Archive for May, 2014

Have we lost and is this why we lost ?

Friday, May 30th, 2014

A new book by a retired army general explains that we lost the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Why ?

I have had reservations about Iraq for years, at least since 2008.

When President Bush convened a meeting of his National Security Council on May 22, 2003, his special envoy in Iraq made a statement that caught many of the participants by surprise. In a video presentation from Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer III informed the president and his aides that he was about to issue an order formally dissolving Iraq’s Army.

I think that decision probably lost the post-invasion war. The other puzzle that was not explained until the recent book, Days of Fire explained it, was why Bremer was put in place of Jay Garner, who had done well with the Kurds.

Garner began reconstruction efforts in March 2003 with plans aiming for Iraqis to hold elections within 90 days and for the U.S. to quickly pull troops out of the cities to a desert base. Talabani, a member of Jay Garner’s staff in Kuwait before the war, was consulted on several occasions to help the U.S. select a liberal Iraqi government; this would be the first liberal Government to exist in Iraq. In an interview with Time magazine, Garner stated that “as in any totalitarian regime, there were many people who needed to join the Baath Party in order to get ahead in their careers. We don’t have a problem with most of them. But we do have a problem with those who were part of the thug mechanism under Saddam. Once the U.S. identifies those in the second group, we will get rid of them.

Had Garner continued with that policy, we might have been out of the cities in a few months instead of years, as was the case with Bremer.

(more…)

Is the United States becoming a corrupt enterprise ?

Thursday, May 22nd, 2014

The activities of the Obama administration have progressed into Mafia territory the past five years. I never thought things could change this fast but it seems I was wrong. The latest example ?

Soon after the US Government sold the last of its stake in General Motors, the company began to announce a huge number of recalls. These safety defects were known for years but unreported until the federal government sold its interests, at a huge loss of course.

Taxpayers, drivers, and investors who assumed the government would never fail to disclose rampant safety problems in a company it owned can rest easy, though. Instead of investigating fatally flawed GM components while the U.S. government was the company’s largest single owner, the NHTSA was busy harassing Toyota — one of GM’s top competitors — for an alleged malfunction that led to “unintended acceleration” in Toyota vehicles. Toyota was fined and eventually bullied into recalling 8 million vehicles over the issue.

Toyota is probably the safest, highest quality auto maker in the world. I drive one and have bought Toyotas for my daughter.

And what was the final result of the NHTSA investigation?

Many drivers may have confused the gas and brake pedals a problem that may account for “the vast majority” of the unintended acceleration incidents the agency investigated, NHTSA deputy administrator Ron Medford said at Tuesday’s NHTSA press briefing.

“What mostly happened was pedal misapplication where the driver stepped on the gas instead of the brake or in addition to the brake,” Medford said.

The Toyota cases were always about driver error, not safety of the auto. Only the trial lawyers and a complacent government permitted this raid on a company to proceed.

Is that the only case ?

(more…)

Global Warming and the Divestment Movement

Thursday, May 15th, 2014

I have previously posted on global warming, at least back as far as 2007.

If you want to know the costs associated with the “Cap and Trade” system proposed by Kyoto, look at this report. If you can’t decipher the bureaucratic language, here is the conclusion. GDP and consumption impacts in the Full Auction case are substantially larger than those in the Phased Auction case. Relative to the reference case, discounted total GDP (in 2000 dollars) over the 2009-2030 time period in the Full Auction case is $462 billion (0.19 percent lower), while discounted real consumer spending is $483 billion (0.29 percent) lower. In 2030, projected real GDP in the Full Auction case is $94 billion (0.41 percent) lower than in the reference case, while aggregate consumption is $106 billion (0.69 percent) lower, almost twice the estimated consumption loss in the Phased Auction case. A reduction in GDP is called a recession.A reduction that is permanent is called a Depression.

It’s no wonder that nothing was done. First, the risks of serious harm are small. The small amount of warming suggested by more serious studies has nothing to do with the alarmist views.

Now, we have a new strategy. The alarmists are going to try to destroy the fossil fuel industry.

The fossil free movement has spread far and wide on American campuses. Fossil Free Stanford organized in fall 2012 after McKibben visited Palo Alto on his “Do the Math Tour.” Two of the founding members, Michael Penuelas and Yari Greaney, both from the class of 2015, proclaimed their commitment. Greaney held that “our tuition money…is going to support industries that are polluting our future.”

