carnage and culture: 2013-02-17

Saturday, February 23, 2013

Why it's time to disband NCAA

The NCAA notified the University of Miami on Tuesday that the school is being accused of a "lack of institutional control," because it allowed a booster named Nevin Shapiro to infiltrate its athletic department and have relationships with athletes that were both personal and - according to Shapiro - financial.

The timing of this notice is beyond laughable. It came about 24 hours after NCAA President Mark Emmert was forced to fire his hand-picked director of enforcement, Julie Roe Lach, for - wait for it - bungling the Miami investigation.

This is the Keystone Kops vs. the Pink Panther.

On Monday, Emmert described Lach's decision to pay Shapiro's lawyer for information in its Miami investigation, which was approved by Emmert's No. 2 man Jim Isch, as "missteps." This is the NCAA way: Find a euphemism that fits in place of the truth. (The height of comedy came Tuesday when Shapiro's lawyer, Maria-Elena Perez, said that if she had known how incompetent the NCAA was, she would have advised her client not to cooperate with it. Meantime, she had no problem at all collecting almost $19,000 from the incompetents - while billing them for close to $58,000.)

But the enforcement debacle is not what ails the NCAA, and neither is Emmert. Both are symptoms of a system gone wrong, one that needs to be abandoned.

The NCAA needs to go the way of typewriters, the Edsel and black-and-white TV. Its time has passed. Collegiate sports can no longer be run with an iron fist - especially an incompetent one - or with the quaint notion that Quinnipiac women's basketball can operate under the same rules as Alabama football.

The NCAA accelerated its path toward irrelevance years ago, when Emmert's predecessors, Cedric Dempsey and Myles Brand, ceded control of football to conference commissioners - wanting no blame for the cartel that was the Bowl Championship Series when it was created 15 years ago. That abdication of ownership is a major reason why conference realignment has been allowed to burn out of control like a wildfire.

In absence of any central authority, conference commissioners have been able to pillage one another for schools in order to try to maximize their appeal to television networks. If the NCAA controlled football and if there were rules in place that prevented schools from jumping conferences haphazardly, the current chaos would never have started.

A private organization has a right to make rules. If the members agree to those rules, they must follow them. If rules existed making it impossible for any school to change conference affiliation without approval from an outside committee, the lawsuits presidents might threaten in order to jump from, say, the ACC to the Big Ten, would be meaningless.

The NCAA blew it - following the Neville Chamberlain's "peace for our time" route - and it has worked out about as well as Chamberlain's approach worked in 1938.

That's mainly because the organization is made up of academics such as Emmert, who lack a sophisticated understanding of all the forces at work in modern athletics. Seventeen of the 20 members of the NCAA executive council are either college presidents or chancellors. There are three token members who are involved in athletics - two commissioners and one athletic director - who apparently are there to explain to the other members which one is the funny-shaped ball and which one is the round one and, no doubt to fetch coffee when needed.

So not only is Emmert's status under no threat - the presidents aren't going to humiliate one of their own - any replacement approved by that group isn't going to be substantially different.

But even if the NCAA had competent leadership, it would be time to start all over again. For several years now, Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski has been saying that there should be three separate organizations, not one. "We need an organization that does what's best for college football, one that does what's best for [men's] college basketball and one that does what's best for non-revenue sports," Krzyzewski proposes. "The needs of each are too different for us to keep acting like they're the same thing. They're not."

Each should have a commissioner, someone who is of the sport and from the sport and familiar with the particular needs and nuances of each. It should be somebody smart, tough and experienced and not somebody concerned with image. That's not easy to find but there are people out there. No one knew who Pete Rozelle and David Stern were before they completely re-made the NFL and NBA, respectively.

Mike Slive, the current commissioner of the SEC, would be a reasonable choice to run football. Potential basketball choices could include former Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese or Greg Shaheen, the former NCAA vice president fired last year by Emmert, or Terry Holland, the former Virginia coach who is now the athletic director at East Carolina.

The presidents should be completely removed from the process except (perhaps) to help in fundraising at their schools. College athletics need someone in charge, but the people in charge should know something about college athletics. It is time to go back to square one.

John Feinstein writes a blog at www.feinsteinonthebrink.com and is the author of 28 books, including "One on One: Behind the Scenes with the Greats in the Game" (2011).

Chasing Away the Rubble...with Black Hawks, Tanks and Loads of Ammo

Return to the Article

February 23, 2013

By Robert Small

"We have cleared away the rubble of crisis," President Obama reported in his State of the Union address, "and we can say with renewed confidence that the State of our Union is stronger." He cited troops coming home after a decade of "grinding war," six million jobs created "after years of grueling recession," American car purchases up, foreign oil purchases down, a healing housing market, a rebounding stock market, corporate profits that "have skyrocketed to all-time highs," Republicans and Democrats working together "to reduce the deficit by more than $2.5 trillion," "tens of thousands" of American jobs created by green energy, and a boom in natural gas production that's lowering our energy bills.

