The New Clarion

What Can the US Do to Ease Tensions With North Korea?

That was the headline I saw on Fox News today, while they were discussing the subject with some guest.  Of course, the question translates directly into this, more honest one: What can the US do to appease North Korea now, since all previous appeasements have failed?  It reminded me of a scene I had recently watched in a Korean historical drama, called Jumong.    The episode examined, and dramatized, the idea of appeasement.

The scene involves the deposed King of Puyo (a Korean kingdom), named Kumwa, lecturing his son, Taeso, who had forcibly taken over from him. Taeso has refrained from killing the King, evidently, because the people would revolt if he committed regicide. So he is ruling under the fiction that the King is incapacitated from a wound received in a recent war against the Han (China), in which Kumwa was attempting to recover lands taken from Korea by the Han in an earlier conflict.

Kumwa: I heard the Han demanded a hostage. Is that true?

Taeso: Yes.

Kumwa: You might be my representative, but shouldn’t you have told me earlier?

Taeso: I was going to, after giving it enough thought.

Kumwa: So, are you done thinking?

Taeso: Yes.

Kumwa: What will you do?

Taeso: I’m going to send a hostage.

Kumwa: Don’t you have any pride?

Taeso: Why wouldn’t I have any?

Kumwa: Yet you’re going to send a hostage and accept that we’re a tributary state?

Taeso: We can’t afford to talk about pride. The Han is just waiting for a chance to make us pay for the war. I had to marry a woman I don’t love just to put an end to it. If one hostage will save thousands of lives, why not? Your Majesty, pride won’t stop a war. I’ll reap the benefits of not starting one.

Kumwa: Give up one thing to avoid a war and the Han will demand something else. You’ll use Puyo’s peace as an excuse to back out again and again until you’re at a dead end. What will you give them then? Will you let them conquer us if they want to? Will you die for them if they ask you to? Can’t you see the reality hidden behind the so-called benefits?

 

 

 

This is indeed the fruits of appeasement. Bush did it too often, and for Obama, it is the only option he considers. How long before we reach the dead end?

According to this article, progress is being made in the development of fusion as a source of usable energy. 

Dignitaries and top scientists gathered near San Francisco Friday for the formal opening of a massive new facility that they hope will accomplish what was once thought impossible — nuclear fusion, the Holy Grail of energy sources.The National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will focus 192 laser beams on a hydrogen pellet the size of a bead, heating it to incredible temperatures in an attempt to recreate the power of the sun.

Nuclear fusion has never been achieved on Earth, and critics argue the facility’s $3.5 billion price tag is a waste of taxpayer money.

“We don’t need this machine to solve our energy problems,” says Dr. Arjun Makhijani of the Institute for Energy and Environment Research in Takoma Park, Md. “The main thing the National Ignition Facility has accomplished so far is to burn a hole in the taxpayers’ pocketbook.”

We don’t need it.  No fire-bringers need apply.  One can imagine people such as these refusing the gift of  Prometheus and betraying him to the gods for eternal punishment.  ”Be gone with you!  We prefer living in our caves.” 

All their efforts, so far, have failed to kill off nuclear fission power plants.  But those plants were born in a better day, before environmentalists had any political power.  Will the enviros, politically powerful as they are today, succeed in killing off nuclear fusion aborning?  Is our civilization that far gone?  If they don’t, it won’t be for lack of trying.

Everything Obama has done so far, both domestically and abroad, has been 180 degrees wrong, and his first Supreme Court pick doesn’t break his ignominious record. Sonia Sotomayor is a disastrously bad judge. She will work on the Supreme Court to further Obama’s agenda of destroying individual rights and reshaping America by the standard of collectivism.

Of course, most of the commentary on Sotomayor has focused not on her ideas, but on that over which she has no control: she was born an hispanic woman. Multiculturalism has so perverted the west that we ignore philosophy to focus on blood. And only blood will come of blood.

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Brother-love need not get in the way of the “public interest” in China.  An angry passer-by pushed a would-be jumper off a bridge after he held up traffic for five hours.  The pusher’s reason – the jumper was “selfish” and his action “violate[d] a lot of public interests.”  Notice the initial false gesture of helping the jumper:

Retired soldier Lian Jiansheng, 66, broke through a police cordon and reached out to shake the hand of would-be jumper Chen Fuchao before shoving him off the bridge.