This is standard student radical rhetoric. What is new ?

The students waged a textbook campaign, assembling impressive numbers, soliciting key testimonials, maintaining a respectful tone towards authority while at the same time keeping up the pressure.

The question is really: to what end? The answer is, sadly, self-delusion. No one doubts that Stanford students are smart, but their intelligence is not much of a defense against irrational enthusiasms that can sweep through a community. What the divestment movement has sold to Stanford students is a bit of flummery. When Stanford announced on May 6 that it would divest “direct investments in coal mining companies,” President John Hennessy issued a statement that begins, “Stanford has a responsibility as a global citizen to promote sustainability for the planet…”

Got that? Stanford is no longer a university. It is a “global citizen.” And global citizens, of course, are charged with promoting “sustainability.”

Delusions of this magnitude seem to be getting more common. As at Dartmouth, for example.

The activists unveiled a Freedom Budget in February with over 70 specific actions they want the Dartmouth administration to take to address students’ concerns over diversity, perceived sexism and the campus climate for minorities and the LGBT community. Students entered President Phil Hanlon’s office Tuesday afternoon at 4 p.m. asking for a point-by-point response, following what they felt was a half-hearted statement about their budget from Dartmouth a day before finals on March 6.

What do they want ? Why not much, just turn Dartmouth into an insane asylum.

The Freedom Budget’s items include hiring more racial minorities as faculty, implementing more gender-neutral housing and bathroom options, banning the term “illegal immigrant,” evaluating the Greek system’s role in sexual assault, and harsher punishments for those who commit sexual violence.

Stanford assigned another Constitutional Law professor to teach the course that Derrick Bell was teaching. Why should this be ?

Stanford at that time had one of the leading scholars in constitutional law, Professor Gerald Gunther — and Derrick Bell was no Gerald Gunther. A hastily created program of study of constitutional law was then used to teach that subject to students who were not getting what they needed in Professor Bell’s course.

When this clever finessing of the problem came to light, the administration apologized — to Derrick Bell for the embarrassment this caused him.

They should have apologized to the law students for short-changing them with a professor who was not up to the job — and to those who donated money to the university to advance the cause of education, not to allow administrators to play racial quota politics on campus.

As a full professor at the Harvard law school, Derrick Bell was also surrounded by colleagues who were out of his league as academic scholars. What were his options at this point?

Here is one example of the result of affirmative action. What about global warming ?

The orthodoxy of the left is just as powerful. It recently claimed another scalp.

Dear Professor Henderson,

I have been put under such an enormous group pressure in recent days from all over the world that has become virtually unbearable to me. If this is going to continue I will be unable to conduct my normal work and will even start to worry about my health and safety. I see therefore no other way out therefore than resigning from GWPF. I had not expecting such an enormous world-wide pressure put at me from a community that I have been close to all my active life. Colleagues are withdrawing their support, other colleagues are withdrawing from joint authorship etc.

No mercy for those who say the earth revolves around the sun. Anyway, the alarmists have a big agenda.

This is not a single-issue movement. This is a space where environmental justice, climate justice, and economic justice have come into contact. We understand that we will not win the fight against the fossil fuel industry without confronting racism, classism, homophobia, and other systems of oppression in our movement spaces.

My colleagues and I at the National Association of Scholars have been pointing out for some time how fluidly the sustainability movement changes from clean energy advocacy to a hard left agenda on social issues. Official Stanford no doubt brushes aside these elaborations, thinking that it has discerned the core issue: dirty industries that pollute the water, blight the landscape, and foul the air. But the true core issue is the effort of a movement to foster in students a lifelong aversion to Western values.

How well it will succeed in that no one knows, but there is no comfort in the ease with which Bill McKibben in a little less than two years has conjured this movement into existence.

Personally, I see this as another example of how environmentalism has become a religion that tolerates heretics not at all. The similarity to the Puritans is striking, even to the region that has given rise to the leftist ideology.

Joseph Bottum, by contrast, examines post-Protestant secular religion with empathy, and contends that it gained force and staying power by recasting the old Mainline Protestantism in the form of catechistic worldly categories: anti-racism, anti-gender discrimination, anti-inequality, and so forth. What sustains the heirs of the now-defunct Protestant consensus, he concludes, is a sense of the sacred, but one that seeks the security of personal salvation through assuming the right stance on social and political issues.

Environmentalism is but one branch of leftism but is a particularly intrusive one.