harmonicminer

The previous post in this series is here.

Thomas Sowell has been writing a multipart series based on his book titled “Dismantling America.” I consider it to be required reading for anyone wanting to understand what’s been happening in and with our government, not just lately, but for several decades.  Here is the fifth video in a series introducing the book.

via Power Line More at the link.

We missed an important moment at the Miss Universe pageant on Saturday night. The outgoing Miss Universe made a little political statement on her final catwalk that was visible to Venezuelans but probably no one else, holding up an obsolete seven star pre-Chavez era flag. She did it to signal distress in her country, and nowhere is that move evident than in Venezuela’s violent crime. This week the news came out that Caracas is the most violent city in the world, a distinction it holds over Kabul, Baghdad, Sao Paulo and Ciudad Juarez.

As we age, we get smaller, we get wrinkles, and we get shaky. So, apparently, does the moon, as lunar scientists say that a Shrinking moon may explain lunar quakes.

Thomas Watters of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and colleagues say the wrinkles likely formed as the moon cooled and contracted.

The features are surprisingly recent, having formed no more than 1 billion years ago. That estimate is based on the fact that they partly destroyed some pre-existing small craters that seem to be no more than 1 billion years old. “The moon may still be geologically and tectonically active and still shrinking today,” Watters said in a teleconference with reporters on Thursday.

What a nice way to say it. The next time someone points out that I don’t look as young as I used to, I’ll just say, “That’s because I’m still tectonically active.”

That’s a continental plate on top of my head.  It only LOOKS like the surface of the moon.

Obama has become famous for his international apology tours, in which he seems to apologize for everything under the sun, as if America is the most brutal and vicious regime in history, as if we’ve been weighed in the balance and found wanting, as if we’re solely responsible for global warming and hunger around the world, in addition to being rude to all the other nice nations. Truthfully, he’s apologizing just for America being America… but here’s a national leader who knows when its time to apologize, as Japanese P.M. apologizes on anniversary of WWII end

Japan’s new liberal prime minister shunned a visit to a shrine that has outraged Asian neighbors for honoring war criminals, breaking from past governments’ tradition and instead apologizing Sunday for the suffering World War II caused.

Members of the now-opposition Liberal Democratic Party, which ruled Japan nearly continuously since the end of the war, made a point by carrying out their own trip to Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo on the 65th anniversary of the end of World War II.

The Shinto shrine — a spectacular building with sweeping roofs and a museum in its grounds that glorifies kamikaze pilots — has set off controversy by honoring the 2.5 million Japanese war dead, including Class A war criminals such as Hideki Tojo, Japan’s war-time prime minister who was executed in 1948.

“We caused great damage and suffering to many nations during the war, especially to the people of Asia,” Kan told a crowd of about 6,000 at an annual memorial service for the war dead at Budokan hall in Tokyo.

“We feel a deep regret, and we offer our sincere feelings of condolence to those who suffered and their families,” he said. “We renew our promise to never wage war, and we promise to do our utmost to achieve eternal world peace and to never repeat again the mistake of war.”

Among those listening to Kan’s words were Emperor Akihito, whose father Hirohito announced the surrender 65 years ago in a radio broadcast — the first time the Japanese public had heard the real voice of the emperor, who had been revered as a living god to justify imperial expansion.

Last week, <Kan> apologized to South Korea for its 1910-45 colonial rule. Imperialist Japan committed atrocities in Asia, including forcing Koreans to fight as front-line soldiers, work in slave-labor conditions and serve as prostitutes in military-run brothels.

In Seouln President Lee Myung-bak, speaking Sunday before a crowd packing a plaza near the former royal palace, said history should not be forgotten but urged Japan and his nation to work together for a new future.

“I have taken note of Japan’s effort, which represents one step forward,” Lee said of Kan’s apology.

How does what Japan has to apologize for compare to what America has to apologize for? Your answer to that will inform your response to Obama’s apology tours.

In no particular order:

A lot less narcissism on Facebook.

