None Of Our Own

Obama himself recently proposed a massive deficit budget that not a single Democrat in the Senate could vote for; then suddenly he flipped, and said that red ink of the sort that he ran up was now unsustainable. When did the president of the United States metamorphosize from the greatest Keynesian in presidential history to a fiscal hawk — January? March? April 1?

As he calls for higher taxes, he still has not offered any plan whatsoever that details where the president himself would cut. Remember that he conceded in December that higher taxes were bad; but by July they were then good again. He courts Wall Street one day for campaign money, yet on another calls them “fat cat” bankers and deplores their jets. Food stamps recipients now number 50 million — and we dare not imagine that even one has taken a dime without good cause.

The would-be employer is told to hire, but on what confident supposition, what rationale? That he knows well the tax rate to come, the health care costs to come, the regulations to come, the pro-business, veteran CEO appointee to come, the next presidential slur to come? Apparently Obama believed that capitalists were so greedy, so wealthy, so money-hungry that they would not mind much the redistributive obstacles he erected.

He talks grandly of getting America back to work, as his subordinates try to close down a Boeing aircraft plant, layer more regulations and burdens on energy production, reverse the order of creditors in the Chrysler mess, and take over GM — even as he continues the old “spread the wealth” and “redistributive change” adolescent rants with newer, sillier faculty lounge concoctions, claiming that at some point we have made enough money and that he himself has hundreds of thousands of dollars in income that he does not need and thus should have higher taxes on. (If so, please, help the Treasury out by offering to pay the gas for the Costa del Sol, Vail, and Martha’s Vineyard first-family freebies). One expects such banalities from the college dorm lounge, but not the middle-aged president of the United States.

Carter 2.0

Abroad the misdirection, confusion, and petulance mirror-image the debt mess. In Libya we have no mission aim, no methodology, and no desired outcome — our consolation only that Libya is a tiny country compared to a nearly 30-million person Afghanistan or Iraq. Obama went to the Arab League and the UN, but not the U.S. Congress for authorization — but to do what? Help the rebels? Enforce a no-fly-zone? Kill Gaddafi? Overthrow the government? All, some, or none?

All such mission objectives have come and gone. Now Italy has joined Germany and half of NATO in opposing the effort — apparently on the logic that either Obama will eventually give up on an oil-rich Gaddafi, or that he should, given the bleak replacement prospects. France, which cooked up the campaign, is fence-sitting. Is this the new multilateral “leading from behind”? The only reason I can think why we bombed Gaddafi, and then allowed him to survive, is that we ourselves are terrified of the possible end-game and aftermath, given that we have little idea of who the rebels are, and even less whether they would be better, the same, or worse than the horrific status quo. If and when they storm Tripoli, expect a pogrom against any sub-Saharan African in Gaddafi’s pay, or, rather, any sub-Saharan African in general still in Libya.

The uncertainty in Libya is like that in Afghanistan, which the president once praised as the good war, then failed to meet his commanders for months, then escalated, then suddenly decided to start pulling out in fears of reelection in 2012, even as he appointed his fourth ground commander in less than three years. All that was sort of like pontificating that drilling new oil does not lower gas prices, but pumping previously drilled oil out of the strategic petroleum reserve apparently might in time before November 2012. Or was it similar to praising campaign finance reform, then being the first president to reject it? Or was it analogous to blasting Goldman Sachs and BP after hitting them up for cash and becoming their most favored recipient?

Bush Obama Did It.

Remember the Obama 2007-8 demagoguery on the war on terror? We live now in Lala land where the bad Bush’s Guantanamo, Predators, renditions, tribunals, preventative detention, Iraq, Afghanistan, wiretaps, and intercepts have become the good Obama’s protocols. We, the public, are supposed to nod and in Orwellian fashion get with the new Ministry of Information line, screaming at Bush on the big screen as the bad becomes good, the old good bad.

Remember the Cairo mythological speech, the falsehoods about an Islamic-enhanced Enlightenment and Renaissance, a multicultural Cordoba (with few Muslims in the late 15th century?) being an Islamic beacon of tolerance during the Inquisition? Remember the administration commentary on the underwear bomber, on Maj. Hasan, on the Ground Zero mosque, on trying KSM in New York? The al Arabiya interview, the sermons to Israel, the bowing to Saudi royals?

Juxtapose all that with the Obama’s administration outlawing of “jihadist,” of “terrorism,” of “Islamist.” His team instead gave us “overseas contingency operations” and “man-caused disasters,” seemed to think that the Muslim Brotherhood is secular, and proclaimed that Israel — not Hamas, not Hezbollah, not Iran, not Syria (recall Assad the “reformer”) — is the problem in the Middle East.

Obama Is Obama

So we have what we have always had — the most partisan and the least experienced man in the U.S. Senate as president, elected by a perfect storm of events (e.g., the 2008 meltdown, the media adulation, the anemic McCain candidacy, the furor over Bush and the Iraq war, the orphaned election without a single incumbent, etc.), in which no one was allowed to ask “Who is this stranger?” and “What has he ever done?”, in which the media finally gave up its last shred of impartiality and became a megaphone, as we were assured that Mr. Obama’s most intimate associates were really total strangers, his once praised avid church-going was merely sporadic, his most partisan voting record was in truth bipartisan, and his bad habits of saying disturbing things were simply a symptom of racialist, raise-the-bar nitpicking on behalf of his Neanderthal critics.

