The Razor

The exact importance of the theft of euros from Cypriot banks this past weekend is difficult to determine at this stage but cannot be understated. The European Union government is stealing the private property from citizens and handing it to the wealthy backers of the banks. It is a bank robbery in reverse as this cartoon below shows:

The EU spin machine is trying to hide this truth, calling the 6.7%/9.9% theft a “wealth tax.” Mark J. Grant writing at ZeroHedge puts the lie to this bit of obfuscation:

Let’s get some things straight and look what has happened directly in the face. There was no tax on the bank accounts in Cyprus. There still is no tax; the Cyprus Parliament has not passed it and will not vote on it until tomorrow so whatever action takes place it is retroactive. Next, this was not enacted by Cyprus. The people from Nicosia did not go to the Summit and ask to have the bank accounts in their country minimized to help pay the bills. Far from it; the nations of Europe, Germany, France, the Netherlands and the rest, demanded that this take place, a “fait accompli,” the President of Cyprus said and Europe annexes Cyprus. Let’s be quite clear; the European Union has confiscated the private property of the citizens in Cyprus without debate, legislation or Parliamentary agreement.

If someone breaks into your home while your away and steals 10% of your possessions, we call it burglary and Society prosecutes and jails the thief if caught. If you run a small shop and the local mafia sends some thugs to extract a 10% “business tax” to do business on their turf, it’s called “extortion” and authorities prosecute it as a crime. In the United States the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution states citizens “shall not be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation,” but even this has not prevented the abuse of eminent domain laws, most recently in New London Connecticut in a case that reached the US Supreme Court (Kelo v. City of New London). Europeans love to take Americans to task for our outdated or overly-restrictive constitution, yet that piece of parchment does at least stand between an abusive government backed by force and the powerless citizen.

The EU spinmeisters will also tar Cyprus with the same brush they use on the Greeks, Italians and Spanish – the southern EU states that spend too much and work too little, while the industrious and spend-thrift northern EU states (e.g. Germany) bail them out. But let’s not forget what a bank bailout does and does not do. A bank bailout does not punish debtor nations for laziness, it rewards the investors and owners of banks for their failures to practice due diligence and lend accordingly. Bank bailouts shift the losses the wealthiest would suffer onto the balance sheets of governments and the taxpayers who fund them. Since the vast majority of tax payers are of modest means, bank bailouts benefit the rich at the expense of the poor. Germany isn’t bailing out Greece because it’s generous; it’s bailing them out because wealthy Germans who own the banks would lose their shirts if the banks were allowed to go bankrupt.

For months, really years now, the world has watched the EU try to hold itself together, not because it worried about Greeks or Spaniards starving in the streets, but rather to protect the rich who fund the banks and also exercise undue influence on the government. Cypriots would not lose 10% of their money if the banks failed because the banks are covered by deposit insurance, but the wealthy Germans who backed the banks would lose their investments. Similarly if Greece refused to pay its debt and left the euro, Greeks would be freed from the burden of austerity measures dictated by Germany and be able to prosper with a devalued currency, but the German investors who back the banks who lent money to Greece would suffer.

In 1992 the European Union heralded a new beginning for the continent promising economic cooperation and prosperity for its peoples. Two decades on the EU has become a grotesque caricature that resorts to petty theft to survive in order to protect its wealthy elite. Pathetic.

UPDATE: Walter Russell Meade disagrees, writing, ” Any sentient depositor in a Cypriot bank had to know that things weren’t right. The dubious nature of the Cypriot banking system has been a notorious fact for almost a generation; during all this time Cypriots seemed perfectly happy that their country was running an offshore money laundry for some of the nastiest people around.”

I respect Meade a lot, and you will will find more links to his articles on this site than any other, but I believe the good professor is wrong in his conclusions. First, as recently as July 2011 Cypriot banks passed European Banking Authority (EBA) stress tests. It’s not as if everyone knew Cypriot banks were wobbly and it was only a matter of time before they collapsed. Second, these banks were operating under EBA rules and authority so if they were indeed “running an offshore money laundry for some of the nastiest people around,” they were doing so under EU regulation. Finally, if these accounts were held by “nasty people” why didn’t the EU charge them with crimes or go to court to confiscate their money? There are all types of nasty people sitting in jails around the USA waiting for their day in court, and that day will come and they will be afforded due process and allowed to defend themselves. Would Meade support pronouncing all of them guilty and order them to serve prison sentences simply because they were nasty?

I don’t care a wit about how the money was acquired in those bank accounts. What I care about is the unprecedented decision to steal private property without due process. There are ways that dirty money can be tracked and expunged from the banking system. Within the USA there are numerous processes in place that prevent funds being funneled to rogue regimes like Iran or nasty characters like Mexican drug lords, but everyone, drug lord and drug abuser are afforded due process before their money is confiscated.

By stealing money from bank accounts, the EU is courting a disaster whose scale threatens world prosperity. A bank run in Europe would destabilize the entire economic system, from Cyprus to South Africa and New York to Nanjing. The international economic system is robust but it is not indestructible, and History has shown time and time again that the Achilles Heel of the system is the banks, and their weakness is the freedom of depositor to take their cash. Break the trust with the depositor, and the results are always catastrophic.

Update 2: The Cypriot parliament has told the EU to take a long run off a short pier. No one knows what happens next. Interesting times.

