Liberals such as President Obama seem to live in a kind of fantasyland where we can have an economy built exclusively on the “knowledge jobs” like advertising, marketing, law, media, communications, programming iPad apps, consulting, etc.  These jobs favor high IQ and not-so-high-IQ but highly credentialed people like the Obamas. They disfavor the working class.   For example, Obama has shut down the Keystone pipeline. He has apparently by executive fiat banned all uranium mining on federal lands in northern Arizona.  He has sent government money to money-losing enterprises like Solyndra while doing a great deal to hurt the old school, dirty industries of yesteryear like the oil business.

Hidden away from the urban knowledge economy is another world. It hasn’t gone away, but the knowledge class is increasingly ignorant of it.  It’s a dirty, dangerous world of combines, mines, factories, sweat, industrial accidents, and tough men. Look around.  The fruits of these jobs are everywhere.  The plastic in your computer is from the petrochemical industry.  The electricity, a result of the confluence of factories and coal mining for the most part.  The gasoline that lets you get to work and take weekend roadtrips is the tail end of a long chain that may start at a wellhead in North Dakota or Texas or Nigeria for that matter.

Making these important foundational economic activities more expensive or completely prohibited will not help the country. It will not help the knowledge economy.  These things will still get done, but they’ll done by others, overseas.  Out of a misplaced fanatical environmentalism, Obama and his fellow travelers have made these activities more difficult or impossible whenever given the chance to do so.  His rhetoric for a new economy based on “green jobs” is no solution at all. In fact, it is magical thinking of the worst sort, the notion that we can get rid of these unsightly tasks and also give jobs to these structurally unemployed “dirty jobs” workers by a perpetual motion machine of new industries that displace the older, dirtier ones.

Here’s a reality check.  Green jobs are fine and dandy, and I’m not opposed to them.  I also think a great many sensitive environmental lands need to be protected, and I like national and state parks and zoning restrictions and other things that prevent all of America from looking like the fruit of some land developer’s stunted aesthetic imagination.   But rural North Dakota is not the Amazon or the Everglades.  And these various goods must be balanced.  It is particularly stupid to hobble our own industries and job creators for “Mother Earth” when the damage will get done anyway in China or Russia or Canada or wherever this work may get done.

Some Marines in Afghanistan pissed on a dead Taliban.  And the Marines’ leadership is pissed off about it.  As they say, it’s better to be pissed off than pissed on.

These kinds of things are clearly not good, but they are also somewhat predictable.  Let’s not get carried away in our condemnations.  Americans, like our enemies, have done things like this before.  Eugene Sledge recalled with some horror how Americans pulled gold teeth from dead Japanese on Pelelieu.  American “ear necklaces” and trophy photos were not unheard of in Vietnam.  The pissing incident  is pretty mild and spontaneous in the historical scale of mutilating the dead.

The tone of the leadership is lacking all proportion. General Amos said the wrongdoers would be prosecuted to the “fullest extent.”  Defense Secretary Panetta described their actions as “deplorable.”  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she saw the video with “total dismay.” The corrupt Hamid Karzai uttered some words of condemnation.  And, as usual, we’re told this incident will inflame Muslim feelings.

Moral judgments must be intelligent, nuanced.  Even when there is an objective moral wrong–a violation of the law of war and a violation of Christian principles about respect for the dead–in every case there is also the question of culpability.  Here that question hinges on the mitigating effects of an extreme situation:  namely, a war against a brutal and uncivilized enemy that has no regard for the laws of war.

These Marines had likely just completed a fight for their lives.  They are young men whom we want to be aggressive and who spend the better part of boot camp being trained to kill enthusiastically.  It is quite a bit to expect these 19 year old, testosterone-fueled, scared, tired, stressed out, and angry young men also to behave exquisitely when they complete a firefight and discover, to their elation, that it is the enemy Taliban who are dead rather than themselves.

Plus, let’s not forget there are many worse war crimes, like mistreatment of civilians, looting, killing prisoners, mutiny, and other atrocities, atrocities with living victims.  To me this pissing incident is worrisome less for the harm of the underlying offense than its suggestion of a breakdown in discipline.  We do not want an undisciplined force for our own selfish reasons.   But even so, we recognize–or at least we should recognize–that military discipline is working against ordinary human instincts in wartime, such as aggression, thankfulness to be alive, hatred of the enemy, and contempt for this terrorist enemy in particular.  Our concerns for discipline must be realistic.

In other words, as in the civilian world, the law should take into account extreme emotional states and provocation in determining punishment and meting out justice. Obviously certain crimes go beyond mere misplaced aggression and suggest a psychopath; such individuals clearly must be identified and punished. This is not such a crime.  This is one of ordinary men committing ordinary human offenses under conditions of extraordinary stress and privation.  From our military and political leadership, some balance is called for.