If things are so peachy, I have a question for the president. What's with the Black Hawk helicopters and urban warfare drills?

The Army took over an empty high school in southeast Houston without warning last month in a Department of Defense drill. Terrified residents mistook blank fire for live rounds. At a City Council meeting the next day, Mayor Annise Parker decried "a shocking lack of sensitivity to community concerns" that caught even some in the police department by surprise. About the same time council members were meeting in Houston, "federal law enforcement" agents were rappelling down ropes from military helicopters hovering over the Capitol in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Days earlier in Miami, one local news station reported that blanks fired from Black Hawks soaring low over downtown were "pinging off the high rises[,]" and another reported troops "rappelling from the military choppers onto the Metrorail station platform." The official explanation: "The training is designed to ensure that military personnel are able to operate in urban areas and to focus on preparations for overseas deployment. It also serves as a mandatory training certification." If true, why so many exercises now, when more troops are scheduled to come home than be deployed? And why are so many of them, like one in Los Angeles last January, team exercises with local law enforcement? A reader claiming to be a former Marine commented on the CBS Los Angeles news website that he was an infantryman for 20 years and never trained in any city or town with civilians present. Others are skeptical as well.

John Wayne Tucker, blogging at theboldpursuit.com, has posted links to local reports of similar exercises that have taken place in at least 14 cities, most of them over the last twelve months. One in his hometown of St. Louis last summer involved tanks rolling through neighborhoods in what local news reported was a military "driver's ed of sorts." Tucker calls for citizens to demand an explanation from their representatives.

While we're at it, can we get an explanation that makes sense for the nearly 2 billion rounds of ammunition the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies have been purchasing? The AP has reported that it's nothing more sinister than bulk buying to get a discount; however, Investor Business Daily's Andrew Malcolm wrote that experts have calculated that it's enough ammo to arm DHS "for a 24-year Iraq war," which, he remarked, "is especially strange given Obama's double-barreled emphasis in his inaugural address on the approaching end in Afghanistan 'of a decade of war.'"

After reading Malcolm's article on air last Friday, radio host Mark Levin dismissed internet chatter about the DHS preparing for domestic insurrection. He thinks it more likely that the government's preparing for a catastrophe of their own making: "the collapse of our financial system, the collapse of our society, and the potential for widespread violence" in the streets that accompanies such crises.

That would certainly explain the Black Hawks as well. It's clear from his inaugural and SOTU addresses that Obama intends to double down on government spending, taxes, regulations, executive orders, collectivism, and unchecked immigration with no budget proposals or plan for reducing our national debt in sight. He's determined to accelerate America forward Thelma and Louise-like into the canyon of fundamental transformation, and both local law enforcement and the military will need to be ready at the scene when it all comes crashing down.

A domestic crisis would also justify the billions of dollars in military surplus the DOD has been gifting to local governments through its Law Enforcement Support Office (LESO). Chicago Channel 7's I-Team has been investigating "weapons of war" that are "ending up in Chicago and the suburbs." Law enforcement is being so broadly defined that M-16 rifles and a humvee went to a Catholic university, and an "arsenal of combat rifles" went to Brookfield zoo. What sense does it make to arm a zoo unless someone envisions a scenario where desperate, starving urbanites are forced to turn it into a hunting ground after grocery shelves run empty?

I've lived in this country my entire life and never heard of government agencies stockpiling millions of rounds of the hollow-point "training ammo" listed in its solicitations or shooting blanks from military aircraft over our neighborhoods and cities. Not until now. None of this makes sense if things are as peachy as the president claims, and I think these circumstances raise enough questions to warrant a congressional hearing. Questions like these would not be remiss:

Is the government preparing for the possible collapse of our economy and society, and why is the Obama administration continuing policies even the General Accounting Office says are unsustainable if that's the case?

What is the added value of blanks to these urban warfare exercises? Are they being used to desensitize members of our military to firing on their fellow citizens if there's domestic turmoil?

Why are DHS and other federal agencies seeking so much of the more expensive and lethal hollow-point bullets, which are not typically used at the firing range and are outlawed by the Geneva Convention for battlefield use?

Are bulk ammunition purchases and LESO's redistribution of military hardware to local governments connected to any domestic scenarios being played out?

If the purpose of these exercises includes preparing for operations overseas, then why were Black Hawks recently firing over Miami but not Benghazi?

