Life in Gaza city

The British Conservative James Delingpole, with whom we usually agree, writes at the Telegraph about the dismal view he takes of the Republican Party candidates in this year’s presidential election.

His assessment of them is so dismal that he thinks that letting Obama, “the POTUS from hell”,  wreck the country for another four years would be a better choice than electing any of them.

We cannot wholly agree with him this time because we think no one on the political horizon could be worse for America than Obama, but we like his article and see his point:

Let’s get one thing clear: Obama unquestionably ranks among the bottom five presidents in US history. In terms of sublime awfulness he’s right up there with our late and extremely unlamented ex-PM Gordon Brown – which is quite some doing, given that Brown singlehandedly wrought more destruction on his country than the Luftwaffe, Dutch Elm Disease, the South Sea Bubble, the Fire of London and the Black Death combined.

Agreed: the damage President Obama has done to the US economy with everything from Ben Bernanke’s insane money-printing programme, to his cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline, to his ban on deep-water drilling to his crony capitalism hand-outs to disaster zones like Solyndra to his persecution of companies like Gibson is incalculable. And, of course, if he gets a second term the damage he and his rag-bag of Marxist cronies at organisations like the Environmental Protection Agency manage to inflict on the US small businessman trying to make an honest buck will make his first term look like Calvin Coolidge on steroids.

So why do I think this would be preferable to a presidency under Mitt Romney? Simple. Because I’ve seen what happens, America, when you elect yet another spineless, yet ruthless, principle-free blow-with-the-wind, big government, crony-capitalist RINO squish. His name is Dave Cameron – and trust me, the cure is far worse than the disease.

Of course it may not seem that way at first. You’ll be so busy dancing round in circles singing “Ding Dong the witch is dead!” that euphoria and relief will completely overwhelm your intellect and your powers of observation. You’ll read endless articles by David L Brooks, the New York Times’s pet pretend-conservative, telling you how Romney is just the kind of uniting, post-partisan, pragmatic POTUS America needed. And you’ll believe it because you’ll want to believe it. This may last for some considerable length of time. In Britain, many Cameroon conservatives … continue to perform this auto-lobotomisation even now.

But then, little by little, something rather unpleasant will begin to dawn on you. The label on the can may have changed but the contents taste remarkably similar. Similarly emetic, that is.

Yes, I know from the other side of the pond David Cameron may look just the kind of stand-up conservative you’d like running the US. But that’s only because the stories you hear about him are extremely selective. For example, I’m constantly surprised by US talk show hosts telling me how tough on militant Islam Cameron is because of some speech they heard Dave give once about the problems of multiculturalism.

But surely we should judge our political leaders by what they actually achieve rather than (Tony Blair-style) by what they tell us they are achieving.

Here are some of David Cameron’s achievements so far:

He has prolonged the economic crisis …

He has urged quotas for women in the boardroom, apparently in the belief that the State has either the knowledge or the right to decide how business conducts its affairs.

He has presided over a massive wind-farm building programme which, besides destroying the British countryside and enriching his father-in-law, is causing energy bills to soar to the point where old people are dying of hypothermia.

He has surrendered at almost every turn to the Carthaginian terms offered to Britain by the European Socialist Superstate.

He has proved himself incapable of expelling the Islamist hate-preacher Abu Qatada. [See our post The tale of a Muslim terrorist parasite, January 18, 2012.]

The list is by no means exhaustive. I would go on but, actually, this was never meant to be a “collected examples of the unutterable crapness of David Cameron” blog. Rather, it’s supposed to be a more generalised warning about the dangers of short-termist thinking.

Yes, of course, conservative/libertarian America, I fully understand how desperate you are to rid yourself of the POTUS from hell. But what you need to ask yourselves – and I don’t believe many of you are: you’re a bit like an hysterical woman who’s just had a tarantula drop on top of her in the bath, you just want to GET RID OF IT NOW! – is what ultimately you’re trying to achieve.

I’m presuming what you really want is stuff like: smaller government; a genuine – as opposed to an illusory, QE-driven – economic recovery; sensible environmentalism (ie conservation but not eco-fascism); liberty; an end of crony capitalism; a diminution of the power of Wall Street; a resurgence of American greatness; a renewed sense of confidence and purpose.