Imagine waking up one morning and finding out that while you were asleep someone accessed your bank account and stole 10% of your money.

That’s the rude awakening the citizens of the island nation Cyprus had this weekend, after the European Union presented the Cypriot government with an offer it could not refuse – confiscate 9.9% of bank deposits over 100,000 Euro, 6.7% of anything below that – or watch their banks go bankrupt. The Cypriot government, in power for less than a month, chose the former route, and the people of Cyprus ran to ATMs and drained the machines of as much cash as they could before the machines ran out; all attempts at electronically transferring funds were cancelled by the government.

But fear not, “European officials said it would not set a precedent.”

Funny thing about precedents: they tend to set themselves regardless of what an unelected bureaucrat in Brussels says. Banking is a fragile affair that relies on trust. People hand their money over to the bank and trust they can get it back. Once that trust is broken in Cyprus, who’s to guarantee the trust in Ireland, in Italy, Greece or Spain will remain? The same group of EU bureaucrats who broke it in Cyprus?

It’s difficult not to think a rubicon has been crossed, that punishing depositors to allow lenders to avoid the consequences of their poor investment decisions will remain localized in Cyprus. Is it the fault of depositors the banking sector is 8x bigger in Cyprus than elsewhere? Without trust, people will pull their wealth out of banks and stash it under their mattresses. They will convert it into foreign currencies not threatened by confiscation, or transform it into gold and silver.

In order to counter these moves governments tend towards oppression, banning forex transactions, limiting transfers of money abroad and confiscating and banning the ownership of precious metals, tactics used by the United States government under the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s. Such tactics may annoy the wealthiest citizens of a country, but they don’t suffer much. With armies of attorneys and tax accountants at their disposal the wealthy are able to shield their assets from the thievery of governments. Lacking those resources the middle and lower classes are the ones who suffer the most.

For years the fragility of the European Union has been on display, with agreement upon agreement announced on a seemingly monthly basis. The Cassandras who have been predicting the collapse of the Euro have been shouting for so long that their din has disappeared into the background. But eventually anything that is under enough strain will break, and do so suddenly and in unpredictable ways. It’s worth remembering that on the eve of World War I, war was expected yet it began not with a massive attack on a large country like Austria or France, but with the assassination of a minor Austrian nobleman in the far-flung province leading to the declaration of war against tiny Serbia. The single bullet that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand set off World War I which in turn laid the groundwork for the following World War. Could this be the single bullet that sets the death of the European Union in motion? Have the Europeans finally broken their own economic system by stealing from the Cypriots? The confiscation is predicted to net 6 billion euro against a 13 billion euro bailout package. The relatively insignificant sum raised by the confiscation may come to haunt the Europeans for days, weeks, perhaps even decades to come just as the ghost of Archduke Ferdinand haunted Europe through the trenches, the blitzkrieg, and the Holocaust that followed decades later.

It will be interesting to see how depositors respond in Spain, Ireland, Portugal, Greece and Italy over the coming days. These economies are so fragile to begin with that it is unlikely the EU could survive even a small bank run or investor panic. It is quite likely, though I’m not foolish enough to say exactly when, the EU will unravel very soon, with countries refusing to abide by the dictates of Brussels, drop out of the Euro, and face the world on their own. There’s even a chance the government of Cyprus will renege on the deal, and the nation be forced out of the Euro. Such an action would in the short term be worse for Cypriot depositors, who could see losses of 25% or more as their Euro assets are changed into Cypriot Pounds, but over the long term such devaluation would allow Cyprus to recover at its own pace without suffering the draconian economic program demanded by the EU.

At the very least it makes one realize how little governments respect the hard work and sacrifices of their own citizens, and that the gold bugs aren’t completely nuts after all.

Update: Via ZeroHedge, RBS analysts explain the situation (I’ll pretend to forget that RBS itself went down in flames only to be resurrected by bailout a few years back). Cyprus deposits total €126.4bn, or over 7-times GDP. Much of that money is of Russian origin, which is why the EU thinks the Cypriots will swallow the medicine. But Russians aren’t the ones draining ATMs, Cypriots are. When Spaniards, Italians and Greeks see the freak out in Cyprus, even the dullest of them will question whether their assets are safe from EU bureaucrats. And it will also be interesting to see how Russia takes the hit. Russia isn’t the most magnanimous nation, so expect it to gain something from the mess – like a Mediterranean port.

UPDATE: What the hell is wrong with me? Jack Snyder in the comments section points out that I leapt to conclusions without learning the facts behind the Munir Hussain case. As is often the case he’s right. Hussain crossed the line by attacking his attacker outside of his house after he and his family were safe. Had I done this first I would probably not have written the piece below, or at least, without as much piss and vinegar. I’m sorry for this mistake. SK———-
The Brits don’t seem to think self defense is a human right.

In 2009, the millionaire businessman Munir Hussain fought back with a metal pole and a cricket bat against a knife-wielding burglar who tied up his family at their home in Buckinghamshire. Hussain was jailed for two and a half years, despite his attacker being spared prison.

Appeal judges reduced the sentence to a year’s jail, suspended.