It amazes me that residents of areas where these exercises are taking place aren't flooding their representatives with questions and complaints. Then again, city dwellers tend to be more liberal, and I don't have the faith in this president and our policymakers in Washington that millions of people like Houston resident Glen DeWitt do. "If it's to protect our kids, I'm for it," DeWitt told a reporter interviewing him about the DOD drill at the school. "I think it's cool," a bystander in Worcester, Mass., said of helicopters "buzzing neighborhoods" and landing around the auditorium in Lincoln Square last August. "At least the empty buildings in Worcester are getting some use," he told a reporter from the Telegram & Gazette.

Not all residents are happy, however, nor are the many people posting comments on websites and under YouTube videos of these drills. Alarmed Worcester resident Chad Julian left a message on the Telegram's Facebook page that ends with the question, "Don't you think it would help put the public's mind at ease to know that there was a reasonable explanation for all this hubbub especially since it was ONLY a training exercise?"

Many of us who can't yet see through the "rubble of crisis" the president claims to have cleared away would like a reasonable explanation for the hubbub as well.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2013/02/clearing_away_the_rubblewith_black_hawks_tanks_and_loads_of_ammo.html at February 23, 2013 - 08:25:39 PM CST

Friday, February 22, 2013

Land Grabs and Buffalo Visions

By BRADLEY ANDERSON on 2.22.13 @ 6:08AM

The American Spectator

http://spectator.org

Enviros team up with the feds to drive out ranchers and create a vast eco-theme park.

Three days before George W. Bush took office in January 2001, President Bill Clinton, with the stroke of a pen, created eight new national monuments that amounted to more than a million acres of land. One of these was the half-million acre Missouri Breaks National Monument in northeastern Montana. Now it appears that groundwork is being laid for more of the same here in Big Sky Country, perhaps during the waning days of President Obama’s second term.

National monuments were originally intended to be, well, monuments — small places of historical or geological significance such as Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, Jewel Cave in South Dakota, or the Statue of Liberty. But that didn’t stop President Clinton and his advisors in the environmentalist community from thinking big, and they did.

The vast national monuments are generally comprised of acreage that was already public land, and usually land that is under the purview of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Why does reclassification matter? Because BLM land is public land, but legally designated as “multiple use.” This allows for commercial leases to be issued: for grazing by ranchers, mineral extraction by mining companies, drilling by oil companies, and recreation by hunters, anglers, hikers, horseback riders, and others. Once land is declared a national monument, however, all bets are off on the degree of restriction on commercial activities that can go into effect.

This is likely the backdrop to a subtle land grab that we saw begin in northeastern Montana, one that went largely unnoticed during the hubbub of the recent presidential election. The size of the grab, however, is not subtle – a 150,000-acre ranch is the latest piece to be moved on this particular chessboard and the real prize is the size of the state of Connecticut. The way it is all happening, however, is very subtle. Oozy, even.

The players in the story: First, agencies of the federal government that control the vast Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge(“the CMR”) plus additional public lands surrounding it — hundreds of thousands of acres around the massive Ft. Peck Reservoir, a large inland lake created by the damming of the Missouri River in eastern Montana. Second, the adjacent historic “South Ranch” of the famedEtchart ranching family, who built one of the state’s largest family livestock operations in a physically remote and harsh corner of the state. Third, the American Prairie Reserve, a private environmentalist group whose vision is to “assemble a multi-million acre wildlife park” in northeastern Montana. The ranch in question — made up both of deeded private land and public land leases attached to the deeded land — was, last fall, sold voluntarily by the ranching family to the American Prairie Reserve.

“Voluntary,” “sold,” and “private” aren’t words usually found in the same paragraph as “land grab.” But that’s where the “subtle” part comes in. In reading a statement released by family representative Steve Page, one learns that they had been made an offer they couldn’t refuse, so to speak. While the statement has been excerpted in various news stories, it has only been published in its entirety on the website of the regionally influential and agriculturally based Northern News Network. To read Page’s stark and unembellished account of the ranch’s history over the last several decades is to experience how ranching families are being gradually worn down by the federal government, until giving up and selling the ranch to environmentalists seems like the only good option.

Page notes that his family and their predecessors have “dealt with… land-use issues over a long period of time.” He goes on to state that they “have concluded that traditional ranching operations on public land [around the CMR Wildlife Refuge] are in jeopardy of becoming history in the not so distant future.”

According to environmentalists, this sale was part of a “market approach” that is ostensibly a win-win for everyone. For many of us with roots in the ranching culture, however, it provoked a sinking feeling, and was yet another reminder that a lot of people outside of the West — people with deep pockets (in this case, billionaire heirsto the Mars candy fortune) — are deadly serious about converting large swaths of traditional ranching country into a giant federal wildlife preserve.