Church worship leaders behaving like worship leaders and not stage performers.

A professional sports star that cares more about the community in which they play than their “brand”.

A politician retire without having become wealthy while in office.

Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams in the president’s cabinet.

Some common courtesy on the freeway.

A government “by the people and for the people” not “against the people” or “at the people”.

A hero’s welcome for every soldier when they come home.

Students who are willing to do what it takes.

A manned mission to Mars.

The view from the top of Mt. Everest.

The 49ers back in the Superbowl.

An emerald flash.

Satchel Paige in his prime.

A cure for cancer.

The earth from outer space.

A long stretch of open road through the windshield of a Shelby Cobra.

The return of the Helms Bakery truck.

Vin Scully live forever.

Federal Judge Overturns California’s Same-Sex Marriage Ban

A federal judge on Wednesday overturned a California ban on same-sex marriage, ruling that the Proposition 8 ballot initiative was unconstitutional.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Vaugh Walker, one of three openly gay federal judges in the country, gave opponents of the controversial Proposition 8 ballot a major victory.

Gay couples waving rainbow and American flags outside the courthouse cheered, hugged and kissed as word of the ruling spread.

Despite the favorable ruling for same-sex couples, gay marriage will not be allowed to resume. That’s because the judge said he wants to decide whether his order should be suspended while the proponents pursue their appeal in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The judge ordered both sides to submit written arguments by Aug. 6 on the issue.

Supporters argued the ban was necessary to safeguard the traditional understanding of marriage and to encourage responsible childbearing.

California voters passed the ban as Proposition 8 in November 2008, five months after the state Supreme Court legalized gay marriage.

“Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples,” the judge wrote in a 136-page ruling that laid out in precise detail why the ban does not pass constitutional muster.

The judge found that the gay marriage ban violates the Constitution’s due process and equal protection clauses.

“Because Proposition 8 disadvantages gays and lesbians without any rational justification, Proposition 8 violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” the judge ruled.

Presumably current law also disadvantages polygamists and polyandrists, not to mention people who want to live in “group marriages”, “without any rational justification.”
Some comments from others:

Power Line

Conservatives have long said that the day would come when liberal judges declare the Constitution unconstitutional. That happened today, when a gay federal judge in San Francisco, relying on the opinions of mostly-gay “expert” witnesses, ruled that an amendment to the California constitution, which was adopted in perfectly proper fashion by a substantial majority of voters, is “unconstitutional.” In this context, unconstitutional means “unpopular with me and my friends.”

The “Who Decides” Election

August is off to an interesting start, with liberal elites telling large majorities of Americans that they are bigots if they oppose a mosque at Ground Zero or same sex marriage in California. These edicts to the cultural surfs from their betters in New York and San Francisco only add to the growing sense that November really is a show-down election, a conviction that was strengthened by the amazing verdict on Obamacare from the Show Me State on Tuesday.

The debates over the mosque and marriage are both being carried on at two levels.

In both cases there is a complicated legal debate underway, as there is in the case of Arizona’s 1070 and Virginia’s challenge to Obamacare. Each of these four disputes could make for wonderful hypotheticals on a final exam in any Con Law class in the country, so not surprisingly the non-lawyers in pundit land are making a hash of it. (For an example of careful analysis of the marriage decision, see Orin Kerr’s take on one small portion of Judge Walker’s opinion at The Volokh Conspiracy, which demonstrates the complexity of the arguments and why almost all non-lawyers and most lawyers are going to have as tough a time with the legal issues here as they have with the preemption and Commerce Clause issues in the Arizona and Virginia cases and the Free Exercise arguments regarding GZM.)

Here’s the all-purpose, all-weather analysis for all four controversies: Eventually Anthony Kennedy will tell us what the law is. Until then, it is all just so much dorm-room chatter. The Supreme Court is narrowly divided between “living Constitution” justices and “originalist” justices, and the four in each camp will be pretty predictable on the marriage, preemption, and Commerce Clause issues, though less so on the Free Exercise issue which would be at the heart of the case should the GZM ever reach the Court (which the Court almost certainly does not want it to do.)