How very sporting of them. A knife wielding burglar ties up a man’s family and he gets prison for fighting the guy off with a cricket bat and metal pole while the assailant walks free? Are you serious? No wonder the Brits don’t understand Americans. I would have shot dead a knife-wielding burglar who tied up my family, not just battered them about the head with cricket bats and metal poles and slept well at night thanks to the Castle laws on the books here in North Carolina, which ironically enough derive from English common law that states “an Englishman’s home is his castle.”

Honestly, I love the UK and the British people, but I’m sometimes simply stunned by how… wussified the English have become. What the hell happened to fighting on the beaches, fields and streets and never surrendering? The Nazis would have conquered this lot in a fortnight.

So Ryuichi Sakamoto and Kraftwerk headline an anti-nuclear power concert in Japan. Both Sakamoto and Kraftwerk are considered pioneers in the electronic music frontier, and as an avid electronic music fan myself I appreciate the music of both.

Kraftwerk Lobbies for Fossil Fuels

The interesting fact about electronic music is that by definition it requires electrons, and lots of them. One cannot play electronic music without them the way a folk musician can pick up an acoustic guitar and play folk music. Although I believe it would be intriguing to have a full acoustic orchestra play techno music, electronic music simply cannot be done without electricity, and that requires generation from fossil fuels, wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, and nuclear sources. Japan is only 16% energy self-sufficient, and nuclear power provides 13% of its energy needs down from about a 24% prior to the disaster. But it hasn’t replaced nuclear power with renewables such as wind or solar. Even if it wanted to do so Japan lacks the space for solar and wind farms, so it has substituted coal, natural gas and oil.

Having an electronic music concert at night when solar power is not available to power the instruments, computers, sound boards, amplifiers, speakers, lighting effects, communications gear, air conditioning, and transportation to and from the venue to protest a form of power that such events require allows a connoisseur of irony to indulge in one of modern life’s increasingly common pleasures.

In my view the backlash against nuclear power since the Fukushima disaster is misguided. All Fukushima reactors survived one of the largest earthquakes in modern history and operated as designed. The failure was one of imagination: siting all backup power where a tsunami could destroy it. Backup systems should have been redundant and sited in several locations immune to all possible waves. The disaster presents an opportunity to learn from mistakes and make nuclear power even safer than it is today just as flight went from being one of the most dangerous ways to travel to the safest in less than a century. More people die in coal mining and solar panel manufacturing and installation every year than have died during the entire history of nuclear power generation. I’ve always believed that people fear nuclear power because of the images of the atomic bomb survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, plus the awe-inspiring power of images of above ground atomic bomb blasts and the fact that we cannot see, taste, smell or touch radiation. The irrational fear of nuclear power makes otherwise intelligent people act stupid, and the anti-nuke movement is filled with scientists, engineers and others who should know better.

Concerts like No Nukes 2012 are more of an emotional reaction than a rational one. For environmentalists concerned about global warming, nuclear power presents unlimited carbon-free power. To avoid using nuclear power, fossil fuels must be substituted, meaning increased carbon emissions. These are not a problem for those of us who are not global warming alarmists, but it must be a terrible dilemma for those who are. Conservation can only do so much in a modern world increasingly reliant on technology, and besides, isn’t an electronic music concert held at night for thousands by European musicians flying from the other side of a planet to perform a luxury that a warming world can’t afford? It would have been much more effective to have had the concert completely online, with Kraftwerk performing from Europe during the day, using solar panels to power their instruments while Sakamoto used hydroelectric to power his portion of the broadcast – unless of course Kraftwerk, Sakamoto and the organizers of No Nukes 2012 really aren’t concerned with their carbon footprints, but they still aren’t off the hook: they should perform benefit concerts for those who die in the fossil fuel extraction business, plus the untold numbers killed by radiation, mercury, dioxins and other poisons released when fossil fuels are burned and solar panels are manufactured.

Mark Steyn had a good piece about Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician that is living under threat of death by various peace loving Muslims. Steyn pointed out something that I’ve often noticed with anyone who dares to question Leftist orthodoxy, the usage of adjectives such as “far” and “extreme” to describe them by reporters. Steyn noted, “the determination to place him beyond the pale is unceasing: “The far-right anti-immigration party of Geert Wilders” (The Financial Times) . . . “Far-right leader Geert Wilders” (The Guardian) . . . “Extreme right anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders” (Agence France-Presse) is “at the fringes of mainstream politics” (Time) . . . Mr. Wilders is so far out on the far-right extreme fringe that his party is the third biggest in parliament. Indeed, the present Dutch government governs only through the support of Wilders’ Party for Freedom. So he’s “extreme” and “far-right” and out on the “fringe,” but the seven parties that got far fewer votes than him are “mainstream”? That right there is a lot of what’s wrong with European political discourse and its media coverage: Maybe he only seems so “extreme” and “far-right” because they’re the ones out on the fringe.”

I’m a fan of Geert Wilders, as I was of another noted Dutch politician, Pym Fortuyn. Like Wilders Fortuyn was tarred with the extremist label, probably the first and only openly gay man ever slandered by the Left as a far right anything. Fortuyn didn’t see himself that way, likening himself to center-left politicians of the day, and was an ardent admirer of American President John F. Kennedy. Like Kennedy Fortuyn paid the ultimate price for his views, gunned down in broad daylight by Volkert van der Graaf, a self-described environmental and animal rights activist who acted in defense of Muslims and “weak members of society.” Wilders has yet to pay this price, but has to move discreetly between safe houses to avoid it.

