Posse Incitatus

Pearl Harbor Day in the age of amnesia

Each volume of Winston Churchill's epic Second World War has its own theme.  The theme for the sixth and final volume, Triumph and Tragedy is:

How the Great Democracies Triumphed, and so Were able to Resume the Follies Which Had so Nearly Cost Them Their Life

And so they are again.  Iraq is becoming steadily more peaceful.  The daily catalog of violence is now more indicative of criminal syndicates than a government-threatening insurgency.

Afghanistan teeters on the brink, but thanks to improvements in the U.S. security posture and the achievements of American arms, it is taken for granted by the political establishment that major terror attacks simply aren't likely any more.  Indeed, Al Qaeda is so beaten down we are permitting ourselves the luxury of civilian-themed show trials for select captured unlawful enemy combatants.

Of course the analogies are never exact.  History repeats itself, but always adds a new twist.  For 60 years, we waited for waves of Soviet bombers to serve as the "next Pearl Harbor," but instead we got civilian airliners hijacked by Islamofascist terrorists.

So it will be with the next attack.  Already we are dulling our readiness, absorbing ourselves in internal debates and beginning to wonder how we can spend the money that should go to strengthening our military (health care?  More stimulus? Cap and tax?).

Santayana got it wrong: those who don't know history are never condemned to repeat it, because they don't know it in the first place.  Rather it is the fate of those who study the past to endure the same follies again and again.  A.A. Milne's phrase keeps coming to mind:

Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise.

...or we shall surely hang seperately

Via the Hated Instapundit, we learn that the warmist front is beginning to crack.

The danger all along would be that, even in the face of the incriminating emails and code, the CRU conspirators would hold together and come up with a common story.  By being consistently brazen, they might have been able to stall an unwilling officialdom and at least muddy the issue enough to get away with some token reproaches for sloppy work.

But the implied destruction of Freedom of Information Act materials changes the game.  This is a criminal matter, and tenure won’t protect faculty who countenance such behavior.  Professor Michael Mann works for Penn State, a land-grant university that receives considerable government funding.  That makes him particularly vulnerable.  In times of tight budgets, it only takes a couple of enterprising legislators to force embarrassing testimony from university officials on why their employees are flouting transparency laws.

Again, the crime isn’t the issue – it’s the coverup.  The public remains divided about global warming, but there is complete unanimity in favor of obeying FOIA requirements.

Right now, in college campuses across the country (and perhaps the world), university presidents are looking with apprehension at their climate studies departments and wondering if they will be called to testify at the next state budget hearing about FOIA compliance.

As sure as the sun rises, you can bet that more than a few Republican state legislators are salivating at the opportunity to make liberal professors sweat at the next Higher Education Appropriations Subcommittee hearing.

Excrement, as the saying goes, rolls down hill.  Thus the presidents are contacting department chairs, demanding to know the full story.  The chairs in turn are pushing their underlings to come clean.  As anyone with even a passing knowledge of faculty politics knows, there are plenty of factions who would be eager to snap up funding/facilities/prime office space, and they need little encouragement to turn up the heat on their rivals.

These rivalries extend through all of academia, and one can rest assured that the case is being built that University A, which is implicated, should be punished by having its money taken away and given to smaller University B, which is untainted and would do oh so much better.

Adding to the mix is the fact that NASA is now facing a FOIA lawsuit – and unpleasant questions may surface there as well.  The fact is, there is nothing in FOIA that would exempt climate research materials – you can’t even claim that it would endanger patents.

The pressure to turn “state’s evidence” is therefore enormous.  Watch for more academics to claim that they were intemperate, perhaps a little mean-spirited, but it was the other guy who totally broke the law.

Actions and deeds

The Posse yields to none in terms of pure hawkishness.  Even when I considered myself a Democrat, I was part of the (now-extinct) Harry Truman/JFK/Scoop Jackson wing. 

 

That being said, I’m tempted to turn dovish on Afghanistan simply because it isn’t clear that we are in it to win it.  We can define victory in a variety of ways, not all of them militarily, but it makes no sense to engage on conflict without some larger purpose – other than preserving one’s electoral viability, I should add.

 

I didn’t watch the president’s speech – not because I had better things to do (though I did), but because I’ve learned at this point that nothing he says really matters.  There is no reason to pick apart what he said because it is abundantly clear that he says a lot of things that he doesn’t really mean.