“I pushed him off because jumpers like Chen are very selfish. Their action violates a lot of public interests,” Lai was quoted as saying by the China Daily newspaper.

This is just one small example where the morality of altruism – living for the sake of others, or the “collective” – gives the excuse to any thug to kill, pummel or push another’s life.  When a perpetrator loudly proclaims that the victim was “selfish,” he is projecting his own motivations of cynical egoism, or range-of-the-moment gratification, onto the victim.  This thug was eager to prove that his actions were moral and his victim’s weren’t.

Under altruism, brother-love does not apply to the individual – only to the greater good.  Individuals are expendable, and thugs are justifiable.

In contrast, a couple weeks ago on my side of town in Michigan, a would-be jumper on a pedestrian bridge closed a freeway for over eight hours.  It was reported that he had lost his job.  Dozens of people gathered around to offer encouragement and finally talked him down without incident.  Benevolence and compassion are based in the minds of people who understand that they, themselves, are individuals and that individuals are more important than the collective “good.”  Rational self-interest is the only moral code that keeps the thugs at bay, is conducive to compassion and allows for human beings to flourish.

As a proud owner of a MINI Cooper, I was aghast to see MINI calling for a “Let’s Not Motor Day”. We had an Earth Hour where we’re supposed to turn off the lights and we’ve had a Buy Nothing Day. But those were put on by anti-consumer types; this “Let’s Not Motor Day” is akin to GE suggesting Earth Hour or Macy’s recommending Buy Nothing Day. It is disgusting to see a company selling a great product ashamed of it.

This is a blatant example of what Ayn Rand called “the sanction of the victim,” one of her most powerful insights into the modern businessman. In the name of making peace with their detractors, modern corporations will support and further their ends. Here MINI USA is seeking to curry favor with those who regard automobiles as a blight on the Earth, those who would have us confined to the range of our legs. Sadly, MINI is not alone in its complicity—examples abound of industries trumpeting their “greenness” even though it is directly contrary to their interests.

MINI requests that you make a pledge of how many miles you won’t motor on June 5th. Luckily, they don’t do a particularly good job of validating input so I was able to pledge -10 miles. It’s a small thing, to be sure, but at least I’ve registered a protest. They don’t have my sanction.

Rich Lowry writes about Obama’s recent speech on “torture”:

Put Barack Obama in front of a teleprompter and one thing is certain — he’ll make himself appear the most reasonable person in the room.

Rhetorically, he is in the middle of any debate, perpetually surrounded by finger-pointing extremists who can’t get over their reflexive combativeness and ideological fixations to acknowledge his surpassing thoughtfulness and grace.

…

But beneath its surface, the speech — given heavy play in the press as an implicit debate with former Vice President Dick Cheney, who spoke on the same topic at a different venue immediately afterward — revealed something else: a president who has great difficulty admitting error, who can’t discuss the position of his opponents without resorting to rank caricature, and who adopts an off-putting pose of above-it-all self-righteousness.

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If you were looking for the reason why we, with the most powerful military in the history of the planet, are struggling to defeat a ragtag collection of dirt poor guerilla fighters, this article from Time lays it out quite plainly, if unintentionally.  Time looked at the victory of Sri Lanka over the Tamil Tigers, and concluded they did everything wrong, and their successful methods were exactly what we should not do.  Never have I seen an analysis so utterly and spectacularly wrong as Time’s.  But Time’s insane method for “defeating” an insurgency is exactly the way the West is fighting, and looks like it will continue to fight, the Islamist assault on the West.

But now that the Tigers have been defeated, governments and security forces around the world may try to learn from the success of the Sri Lanka government. President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his army have turned the conventional wisdom on fighting insurgencies on its head, adopting strategies and tactics long discredited, both in the battlefield and in the military classroom. Since they appear to have worked against the Tigers, other countries wracked by insurgencies — from Pakistan to Sudan to Algeria — may be tempted to follow suit. But Rajapaksa’s triumph has come at a high cost in civilian lives and a sharp decline in democratic values — and he is no closer to resolving the ethnic resentments that underpinned the insurgency for decades. Perhaps Sri Lanka’s success should come with a warning label for political leaders and military commanders elsewhere: Do not try this at home.