As Steyn notes, Europe’s multiculturalism that has allowed Islam to thrive without any push back has resulted in a society where gays are hunted without fear of persecution, women and children are raped, and Jewish children are legitimate targets living on borrowed time. Muslims are free to exercise their intolerant views on everyone as they see fit, and those who dare fight back are labeled as Islamophobes and far-right extremists by the very people under greatest threat. When the editor of DC’s gay newspaper the Washington Blade and his boyfriend get beaten up in Amsterdam by 7 Moroccans, and Muslim apologists explain away the attacks as kids unsure of their own sexuality, you know something has gone terribly wrong in Holland.

Islamophobia is an irrational dislike of Islam. There is nothing irrational about refusing to tolerate a religion that views women as less than property, all other religions and political institutions as invalid and heretic, and homosexuality as an abomination punishable by death. There is also nothing irrational about despising a religion whose adherents have called for your death. Yet this is exactly what has happened with Fortuyn and now Wilders.

Throughout world history Europe has been a place where ideas, ideologies and civilizations mix and occasionally clash. Like all complex problems, there is more going on in Europe than just the spread of Islam.

Europe had a long history of Jewish pogroms and persecution long before Adolf Hitler came to power and instituted the Final Solution. Deportations and massacres of Jews were common on the continent well before then, so in a sense Europe’s default state is anti-Semitism. The aftermath of World War 2 changed that briefly as local Europeans were paraded through the concentration camps to see what their hatred wrought, and the guilt caused by the Holocaust swung the elites behind the Jews and the nascent Jewish state of Israel. For decades after it’s founding Israel’s primary supporter was not the United States, it was France, and the ties went beyond the love of socialism that Jews share with Europeans, there was guilt as well. It wasn’t until de Gaulle himself switched sides and backed Israel’s Arab enemies starting in 1967, setting a policy that has continued since. The return to its innate anti-Semitism was complete when French ambassador Daniel Bernard stooped to scapegoating the Jews for all evil in the world, saying in 2001 “All the current troubles in the world are because of that shitty little country Israel.” The problem with guilt is that it’s not static. It gets old and begins to change and when it does it easily changes into hatred. One can only feel guilty for so long before the pain of guilt turns to jealousy towards those in whom the guilt is directed at. It’s a short step from that emotion to hatred, and it’s a step that Europeans all over the continent have taken.

James Oberg, a NASA scientist and engineer once quipped, “You must keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.” The origins of multi-culturalism lies in cultural relativism, the belief that all cultures are equal. In order to achieve that equality multi-culturalists downplay the success and achievements of the dominant culture, criticizing its success as originating from the exploitation and domination of weaker cultures while exaggerating the latter’s achievements. Multi-culturalism became possible after the one culture took a dominant position in the world, and after World War 2 that culture was Western civilization based on Greco-Roman democratic ideals with Judeo-Christian morality supported by Anglo-American capitalism. Multi-culturalism attacked all three of these aspects of western culture in the post-war world. Having become entrenched in academia and to a lesser but substantial degree in non-elected governmental bureaucracies, multi-culturalists pushed for an end to the assimilation of immigrants into a country, viewing it as state enforced cultural genocide. As the western economies in Europe grew, they drew in millions of immigrants from around the Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Middle East. Because these immigrants were not forced let alone encouraged to assimilate, they found themselves at the fringes of their host societies, unable to speak the host nation’s language or participate in its civil life. Multi-culturalists quickly blamed the racism for this failure, unable to understand that contrary to their philosophy there are significant differences between western and Islamic culture, and that saying the two are alike shows an ignorance of both in the same way that Emerson took issue with the fallacy that all men were the same: “The wise man shows his wisdom in separation, in gradation, and his scale of creatures and of merits is as wide as nature. The foolish have no range in their scale, but suppose every man is as every other man.” Multi-culturalists now find themselves trapped by their ideology, defending the gender inequality and intolerance of Islam while unleashing its fury on any one who challenges it. They continually side with and condone the actions of wife beaters and gay bashers and murderers, the very people they are supposed to represent and in many cases are. In short their brains have fallen out.

These two changes in Europe, the return to its default anti-Semitism and the development of multi-culturalism that prevented assimilation of Muslim immigrants, would not have together ended the liberal freedoms that come with Western culture. The dollars spent by Western nations on cheap oil from the Middle East was recycled by the Saudis and other adherents of Wahhabi Islam around the Persian Gulf and used to fund mosques throughout Europe and North America. These mosques spread Wahhabi Islam, one of the strictest and least tolerant forms of Islam, across the West and throughout the Islamic world, replacing moderate and liberal forms that had arisen in the centuries after Mohammad’s conquering of the Arabian peninsula and nearby Levant. This “replacement” was often violent in places (e.g. in Pakistan, Thailand, Egypt) where internecine strife broke out between Wahhabi Sunni’s and followers of other Sunni sects or Shi’a, but happened quietly in the West, as other forms of Islam simply couldn’t compete with Saudi money to gain converts.

It is this toxic combination that Geert Wilders and his supporters recognize as a threat to their freedom, and by choosing to make a stand against it Wilders and those like him have found themselves condemned by the Left and hunted by Islamists. Their voices are few, but sound an alarm that warns the return to Europe of another of its default states: war.