 

This is why I’m rethinking our involvement.  It all boils down to the Yoda Doctrine:  “Do or do not.  There is no try.”

 

Right now, we’re trying, which probably won’t be enough.  In Iraq, we most emphatically Did.  George W. Bush had many faults, but he was in it to win.  No one had any doubts.  Is Obama similarly committed?  No one is sure.  The months it took him to make up his mind do not provide much encouragement on this.

 

Victor Davis Hanson compared Obama to Stanley Baldwin, the politically brilliant but strategically disastrous British prime minister who preceded Neville Chamberlain.  Like Baldwin, Obama seems more interested in fighting elections than fighting wars.  Hopefully we will avoid the end result of this myopic strategy: fighting for our lives against a vastly stronger opponent.

The necessity of deceit

The release of the Climategate emails has been called a “smoking gun” for the global warming/climate change movement. It is perhaps the perfect metaphor, because the science behind gun control relies on similar deceptions.

Long-time readers may be shocked to know that once upon a time, I was what could be called a centrist on gun control: I supported the free use of hunting and sporting weapons, but thought that handguns and automatic weapons should be heavily regulated.

That was a mainstream position during the 1980s when I was growing up and the “science” of the time labored heavily to back it up. Shotguns were (and still are) fine for taking game or defending the home – and they weren’t particularly threatening. “Assault weapons”, on the other hand, were the province of survivalists and militia crazies. Just ban ‘em.

So went my thinking.

That began to change during the debate over the Assault Weapons Ban in the 1990s. For the first time, I began to actually study the matter and learned that the science wasn’t as solid as it seemed. When John Lott’s massive study on the effect of shall-issue laws burst onto the scene, I was skeptical but willing to be convinced if the facts were there.

Lott’s academic reputation has taken a (not entirely undeserved) beating since then, but what really pushed me into the gun rights camp was the compulsive dishonesty of the gun control advocates. These guys couldn’t ever make an honest argument; everything they said was twisted, spun or blatantly false. This got me to thinking: if your position is so strong, why weaken it with lies?

This is pretty much my rule now, and it has served me very well. Whether dealing with gun control or climate change, you can tell the strength of the argument by how much its supporters have to distort the truth to make it.

The question of climate change is, from a purely scientific perspective, a very difficult one to answer. The only way that we can even approach the truth is to take an open, collaborative attitude to research – basically we have to use the classical scientific method.

This method, where data is openly shared, where theories are constantly questioned – is what has allowed the Western world to make the quantum advances it has in less than a century. What the Climategate emails show is that the supporters of the globalwarmism are not interested in real science. Their agenda is too important.

They are driven by a moral certitude that is so overwhelming that it renders facts unimportant – it’s bigger than such trifling considerations. There is also a “bunker mentality” at work. These people simply cannot handle the thought of being proved wrong. They must be right, they have to be right, they know they are right – so they believe they are permitted to use any means necessary to win the public debate.

A few years ago, gun control was starting to falter. John Lott’s research had broken the debate wide open. Other criminologists, like Gary Kleck, were asking very uncomfortable questions about whether guns caused or prevented crime.

As the debate raged, the gun control advocates received news that powerful help was on the way: Michael Bellesiles was doing ground-breaking research to prove that guns in colonial America were rare and barely utilized, in effect undermining the core arguments in favor of the Second Amendment.

Bellesiles was an immediate hero and a great many academics fell over themselves praising him. His book, Arming America, won top prizes and became an instant best-seller.

And then it all fell apart, and it was the scientific method that brought him down. As more academics sought to replicate his research (in this case his sources rather than equations or methods), problems began to appear. His defenses became more convoluted and resulted in a series of embarrassing excuses and walkbacks until even his own institution was forced to fire him for academic misconduct. His prize was rescinded; his publishing contract terminated and he went from rising star to the Stephen Glass of the history profession.

Bellisiles misconduct also brought a great deal of discredit to the gun control supporters who had endorsed him and caused a new level of scrutiny on the science behind previous studies. It is no coincidence that public support for gun rights is now at an all-time high, and that even for Democrats, gun control is now a dead issue.

Climategate may have a similar effect. The warmenists in academia have been increasingly shrill and demanding over the years. Like gun control advocates, they had a set of policies they wished to see enacted and, like gun control researchers, they profited handsomely from the resulting attention.

Of course, their policies would have utterly reordered society to an extent far exceeding anything contemplated by gun control advocates. A natural response – a rational response – was to question if all this was really necessary. Was the science sound?