This is exactly right, I think. If the words of the Constitution don’t mean what they meant to the founders, then they don’t mean much of anything other than the personal preferences of the judges making the decisions now.

What, you say that you don’t see anything in the Constitution or history to suggest that the founders (or anyone else for the first two centuries of the republic) believed that same sex marriage was/is protected by the Constitution?

Then stop voting for Democrats, who have for decades reliably (meaning almost ALWAYS) appointed judges who think that their opinion about what the constitution really means is more important than the opinions of, say James Madison, or Thomas Jefferson, or Alexander Hamilton, or, for that matter, John Jay.

Today, it seems we can forget what the Constitution actually meant to the people who wrote it and approved it, because we have Anthony Kennedy to divide the waters for us.

Pray he gets it right.

Modern physics has for decades assumed that we know of the basic four forces in the universe, and that there are only those four, gravity, electromagnetism, weak nuclear and strong nuclear forces. The problem is that some observed aspects of the universe seem not to be explainable in terms of only those four forces, notably the continued expansion of the universe, and the way galaxies stay together without (apparently) enough mass to produce the gravitic effects that are observed.  So called “dark energy” and “dark matter” is the scientific community’s way of saying, “We don’t have a fuzzy clue what’s out there or why it behaves that way.”  Dark energy and dark matter are believed to be 95% of everything in the universe, with what we see and can directly measure being 5% or less. So some scientists are asking, Is a cosmic chameleon driving galaxies apart?

The basic idea for this fifth force was hatched in 2004 by Justin Khoury and Amanda Weltman, then members of a team led by well-known string theorist Brian Greene at Columbia University in New York City. String theory is the favoured route to unifying gravity, the odd one out among the four forces, with the other three under the umbrella of quantum mechanics. It is a great playground for devising new fields and forces. The theory is formulated in 11 dimensions, seven of which are assumed to be curled up so small that we cannot see them. Disturbances in those curled-up dimensions might make themselves felt as “extra” forces in the four dimensions of space and time we do see.

For this picture to make sense, the effects in the visible dimensions must match our observations of the universe. Khoury and Weltman proposed one way of doing this: an extra force could be transmitted by particles whose mass depends on the density of the matter around them. That way, its effects could remained veiled on Earth.

How would that work? Well, in quantum mechanics, the range of influence of a force depends largely on the mass of the particles produced by the associated force field: the lighter the particle, the longer the force’s range. Electromagnetic fields, for example, produce photons that have no mass whatsoever, so the range of the electromagnetic force is infinite. The particles that transmit the weak nuclear force, on the other hand, are extremely heavy and do not travel very far, confining the force to the tiny scales of the atomic nucleus. With the strong nuclear force, things are slightly more complex: the associated particles, called gluons, are massless but also have the ability to interact with themselves, preventing the force from operating over large distances.

Khoury and Weltman started from the observation that the average density of matter in Earth’s vicinity is very high in cosmic terms, at about 0.5 grams per cubic centimetre. Under these circumstances, they proposed, the particle that transmits the chameleon force would be about a billion times lighter than the electron. The force itself would then have a range of not more than a millimetre – small enough for its effects to have remained undetected in the lab so far.

In the wide open spaces of the cosmos, however, where a cubic centimetre contains just 10-29 grams of matter on average, the mass of the chameleon particle plummets by something like 22 orders of magnitude, producing a muscular force that could act over millions of light years. The lost mass is picked up as energy by the chameleon field.

You’ll pardon me… but I’m excited by the idea that there is still plenty of physics left undiscovered, and the universe is still a very mysterious place. And, by that same token, I suggest that all the scientists in the room be relatively circumspect, or maybe even downright humble, in their conjectures about the possibility that all this happened more or less “by accident”, and did not require a Designer.