In short, Obama came into office with all the Carteresque assumptions on how to take over a private-sector economy and outsource foreign policy to international bodies. He now finds to his utter amazement — as Carter discovered in late 1979 after Teheran, Afghanistan, and Central America — that in the real world none of what worked in word worked in deed. Those who assured Obama that his Harvard lounge fantasies were real have either quit, are now offering new advice, or are criticizing him for once taking them at their word.

So what is he left with? Not much other than hoping that all the ten-trillion-dollar man’s printed money finally starts inflation to coincide with the 2012 election. Otherwise, we get only the same-old, same-old: blame Bush for the deficit each week; or a slur about starving granny with Social Security cuts; or a speech from an African-American congresswoman from the floor of the House attesting to the racism behind doubting Obama can do the job. Nothing much more than that.

The Wages of the 1960s

Obama, you see, is our nemesis. He is a totem, the logical manifestation of a warped media, the reification of some crazy — and arrogant — ideas about redistributive politics, the statist economy, and cultural and social life that permeated American life the last forty years. He is the president with a 1,000 faces that we have all seen at work, on TV, throughout American life, and at some point the odds determined that we had to have a rendezvous with him— perhaps a catharsis to teach us the wages of Keynesian debt, of a social policy contrary to human nature with its equality of result doctrines, of an all-powerful, all-growing unaccountable government, of the now hip ambiguity about past American protocols and history. Obama is the exaggeration of all the dubious ideas that arose since the 1960s — brought to fruition on his watch, delivered by mellifluous cadences by an untouchable persona.

In fact, a Barack Obama was long overdue. Had he not appeared out of nowhere in 2008, we would have surely had to invent him.

If you didn't invite me to the big take-off, don't invite me to the crash landing

Debt-Ceiling Chicken

By Thomas Sowell

The big news, as far as the media are concerned, is the political game of debt-ceiling chicken that is being played by Democrats and Republicans in Washington. But, however much the media are focused on what is happening inside the Beltway, there is a whole country outside the Beltway -- and the time is long overdue to start thinking about what is best for the rest of the country, not just for right now but for the long haul.

However the current debt-ceiling crisis turns out, the current economic turmoil in financial markets around the world should cause some serious thoughts about the long run, and about the whole idea of a national debt-ceiling.

Some people may have been shocked when the credit-rating firm Moody's recently suggested that the debt-ceiling law be repealed, in order to avoid fiscal crises which can throw world financial markets into turmoil that can injure countries around the world.

Anyone who wants to show that Moody's is wrong should be prepared to show the actual benefits of the debt-ceiling, not its goals or hopes. That will not be easy, if possible at all.

Too many policies, programs and institutions are judged by what they are supposed to do, rather than by what they actually do and the consequences of their actions. The United Nations, for example, survives as a glorious idea, despite how corrupt, counterproductive and even dangerous its actions are.

The national debt-ceiling law should be judged by what it actually does, not by how good an idea it seems to be. The one thing that the national debt-ceiling has never done is to put a ceiling on the rising national debt. Time and time again, for years on end, the national debt-ceiling has been raised whenever the national debt gets near whatever the current ceiling might be.

Regardless of what it is supposed to do, what the national debt-ceiling actually does is enable any administration to get all the political benefits of runaway spending for the benefit of their favorite constituencies -- and then invite the opposition party to share the blame, by either raising the national debt ceiling, or by voting for unpopular cutbacks in spending or increases in taxes.

The Obama administration is a classic example. When all its skyrocketing spending bills were being rushed through Congress without even being read, the Democrats had such overwhelming majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives that Republicans had all they could do to get a word in edgewise -- even though their words had no chance of stopping, or even slowing down, the spending of trillions of dollars.

Now that the bill is coming due for all that spending and borrowing, Republicans are suddenly being invited in to share the blame for either raising the national debt ceiling or for whatever other unpopular measures will be legislated.

Many years ago, someone said, "If you didn't invite me to the big take-off, don't invite me to the crash landing." This was Obama's big spending spree, but "bipartisanship" requires Republicans to either split the bill or be blamed if the government shuts down or defaults.

What would happen if there were no national debt-ceiling law?

Those who got the political benefits from handing out trillions of dollars of the taxpayers' money (plus borrowed money) would also get the clear and sole blame for the resulting skyrocketing national debt and all the unpopular consequences.

Those people who want serious and substantial spending cuts are absolutely right in what they want. There are not only government programs that need to be cut but whole government agencies, including Cabinet-level Departments, that are not merely useless but positively harmful on net balance.

There are a lot of things that could be cut, and should be cut, instead of defaulting on the nation's debts. But that is not likely to happen, if Obama and his media chorus can instead blame the Republicans for forcing a government shutdown or a credit default.

Regardless of how the current crisis is resolved, Moody's suggestion of repealing the national debt-ceiling law deserves some very serious thought, because that law is the crucial factor in the political games that allow big spenders to blame others for the consequences of their own irresponsibility.

Those who say that the reckless spending and reckless borrowing of the Obama administration are the roads to ruin are absolutely right.

Too many policies and institutions are judged by what they are supposed to do, rather than by what they actually do.