"We Will Control the Market"

And there you have it, really. (h/t Protein Wisdom)

For 100 years these hyper-instructed ne'er-do-wells have been telling that, given sufficient money and authority, they'll get everything under control. That the business cycle is theirs to command. That the incentives and motivations of millions of human hearts could be perfectly shaped by legislation. Despite watching their house of  jokers collapse around them, they believe it still.

Monty, at Ace:

The “market” is not a thing to be managed, or a process to be controlled. The market is just an aspect of the natural world, working on the creatures who move through it. Merkel’s comment reflects the combination of arrogance and ignorance that is at the root of so many of our economic problems.

Yes. And the only thing wrong with this statement is that every GOP candidate is not shouting it from the rooftops, all the time. Every quarter the GDP is "unexpectedly" less than envisioned, and yet the premise of progressive politics -- that a learned technocracy can manage the wealth of the land better than the people -- remains a truism in the minds of too many people. They will continue to believe it until the bottom drops out.

Whereupon, they will eulogize their fallacies as "noble".

This Magazine's Offices Got Firebombed

It says "100 Lashes if You Don't Die of Laughter"

Take it and Post it. They can't firebomb all of us.

The New Depression is On, Y'all...

So sayeth Carl Weinberg, chief economist at High Frequency Economics, to CNBC (h/t: Ace):

“Our view is that unfunded guarantees are worthless. Raising resources to fund the EFSF and the associated SIV will require diverting savings – domestic European savings, for the most part, not Chinese savings, and not those kept on reserve at the IMF – from either domestic consumption or investment,” he said.Raising that money within the next year from European savers will have a major effect on jobs and incomes as output and demand drop sharply, according to Weinberg, who believes that Europe will be back in crisis sooner rather than later.“We predict a catastrophic contraction of GDP in Euroland in a combined monetary and real-economy event," he said. "The event we envision is much more akin to the Great Depression of the 1930’s than to any business cycle we have experienced in our lifetimes.”

And what happened after the Great Depression in Europe?

I say we let the Germans win this time. Help them out, if possible.

Kaddafy Killed

I guess that means we won.

What did we win?

Christian Fundamentalist Behind Norway Attack

Because nothing is more Christ-like than "I'll Kill You All!"

The Other McCain has the skinny.

91 Dead. Jesus wept.

JFK was No Arthur...

...and his presidency was no Camelot. (h/t: Other McCain)

This should be read because it punctures the Assassination Conspiracy Myth: that Kennedy was killed because he was going to withdraw our forces from Vietnam. The truth is exactly the opposite: Kennedy wanted Vietnam to be his "splendid little war," an opportunity to show the world American strength and resolve. Had he lived, he almost certainly would have done exactly as Johnson did, and his reputation would today be vastly different.

Europe Points the Way

Netherlands abandoning multiculturalism

At some point, two peoples occupying the same land either blend, or fight. Looks like the Dutch just figured out which one was happening.

Frank Fleming Asks the Hard Afghanistan Questions

I’m confused on what the Democrat narrative on Afghanistan is now. The war in Iraq distracted from fleeing Afghanistan?

For more, see here.

How's that "Reset Button" Working Out, Obama?

The Czechs are now withdrawing from our missile-defense compact. Appeasing Russia tends to make Eastern Europe nervous. Who knew?

Knife point:

“I’m not surprised by the decision,” said Jan Vidim, a lawmaker in the lower house of the Czech Parliament. “The United States has been and will be our crucial strategic partner but the current administration doesn’t take the Czech Republic seriously.”

The man who promised to heal our international relations is now losing us allies that the Dum Cowboy gained for us.

Quiet Progress in Afghanistan

A tonic to the general cries of doom and gloom in the graveyard of empires: (H/T: Chequerboard)

The United Nations Security Council, who has issued almost 40 quarterly reports on the situation in Afghanistan since 2001, most recently reported in March that "the number of districts under insurgent control has decreased.… As a result of the increased tempo of security operations in northern and western provinces, an increasing number of anti-Government elements are seeking to join local reintegration programs.… In Kabul, the increasingly effective Afghan national security forces continue to limit insurgent attacks."

If current trends continue, the Invincibility of Insurgency will take another, hopefully final, blow.

And If We Don't Give the Palestinians What They Want....?