You’ll need your cellphone to take and send pictures of yourself as you lay neglected, like this young woman who texted pics of herself dying to her family.  NHS is Britain’s National Health Service:

A DESPERATE woman texted photos of herself slowly DYING to her mum as she lay suffering on a hospital bed – being ignored by NHS doctors.

Tragic Jo Dowling, 25, sent over forty messages to her mother and best friend including pictures of a deadly rash spreading across her body as her life ebbed away.

The pretty youngster was diagnosed by her family GP with suspected Meningococcal Septicaemia after developing a purple skin rash and low blood pressure last November.

She was rushed to Milton Keynes Hospital where A&E doctors rejected the diagnosis believing instead her illness was a mild infection caused by her Cystic Fibrosis.

Doctors abandoned Jo on a observation ward and gave her headache tablets and fluids as they failed to spot the purple rash spread over her arms, hands and legs.

As the hours passed terrified Jo took photos of her rash on her mobile phone and sent them to her mum and best friend describing her condition as “getting worse”.

The meningitis bug left her in septic shock choking and coughing as fluid filled her lungs and she died four hours after her last text message – just 14 hours after arriving at hospital.

It seems that the hospital was understaffed AND incompetent:

The inquest heard there were only two doctors on duty to cover the entire hospital the night Jo died.

Devastated mum Sue Christie, 48, of Milton Keynes, a distribution worker, said: “Our doctor knew it was meningitis but when we got to hospital all the care seemed to stop.

“They didn’t seem to know what they were meant to do or what meningococcal septicaemia was.

“The hospital was saying it was just an infection. She had a lot of infections with Cystic Fibrosis but never a rash like this.

“I saw her picture messages and the rash was really bad. You couldn’t miss them but the nurses did. I thought she was in hospital and with the best people.

“She wasn’t given a chance and was left to die without being given any treatment.

“It is so sad as Jo had got through everything with her Cystic Fibrosis and was such a strong girl.”

I give blood regularly, and the donor center always asks me if I’ve been to Britain lately.  I suspect that if I said yes, the next question would be, “Did you have any medical care in Britain?”

Word gets around.

h/t: Powerline

U.S. Authorities Shut Down WordPress Host With 73,000 Blogs

After the U.S. Government took action against several sites connected to movie streaming recently, nerves are jangling over the possibility that this is just the beginning of a wider crackdown. Now it appears that a free blogging platform has been taken down by its hosting provider on orders from the U.S. authorities on grounds of “a history of abuse”. More than 73,000 blogs are out of action as a result.

They say it’s because of copyright infringement, but is it really? From reading the article here, it would seem that only sites/blogs which were streaming movies and TV shows were shut down initially, but upon further perusal, it seems like the Feds just arbitrarily shut down a server with several tens of thousands of bloggers on it without due process as is usual with this administration. How soon before they find some reason to shut down other servers or networks? What’s probably infuriating to the bloggers who were shut down is that they have no recourse. They have no idea why the server was shut down. And the Feds are mum about it. Also, if the bloggers can even get a hold of the server admin, they’re refused any explanation of why.

Perhaps this is just a “test case” for the FCC to see if or what they can get by with.

Doesn’t it just make you feel all warm and fuzzy towards the Obama administration to know that they’re watching out for you?

By the way: WordPress is the engine that runs this blog.

Even giving full credence to the notion of “copyright infringement” happening, causing the feds to crack down, it is beyond belief that 73,000 blogs were all the targets of federal investigations.

I suppose we’re supposed to just accept that as collateral damage.

If you blog, may I suggest you frequently back up ALL your data?  And maybe be prepared to put up a mirror site if the feds decide someone in your cyber-neighborhood is hosting too many Seinfeld episodes?

Just a thought.

I’m pretty sure that that if the Bush administration had done this, the media and web would have been full of accusations that Bush was “protecting his big business friends” (who else owns big money copyrights?) and taking the opportunity to “shut down free speech” for all the lefty blogs on the same servers.  There would be individual sob stories of people who lost their access to pictures of grandma, and small business sites selling energy efficiency products that were now out of business, and so on.