You’re not going to get any of that from a Romney administration.

But you will, provided you’ve got the patience, get it in 2016 from President West or President Rand Paul or President Palin or President Ryan.

Only it might be TOO LATE.

(Hat-tip Andrew M)

Poor George Washington. His birthday, spontaneously celebrated since the Revolution and formally declared a holiday in 1879, has slowly morphed into the insipid Presidents Day you’ll hear about today.

This is from the Heritage Foundation, celebrating the greatest President. His actual birthday, they remind us, is on Wednesday, but “let us remember why he deserves a national holiday”:

George Washington, the “indispensable man” of the Revolution who was rightly extolled for being “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen,” has now been lumped together with the likes of James Buchanan, Jimmy Carter, Franklin Pierce and John Tyler.

Worst of all, with Barack Obama.

It gets worse. Washington’s good name and great legacy are now shamelessly invoked to justify positions that he would never have envisaged.

In a Time Magazine special edition on George Washington currently in newsstands, historian Joseph Ellis matter-of-factly remarks: “He began the political tradition that produced a Union victory in the Civil War, the Federal Reserve Board, Social Security, Medicare and, more recently, Obamacare.”

!?

Washington, who called on Americans to display “pious gratitude” for their Constitution and warned against any “change by usurpation,” is now a partisan of the sprawling welfare state and the unprecedented individual mandate. Ellis even has the gall to hail Washington – the man who gracefully and voluntarily relinquished power after two terms when he could have stayed on for life–as the father of “strong executive leadership” and the precursor to FDR, who stayed in office for an unprecedented 12 years!

The true Washington still has much to teach us, in particular when it comes to the presidency, foreign policy and religious liberty. Although much has changed in the past two centuries, his sage advice and conduct in office have lost none of their relevance, anchored as they are in the timeless principles of the Founding and a sober assessment of human nature.

Washington, like every President after him, swore the followingoath upon taking office: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Unlike many presidents in the past 100 years, however, Washington took the oath seriously and did not try to place himself above the Constitution.

He understood himself to be the President of a Republic in which the people, through their elected representatives in Congress, make laws – not some visionary leader who must define what Progress requires and lead the unenlightened masses there.

Washington took care “that the laws be faithfully executed”. … He did not try to make the laws himself, either by issuing executive orders that circumvented Congress or by regulating what could not be legislated. He left behind no “signature” legislative accomplishments as we would say today. He only used his vetotwice–once on constitutional grounds and once in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief.

Washington gave, on average, only three public speeches a year while in office – including the shortest ever inaugural address. And, of course, he had to be persuaded to serve a second term.

As a President who took his bearings from the Constitution, Washington devoted considerable attention to foreign policy. Our first President sought to establish an energetic and independent foreign policy. He believed America needed a strong military so that it could “choose peace or war, as our interest guided by justice shall Counsel.” …

No survey of Washington’s legacy would be complete without acknowledging his profound commitment to religious liberty. Many today seem to have lost sight of the crucial distinction he drew between mere toleration and true religious liberty. As he explained in the memorable letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport:

“All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.”

But what would he have done about creeping sharia?

This is from an undated article. We quote it here in order to raise a question.

Authorities in four states are prosecuting Chris­tian Science parents on manslaughter, murder, or child abuse charges for refusing medical care to their dying chil­dren. The cases — six of them in all, including three in California — represent the largest assault in history against Christian Science reliance on prayer instead of medical treatment to cure dis­ease.

Are such prosecutions against the Constitutional principle of the separation of church and state?

If so, should the state not interfere in any way in such cases?

Should the state never interfere in any religious practice whatsoever, even if – for instance – it included human sacrifice?

Debate is invited.

What are “rare earths” used for?

Cell phones, computer hard drives, and MRI machines. Military applications include guidance and control systems, advanced optics technologies, radar and radiation detection equipment, advanced communications systems. Weapons and equipment that contain rare earths are: Predator unmanned aerial vehicles, Tomahawk cruise missiles, Zumwalt-class destroyers, night vision goggles, smart bombs, sonar transducers.