James Delingpole lays out the case against anthropogenic global warming hysteria and other environmentalist dogma’s in his book, “Watermelons: How Environmentalists Are Killing The Planet, Destroying The Economy And Stealing Your Children’s Future.” He writes about his experience in this article in The Daily Mail.

“As someone who loves long walks in unspoilt countryside and who wants a brighter future for his children, I’m sickened by the way environmental activists tar anyone who disagrees with them as a selfish, polluting, anti-science ‘denier’.

The real deniers are those ideological greens who refuse to look at hard evidence (not just pie-in-the-sky computer models which are no more accurate than the suspect data fed into them) and won’t accept that their well-intentioned schemes to make our world a better place are in fact making it uglier, poorer and less free.”

Rachel Carson and her ilk have blood on their hands. Millions of Africans and south Asians died because of their fear-mongering in the West. It’s a dirty secret that isn’t discussed by the mainstream environmental movement. In fact it’s a shame but it seems those who care about the environment aren’t associated with environmental groups anymore because even the Sierra Club and other so-called moderate organizations have been hijacked by zealots.

Even though I live in a low crime area of the rural American South, I still lock the doors of my home. I also never leave my keys inside my car. That’s because while the likelihood of someone burglarizing my home or stealing my car may be small, they are not zero and such things as locking doors and not leaving ones keys in a vehicle are prudent. Similarly this year there have been numerous tornadoes around the state that have killed scores of people, but having grown up in the Midwest I was sure to buy a home with deep basement. I have also stocked it with a few days of emergency supplies “just in case.” Like many here I also do more to protect my home and family from unlikely events because where we live there is no one else to rely on if these events occur. As a fan of the book The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, I recognize that it is impossible to prepare in detail for every possible contingency, so instead I have followed general principles for home protection and disaster preparedness that work across the board.

I’ve been thinking about this topic as I watched the horror in Norway unfold and as the European contingent of NATO has struggled this Summer with trying to remove a despot from power in Libya. To continue the metaphor, Europe has lost the ability to act prudently to defend itself. It has forgotten to lock its doors and to take its keys with it.

Both Taleb and Dietrich Dorner, author of The Logic of Failure, recognize that humans are terrible at assessing risk. Dorner believes that humans often continue risky behavior because the likelihood of bearing the consequences of the behavior is small.  Take speeding, for example. The first time a driver drives over the speed limit, the chance of being caught and ticketed by the police  is almost nothing; that it encourages him to continue to break the law. He enjoys the benefits of speeding (shaving a few minutes off his commute) while not fully appreciating the risk because it is so small. So he continues to speed and forgets that he is engaging in a risky – and illegal – behavior. The more he speeds, the more likely the odds are that he will attract the attention of the cops. That day eventually comes and he ends up holding a speeding ticket in his hands while contemplating a bump in his insurance premium. Even though he has been engaging in a risky behavior, he will doubtlessly think that he has been picked on by the police. Because the risk was so small for speeding, the driver had come to believe that it was in fact a risk-free behavior when in fact it wasn’t.

World War 2 was of such an epic scale that it devastated Europe both physically and psychologically. The war had so weakened the continent that it had no choice but to rely upon the United States for its defense. But an odd thing happened over the years. The defense was so complete that threats became invisible. Professional militaries cost money to equip and maintain, and the likelihood of needing them is small. So European governments cut them to the point where today, NATO is struggling to provide logistical support to a group of rebels in a small country in North Africa. Without the United States providing most of the equipment and personnel the effort to overthrow Mohammar Khadafi would collapse. European governments outsourced their defense to an outside power, and for sixty-five years have enjoyed the benefits of protection provided by the United States, while ignoring the risk of their behavior.

It’s easy to forget that for most of its history the United States has been an isolationist power; it has only been the last seventy-odd years that it has acted as an international one. The country was founded and later populated by people who fled from other places, particularly Europe, and weren’t particularly keen on getting involved with the politics of the places they left. Add in the buffers provided by two large oceans and Isolationism becomes the default state for America; internationalism is the outlier.

The risk of the United States turning isolationist and withdrawing from Europe seemed remote to Europeans, but it was not zero. Europe reaped the benefits of not having to provide for its own defense, so it was easy to devalue the risk further. Plus an odd thing happened through the years. The continent of Europe, so steeped in blood that it makes the entire known history of the Middle East and other regions of the world seem bloodless by comparison,  forgot it’s history. Instead of appreciating the American presence in Europe for providing for its defense, the Americans became viewed by some quarters as a cause of War, not a force for preventing it. It was the equivalent of viewing the police as the cause of crime. This attitude was transferred to the national militaries that worked closely with Americans in NATO and even the local police forces (who are often more closely allied with the national military than in the US) as well. Their budgets were slashed even further and those who served became denigrated by the very societies they had sworn to protect. Any inner city cop in America could relate.

Europe finds itself today paying the price for the amnesia of its past.  America is slowly returning to its isolationist nature, leaving the Europeans to fend for themselves. But wars in the former state of Yugoslavia and now in Libya show that Europe is in no condition to protect itself, let alone the people at risk of genocide in the region. The fact that Norwegian authorities had to beg for guns from their supervisors and took 90 minutes to respond to a single gunman on a rampage proves that Europe’s police forces are in no condition to act to protect its citizenry. Some may console themselves that the attack executed by a single madman is a rare event, but so is having one’s house burglarized or one’s car stolen. Sensible people still lock their doors and don’t leave their keys in the car.