The answer is: we don’t know. But “not sure” isn’t enough to justify a transformative global government that will tax and regulate every single human activity. So these folks set out to prove the science was settled even though it wasn’t.

I suspect that like gun control, the climate change movement is now headed for hard times politically. A good many scientists may be sympathetic to the case (and grants and power) accorded by the global warming theory, but the sheer crassness of the behavior illustrated by these emails will cause them to hold back. Their entire profession has been brought into disrepute.

In a time of tight government budgets, the public is ill-disposed to funding junk science. They will have to police their own – whether through tenure hearings or Freedom of Information Act investigations – or the whole university edifice will take irreparable damage.

The public is rightfully skeptical of people who have to cheat to win. Fabricating and distorting data is no way to win an argument over the long term. The intellectual argument for gun control collapsed because of it. Climate change may go the same way.

Return of the Twilight War

The news that the Obama administration is going to conduct a show trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed is perhaps the clearest evidence yet that the president wishes to de-escalate the Global War on Terror and essentially wish it out of existance.

This is not surprising; the administrated famously tried (and failed) to "reset" relations with Russia, but the American judicial system will perhaps be more pliable.

History is repeating itself, though as always, the parallels are not exact.  In 1940, Great Britain replaced the vacillating and dilatory wartime leadership of Neville Chamberlain with that of the formidable Winston Churchill.  Though the American public wasn't aware of it, a year ago they voted to do the reverse:  essentially removing Churchill and instating Chamberlain.

There can be no question that we are now advertising our weakness to the world.  No crime is too heinous, no affront to insulting - we will always turn the other cheek (unless you are a domestic opponent or an ally - then the gloves are off!).

Note to foreigners: get a clue before commenting on U.S. health care

In the comments to one of T. Mo's previous posts, reader jtl (who claims to be a Canadian) makes a series of singularly ignorant remarks about the quality of U.S. health care.

T. Mo addresses some of this below, but I would like to address jtl in a little more detail because I have seen similar arguments from foreigners when the U.S. health care system comes up before.

1. We spend a lot of time watching you people down there.

I don't doubt it, but I am consistently amazed at how ill-informed our international observers are.   Unquestionably this comes in large part from watching our media, which gets just about everything wrong.  You would do well to dig a little deeper.  I know the U.S. is supposed to have a monopoly on international ignorance, but from my own travels, we are actually much-better informed than the people who constantly criticize us.

2. Your current health care system is the shittiest piece of shit -- assuming you're not rich -- that a country could have.

This is manifestly not true.  Do you know any poor people in the U.S.?  I have a friend who is unemployed, and he has a hernia.   He isn't just broke, he's going bankrupt.  He applied for public assistance last week.  Yesterday they performed his operation.   His cost?  Nothing.

What's the turnaround time for that kind of procedure in Canada?

3. The fact that the US is the only major industrialized country on the planet that doesn't have single-payer health care is *not* something to hold up as a source of pride.

What difference does it make where the money comes from?  Are government dollars more virtuous?  Do they have special healing properties?

There is a recurring theme - tell me if you've heard it before:  A poor person comes into a hospital needing treatment.  He has no insurance. He gets turned away and dies.

It's a myth.  All hospitals are required by law to treat people immediately, without any attempt at getting payment.

I'm sure you can conjure up horror stories and urban legends, but the fact of the matter is, by law if you are sick you have a right to treatment.  Payment is worked out later.

Now if you are not sick, you don't have a right to elective procedures, such as cosmetic surgery, breast implants, etc.

To be fair, I can't fault you too much for falling for these falsehoods, since the Democrats are constantly spreading them.

But they are lies.  They have no basis in fact.  Like with gun control, the fact that the supporters of a policy have to distort, twist and outright fabricate data tells you a lot about the underlying weakness of what they are proposing.

4. It is absolutely shameful that there are more Americans without health insurance than there are Canadians. Health care is not a privilege: it is a right.

Um, how?  What if they choose not to get it?  When I was in my 20s - a single male, young and healthy - I had no health insurance.  That was my choice.  When I wanted some later on, I bought it.

According to our rulers in Washington, I was committing a crime by being uninsured.  Tell me, do Canadians get jailed for failing to exercise a "right?"

5. For your sake, and for your fellow countrymates' sakes, I hope the Senate version of this bill has a public option.

Does single-payer health care make a country "socialist?" I think the question should be, "Does the lack of guaranteed health care for every person in a country make that place a bad place to live should you lose your job?"