The point is, we need them, and at present are reliant on China to supply them.

This is from Wizbang:

China provides 97% of the world’s REE (Rare Earth Elements) production but … only has 48% of the world’s known reserves of rare earths. … China has been imposing export quotas on rare earths which has created two separate rare earth markets – an internal Chinese market and globally, pretty much everyone else. The Chinese export quota for the year sets the global supply and price of REEs. …What we [the US] and the EU are setting ourselves up for is the potential for China to hold us hostage for critical technology.”

Will the question of rare earth elements find their way into discussions with China’s Vice President Xi Jinping during this week’s state visit?

Sarah Wirtz of the American Resources Policy Network tells The Atheist Conservative: “We need to get our act together on these critical metals. Regardless of whether the issue will be touched on in the bilateral talks, we can’t wait for China – and shouldn’t assume that it would be inclined – to change its policies to suit our needs. We can and we must shape our own strategic and economic future, and maximize our own mineral resource potential, and it is about time Washington created a framework conducive to doing so, rather than adding additional barriers to the responsible exploration and development of the mineral riches we’re blessed to have.”

This is from Real Clear World:

[There are] 18 “mineral materials” for which U.S. manufacturers – commercial and military – are 100 percent dependent on foreign sources of supply. In the case of 9 of those 18 minerals or metals, the U.S.’s No. 1 or 2 supplier is China. Next comes a baker’s-dozen of metals and minerals for which the U.S. is 80 to 99 percent foreign-dependent, from the humble Antimony and Potash to exotics like Gallium, Germanium, Titanium and Rhenium. Some we buy from Canada, others from Kazakhstan. How sure we can be of our future supply is anyone’s guess.

And that’s the problem. It turns out, for all of our breezy pundi-fication about the U.S. being a post-industrial economy, we still build stuff out of things that have their origins in rock and dirt. The materials [we need]  are found in the electronic gadgets we use for play and work, the weapons our military uses to keep us safe …

That’s where the fear-factor kicks in, because … we’re more dependent on foreign sources for dozens of key resources than we’ve ever been dependent on OPEC for oil. We just haven’t realized it yet.

So, what do we do?

We can start by reading the global signals that suggest we’re heading into a period of resource scarcity.

There is a high probability that China will exhaust  its supplies of REEs with its own consumption.

Take the much-mentioned Rare Earths crunch. … [China’s]  break-neck GDP growth will consume all of the Rare Earths it sweats out of the ground, and then some.

Rare Earths may be getting the headlines, but there’s no reason to think things will prove much different for Fluorspar, Indium or Gallium. Shortages of any of those substances may not knock us out of our easy chairs, but translate them into the products they make possible: There go our flat panel TVs (Indium), our semiconductors (today), our fuel cells (tomorrow) – both Gallium – and our microscopes, telescopes and optical lenses (Fluorspar).

Glib comments that we can solve shortfalls by simply substituting for scarce raw materials in the manufacturing process deserve deeper examination. Substitution is not so easy. Take, for instance, Niobium (100 percent foreign-dependent, with Brazil our leading supplier), used in fabricating high-strength steel alloy. Instead of Niobium, you can substitute Vanadium as an alloying agent – and you’ll only be switching U.S. dependency from Brazil to China (100 percent foreign-dependent, leading Vanadium supplier).

Or take Indium (100 percent dependent; China the No. 1 supplier), an essential ingredient in solar cells and semiconductors. Gallium Arsenide can substitute for Indium in solar cells and in some semiconductor applications. But we’re 99 percent dependent on Gallium (China, No. 1 supplier) and 100 percent dependent for Arsenic (China again).

What we can do to work through a resource shortage differs, metal by metal and country by country. After all, there’s nothing a nation can do if it drew the short straw in the sub-surface minerals lottery. But when a nation does have untapped resources, it needs a policy to address surety of supply. That means mining more if you’re geologically blessed, keeping on friendly terms with like-minded governments that have resources you lack and diversifying away when possible from regimes likely to use their resource leverage against you in some future crisis or conflict. …

For U.S. policymakers, the looming resource crunch seems to be one more crisis that they’re not ready to cope with right now. With trillion-dollar deficits and a debt-clock ticking down to doomsday, that’s fair enough. But once Congress and the White House get the budget straightened out, it’s fair to ask: What’s our strategy for feeding our high-tech economy the metals and minerals it needs to grow? What’s our national plan to cope with the coming Resource Deficit?