Obviously, the US war with the Islamists is not the same as the insurgencies mentioned here.  But it is in fact comparable, simply on a global scale.  The Islamist insurgents want the whole world to bow to Islam, and since we are the top dog on the planet, as far as non-Muslim nations go, we are their most tempting target.  If we fall, the rest of the dominoes will quickly follow.  And the “discredited” tactics, as you will see, are certainly meant to apply to the US military as well. 

What horrible tactics were used by Sri Lanka?

Brute Force Works
Modern military wisdom says sheer force doesn’t quell insurgencies, and that in the long run political and economic power-sharing along with social reconciliation are the only ways to end the fighting. But the Sri Lankan army eventually broke down the Tigers in an unrelenting military campaign, the final phase of which lasted more than two years. That sort of sustained offensive hasn’t been tried anywhere, in decades.

I’ve never before read such a perfect statement of how the West will be lost as that one.  The way to fight a terrorist insurgency, according to Time, is not to kill the insurgents who are killing you, but a strategy of compromise and appeasement, i.e., total capitulation.  This will assuage their grievances, and voila! the insurgency will be over.  It’s so simple when you’re willing to give up without a fight, isn’t it?  This is the strategy that has led to a Hamas government in the Palestinian territory, and soon, no doubt, a Hezbollah government in Lebanon. 

Negotiations Don’t
After numerous attempts at mediation — most notably by Norway — led to nothing, Rajapaksa basically abandoned the pursuit of a negotiated solution. Once the military had the upper hand, there was little effort to treaty with the Tigers.

Negotiations assume their is something worth negotiating.  There was no mention in the article of what the Tamil Tigers wanted.  If they are anything like al Qaeda, obviously, there is nothing to negotiate with them.  We either surrender, or kill them. 

Collateral Damage Is Acceptable
In the final months of fighting, the Sri Lankan military offensive hardly differentiated between civilian and Tiger targets. Refugees fleeing the fighting said thousands of innocents were being killed in the army’s bombardments. Modern militaries typically halt hostilities when large numbers of civilians are killed. The Sri Lankan army barely paused. Reva Bhalla, director of analysis at Stratfor, a global intelligence firm, says Rajapaksa’s “disregard for civilian casualties” was a key to the success of the military operation.

In other words, we must allow our enemies to attack, and then hide behind civilian shields.  WWII would have went very well under those rules, wouldn’t it?   In fact, any civilian casualties are the responsiblity of the insurgents who initiated the warfare.  End of story.

The last point Time makes is that Sri Lanka restricted press freedom during the conflict, and kept reporters away from the fighting.  Some restrictins on the press are proper during a war.  You cannot allow reporters to give away the time and location of the D-Day invasion, for example. 

In any case, I’m not defending the Sri Lankan government as such.  They may be as bad as the Tamil Tigers, for all I know.  But the tactics they used to defeat the Tigers were exactly the right tactics, and their success should be an encouragement to anyone in the US government who wants to win this war.  Old fashioned, rational tactics still work just as well as they ever did.  We could easily defeat al Qaeda, not to mention the Somalian pirates, with a fraction of our military might, in a fraction of the time we have already spent appeasing and limiting ourselves to rules of engagement that only strengthen our enemies.  

The Sri Lankan defeat of the Tamil Tigers is, however, a lesson lost on the powers that be in this country, as the Time article so glaringly makes clear.

Billy Beck writes,

We are now in the fait accompli of American socialist revolution. Most peoples’ ignorance of history doesn’t allow them to really grasp how rapidly this is happening now, but this wheel is turning like never before.

I have no illusions that I can change any of it, but I am beginning to see new inspiration — if we can call it that, but it’s more like desperation — toward better work on the blog.

I suspect a lot of bloggers on the individual rights/free market side have had similar thoughts. We are at an important moment in history. Speaking out seems more urgently needed, and yet one has moments of doubt and despair. Does blogging matter?