You know how it would go:  Bush lied, servers died.

I’m guessing you probably haven’t even heard of this story much of anywhere else.  Apparently, the muzzling of free speech is only worth reporting when Republicans do it.

We get these lightning storms around here every now and then, but they don’t always get videoed.

Power Line – Why the silent treatment?

As Scott points out in the post immediately below, the news that President Obama tasked NASA head Bolden, as perhaps his foremost mission, with raising Muslim self-esteem is entirely absent from the New York Times and the Washington Post, as well as the nightly newscasts of ABC, NBC, and CBS. Why? Bill Otis argues, persuasively I think, that it’s because this news is potentially devastating to Obama:

The reason the MSM has the lid on NASA’s new “mission” to snuggle up to Islam (in between decapitations and floggings) is that it would be devastating to Obama if it became known. On the surface, the new NASA “mission” seems merely screwball, and thus a small story. But I think it’s a good deal more than that. It shows that Obama’s thinking is unrecognizable to the average person. It also shows that he’s unserious — frivolous, really — about something that made a generation of Baby Boomers take pride in their country. How many millions of people sat in their junior high auditoriums and watched the Alan Shepherd and John Glenn launches? How many millions more were up at midnight on July 20, 1969 to watch the first human being, an American, put his foot on the moon?

When the domestic roots of skepticism about America (and sometimes flat-out anti-Americanism) were being laid — in the 60′s assassinations, the Vietnam War, and the exposure of the country’s treatment of blacks — the one thing in which we all took pride was the space program. So for Obama, it’s now one thing that needs to be perverted. Making it a dumbed-down PR front for Islam is, in its way, a genius move for this purpose. But as the MSM recognizes by its silence, it’s a bridge too far.

A lot of people out there haven’t heard of “American exceptionalism,” or, if they have, aren’t too sure of what it means. But they have a good intuition for it: It is, among other things, but quite importantly, the excitement and pride they felt when America did something the human race had wanted to do since it looked up at the night sky. Space exploration took on added luster for our generation because it was so in keeping with the natural optimism, bravado and energy of our youth.

Under Obama, NASA has ended plans to go back to the moon, or go to Mars (something also underreported). Budgets are tight, you know. Time to hunker down and lower our sights. But we can do Muslim outreach.

This is a window on the kind of thinking Obama does. Were it widely known, it would be devastating: We will put away what has made the country a beacon, and act like the small, repentant ex-bully Obama takes us to be. Thus the rockets get mothballed as The Great Satan starts to make amends by printing comic books celebrating Arab contributions to trigonomety 4000 years ago, or whatever it was.

“You’ll be able to keep your own insurance” was the most important political lie of the last year. But NASA’s new mission is the most revealing truth. The MSM understands this, which is why it’s been so resolute in keeping it out of sight.

On Visit To Poland, Clinton Says Missile Shield ‘Not Directed At Russia’

The United States
and Poland have signed a revised agreement to deploy elements of a missile-defense system in Central Europe, overriding Russia’s objections.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton witnessed the signing of the deal today in the Polish city of Krakow, the second leg of her four-day trip to Ukraine, Poland, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia.

The revamped agreement takes into account changes brought in by U.S. President Barack Obama, who announced in September that Washington would drop the plans of his predecessor, George W. Bush, for a long-range system.

Instead, Obama’s plan envisages a short- and medium-range system to counter Iran’s ballistic missile program, as well as a small U.S. base in Poland.

Speaking at a joint news conference with Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, Clinton said Washington remains deeply committed to Poland’s security and sovereignty.

“Today, by signing an amendment to the ballistic missile-defense agreement, we are reinforcing this commitment. The amendment will allow us to move forward with Polish participation in hosting elements of the phased adaptive approach to missile defense in Europe,” Clinton said. “It will help protect the Polish people and all of Europe — our allies and others — from evolving threats like that posed by Iran.”