If a casual visitor goes to the part of Montana in question, he might be tempted to wonder, “What’s the fuss?” Compared to the vast majority of the American subcontinent, it already is a vast wilderness area. Deer, elk, bighorn sheep, pronghorn antelope, coyotes, waterfowl, upland game birds, and wildlife of every description are more plentiful than at any time since Lewis and Clark first explored the region, and they share the landscape peacefully with ranchers and their herds of cattle and sheep. It really is a paradise — or at least we think so out here. But not paradise enough, it seems, to suit the environmentalist groups that covet it. As is so often the case, the reason comes down to a single species, one that ironically isn’t even endangered: the American bison, hundreds of thousands of which can be found across the American West on ranches and in wilder settings like national and state parks. Bison have already returned to the Great Plains to an extent that would astound a time-traveler from even 50 years ago, and they have emerged in an organic fashion that melds with the existing economy and culture of ranching in the West.

What is missing, say bison purists, is a large range where truly wild bison can truly range across a vast, human-free habitat. To create what the purists want — huge, free-ranging herds of wild bison wandering the Great Plains — millions of acres would need to be returned to the state they were in 150 years ago. Unfortunately, pretty much all of the land on the Great Plains has been part of someone’s ranch for more than a century, whether by direct ownership or time-honored leases so settled and prescriptive that they would set an old-school Burkean heart aflutter. (Why they need to start with a part of Montana the size of Connecticut, and can’t just use Connecticut itself, we are never told.)

Carving out national parks, national monuments, and national wilderness areas has always been surrounded by controversy. Every time it’s done, existing ranching, logging, and mining operations have been shut down, and families have been displaced from their traditional homes. Even in as beloved a place as Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park, one doesn’t have to dig far beneath the surface to unearth bitter memories of the secrecy, shell games, half-truths, and outright manipulation by the informal “private-public” partnership between John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and the federal government that led up to its creation in 1950. Ranchers around Jackson who sold their land at the time thought they were selling to other ranching operations, and most had no idea that they were participants in eliminating the area’s ranching culture forever.

The same can’t be said this time, which is part of why the Page statement is important. It sets forth, for the benefit of friends, neighbors, and other Montanans, the compelling case that this time the final outcome has already been determined by others, and the family is bowing to that reality. The sale has been unpopular with many Montanans, but at the same time, most who read the story understand that this sale was far from “voluntary,” in the truest sense of the word. It was the family’s one and perhaps only shot at recouping the real value of their land, giving future generations a chance to start again elsewhere.

Is anywhere completely safe, though? At one time, those of us who grew up ranching on the rough ridges and vast openness of the high plains thought we would be very safe. The ranchers being bought, bribed, and muscled out of their operations have long tended to be those whose forebears had settled in physically harsh but breathtakingly beautiful mountain valleys like Jackson Hole. While we thought our family lands on the high plains were equally beautiful in their own way, we knew they weren’t sexy enough for environmentalists or developers ever to covet them. We hadn’t anticipated, however, the intensely priapic effect that visions of wild bison can apparently induce.

This vision is that of the “buffalo commons,” an idea first articulated by a pair of academics — Frank and Deborah Popper — and tirelessly marketed by them and their acolytes ever since. In their imagining of the future of the West, the natural decrease in rural populations on the Great Plains should be sped along by having the government buy out farmers and ranchers, turning the land into a grand buffalo theme park stretching from Canada to Mexico, largely empty of people and full of bison. People will of course visit this theme park, and the future eco-tourists will be far more spirituallyattuned to nature than, say, mere ranching families that have lived and worked on the land for generations.

It is a long way from the recent sale of a ranch in northeastern Montana to the creation of a vast “buffalo commons,” with tens of millions of acres emptied of permanent residents. It is, however, a clear step, and neither the fact that it is “voluntary” nor the fact that it is touted as a “market-based” solution can change the fact that we are watching a “public-private partnership” between deep-pocketed conservation groups and the federal government.

Roger Scruton, in his recent and excellent book How to Think Seriously About the Planet, asserts that “wise government… should not have a goal beyond that of reconciling, as best it can, the goals of its citizens.” What ranchers throughout the West have been discovering, however, is that the government is not trying to reconcile anything, but is rather picking winners and losers. When environmentalists want what ranchers have, ranchers are consistently finding that it is they who are the designated losers.

Blame Game Rages On Over Looming Sequester

By Jonah Goldberg

http://www.nationalreview.com

February 22, 2013 12:00 A.M.

We are just days away from a cataclysm of biblical proportions. The cuts foretold in the Budget Control Act of 2011 are young as far as prophecies go, but apparently they are every bit as terrifying as rivers of blood and plagues of locusts. Any day now we can expect White House spokesman Jay Carney to take to the podium and read a prepared statement: “And when he opened the seventh seal, there was a small decrease in the rate of increase in federal spending.”