It is time for Europe to come to terms with its past and become “normal.” This means losing the pacifism that infantilized it during the Cold War and recognizing that threats to it exist from within and without – that is, if it survives the coming collapse of the Eurozone. Europe needs to prepare for rare events by creating a better trained and equipped police force matched by a similarly trained and equipped military. Europe also needs to accept that it has not “evolved beyond war” as some have come to believe. Only then will it be able to prevent mass murders from happening in Norway or in countries like Libya.

It’s been a week after a 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti and within minutes of the disaster the world was presented with televised images of the event. Over the past several days we have watched Haiti descend into savagery as people go without food and water, law and order break down, and the injured join the ranks of the dead who go unburied in the streets. We have also seen a massive relief effort mobilize, but witness relief supplies and rescue efforts become snarled in red tape.

Complaints about American actions are pouring in. France blames the USA for the congestion at the Port au Prince airport. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is also claiming that the US is occupying Haiti, a claim that is backed by the French. What started out as a natural disaster is quickly becoming a man-made one as looters and gangs take to the streets in the absence law. Aid is pouring into the country but cannot get through critical chokepoints to those in need.

Although Obama’s lapdogs in the mainstream news media have yet to prick up their ears regarding the similarities between Hurricane Katrina and the Haiti earthquake, Howard Fineman writing for MSNBC notes the irony of the situation: “Elected in part out of revulsion at the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina, Obama now finds himself confronting an even more devastating and complex humanitarian crisis.” Dan Kennedy writing for the Guardian takes issue with Fineman’s characterization as well as those of others seeing similarities between the two disasters. Kennedy writes, “In fact, though we would all (OK, not Limbaugh) like to see the US alongside other countries and relief agencies doing everything they can in Haiti, the disaster is so large, the people are so poor and the social structure is so dysfunctional that it is bound to end in something that looks like failure.”

Evidently Kennedy isn’t familiar with Louisiana and Mississippi – two of America’s poorest states with state and local governments that are dysfunctional at best, corrupt at worst. While the divisions between local, state and federal government snarled the Katrina relief effort in 2005, the divisions between the UN authority, the US military, US Department of State, French and other governments pouring men and material into the devastated nation are just as bedeviling today. Kennedy argues that it takes time to work through these divisions, but President Bush was not afforded the luxury of that excuse 4 years ago. Why should Obama be exempt today?

It is true that a disaster of this scale cannot be practiced and prepared for beforehand. Nations cannot meet and design a coordinated plan for every possible disaster scenario that may or may not happen. But as President Bush was judged by the actions of the federal government in the Hurricane Katrina disaster, so too should President Obama be held responsible for the failures in Haiti. The precedent has been set Obama himself.

Try as he might our president cannot seem to please the Left. He bows to foreign leaders, kowtows to China, rubs shoulders with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, and allows Iran to develop nuclear weapons so that it can finish off what the German ultra-right started 77 years ago: cleansing the world of Jews. Obama traveled to Copenhagen two months ago to beg for the Olympics to come to Chicago and left empty-handed. Now he’s preparing to leave Denmark without a climate deal, and the Left is blaming him. The Guardian newspaper, an outfit that makes Pravda and Izvestya look as conservative as Fox News, writes:

Tim Jones, a spokesman for the World Development Movement, said: “The president said he came to act, but showed little evidence of doing so. He showed no awareness of the inequality and injustice of climate change. If America has really made its choice, it is a choice that condemns hundreds of millions of people to climate change disaster.”

Friends of the Earth said in a statement, “Obama has deeply disappointed not only those listening to his speech at the UN talks, he has disappointed the whole world.”

Well, good. These are the same idiots that gave Chavez a standing ovation and allowed a genocidal African dictator Robert “Comrade Bob” Mugabe to speak and blame the West for failing to improve the lot of his people so that he could rape and pillage them some more. Seeing so-called “environmentalists” in league with some of the worlds most despicable dictators shows what a sham the fantasy of AGW really is. So Friends of the Earth: What will be the effects of the fallout from Iranian nuclear explosions in Israel, Jordan and Lebanon? Mr. Jones of the WDM, how much dosh do you get from Robert Mugabe and the people of Zimbabwe? Given that the former was once the wealthiest country in African and the latter now struggles to survive, I doubt that you have to worry much about converting Zimbabwean currency to the American dollars that constitute the majority of funding of your sucky little organization.

The issue that even the most liberal American politician cannot stomach is China’s refusal to allow inspections of their CO2 emissions. China wants to say that it cut emissions by X% and have the world believe it without actually checking. Meanwhile the US, Europe and Japan will be monitored (and hectored by the likes of Mr. Jones) for every cow fart and football hooligan belch emitted in these countries.

But Leftists have always given China a pass, probably due to the cool posters of Mao that they used to hang in their dorm rooms while getting stoned on Moroccan hash paid for by their wealthy parents. They tend to ignore things like Mao’s Great Leap Forward which forced China back into the middle ages technologically and killed anywhere between 30,000,000 and 100,000,000 depending on whose estimates you go by. They have forgotten the Cultural Revolution which forced intellectuals and academics like themselves out of the cities to slave on farm communes in the countryside where they were starved to death for not being peasants. Chinese communism is quite cool until you study it. Then it’s pretty uncool no matter how stoned you are.