Despite the initial dismay sparked in Poland by Obama’s decision to scrap the Bush-era missile plans, Sikorski insisted that his nation actually favors the new approach.

“When President Obama announced the new configuration of this sytem, we did say that we liked the new configuration better, but I think you didn’t believe us,” he said. “Now that we have signed the annex, I hope you do believe us.”

Of course, the Polish government would say nearly anything to get some kind of missile shield in place, and have little choice but to accept whatever Obama will offer. The Polish government knows that the rest of the world knows this. So, in a way, I think the comments just quoted should be read to mean, “Obama reneged, and has now come back half-way, and since this is far as he’s going to go, we’re going to make the best of it and not rock the boat.”

As usual, Obama is more interested in placating opponents (which, realistically, Russia has become) than supporting friends.  One wonders what Obama knows about the actual state of the Iran nuclear weapons program and missile delivery systems that he didn’t know when he canceled the missile defense program planned by Bush.  It’s hard to imagine what else would move him to make this half-concession, given that the American press has given him a complete pass on withdrawing from the Bush/Poland agreements to base missile defense there.

Guy Sorman predicts the End of the European Siesta?

The tragedy of Europe goes far beyond the case of Greece and only appears to be financial. The problem lies deeper: it extends to all member countries, or will eventually. It won’t be enough to put government budgets somewhat in order, to avoid a Greek bankruptcy, or to reassure the creditors of Spain and Portugal. Patching things up financially will not stop a contagion common to all of the European Union’s member countries, since all suffer from the same illness, though many would like to minimize its seriousness. The IMF, the Central European Bank, and the ministries all tell us: this is a financial and technical problem. We know how to proceed; this trouble will pass. We’ll provide a few loans and persuade the Germans to bring down government spending a bit. And then everything will be as before.

What a denial of reality. The truth is that the foundations of the European Union are incompatible with the way European states govern themselves. Let’s be clear: the European Union is based on a free market. It was so conceived in political philosophy and in economics, and the only possible way to govern it is in accordance with such economic freedom. Yet all the national governments, even those of the right, have in fact created gigantic welfare states inspired by socialist ideology.

The fact is that, at the origins of Europe, Jean Monnet, a Cognac entrepreneur with strong American connections, concluded that European governments had never succeeded and would never succeed in making Europe a zone of peace and prosperity. He thus replaced the diplomatic engine with an economic engine: free trade and the spirit of enterprise, he envisioned, would generate “concrete areas of solidarity” that would eliminate war and poverty. Three EU founders, all Christian democrats—Konrad Adenauer, Alcide De Gasperi, and Robert Schuman—ratified Monnet’s free-market intuition. These men shared a common moral and political understanding and a common economic analysis. All were suspicious of the statism then identified, for good historical reasons, with totalitarianism. The Commission of Brussels, and later the Central European Bank, were determined to keep faith with this original spirit of freedom in opposition to constant pressure from national governments to “socialize” Europe. The principle of free trade, which the Commission of Brussels constantly reinforced, roused Europe’s spirit of enterprise against various attempts at protectionism and national monopoly. (Often perceived in the U.S. as just another European super-bureaucracy, the Commission has been a consistent force for deregulation and competition.) The euro, moreover, was created to force states to balance their budgets, just as free-market monetary theory prescribed.

Unfortunately, the national governments thought it possible to reap the economic benefits of a free Europe and the electoral delights of socialism. By “socialism,” I mean the unlimited growth of the welfare state—the accumulation of entitlements and jobs protected by the state. This de facto socialism, this sedimentation of electoral promises and acquired rights, grew in Europe at a much faster rate than did the economy or the population. It could thus only be financed by loans, which seemed risk-free, since the euro appeared “strong.” The euro’s strength drove its holders into a frenzy: suddenly, anything could be bought on credit. The result was a remarkably homogeneous indebtedness in all the countries of Europe, on the order of 100 percent of national wealth—ranging between Germany’s 91 percent and the Greeks’ 133 percent (a relatively modest difference), all reflecting a common socialist drift. Germany, Greece, Spain, and France differ less in their levels of debt or modes of administration, which are in fact quite similar, than in their debtors’ capacities to repay. All European states are run socialist-style, in contradiction with the European Union’s free-market principles. Some will be more able than others to deal with defaults, but all have drifted off course.