John McCain advocated a wonderful solution to this: an individual tax credit.  Right now, employers get a tax credit for providing health insurance.  If this became an individual tax credit, people would contract for their health care directly, and avail themselves of the free market to shop around and get the plan and service that suits them best.

I notice that Canada - that Mecca of great health service - now has a private system precisely because the public one was so bloated and unresponsive.

One other item you left out - malpractice reform.  The "rest of the world" doesn't sue the crap out of doctors merely for trying to do their jobs.  None of the Democrat "reforms" address this massive cost which tells you that the motive isn't to help people - it is to put 1/6 of the economy under federal control.

We need to reform our health care.  No question.  But the reform should actually address the real problem: runaway lawsuit costs, increasing competition, improving quality care.

None of Democrat proposals do any of this.  All they do is put Washington in charge of our lives.

That is what this debate is about.  Dig a little deeper and hopefully you'll see that.

Stop me if you've heard this one...

The internet is abuzz with the startling rise of the British National Party.  Pajamas Media has one good piece (by Richard Fernandez aka Wretchard) and a much weaker one by Mike McNally.

I've noted before that Europe is a deeply fissured society.  There are the flawlessly moralistic elites, but the great masses are not so easily categorized.

Mark Steyn likes to point to shrivelling birth rates as evidence for Europe's impending doom, but I am not as convinced.

A few years ago, I was firmly in Steyn's camp.  Since then I've come to know more about Europe's social fabric and I've also actually been there.

The birth rates aren't evenly spread.  Of course Steyn brings this up often to prove that the ethnic Europeans are doomed because most of the babies being born are to non-assimilated Muslim immigrants.

But there are other groups within Europe.  I talked about this over a year ago and I stand by what I wrote then.

In fact, after visiting Europe, I remain even more convinced that there are portions of the ethnic European populations that are quite willing to do the dirty work their parents' wouldn't.

These people make up the professional long-service military cadres of the continent.  Call them the "military caste."  They hate the politicians who tie their hands and have quite a bit of nostalgia for the Good Old Days.  While I was in Germany, I was surprised at the prevalence of the old Imperial eagle.  Nazi nostalgia?  Not so much, but quite a bit of Kaiser nostalgia.

The German military types I spoke with seemed only slightly less zealous than Marines in terms of being seriously squared away and ruthlessly competent.  The Prussian pride and tradition is still there.  The same goes for the Brits, French and so on.

Our military is deeply devoted to the Constitution.  Europe's military caste is different.  Yes, they are bound to uphold the rule of law, but what if that rule breaks down?  France has had five republics.  If you are a French military professional, your loyalty is to France, not the current dusty piece of paper the politicians are using to enrich themselves.

My point is that the guardians of the current political order are increasingly less invested in that order and have more to gain by overturning it than in maintaining it.

Thus, the rise of the BNP illustrates that within the UK, there is a substantial group than wants the nationhood of the UK reasserted.  They want the immigrants to assimilate or get out - and the same ugly authoritarian impulses that currently are used to harry the foes of the current multi-culti elites can be turned around in a heartbeat to round up the new enemies of the state.

Political will waxes and wanes, and as the world economy deteriorates and public safety weakens, expect these radical nationalists to become more popular.  I would in turn expect the authorities to try to break them up.

But here lies the rub: many of police and paramilitary types probably believe in what the nationalists believe.  Maybe not as stridently, but if you can point to four or five generations of soldiers in your family tree, you may not be all that excited about annihilating your national heritage because a suit-wearing bureaucrat tells you to.

So thus you have the potential for the police to join the people they are supposed to be persecuting - the military as well.

And let me be clear - given the huge overreach that many of these governments are already making, the police would likely be fully justified in refusing to enforce the diktats of their masters. 

Whether we are talking about the enforced re-vote in Ireland or the harassment of Geert Wilders, the EU and the British government have each forfeited much of their claim to legitimately reflected the will of the people.  The latest revelations that Labour purposefully imported immigrants to bolster their political fortunes destroys any moral authority the party might have over the BNP.  Both are bigots - they simply favor different groups.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. 

Pope: All your Anglicans are belong to us

The Posse has been following the fissures within the Church of England for some time.

Now, via The Anchoress, we learn that Pope Benedict XVI has made an amazing and sweeping move to bring traditional-minded Anglicans into the Catholic Church.