Who doubts that Obama and his highly informed White House advisers have anticipated the problem, and at this very moment are working out a strategy to solve it, starting with a discussion of rare earth minerals with Xi Jinping?

We do.

*

Question: Are there sources of REEs in the US?

Answer (from Wikipedia): In 2010, the United States Geological Survey released a study which found that the United States had 13 million metric tons of rare earth elements.

The cruelly oppressive apartheid regime in South Africa came to an end when elections, open at last to non-white voters, brought the African National Congress (ANC) to power in 1994.

A South African academic who lives in Johannesburg has sent us, at our request, this view of what everyday life is like in South Africa now:

South Africa really is such a peculiar place in which to live. Johannesburg, at the moment, is looking glorious: at least, its suburbs are. We have had wonderful rains (Wagnerian storms in fact!), and the gardens of the Northern suburbs are positively lush. The inner city is a curate’s egg: some parts have been reclaimed; others are lost forever, drug-lord-dominated, filthy slums, heartbreaking to see, if one ever dares to venture near them. In the part I live, we are pretty comfortable, but one always has to be cautious.You never stroll anywhere at night, and do not place a handbag beside your chair in a restaurant. Theft is rife, and one still hears of dreadful rapes and armed attacks on homes in affluent Johannesburg. Crimes are always vicious, and car thefts continue.

Motorists have to be very alert. Traffic is mind-boggling, and the roads are anarchic, a hellish cacophony of hooting and a blur of careering, lethal vehicles, dominated by the so-called “black taxis”: mini-vans crammed with passengers, and driven by desperate, unlicensed youths, who frequently kill their helpless passengers by causing horrendous collisions. Over the December vacation, over 1000 people were killed in road accidents, most of them involving taxis.

Yet, there are still stylish restaurants in which to wine and dine; local cinemas get the transmitted operas from the Met and the dramas from London’s National Theatre – so, although our live theatre is moribund except for revived “protest works” and musicals, we are not quite theatrically starved. So much for the good news.

The bad is pretty dire. Poverty and unemployment are appalling: there are tattered beggars on every street corner. The wealthy “Black diamonds” [the new elite] care even less for the poor than did the Nats [the Nationalist Party which ruled in the apartheid era], and the ANC’s corruption puts that of the Nats to shame. In what is known as North West Province (North Western Transvaal), every ANC-run municipality is being investigated for corruption, and, in Limpopo Province, there is complete bankruptcy owing to ANC corruption. A doctor friend of mine put it aptly: under the Nats, bureaucrats repaired the roads and then kept the left-over money; ANC bureaucrats keep all the money and never bother to repair the roads.  That is very accurate. Oh, and, as The London Times put it, South Africa must be the only country in which there is Affirmative Action for a vast majority, and an over-taxed minority supports the mass populace. Talk of “nationalization” [ie full socialism] idiotically continues, but I think that the greed of the ANC will prevent any attempts at complete nationalization, for President Zuma does not wish to slaughter the golden-egg-laying goose.

In short, we live in a kleptocracy, under a regime voted in by the majority. I shall never regret the overthrow of the vile Nats or the enfranchisement of the unenfranchised, but I hoped for ‘different’, not more of ‘similar’. One’s only hope is that one might live to see a truly democratic government in power in South Africa.

A short while ago it looked as if any Republican candidate would beat Obama in this year’s presidential election.

Now the appalling prospect of a second term for the Obominable Obama looms.

His re-election would be a disaster that cannot be overestimated.

This is by Roger L. Simon, from PJ Media:

To say the least, things do not look good for the Republicans at this moment. Rasmussen polls released Tuesday showed Romney trailing Obama at 49 to 42 and Santorum lagging even further behind at 41. No word on Gingrich, but it’s hard to be optimistic.