How shall we explain this fatal drift? The true cause lies in ideology. Socialism dominates minds across Europe, whereas liberalism—which has retained its original free-market meaning in Europe—is under attack in the academy, in the media, and among intellectuals generally. In Europe, to support the market against the state, to recommend modesty on the part of the state, is taken for an “American” perversion. And socialist ideology is sufficiently engrained that it’s almost impossible for a non-suicidal politician to win election without promising still more public “solidarity” and still less individual risk. These welfare states, through their financial cost and the erosion of ethical responsibility that they foster, have smothered economic growth in Europe. We are the continent of decline, albeit decline with solidarity.

And now Greece’s bill has come due. It won’t be the last of its kind. What is to be done? We might perfectly well refuse to pay it—after all, why should French or German taxpayers of modest means pay taxes evaded by rich Greeks to finance Greek unions and the Greek military? But European finances are deeply interwoven: in reality, the euro owed by a Greek sits in a German or French bank. Whether or not non-Greeks rush to Greece’s aid would therefore change nothing; Europe’s failure will be collective. We thought we were citizens of independent nations, but we are instead a continent’s debtors. If Europeans don’t settle the Greek bill, then those of Portugal, Spain, and Italy will come due in quick succession, since a Greek bankruptcy would impact the euro’s value across the continent.

How can we escape such a tragedy? By buying time, by denying reality, by committing suicide—or by telling the truth. At this historic threshold, it’s hard to tell which of these scenarios will prevail. At the origins of Europe, Jean Monnet told the truth, and statesmen explained it to the various peoples of Europe. Today, it is not the Greek crisis that needs explaining, but the path that led to it. The long-term imperative is not the absorption of Greek or Spanish debt, but putting an end to the European strategy of decline. All things considered, we should thank the Greeks for waking us, however inadvertently, from our European siesta.

Mr. Sorman’s analysis is true as far as it goes, in pointing out the disconnect between the underlying assumptions of national politics (socialism) and the Common Market EURO system (a “free” market).  What he does not address is how the situation came about.

After WWII, Europeans had just suffered through two horrendous wars, of such unprecedented destructiveness as to be without parallel in human history.  The Europeans were shell-shocked, traumatized, terrified, numb and reeling, all at once.  Many had lost their faith in God, and all simply wanted the suffering and uncertainty to be over.  It’s understandable that they simply wanted to be taken care of by their national governments, and candidates who promised more from the government were the ones more likely to be elected.  Movement in the socialist direction was probably inevitable.

Europeans were like children traumatized by evil relatives, who snuck in by stealth and then brutally suppressed the parent’s ability to protect the children.  When the evil relatives had been neutralized, the children clung to the parents (who understandably made promises of future care) instead of soberly assessing the causes of the parent’s inability or unwillingness to protect the children in the first place.  The problem, of course, is that children aren’t really responsible for themselves, and are not particularly wise observers of their own situations.  They are easily fooled by promises, especially if the promises appear to be kept for a time.  They want to believe the best of their parents. 

They are likely to vote for the parent who promises a trip to Disneyland every week.

Make no mistake.  The socialist impulse is to see government as a parent, a benevolent overseer and protector, giver of good things to children. 

In the end, children must grow up.  And parents who overspend, and then perpetrate fraud in order to cover it up, are eventually caught, and may go to jail.  Either way, they won’t be able to keep the promises they made to the children forever.