When I was 16 years old, I believed that Israel and Palestine could come to some kind of agreement and just drop everything. I believed that this was about a homeland. I no longer think so, because I became convinced of the reality that Mark Steyn is talking about:

“That’s why there was no peace in 1948, no peace under the British mandate in the 1930s, no peace at the time of the 1922 partition because one party to the dispute wants to kill the other. So, if they are wedded to that, then you got to put pressure on the party that doesn’t want to kill each other, to make concession – to keep throwing concessions in the face of the beast that wants to devour it and I think that’s – if you look at where he’s applying the pressure, I think that tells you a lot about the fundamental fraudulence of these negotiations.”

Now it could be that all this talk of wanting to drive Israel into the see is so much bluster. But if you were an Israeli Jew, how much would you want to bet on it? Palestine could have had peace in 1999, when Israel offered them more or less the same deal that Obama wants them to offer now. Palestine chose war, instead. Because war is what they want.

So war is what Palestine gets. And so long as Israel refuses to surrender anything to an enemy they have no reason to trust, it's a war they will slowly lose.

It's Funny Cause It's True...

Stacey McCain reveals the true info source behind the Bin Laden Raid.

I Thought the French Beheaded Their Aristocracy

Apparently I was mistaken.

This morning, I hold it against the American judge who, by delivering him to the crowd of photo hounds, pretended to take him for a subject of justice like any other.

Does this American judge not know that he is dealing with Strauss-Kahn, Comte de Money, Baron du Socialisme, and Seigneur De La Marmalade-Douche? Quelle effrontery!

The ISI are Spies. This is What Spies Do.

The pundits are aflutter with the question "What the Hell was Osama doing in Pakistan?" (Not small-arms training, obviously.) Everyone's bubbling with consipiracies about what the Pakistani ISI knew and when they knew it. Michael Ledeen runs this to the hilt, suggesting that not only might the ISI have a motive for betraying Osama...

There are many possible reasons.  One is that things were going badly with us — look at all the tough language coming from the likes of General Petraeus and from leading members of Congress and several spoon-fed journalists — and the gift of bin Laden would make for a happier Obama administration.

...so might Al Qaeda:

The war in Afghanistan is going badly for al-Qaeda. We’ve been slaughtering them for many many months, just read the military reports. So their recruitment is down, their fund-raising is down, their morale is down. Inevitably, this sort of thing produces divisions within the organization. Some of them want to fight on, others say let’s cut our losses and focus on the opportunities elsewhere…the world is changing, after all…

It's not that implausible. On the other hand, Five Rupees points out that intelligence organizations often have blind spots:

Look, if the mil-ISI knew everything there is to know about everything, there’d never be another terrorist attack in Pakistan (they’d just be restricted to Afghanistan and India). Clearly this is not the case. They are evidently caught off guard time and again. Just a couple months ago, there was a suicide bombing inside an army compound in Mardan. More relevantly, less than two years ago was the raid and hostage-taking attack at the army’s headquarters! The headquarters! And this is leaving aside all the terrorist attacks on civilians targets throughout the country that these brilliant and resourceful organizations should ostensibly have intimate knowledge of.

We Americans regard the CIA with the same dualism: All-Powerful Secret Masters of the Land one minute, and Bumbling Blinded Toadies Unable to Locate Their Posteriors with Both Mani and a Torch the next. They can't both be true.

So while I suspect the Pakis knew what was going on and looked the other way because they decided that Osama was worth sacrificing, I'm not going to rule out the possibility that they simply had no idea what was going on. I'm not a spy, so I don't know, and given the poor information control the White House displayed with regard to the raid, I'm not certain the spies know any better.

Thoughts on Bin Laden

1. It's obviously true and totally irrelevant that Al Qaeda and the Taliban will continue just fine in his absence, just as Iraq continued bloodily after Saddam was caught and hung. It matters not. This man declared war on us, and now he is fodder for worms. The message is clear: you may run, and you may hide, and the long years may seem to stretch on, but one day you will turn around, and one of ours will be behind you, and he will put two in the back of your head, and we will take your gangly corpse and display it to the four corners of the realm. Sleep tight.
2. Teleprompter hiccups aside, Obama looked presidential last night. He's milking this win for his own political capital, and there's no reason he shouldn't. As he said, he gave the order, and it redounds to the Commander-in-Chief's credit. Democrats are going to use this as evidence that The Shadow Way, the Non-Invasion Way, is the better way to defeat terror. After all, Bush missed Bin Laden for eight years, and Obama got him in two. But there's no way we would have done so without the assets that Bush put in country. Obama relentlessly praised the men and women, military and intelligence, who made this happen. We should not pretend that they started in January 2009, whatever Double Secret Probation that the President ordered then.
3. On a religious note, I don't really care all that much about Bin Laden's Final Judgment. If he should be barking in Hell, so be it. If I should run into him in Purgatory, and we stare dumb-foundedly at one another as the last of our wickedness is scorched away from us, so be it. Bin Laden's death means that he is no longer a problem for me and my countrymen. That is enough. The Almighty has His own purposes.