According to the pollster: Among unaffiliated voters, the president leads Romney by 10 and Santorum by 16.

Yikes. … And it gets worse. The candidates, bunched closely together in the polls and looking to separate themselves, are too busy denigrating each other to pay much more than temporary lip service (except on the evening of a primary victory) to the main enemy in the White House who expands his lead over them even while his own approval rating is a dismal -11.

What seemed even weeks ago as potentially a banner year for Republicans now appears a potential debacle. Not only is the continued loss of the presidency (Intrade now has Obama’s reelection at 60%) and the Senate an increasing likelihood, the loss of the House looms as a possibility. …

Sure [the Republicans] have to contend with a dishonest and biased media, not to mention a meretricious administration honed on Chicago and Alinksy — but this is a surprise? In reality, what the Republicans mostly have to contend with is themselves in an endless roundelay of “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the most conservative of all?” – a game more befitting a theocracy than a democracy.

The debates came down to a contest about who had the more unsullied conservative bona fides and who would really fulfill their campaign promises about curtailing government spending and appointing pro-life judges to the Supreme Court. In truth they all would, but the media played up (and encouraged the candidates to play up) the idea that one or all of them might be lying, that there was a hidden liberal under the rock waiting to explode, whether it was Santorum with his earmarks and anti-right-to-work voting record, Gingrich with Fannie/Freddie links and global warming flirtation, Romney of RomneyCare and one time tolerance of abortion, etc., etc. The Republican electorate … sat complaisantly at the debates as the media manipulated them into thinking one after the other of the candidates might be prevaricating. No one paid the slightest attention to the candidate’s actual ideas, even though the country was and is in the worst pass it has been in decades. And so, with little encouragement, fewer ideas were discussed in public, most relegated to the back pages of a website.

No wonder the candidates look so unsatisfactory. The system has been rigged – and the Republican Party has allowed it to be rigged – against the Republicans and in favor of the incumbent. So we are left with tarnished candidates poised to compete with a president (himself a total failure) who has barely had to break a sweat as the polls tilt in his favor. If this continues, he will waltz back into office. What an abysmal prospect for us and for our children.

So what is to be done … ? For now, not much. The string must play out. Maybe someone will separate himself from the field sufficiently to redirect the focus where it belongs – on the president and his policies.

But if not, all is not lost. There is still the chance of a brokered convention, dicey as that may be. No one likes to see political decisions made behind closed doors. But that is something the Tea Party and others may have to swallow. Names like Rubio, Ryan, and Daniels (to choose just a few) may end up having more resonance with the electorate than the ones we have been living with lo these many months. The question is: where were they in the first place?

Amazing that in a population of over 307 million people, the Republican Party cannot find a candidate who’ll save America from a Communist, pro-Islamic, would-be dictator!

What America and the world needs is somebody who will hammer away, day after day after  day, at all that Obama and his henchmen and the Democratic Party are doing wrong. The list is long. Their crimes against the American people are vile, topped by the economic ruin of the country and the destruction of America’s power in the world. However bad they’re said to be, exaggeration is impossible. The man who will by-pass the left-biased media by using his opportunities to be heard by the tens of millions every single time he’s on TV shouting out against the treachery, the betrayals, the illegalities, the corruption, the scandals, the trickery of the Democrats; who will not allow the lying accusations that the left will bring against him to stand for a moment, remembering always that the best defense is attack; who will constantly hold before the voter the facts of Obama’s lifelong commitments to radical leftism and the equally collectivist totalitarian creed of Islam – he  is the man who will win the election and save America, the last beacon of freedom in a darkening world. 

Where is he?  Who is he?

This is from the Washington Post:

Nobel-laureate Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and a top official from the Simon Wiesenthal Center said Tuesday that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney should use his stature in the Mormon Church to block its members from posthumously baptizing Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

Their comments followed reports that Mormons had baptized the deceased parents of Wiesenthal, the late Holocaust survivor and Nazi-hunter. Wiesel appeared in a church database used to identify potential subjects of baptisms. …

Posthumous baptisms of non-Mormons are a regular practice in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Members believe the ritual creates the possibility for the deceased to enter their conception of Heaven.