The great game in Washington is who will get the blame for something both House Speaker John Boehner and President Obama agree will be calamitous for the country. It is an argument so idiotic, it could pass for seriousness only in Washington. The Republicans correctly note that the president proposed the sequester. In fact, back when the president believed that Republicans were more terrified of these automatic budget cuts than Democrats were, he pretended that he would veto any attempts to get rid of them that didn’t give him even more of the tax hikes he holds so dear. Now that Republicans have already agreed to a tax hike, they’ll be damned if they’ll raise them even more.

Fair enough. But the GOP agreed to the idea. This wasn’t some elaborate con in which John Boehner wakes up thinking March 1 is a morning like any other, only to discover that $85 billion is missing.
The GOP will probably lose the public-relations battle over the sequester, because that’s the Republicans’ job in the age of Obama. A U.S. ambassador is murdered in a terrorist attack the administration ineptly responded to — and blamed on a video — but the only real story is that Republicans are so crazy, they want to know what happened. The president nominates a middle-brow pol to run the Defense Department, one who must recant all of his well-known views in order to get the job, and the story is how irrational the GOP is for caring. If the White House dispatched a drone to circle Boehner’s home, the front-page story in the New York Times would be on the speaker’s troubling paranoia.

But that doesn’t mean Republicans should make the White House’s job easier. Which is why it’s good news that the House leadership is reportedly working on legislation that would force Obama to choose where the $85 billion in cuts should come from. Both the president and Boehner agree that the across-the-board cuts required by the sequester make no sense, given that most agencies can find less painful ways to trim a few pennies out of every dollar.

It’s unlikely that Obama will take such a deal, since he and the Democratic-controlled Senate twice rejected legislation that replaced sequester cuts with more reasonable ones. Obama wants more tax hikes and thinks he can convince the country to accept them if the choice is between what he calls reasonable revenue increases and catastrophic cuts that will let people die in the streets, leave children to go hungry and illiterate, and allow poisoned food to sit rancid on supermarket shelves.
And he’s not crazy for it. This strategy has worked time and time again. If an agency has a billion-dollar budget and someone proposes cutting a dollar from its scheduled increase in funding, that dollar will be the one earmarked for the screw needed to keep a bridge from collapsing on a grade school’s Thanksgiving parade.

And that is what galls me. If the sequester goes into effect, the federal budget for this year will still be larger than last year’s ($3.553 trillion in 2013 vs. $3.538 trillion in 2012). With the sequester in effect, federal non-defense spending will still be 10 percent higher than it was in 2008. But Washington, led by Obama but with GOP help, is telling the American people that unless government gets an even bigger raise (with money borrowed from China, by the way), civilization will unravel, 911 calls will go unanswered, and Bane shall irrevocably seize control of Gotham.

The federal government has grown inexorably for decades. Our president casts himself as a Solomonic manager, and yet he is saying that absent a few extra pennies on every dollar, there’s no way he can maintain government’s core functions? A manager in any other field of human endeavor would be fired on the spot for making such an argument. But in Washington, this passes for leadership.

— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. You can write to him by e-mail at JonahsColumn@aol.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2013 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Permalink

Hollywood Forgets 9/11

Hollywood aligns itself with three U.S. senators against "Zero Dark Thirty."

The SEALs land at Abbottabad, from 'Zero Dark Thirty' (2012). Photo: ANNAPURNA PICTURES / THE KOBAL COLLECTION

By Daniel Henninger

The Wall Street Journal

http://www.wsj.com

February 20, 2013

Before Hollywood blackballs "Zero Dark Thirty" director Kathryn Bigelow this Sunday evening, a final and much-deserved stare is in order at the source of this distasteful snub—Senators Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin and irresistibly along for the ride, John McCain. Had Senators Feinstein, Levin and McCain (FLM) not saddled up their high horses in a Dec. 19letter to Sony Pictures denouncing the movie, "Zero Dark Thirty" would not be out of the running for best picture at the Oscars.

Unjolly Ed Asner does not have the clout to intimidate the Academy Awards into dropping Kathryn Bigelow from consideration for best director. Absent the FLM letter, what remained were articles from the fever swamps of the left-wing media, such as "How 'Zero Dark Thirty' Brought Back the Bush Administration." Efforts by "Lincoln" screenwriter Tony Kushner and others to stop Hollywood's collaboration with the senators came to naught.

But while Hollywood pulled down the shades to leave "Zero Dark Thirty" alone in the street with Washington's hitters, the film was reviving memories for many others.