So Obama will leave Denmark a failure once more. This makes me question why he went in the first place. Does he really believe that he alone can fix something as fucked as a UN Climate Conference? If not him, then is Rahm Emmanuel to blame? Whomever it is should be sent away to silk-screen Obama t-shirts.

But the conference wasn’t a total disaster. It did inspire the following from Gerald Warner writing for the Daily Telegraph:

What a bunch of buffoons. Not since Neville Chamberlain tugged a Claridge’s luncheon bill from his pocket and flourished it on the steps of the aircraft that brought him back from Munich has a worthless scrap of paper been so audaciously hyped. There was one good moment at Copenhagen, though: some seriously professional truncheon work by Danish Plod on the smellies. Otherwise, this event is strictly for Hans Christian Andersen.

Some seriously professional truncheon work by the Danish Plod on the smellies. Now that’s the kind of change I can believe in!

UPDATE: Obama has announced that a “meaningful deal” has been reached at the Summit, but it’s nonbinding and a step towards an agreement instead of an actual agreement. It saves some face for the thousands who traveled from around the world, filling the atmosphere with the very gases they believe will change the planet’s climate. Since it was a UN conference, your tax dollars helped pay for around a quarter of it. Hope you feel that you got your money’s worth.

Too bad the word “chutzpah” would be banned by the United Nations for being “Zionist” because UN official Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,sure has it. To believers of anthropogenic global warming, air travel is one of the largest contributors to global warming, producing not only CO2 but nitrous oxide which is believed to be twice as damaging. It has even led to protests by greens at Heathrow Airport, calling air travel non-essential and demanding that it be regulated.

Dr Rajendra Pachauri flew at least 443,243 miles on IPCC business in this 19 month period. This business included honorary degree ceremonies, a book launch and a Brookings Institute dinner, the latter involving a flight of 3500 miles.

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So strong is his love for cricket that his colleagues recall the time the Nobel winner took a break during a seminar in New York and flew in to Delhi over the weekend to attend a practice session for a match before flying back. Again, he flew in for a day, just to play that match.

Yep, that’s chutzpah.

Unlike many on the right I don’t instinctively fear Russia or the former Soviet Union. Having studied Russian history and culture over the years I appreciate the suffering its citizens have gone through – usually at the hands of their own government. But understanding Russia one appreciates that at heart it views itself as in competition with the West – a zero sum game whereby any perceived weakness of the Western powers is perceived as making Russia that much stronger.

Eastern European countries also understand this, which is why they are pissed at being stabbed in the back by the Obama administration (who can’t even seem to get the protocol right when wielding the knife). Having been occupied by the Soviet Union for most of the last century, they aren’t very keen on being threatened with another occupation, especially when they see themselves as a pawn by an American administration keen to “reset” relations with their former occupier.

So being an ex-diplomat-wannabe myself, I propose that we offer Russia a grand bargain: They can occupy France, Germany, the Benelux countries, the Nordic states (except Denmark because the Danes understand America better than most of the Euroweenies), Portugal and Spain in exchange for leaving alone the Eastern European countries of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Ukraine. We can even throw in my ancestral Ireland to sweeten the deal. Moscow wants a warm-weather port? How about Lisbon? Is that warm enough for you?

That way most of the Europeans who hate America will get their wish, and those who want to be our allies, get theirs. Russia gets some new friends – and everybody wins.

UPDATE: Since I got someone’s Irish up in the comments I reconsidered and decided to swap out Ireland for New Zealand in the Grand Bargain. Ireland may have its doubts about the USA, but aside from throwing Mary Robinson at us and being neutral during WW2 it has generally been a good ally. So sorry Liamascorcaigh.

As I’ve documented here, here and here, New Zealanders hate America with a passion that scares their sheep. So that they can sleep soundly, I would offer this fly on the windscreen of American foreign policy to the Russians gratis.

Guess it’s obvious why I washed out of the Foreign Service interview process.

Iranian protester begs for American intervention.

U2’s the Edge owns 156 acres in the Santa Monica Mountains and plans to build five 10,000 sq ft mansions on his property. “These homes will be some of the most environmentally sensitive ever designed in Malibu — or anywhere in the world,” the guitarist, whose real name is David Evans, said in a prepared statement released to the press. This being America even if it is a post-Kelo America, property rights should trump p***ing off the locals which The Edge’s plan seems to be doing.

“It is going to look nice to the human eye but at what cost?” said surf shop owner and City Councilman Jefferson Wagner. “When is enough enough?”

As a property owner myself I support the Edge’s right to do whatever the heck he wants to with that 156 acres. If he wants to clear-cut it and turn it into a parking lot, that it is his right. Ditto with the Surf-dude councilman. If he wants to sell wannabees boards that they aren’t qualified to ride, then that’s his business – not mine.

But one difference between the Edge and me is that I don’t claim to be green. He’s considered by the MSM to be an environmentalist yet I’m considered to belong to a group that would drop-kick the Lorax into a chipper-shredder.