Let's Be Honest: The Man is a Fool.

For it must be noted, that men must either be caressed or annihilated; they will revenge themselves for small injuries, but cannot do so for great ones; the injury that we do to a man must be such that we need not fear his vengeance.  -Machiavelli

Obama has gone to war with Libya without Congressional authorization, without a plan for achieving his goals, and he is likely to fail. Like many a man who festoons himself with the title of Man of Peace, he has refused to study war, and so has allowed himself to be hoodwinked. He believed the rebels in Libya, who believed, like the rest of the world, that Gaddafi was Mubarak in silly clothes. He did not consider that Gaddafi was a soldier by training, that he fought in Chad for seven years to control that poor country, or that he went to war with Egypt in 1977 more or less on a whim.

Such a man does not flee like Ferdinand Marcos or Baby Doc from popular discontent. He does not fear his palaces being blown up by cruise missiles. He will not surrender to maintain his wealth. He will give up his control over the country at the same moment that his body gives up his spirit.

Obama should have known this, or at the very least, inquired as to the nature of the man whom he had decided "must go." But we should not be surprised that he didn't. Conflict and the resources needed to win it have always been above his pay grade.

For the Love of God, Obama...

Why are you stupid?

The Russians specifically are seeking a defense technology cooperation deal with the Pentagon that will permit them to gain access to U.S. hit-to-kill missile defense know-how, the key technology for the most current strategic long-range and tactical short-range defenses that were developed at a cost of billions of taxpayer dollars over the past two decades.The reason, the officials said, is that Moscow knows it can offer very little in the way of cooperative missile defense with the U.S. The current strategic anti-missile interceptors around Moscow are armed with nuclear warheads — tactical weapons that Moscow is not expected to use against an Iranian missile attack.

That's because the Russians don't expect to be receiving any Iranian missile attacks. Hell, they'll probably sell the tech to Tehran the first chance they get.

And yes, Ace, the appeal of not voting for Romney (or even Palin) diminishes when confronted with this basic fecklessness in the one area the President has total control.

"Kinetic Military Action"

The Examiner:

Now, White House officials are referring to the war in Libya not as a war but as a "kinetic military action." As common as "kinetic" might be among those in government, it still seems likely to strike members of the public as a euphemism that allows the Obama administration to describe a war as something other than a war.

Polysyllabics are like passive voice: they obscure. Passive voice obscures who's acting; pollysyllabics obscure the action itself.

Is it Really Aggression if You're Fighting a Rebellion?

Look, I'm sure that Muammar Kahadaffy (or however his name is spelled) deserves every salty ounce of the rage that the Libyan rebels have for him. But Mickey Kaus has a point:

It’s one thing for a supra-national authority–the U.N.–to authorize a war against someone who has committed cross-border aggression, or who has repeatedly violated earlier U.N. resolutions left over from a previous war. That was the case with Saddam in 2002–in theory.*It’s another to let the U.N. authorize a war on what Obama calls ”humanitarian grounds”–whether it’s to stop actual killings or some less severe variety of  “human rights violation.”  These are concepts that are easily watered down to justify intervention–indeed, as Massimo Calabresi makes clear, they seem to have been watered down in this very case, where Gaddafi’s pending atrocities are hardly Rwanda-sized...

And yes, that's a mighty flimsy defense. But legal authorization carries with it the threat of precedent. Are all rebels to demand UN-guarunteed Marquess of Queensbury rules?

Getting rid of Gaddafi is an easy call on national-interest grounds: he's a slime. He has the blood of Americans on his hands. His people, carried up in the winds of the Arab Spring, want him gone, and it behooves us to make nice with them. Done and done. But jumping in with a vague constructions about atrocities that may not have happened, in an internal revolt that touches no other nation, this may lead we know not where.

It's Not Just Me...

Word Around the Net:

Months before the actual invasion of Iraq began, President Bush brought his argument to the American people, using speeches, interviews, and his administration writing editorials for various news sources. President Bush tried to convince the American people of the necessity of his plan and why.
By contrast, President Obama went to the UN and started taking action. He did not seek to convince anyone in the public of what he was doing, nor gain public support.

Obama seems not to remember what country he Presides over. After all, there's oceans to stop...