I've been a huge fan (if that's the appropriate term) of the Blessed Benedict and this latest move demonstrates his dynamism and courage.  This  could pretty much result in the end of the Church of England.

Consider:  The UK is already a very secular society where Anglican churches spend most of their time empty.  The Archbishop of Canterbury is largely treated as a joke.  Why, then, bother with the Establishment?  If traditionalist Anglicans convert en masse, the pews could get very empty indeed.  Why, in a time of deep government debt, should the Church of England receive state support?

At the same time, the tradition-minded Anglicans in the developing have been upset for years with how the leadership in the UK and the US seem determined to undermine the core tenets of the faith.  These people are on the front line against radical Islam's penetration into sub-Saharan Africa.  I am sure they find the Pope's public conversion of a Muslim far more compelling than the hip new Seattle phenomenon of an  Anglican/Muslim hybrid priestess.

Of course, this is about more than shuffling the interdenominational cards.

What it is really about is strengthening Christianity for the fundamental challenges of our time:  radical Islam and decadent secular society.

The Church has defeated Islam before, and the victory was so resounding that many historians considered the issue settled.  Similarly, the fall of Communism 20 years ago was thought to have destroyed the notion of state-run social engineering - now packaged in a bright-green eco-friendly label.  Alas, no bad idea stays forgotten forever.

His Holiness understands this.  All of his actions have been based around the central concept of strengthening the Church - not through the false comfort of numbers - but in its faith and adherence to fundamental truths.  These are the things that really matter.

This is not a hoax

I think it says something about Obama's Nobel Prize that people have to be convinced that it isn't a joke.  I've yet to come across anyone - online or in person - who considers this an obvious decision.

Which is honestly what the Nobel Prizes are for.  When Mother Theresa recieved the prize, people could nod their heads and say "Of course, she's a living saint."  They may not already have heard of the recipient, but when they had, it seemed the right thing to do.

Well, until Jimmy Carter and Al Gore.

The world that we grew up knowing is breaking down.  Its institutions are crumbling around us.  The Nobel is only the latest edifice to crumble. 

Thus it is that a man not yet in office for a full year can receive an award for peace - even though he commands vast armies involved in two major wars with no end in sight to either of them.

There are no treaties, no peace proposals, only lofty words.  In a way, I feel sorry for the president.  By the time he is fifty, he will have achieved everything other men needed their entire lifetimes to accomplish. 

What can he possibly do for an encore?

Sweet home, Chicago

So Chicago will not get the 2016 Summer Olympic Games.  The President took a lot of time out of his busy schedule, personally lobbying the International Olympic Committee in Copenhagen.

Below is a portion of his pitch – the best, smoothest and most persuasive argument he can muster.  Read the whole thing, but here are some key paragraphs:

I know you face a difficult choice among several great cities and nations with impressive bids of their own.  So I've come here today to urge you to choose Chicago for the same reason I chose Chicago nearly 25 years ago -- the reason I fell in love with the city I still call home.  And it's not just because it's where I met the woman you just heard from -- although after getting to know her this week, I know you'll all agree that she's a pretty big selling point for the city.

You see, growing up, my family moved around a lot.  I was born in Hawaii.  I lived in Indonesia for a time.  I never really had roots in any one place or culture or ethnic group.  And then I came to Chicago.  And on those Chicago streets, I worked alongside men and women who were black and white; Latino and Asian; people of every class and nationality and religion.  I came to discover that Chicago is that most American of American cities, but one where citizens from more than 130 nations inhabit a rich tapestry of distinctive neighborhoods.

 

The arrogance of this thing is breathtaking.

This is supposed to be persuasive?  This is a supposed to win people over?  Basically, he told the IOC that they should choose Chicago because Obama did. 

There is a term for this kind of pitch: a testimonial.  In advertising they use it when the person “testifying” has some sort of qualification that the public finds compelling.

Some testimonials are just average folks saying “This worked great for me, you should buy it, too.”  Others use celebrities who are presumably experts on whatever they are selling to reassure prospective buyers that the product there are pitching works and has value.

Examples?  Think sports figures selling athlete’s foot powder or race car drivers pitching gasoline additives.

What standing is Obama supposed to have before the IOC?  Did this clown really think that they would say “Oh, well The One likes it, so I guess we should, too!”?

No wonder they dumped Chicago first.

Tom Maguire has more on the First Lady’s similarly narcissistic sales pitch.