Funny thing is that I’m currently looking at properties with acreage in rural North Carolina with the intent on protecting it from development. In fact the Wife just checked out 75 acres along a river with old growth timber on it. Unfortunately it was also infested with hippies and Rainbow People-types. The owner was charging top dollar for the property but insisted that in any contract he was going to write a clause that allowed him access to a cave on the property anytime he wanted, and that the hippies would be allowed to continue to “gather” on the property.

The Wife laughed heartily at that and then mentioned that the Kid and I planned to set up a shooting range. The owner smiled a bit wanly, evidently imagining me running my very own hippy hunting reserve.

I don’t care about my carbon footprint and evidently The Edge doesn’t care about his either. Supporting each of five 10,000 square foot mansions takes a lot of carbon to build and maintain. I do care about wilderness, preserving what remains and returning land that has fallen out of use by Man to the wild. I look at the blocks of empty lots and vacant buildings that blight the urban landscape, and imagine fencing the area off with razor wire, removing the concrete and asphalt, planting trees and adding a pack of wolves and a herd of deer. But I don’t have the money for my crazy “green” ideas like the Edge does.

Meanwhile I live in a 1,200 square foot home. My Wife and I are adherents of the Not So Big House philosophy which is the anti-thesis of current American housing culture. In place of a large McMansions on postage stamp piece of land our ideal is a small cozy cottage on a large tract of land. We have considered how much house we really needed and decided that the answer was under 2,000 sq. ft.

Does the Edge need 10,000 square feet? That is just under a quarter of an acre, and over 4x the average home size in the USA. According to Wikipedia, Edge has a wife and two children. Does each need the equivalent square footage of the average American house? More importantly does he need to offer such mansions to 4 other families?

The price of the lots alone are $7.5 million, and selling all four would net him $30 million – 3 1/2 times the original cost of the entire 156 acre parcel. The project would require the removal of 70,000 cubic yards of earth and the grading of a road up the steep hillsides.

Edge claims that the properties will be “environmentally sensitive” in terms of blending into the landscape and using state of the art power and water conservation technologies. But reducing the environmental damage caused by building a single 10,000 sq. ft. house doesn’t eliminate the damage such construction causes in the first place, not to mention the ongoing damage caused by the maintenance of such a behemoth.

So what ego requires 10,000 square foot? The Edge’s ego and no doubt his pocket book; it has nothing to do with being green – and that’s hypocrisy in my book.

In the 1950’s William F. Buckley lifted conservativism out of the muck by driving out the John Birchers and racists, forming a modern political movement that changed America a generation later. Today liberalism continues its swift descent into the same sewer conservativism left, supporting religious extremism and spouting neo-nazi rubbish. There is no better example of this than the following cartoon.

This cartoon did not appear in a Middle Eastern paper, one that regularly demonizes the Jews for all the world’s problems. No it appeared in an American paper that refused to display the Mohammed cartoons for fear of getting a suicide bomber in the editorial office: the Washington Post.

As Roger Simon notes, “Oliphant – whose work I usually find humdrum in the extreme – has done us a favor. Deliberately or not, he has dropped the oldest of phony Leftist pretenses – that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are not the same.” That’s something I’ve noticed recently; increasingly the Left is dropping the pretence no doubt due to the fact that the pretence is a sham. Hating Israel is simply the politically correct and modern way to hate Jews. After all anti-semitism is probably the oldest existing prejudice and hatred, and being called an anti-semite just makes one seem old-fashioned.

It fascinates me how the Left, which claims to champion feminism, supports a doctrine where women are second class citizens. The Left claims to uphold gay rights, but supports regimes and groups in the Middle East where homosexuals are stoned to death. Yet I – who support these very rights – am dismissed as a “conservative” and called thug.

The Left is sliding into irrelevance the same way conservativism did in the 1930’s. Until it’s own version of Buckley comes along and cleans it up, the Left is looking mighty pathetic.

In the meantime liberal outlets like the Washington Post will slowly resemble the Arab media. How far is the cartoon below from the one above?

UPDATE: Does anyone else find it odd that the Arab media enjoys showing Jews as modern day Nazis considering that the Arabs were Nazi allies during World War 2? This group appreciates the irony.

UPDATE: Barry Rubin weighs in.

No surprise considering it’s the Land of the BBC:

A poll of nearly 2,000 Britons by YouGov/PHI found that 70 per cent of respondents incorrectly said it was true that the US had done a worse job than the European Union in reducing carbon emissions since 2000. More than 50 per cent presumed that polygamy was legal in the US, when it is illegal in all 50 states.

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The survey showed that a majority agreed with the false statement that since the Second World War the US had more often sided with non-Muslims when they had come into conflict with Muslims. In fact in 11 out of 12 major conflicts between Muslims and non-Muslims, Muslims and secular forces, or Arabs and non-Arabs, the US has sided with the former group. Those conflicts included Turkey and Greece, Bosnia and Yugoslavia, and and Kosovo and Yugoslavia.

Asked if it was true that “from 1973 to 1990 the United States sold Saddam Hussein more than a quarter of his weapons,” 80 per cent of British respondents said yes. However the US sold just 0.46 per cent of Saddam’s arsenal to him, compared to Russia’s 57 per cent, France’s 13 per cent and China’s 12 per cent.

Nothing like taking the “special relationship” for granted. Hope they can develop a similar “special relationship” with Russia to prevent them from freezing to death should Russia decide to cut off natural gas exports.