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Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death! 

Patrick Henry

An article on MarketWatch, called The Happiest Taxes on Earth, quotes a study which claims people in Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands have the highest “life satisfaction” in the world.  The writer equates “life satisfaction” with happiness, and then notes that these nations have some of the highest taxes in the world.  Finally, he makes the assertion that high taxes are one of the causes of their happiness:

There are myriad reasons, of course, for happiness: health, welfare, prosperity, leisure time, strong family, social connections and so on. But there is another common denominator among this group of happy people: taxes.

Northern Europeans pay some of the highest taxes in the world. Danes pay about two-thirds of their income in taxes. Why be so happy about that? It all comes down to what you get in return.

He proceeds to list many of the welfare programs these nations have.  Then he contrasts this with the situation in America, where we do not have as many, or as comprehensive, welfare programs, and he concludes:

 Healthcare and other such social services aren’t built into our system. That means we have to worry more about paying for things ourselves. Worrying doesn’t equate to happiness.

So happiness, according to this line of reasoning, is a result of being taken care of by the government.  Happiness is not having to worry about being responsible for yourself.  Happiness is about giving two thirds of your income to the government, and letting them worry about taking care of you till the day you die.  If this is true, then of course it means one thing:  

Maybe it’s time that we [in America] looked at taxes differently. We have to pay them anyway. So they might as well make us happy. If Northern Europe is any benchmark, the more we’d pay the happier we just may be.

Now two thirds of a given individual’s income might not be enough to pay for his health care or retirement needs, of course.  No matter.  His wealthier brothers will pay it for him—whether they want to, or not.  And therein lies the flaw in all welfare programs, in all welfare states.  Welfare is theft.

But leaving aside the matter of justice, which already invalidates all welfare programs, what does it say about someone to be “happy” to live in a Nanny State?  What kind of “happiness” is this?  It is the happiness of slaves.  Anyone who is content to have the government take care of them, has the morality of a voluntary slave.  Such people want to be slaves, because they believe it is safer than freedom, and removes all worries from their existence.  Whether it really is safer or not, whether it really removes worries from their lives or not, they at least believe that it does. 

To anyone with a shred of pride, to anyone who actually wants to live a human existence, a life of such slavish contentment is not worth living.  This does not mean a person trapped in such a state would or should commit suicide, of course.  It means they should either escape to a freer country, or fight to establish a system of government in their own country that is worthy of man.   The Nanny State is worthy only of sheep.

I have posted here before about how environmentalists are anti-human life. Another example of same is found in the May edition of Ward’s AutoWorld in an editorial by editor Drew Winter titled “Criticism of Tata Nano Wrong Headed.”

For the uninformed (like me) Mr. Winter writes:

“The Tata Nano, a tiny car with average fuel economy of 55 mpg (4.3 L/100 km).
Priced at $2,500, it is the world’s cheapest car and designed specifically to give South Asia’s low-income families a safer, all-weather alternative to a motorcycle or scooter, currently the only “family car” millions can afford.”

Evidently, most Indians ride motorcycles or scooters which results in over 100,000 deaths and 2 million injuries per year. This car might alleviate that. But who is attacking the development of this car? Some fringe eco-activists? Nope. One of the enviro leaders at the UN.

“And yet, many environmentalists who profess to be on a mission to save mankind are condemning this new device as an “environmental disaster” they would like to wish out of existence. Chief U.N. climate scientist Rajendra Pachauri has said “I am having nightmares” about it. Many other green groups also lament its debut.”

Mr. Pachauri is also the lead scientist at the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) which has been, since 1990, selling the notion that global warming will lead to disaster for life on Earth and is all man’s fault which my own two US Senators Debbi Stabenow and Carl Levin bought.

Mr. Winter reports that demand for the Nano is expected to exceed supply and this means:

“It is exactly this popularity that critics from green groups — 100% of whom we can assume do not have to drive their children to school on a scooter — fear. They are afraid the Nano will become so popular it will spark an industrial revolution, such as Henry Ford’s Model T did in the U.S.
In other words, demand for the Nano will soar; leading to more factories being built, creating more jobs, which in turn will create more demand for cars, accelerating India’s production of greenhouse gases. The Nano will create progress. And gosh, that will be terrible.”