Europe lost its faith, and Europeans simultaneously seem to have become children demanding limitless and permanent care from their (parental) governments.  Like nihilistic, cynical post-teen-agers who refuse to grow up and take care of themselves, who insist they can do what they want (including limitless sexual freedom divorced from childbearing and personal responsibility, since, after all, there is no God, and no real ground for morality or purpose), and require an “intervention” by those who actually care about them, Europeans are about to be subject to the tough love of the laws of economics and demographics. 

It’s going to be a hard lesson.

In the meantime, we have some pre-adolescents running the show in Washington D.C., who have admired their older cousins in Europe for some time, with their cool attitudes, worldly-wise airs, great parties, and big talk.  They are 12 yr old girls admiring Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan.

It’s not a good influence. 

Where Best To Be Poor

Imagine you are an unborn spirit whom God has condemned to a life of poverty but has permitted to choose the nation in which to live. I’m betting that most any such condemned unborn spirit would choose the United States. Why? What has historically been defined as poverty, nationally or internationally, no longer exists in the U.S. Let’s look at it.

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the 2009 poverty guideline was $22,000 for an urban four-person family. In 2009, having income less than that, 15 percent or 40 million Americans were classified as poor, but there’s something unique about those “poor” people not seen anywhere else in the world. Robert Rector, researcher at the Heritage Foundation, presents data collected from several government sources in a report titled “How Poor Are America’s Poor? Examining the ‘Plague’ of Poverty in America” (8/27/2007):

– Forty-three percent of all poor households actually own their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage and a porch or patio.

– Eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, in 1970, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.

– Only 6 percent of poor households are overcrowded; two-thirds have more than two rooms per person.

– The typical poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens and other cities throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)

– Nearly three-quarters of poor households own a car; 31 percent own two or more cars.

– Ninety-seven percent of poor households have a color television; over half own two or more color televisions.

– Seventy-eight percent have a VCR or DVD player; 62 percent have cable or satellite TV reception.

– Eighty-nine percent own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, and a more than a third have an automatic dishwasher.

What’s defined as poverty is misleading in another way. Official poverty measures count just family’s cash income. It ignores additional sources of support such as the earned-income tax credit, which is a cash rebate to low-income workers; it ignores Medicaid, housing allowances, food stamps and other federal and local government subsidies to the poor. According to a report by American Enterprise Institute scholar Nicholas Eberstadt, titled “Poor Statistics,” “In 2006, according to the annual Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey, reported purchases by the poorest fifth of American households were more than twice as high as reported incomes.” That additional money might represent earnings from unreported employment, illegal activities and unreported financial assistance. A proper measure of well-being is what a person consumes rather than his income. A huge gap has emerged between income and consumption at lower income levels.

Material poverty can be measured relatively or absolutely. An absolute measure would consist of some minimum quantity of goods and services deemed adequate for a baseline level of survival. Achieving that level means that poverty has been eliminated. However, if poverty is defined as, say, the lowest one-fifth of the income distribution, it is impossible to eliminate poverty. Everyone’s income could double, triple and quadruple, but there will always be the lowest one-fifth.

Yesterday’s material poverty is all but gone. In all too many cases, it has been replaced by a more debilitating kind of poverty — behavioral poverty or poverty of the spirit. This kind of poverty refers to conduct and values that prevent the development of healthy families, work ethic and self-sufficiency. The absence of these values virtually guarantees pathological lifestyles that include: drug and alcohol addiction, crime, violence, incarceration, illegitimacy, single-parent households, dependency and erosion of work ethic. Poverty of the spirit is a direct result of the perverse incentives created by some of our efforts to address material poverty.

Anyone can fall temporarily on hard times. If you STAY poor for a decade, you’re probably doing something wrong, absent some radical medical condition and the like. Multi-generational poverty in the USA is almost always a values problem. If you stay out of jail, finish high school, get married, stay married, don’t make babies till you’re married, and don’t get addicted, you will eventually be able to find work if you keep looking, and the factors that keep people poor for years, decades or generations will not tend to be true for you.

The federal government has done a lot to encourage bad behavior (the kind that keeps people poor), by creating incentives for it, and literally subsidizing it.