After September 11, when those of us who worked in that lower-Manhattan neighborhood returned to our offices, one unforgettable memory was the pit called Ground Zero. That vast space sat vacant for years—the ripped walls, the rubble, the emptiness. Many of us walked past the pit twice a day, and nearly every hour of the year—no matter how cold the day—there would be visitors staring into it in silence. They seemed to feel that they had to visit this place and put their hand in the wound to prove anything so ghastly had happened.

At the end of the movie, when the SEALs team hits the ground in Abbottabad, it is an intense 20 minutes that, shall we say, closes the circle. After the FLM letter did its damage to "Zero Dark Thirty," a group called 9/11 Parents & Families of Firefighters and WTC Victims pushed back with a statement that didn't get much notice. The movie, they said, was "a rare moment of justice and elation."

None of this was on the minds of the senators. We know that because in their letter to Sony there is no mention of Sept. 11, or the London bus and subway bombings, or Khobar Towers or any of the other acts of terror shown in "Zero Dark Thirty." Senators. Feinstein and Levin wanted attention drawn to their report on the CIA's interrogations and detentions, for which committee staff "reviewed 6 million pages of records."

So what exactly did the senators say that caused Hollywood to head for the gopher holes?

"We believe," FLM wrote to Sony Chairman Michael Lynton, "the film is grossly inaccurate and misleading in its suggestion that torture resulted in information that led to the location of Usama bin Laden." The movie's "suggestion"? Only a politician would have the skill to hang condemnation around a slippery word like "suggestion." But it worked. Sen. Feinstein completely unbalanced public discussion of the movie.

Suddenly it was a film about waterboarding, rather than what Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal produced: The story of U.S. intelligence officers spending years digesting an incomprehensible flow of half-baked data, making mistakes and wrong calls, some getting blown up themselves by suicide bombers and finally, after three of them ride around teeming Peshawar in a Jeep with some tracking device, they nail the identity of bin Laden's courier. On May 2, 2011, bin Laden was dead. That's "Zero Dark Thirty."

But not for Dianne Feinstein or the Hollywood hundreds. Here's her denunciatory letter's best part: "The use of torture in the fight against terrorism did severe damage to America's values and standing that cannot be justified or expunged. It remains a stain on our national conscience. We cannot afford to go back to these dark times. . . . You have a social and moral obligation to get the facts right."

This letter gives moralism new meaning. "We cannot afford to go back to these dark times." How true.

If one sits to the end of the long credits for "Zero Dark Thirty," you'll see these last words about those dark times: "The filmmakers wish to especially acknowledge the sacrifice of those men, women, and families who were most impacted by the events depicted in this film: the victims and the families of the9/11 attacks; as well as the attacks in the United Kingdom; the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan; in Khobar, Saudi Arabia; and at the Camp Chapman Forward Operating Base in Afghanistan. We also wish to acknowledge and honor the many extraordinary military and intelligence professionals and first responders who have made the ultimate sacrifice."

Hollywood won't do this Sunday. Instead, the members of the Academy will take a seat beside the intimidations of three U.S. senators. It is going to be an evening to remember in Hollywood's most unusual history.

Write to henninger@wsj.com

Facebook

Twitter

Google+

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Not Fighting Back

By Ralph Peters
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com
February 21, 2013

Quietly eating our lunch: A Chinese soldier guarding “Unit 61398,” fingered in many cyber-attacks on US targets.

This week, a cutting-edge security firm in Virginia, Mandiant, reported that it had traced major cyber-attacks on 140 US and other Western targets back not merely to China but to a specific Shanghai high-rise belonging to Chinese military intelligence.

Mandiant did splendid detective work at the unclassified level. But the situation’s even worse. Exasperated government workers tell me we should beterrified at what the Chinese already have done to us.

The Chinese government has hack-attacked our military, other branches of government, the defense industry, our energy infrastructure, telecommunications, hi-tech research and basic manufacturing.

According to the US International Trade Commission, Chinese intellectual property theft cost the United States $48 billion in 2009, as well as taking away 2 million jobs. Since then, the amount of theft has worsened, so the total loss is likely around $300 billion. But US companies, afraid that making their losses public will shake consumer confidence, won’t go public with their outrage.

Our military and intelligence services know the situation has gone beyond the Chinese preparing for cyber-war: Beijing’s already waging war against us.

It’s not that we can’t fight back. We have stunning, close-held capabilities to respond with punishing cyber-strikes of our own. We have the intelligence. We have the targets.

But the order never comes.

We’re bleeding money, government secrets, technology secrets, corporate strategies — and seem to have suffered trial attacks on our critical infrastructure. Why won’t the Obama administration doanything to retaliate against Chinese cyber-assaults?

Playing defense doesn’t cut it. The Chinese won’t throttle back until they feel pain. Serious pain.