He properly condemns this enviro attitude:

“Unfortunately, this contemptible viewpoint, spewed from comfortable middle-class lodgings in the U.S. and Western Europe, has not received the heaping dose of ridicule it deserves. In the worst kind of cultural elitism imaginable, environmentalists argue that in their noble war on global warming, tens of thousands of traffic deaths annually in the developing world are acceptable casualties.

This is an utterly unacceptable position to take, no matter what. The birth of the Nano is an historic event that needs to be celebrated, and environmentalists need to reevaluate their rhetoric and game plan.”

There is of course, no chance they will reevaluate their game plan. Although I won’t be buying a Nano in the forseable future (I prefer something of substance between me and whatever is going to run into me), I’m happy to see such an objective, rational argument in a trade journal.

Miss California, Carrie Prejean, and Senator Arlen Spector both learned the same lesson in the last few weeks: you can disagree with the right, but the left demands ideological conformity. If you disagree with the left, you are judged not only as wrong, but as a bad person.

John McCain, who often disagrees with the right wing of his party, is hailed by the media as a “maverick,” and even gained the Republican presidential nomination. Joe Lieberman, who dares to suggest that maybe America should not commit suicide abroad, is reviled by the left.

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The European antitrust regulator has just announced it will fine Intel Corporation $1.44 billion (1.06 billion euros) because it “harmed millions of European consumers by deliberately acting to keep competitors out of the market for computer chips for many years.” It did this, essentially, by discounting the price it sold chips to stores that agreed to sell computers containing them in bulk through exclusive agreements.

We’ve been down this path before. The railroads that served Standard Oil charged him a lower rate because Rockefeller could guarantee large, steady shipments of oil, which the railroads could ship more cheaply. For providing the railroads with product in a way that reduced their costs, and being charged less for providing that, Rockefeller was prosecuted.

In the same manner, a retail store that can guarantee large, steady sales of computers containing Intel chips is more valuable to Intel than a store that buys some of its chips and some of its competitor’s chips. Intel can afford to provide a discount.

Those never-to-be-denied European customers benefit from this by getting cheaper Intel chips, yet they were supposedly harmed according to the European antitrust commissioner.

But also evaded by the European antitrust commissioner is that a market for computer chips would not exist at all if Intel did not invent, develop, and constantly innovate the chips that become the brains of computers. Because of Intel’s work, each year the chips are faster and smarter. Each computer sold with those chips can do more — faster processing of material from the Internet, simultaneous handling of video and audio, and numerous other tasks — because of the relentless intellectual effort of Intel’s scientists and engineers.

That is part of what the never-to-be-denied European consumers and all others who buy Intel chips are getting.

To steal $1.44 billion from Intel is to demand that these scientists and engineers work for free. It is to steal the fruit of their effort, which we all benefit from by voluntarily buying their products that they create. As their property created by their minds, they have the right to set the terms under which we gladly buy these products, which we buy because of the great benefits they offer us.

Into all this steps the punishing European antitrust commissioner. She violates Intel’s property rights and the rights of Intel’s customers to do business with Intel on mutually agreed-upon terms. And by so doing, she ensures that Intel has $1.44 billion less in which to reward the efforts of those scientists and engineers who create the marvelous Intel chips.

If our computers are a little slower than they could be and our freedoms more diminished, thank Neelie Kroes, the European antitrust commissioner, and the legions of apologist economists who rationalize the pernicious doctrine of antitrust that gives her this power.

Evidently, some eco nuts ran into reality. Billy Beck at Two-Four reports that:

“An expedition team which set sail from Plymouth on a 5,000-mile carbon emission-free trip to Greenland have been rescued by an oil tanker.”

They just don’t get it.

Update; corrected typo

Charles Johnson does a lot of good things at Little Green Footballs.  His anti-jihadist stance since 9/11 has been consistently good.  His criticism of creationism/Intelligent Design has been excellent.  And his criticism of making alliances with racist/fascist parties in the war against the jihadists has also been good.