Individual members can submit names, usually of deceased relatives, for proxy baptisms. The church has tried to improve its technology to block the process from including Jewish Holocaust victims. … [as it ] has long been offensive to Jews.

How is all this absurd?

Let us list the ways. They are too numerous to count.

• The absurdity of worshipping “Jesus Christ”.
• The stacks of absurdities in Mormonism.
• The absurdity of baptism.
• The extra-hilarious absurdity of baptizing the dead.
• The extra-extra-absurdity of baptizing dead Jews.
• The absurdity of Jews complaining to the Mormon church about dead Jews being baptized. Do they fear it will turn dead Jews into Mormons?
• The absurdity of Mormons not getting their “technology” good enough to exclude Jews from their posthumous baptismal rites.
• The absurdity of expecting Mitt Romney to bring that mysterious technology up to scratch.

And there are probably more that we’ve missed.

Ah, well! Bring on the figurative corpses. It’s all good clean fun at the virtual baptismal font.

Perhaps the Jews could get their revenge by posthumously circumcising dead Mormons.

Two British voices – Nigel Farage and Godfrey Bloom – cry out against the undemocratic EU’s destruction of Greece and a repeat of the subprime conspiracy of politicians against people.

Who’s listening? Hardly anyone in the joke of a “European parliament”. But millions on the Internet.

Yet again, the UN is conspiring against the world.

Claudia Rosett writes:

The United Nations hasn’t stopped the carnage in Syria, hasn’t stopped Iran’s race for nuclear weapons, and so far hasn’t even managed to produce financial disclosure forms for its top officials that actually disclose anything about their finances. (For instance, here’s the UN “disclosure” form for the head of the UN Environment Program, Achim Steiner.)

Please read the disclosure form. All by itself it provides an insight into everyday practices at the United Nations.

But that’s no bar to the UN proposing to plan the future of the planet. While the headlines focus on upheaval in the Middle East, financial crisis in Europe, an election year politics in the U.S., the UN has been planning its grand summit-level Rio+20 Conference, scheduled for June 20-22 in Brazil. This will mark the 20th anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit, which helped spade the ground for climate hysteria, the Kyoto treaty, and the quack vilification of the world’s most productive economies. This round, the UN plans to make even more “sustainable” the things the UN-ocracy would like to see sustained — paramount among them, the UN itself.

As is the way of such UN confabs, the Rio+20 Conference already has a “Dedicated Secretariat,” headed by China’s Sha Zukang, the UN Under-Secretary-General who made news in 2010 for his drunken rant during a UN retreat at an Austrian ski resort — in which Sha declared he had never liked UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, and he didn’t like Americans either. Also in 2010, Sha served as ceremonial presenter of a “World Harmony Award” to the former Chinese military chief who was operational commander during the 1989 crushing of the Tiananmen Square uprising. 

Now … Ban Ki-Moon, Sha Zukang and another two dozen or more of the UN’s top Rio+20 planners held a closed-door retreat last October, at a Long Island mansion, where they discussed how Rio+20 could help them reshape the world. The proceedings were meant to be secret (apparently, UN top managers prefer that the world not know the details until their world reshaping is already well underway). …

The minutes include the usual mind-numbing welter of UN buzz words: “sustainable…implementing… institutional framework… integration, implementation and coherence…” etc. …

Thanks in substantial part to U.S. tax dollars that subsidize most of its system, the UN has the ability and resources to stage these mega-conferences, whether the U.S. contributes directly or not.

These conferences produce secretariats that become permanent fixtures, and spin off other conferences, commissions, programs — which in turn become frameworks and funders of global lobbying efforts in which an organized few can trample the interests of a disorganized many.

At what cost to humanity does this “sustain” and continually expand the UN, and its ever-swelling ambitions?

As it is, we have a huddle of UN officials — none of them chosen by any process that a normal democracy would recognize as elections — bankrolled in substantial part by U.S. tax dollars, and protected by UN immunities, meeting in luxurious secrecy on Long Island to plan the reshaping of the world.

The UN must be destroyed.