There are four possible reasons for President Obama’s inaction — only one of them faintly valid:

Our own businessmen put profit over patriotism. The minority of US-based corporations that make money in (or off of) China form an influential lobby in Washington. It was bad enough when outsourcing dumped hardworking Americans out on the street, but arguing that we shouldn’t respond to Chinese attacks is greed bordering treason.

Imaginary legal concerns paralyze this administration. If Obama had been president on Dec. 7, 1941, he’d have spent all of 1942 having government lawyers research whether sinking our Pacific fleet in a surprise attack was an act of war. We are under attack. Every day, around the clock. And our president seems afraid that Chinese spies are going to sue us.

Team Obama just has other priorities: If the administration had a theme song, it’d be the old country number, “Make the World Go Away.” Obama came to office with no serious interest in foreign policy, but a highly charged domestic agenda. And foreign policy has bewildered, befuddled and bloodied his presidency, as it’s done to Democrats since the Vietnam War. He just wants foreign problems to disappear.

We fear a massive cyber-attack. This is the only remotely valid reason for responding carefully, but inaction merely worsens the prospect of disasters to come. And the administration is doing precious little to improve our defenses in the meantime.

The more complex a socio-economic system becomes, the more vulnerable it is to any kind of attack. Our vast infrastructure offers countless target nodes, while our centralized systems for distributing everything from energy to foodstuffs rely on national networks and long-distance supply chains. An African village wouldn’t suffer much from a cyber-attack; a Chinese town would feel it, but not severely. An American city would shut down.

Which means you can’t play tit-for-tat and let the Chinese continue to escalate. You have to hit their military and intelligence computer networks with shocking force — demonstrating what we could do to their showcase cities, if they don’t behave.

They have to be punished for their massive theft of our secrets and intellectual capital — as well as for the direct damage they do.

If you don’t stand up to the bully, the bully keeps taking your lunch money.

As for the nonsense that we can’t retaliate because Beijing holds so much US debt, that situation makes China our prisoner, not the other way around. The Chinese economy is far more fragile than the leadership in Beijing lets on.

In the time you spent reading this column, the Chinese launched multiple attacks upon our country. Your president, whose fundamental mission is to protect the United States, did nothing.

Ralph Peters is a retired Army officer and former enlisted man.

Green Anti-Humanism

By Robert Zubrin

http://www.nationalreview.com

February 21, 2013 4:00 A.M.

On February 11, 2013, the Denver Post ran a guest commentary of great clinical interest. In the piece in question, Colorado State University philosophy professor Philip Cafaro advanced the argument that immigration needs to be sharply cut, because otherwise people from Third World nations will come to the United States and become prosperous, thereby adding to global warming.

“And make no mistake: Immigrants are not coming to the United States to remain poor,” warns the philosopher. “Those hundreds of millions of new citizens will want to live as well and consume energy at the same rates as other Americans. . . . What climate change mitigation measures . . . could possibly equal the increased greenhouse gas emissions we would lock in by adding 145 million more new citizens to our population?”
This is truly remarkable. Conservative immigration skeptics have voiced the concern that immigrants might not assimilate and achieve success, and even common xenophobes have never objected to would-be immigrants’ attaining prosperity elsewhere. But according to Cafaro’s liberal argument, the wretched of the Earth must be kept poor wherever they reside, because otherwise they will ruin the weather for the rest of us. Following this logic, the United States should adopt the role of the world’s oppressor, enforcing the continuation of poverty around the globe.
But why stop there? We have millions of poor people right here in America who hope to rise into the middle class. Surely we must stop them from doing so. At present, there are at least 12 million unemployed. If they get jobs they will be able to keep their homes, and buy oil, or gas, or coal-fired electricity to heat them. They will be able to put food on their tables, and to buy gasoline to drive to work or get their children to school or soccer practice — or engage in any number of other ecologically unsustainable practices. Not only that: if the rabble become more prosperous, they can pay for better medical care, prolonging their carbon-footprinting lives. And what about those impoverished black farmers down south who want to migrate north and integrate to better their condition? Why, they are as big a global-warming threat as migrating Mexicans! Better keep them in their place.
The use of fictitious necessity to rationalize human oppression is not new. Whether the justification is a putative lack of food (e.g., Malthus, 1817, “A great part of the [Irish] population should be swept from the soil”), shortage of Lebensraum(e.g., Hitler, 1941, “The law of existence requires uninterrupted killing, so that the better may live”), overpopulation (e.g., Ehrlich, 1967, “India . . . will be one of those we must allow to slip down the drain”), or global warming (e.g., Cafaro, 2013), the argument has always been the same:

There isn’t enough of x to go around.
Therefore human numbers, activities, or liberties must be severely constrained.
Those of us enlightened by wisdom must be empowered to do the constraining.
And having obtained such power, let’s make the best of it and stick it to those we despise anyway.