But there are also serious flaws in his philosophy.  Seeing that Republicans have become too dominated by religion, his solution is for Republicans to become  ”moderates.”   He uses other anti-concepts like ”extremist” with reckless abandon.   And when Republicans begin to show interest in rational economic ideas, such as sound money and abolishing the Fed, Johnson chastises them for their interest in such “weird economic ideas.”   In other words, Johnson is an anti-capitalist.  He described himself as “center/left” before 9/11, so his anti-capitalist views are no surprise. 

I’m not suggesting LGF isn’t worth visiting, because it is.  I go there every day.  Just keep in mind his philosophical views when reading his more political posts.

I heard a few radio spots (also known as commercials) in my day job that make me despair for America.

The first was an ad for Home Depot, in which two women are shopping in a produce aisle. They are shocked by the price of spinach. But one of the women has a plan! She won’t let any supermarket foist expensive spinach on her! No, sirree — she’ll start a garden and grow her own spinach!

Are you kidding me?!

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Here are a few choice pieces to read to get up to speed on Obama’s Chrysler mess.

Neal Boortz explains secured and unsecured loans. (It sounds boring, but it’s not.) Usually secured lenders get precedence in a bankruptcy, but Obama is setting another ominous precedent by turning that upside down. And in the process he has demonized the secured lenders involved as “speculators.”

Obama demagogued these secured lenders by saying “I stand with Chrysler’s employees and their families and communities” and not “those who held out when everybody else is making sacrifices.” So there you go. If you want to enforce your security interest – if you want your money back — you’re against Chrysler’s employees and families. Everyone else is making sacrifices and you don’t want to. Hey … wait a minute here. Are we forgetting that these people have obligations to their shareholders?

What effects will this have on the loan industry?

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The Monday Detroit News editorial page has an op-ed by Michael Barone, senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, titled “Arlen Specter’s switch will haunt GOP.”

Mr Barone claims that the cry of ‘good riddance’ in many conservative circles is ‘wrong headed’ because he (Specter) voted for nomination of Supreme court Justices Thomas, Roberts and Alito, was for the Iraq ‘surge’ and opposes the union card check legislation. All this means is that Specter is a mixed bag of contradictory ideas. He voted with the liberal Dems often.

But Mr. Barone’s pet peeve seems to be his disdain for principled ideas. He laments the fact that Sen James DeMint of South Carolina last Monday told Specter:

“Specter decided to defect after Sen. James DeMint of South Carolina told him Monday that he planned to support Toomey. “I would rather have 30 Republicans in the Senate who really believe in principles of limited government, free markets, free people, than to have 60 that don’t have a set of beliefs,” DeMint said.”

I don’t know much about Mr. Demint but if he is earnest I admire his call for consistency. Anyway, Mr. Barone responded with:

“DeMint may get his wish. A party in decline should adapt its basic philosophy to new policies and positions to win over voters, rather than stand on principle and expel heretics. “

This means that a party in decline needs to abandon principles and adopt its policies according to whatever political winds happen to be blowing at any given moment. He doesn’t understand that trying to be many things to many people is precisely why the Republicans are out of power. It can’t be done.

But conservatives like Mr. Barone make the mistake of thinking that that’s bow the Dems acquired their power, by trying to be everything to everyone. It isn’t. The Dems are in power because they have been loyal to their core principles: in politics, collectivism which holds that there are no individual rights, that the individual is the property of what ever collective he belongs to; in ethics, sacrifice, the surrender of individual values for the sake of some collective (social) need. What the conservatives don’t see is that this collectivist/altruist ideology is hidden behind a facade of pragmatism. They pretend not to be ideologues but they are.

What troubles me is that the Republicans will not be able to commit themselves to individual rights until they commit to principled thinking and abandon pragmatism and the Michael Barones of the world.

This is just a note to direct your attention to PJTV, where Bill Whittle has a really excellent video piece about the use of atomic weapons on Japan during WWII, after comedian Jon Stewart opined that our use of them constituted a war crime.  (Hat Tip, LGF.)

Jack Kemp died of cancer at the age of 73. He was a huge figure in American politics in the late ’70s and early ’80s, when the Republican Party was the one with all the new ideas and the Democrats offered nothing but the same old tax and spend.

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