All these cases were frauds. Ireland never lacked the capacity to feed its people. During the entire “great famine,” the island continued to produce massive amounts of beef and grain. The Irish just couldn’t afford to buy any of it due to the enforcement of rack-renting, high taxation, and suppression of manufactures. Germany never needed additional living space. It has a bigger population now than it did under the Third Reich, on much less land, yet it has a far higher living standard. Hitler just used the Lebensraum imperative as an excuse for genocide. Contrary to Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich, the world was not overpopulated in 1967. In fact, since that time, as world population has doubled, average GDP per capita has nearly tripled. Yet, unfortunately, that did not stop population-control advocates from obtaining billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money to help Third World regimes stop reproduction among their poor, in general, and despised national minorities, in particular. And there is certainly no moral case for limiting carbon emissions.
Quite to the contrary: The expanded use of carbon is both good and necessary. As a result of the carbon-dioxide enrichment of the Earth’s atmosphere, plants are now growing faster. Furthermore, global warming lengthens the growing season and increases net rainfall. We are making the Earth a more fertile planet. But even better, the tenfold increase in human carbon use over the past century (from 900 million tons in 1910 to 9 billion tons in 2010) has driven a tenfold risein global GDP per capita, from $900 per year in 1910 to $9,000 per year today. This escape of a large fraction of the world’s population from horrific poverty, accomplished through expanded carbon use, is among the greatest accomplishments in history.
If all are to attain a life of dignity, it clearly needs to go much further. Yet there are those who would call a halt to this miraculous march forward. For them, environmental devotion is enough to condemn billions to perpetual misery.
— Dr. Robert Zubrin is president of Pioneer Energy, www.pioneerenergy.co, and the author of Energy Victory. His latest book, Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism, was published last year by Encounter Books.

Permalink

Latipha Cross - Running for her life

By Ali Skylar/Parental Guidance

http://www.nj.com
on February 19, 2013 at 5:07 PM, updated February 19, 2013 at 5:21 PM

This past Sunday was Michael Jordan’s 50th birthday, the day before my hubby’s 60th birthday.  We had designated the day to celebrate hubby’s 60th mark not realizing that MJ was the big talk of the town that day.

It was inspiring to watch 50 of Michael’s greatest moments on ESPN and revel in this man’s amazing talent. (I’m still working on coming up with 60 of my husband’s greatest moments....:)  

However, the star of the afternoon was neither my hubby or Michael Jordan. It was a young woman named Latipha Cross. A moving piece on ESPN that came on between the MJ segments, Latipha’s story blew us away and truly transformed the way we
celebrated the rest of the day. Even with our personal struggles, we spent the day humbled, being more grateful than ever before for each other, what we had, and our family.

Screen Shot 2013-02-19 at 5.13.47 PM.png

Latipha Cross, runner and human being extraordinaire

Latipha Cross was a young high school school champion runner who was abandoned by her parents, beaten by her foster parents, homeless and living on playgrounds during her sophomore year, raped by her biological father and a victim of cancer, TWICE, before she even graduated high school.

What amazed both my husband and I was the sense of self, determination, connection and faith in her talent, and a perseverance that most children with two functioning, loving parents, and a comfortable life rarely possess!
Interestingly enough, as a parent who is very active in assisting my kids in navigating through life, Latipha’s story actually made me feel a bit of a burden lifted from my shoulders. Maybe I don’t have to feel SO responsible as a parent in the way that WHO my kids are and HOW they approach life and WHAT they end up doing with their life is so strongly connected to the way that I parent.
Latipha’s story taught me that so many of us come in with our own stuff - characteristics, traits and approaches to life - regardless of our parental situation. And although I can do my darndest to be the best possible parent, my kids have their own driving force that will greatly determine the course and meaning of their life.
I like everyone have had my share of challenges personally and parentally. I’m blessed like many though and have a family, home, friends, food, and so forth. However, Latipha has something that I envy. She has a fire in her belly, a force bigger than her circumstances that rises her above the conditions of her life and gives her PURPOSE. She has a bigger and more powerful parent than either a mother or father. She had her-SELF. NOTHING, NO THING stopped this girl from living her soul’s purpose. She is a teacher of a the highest order for both parents and children alike.
Ali Skylar is a personal growth blogger, (www.SuckytoSoulful.com), author (Transforming “Ahh Crap!” into “Wholy Shift!” and Life Sucks...Just Kidding!), songwriter, mom and West Coast Swing dancer whose gutsy and humorous insights inspire personal growth at the speed of life! For more info on Ali, click on her name above to visit her personal profile.

carnage and culture