The leadership outrage is not only excessive, but such occasional pirouettes of outrage are highly selective.  Is there equal outrage for the fact that this unlawful enemy tries every day to kill our troops and their own countrymen who may support us?  Will we condemn the widespread fraternization, adultery, and screwing around that occurs as a result of putting women in a combat zone? Or how about the crimes that thuggish guys in uniform sometimes commit at home, like the rape murder of a Marine couple that occurred in San Diego?   Will our leaders condemn with equal fervor the lawless attack on our airpower by Pakistani border guards?  (No, it is we who apologized to them.) Finally, will we note the relative scale of war crimes here, as it is the Taliban that ran a totalitarian state worthy of the Khemer Rouge before our arrival and who today sexually mutilate women who will not go along with their Satanic program?

I must say, I’m especially tired of hearing about how this will affect the enemy and his feelings.   Muslim feelings are already inflamed against America, let’s not forget.  Before Abu Ghraib and the death of bin Laden and the Koran burning pastor, we had the 9/11 attacks.  Before, during, and after this incident, Muslims have tried abroad and at home to kill our countrymen.  They likely will do so as long as we try to transform their backwards societies, and they will probably still hate us from afar even when this task is abandoned, because we are wealthy and powerful and, most importantly, because we are not Muslim.

As I said above, this kind of crime suggests a breakdown in discipline.  It needs to be punished for that reason, but that punishment should fit the crime.    It certainly does not deserve any jail time, the stupid video notwithstanding.

One might think that the video has necessitated extreme punishment because of diplomatic considerations.  I think that is only part of it.  There is a domestic agenda that these men and their unbridled warrior aggression threatens.   The video suggests their confusion, their youth, and their immaturity in more ways than one.  The men involved are especially unwise to forget the politically correct military whom they serve, a military whose leaders did cartwheels to defend diversity after Major Nidal Hassan killed 13 fellow soldiers, a military that has fallen over itself to integrate gays, and a military that has declared its traditional core of white males obsolete  in order to pursue the sacred goal of diversity, a military that is impossibly trying to “win hearts and minds” while deliberately ignoring the impact of totalitarian Islam.  I find these things 100 times more offensive than whatever a bunchy of lance corporals did to some Taliban corpse.

Part of my confidence in the ability to cut defense spending is based on my view that much of what our country does in the nature of “defense” is wrong-headed and interventionist foreign policy, rooted in the notion that we must perpetually be involved “ensuring stability” and “spreading democracy.”  Cutting this will do much to save money.

From a strictly numbers perspective, the size of our uniformed military does not seem extravagent.  But the spending certainly is, based as it is on the idea of massive foreign bases in Europe and Asia, welfare-style spending at home for the military and its numerous contractors, and, above all, the idea that we must be involved everywhere all the time.  We shold have a strong military, capable of defending America from all threats, securing sea lanes, protecting our borders, destroying terrorist camps, and projecting conventional and nuclear power overseas in the event of a real threat.  But there is no reason the DoD cannot cut a lot, and Republicans who fall overthemselves to exempt this one piece of the government from scrutiny as if the Cold War were still raging are foolish.

Marine Major Peter Munson over at his blog, stated the matter as follows:

In what world is spending more than the next ten nations combined on defense not enough?  I believe that is the figure we will be at after the coming cuts.  Right now we are spending more than the next 19 countries, only two of which could be called potential adversaries.  After yesterday’s strategic guidance announcement, the hand-wringing and incriminations were enough to make me ill.  It started with on the ride into work with LtGen Dave Deptula, Ret, who has now been elevated to the man who designed the air war in Desert Storm, evidently single-handedly.  I do not remember his exact words on NPR, but I believe the sound bite they pulled out was “disastrous.”  There were plenty of other hyperbolic epithets thrown around, my favorite of which said something to the effect of “it’s all good until there’s another Pearl Harbor.”  Maybe I am a naif, but I just do not buy any of it.  I think the DoD needs deep, deep cuts if it is to escape the decadence of its ways that a decade of unconstrained spending has brought about.

An Austrian MP takes down the Turkish Foreign Minister and his repeated, one-sided demands for “respect” by Christian Austria.

Would that we would have one politician who would speak plainly of the disrespect, hypocrisy, and insanity of “tolerating” the intolerable backward customs of Third World immigrants, particularly from the Islamic World, whose every act suggests hostility to all of the laws and customs that characterize our open and free society.

Most murderers are young, stupid, previously violent, and all around failures.  But failure is a relative thing.   In an extremely unusual crime, a young Navy pilot on New Years melted down and killed three people as well as himself:   his roomate’s sister, as well as a guy they all met at a New Years party, in addition to the roommate, also a Navy pilot. Then he killed himself.  The killer’s name is John Robert Reeves.  I’ve been following the story pretty closely because it is so weird and out of character for this highly selected bunch.

So, as details emerge, there has been speculation the shooter may have been jealous over the sister.  This appears more and more likely.  He was apparently an avid member of an online discussion forum for Isuzu owners. This itself is not that weird; lots of people have hobbies like cars, sports, running, hiking, motorcycles, etc.  Everyone’s into facebook these days.  These online communities can be valuable things.  But a personality often emerges on these.  And this is especially true when a forum on something mundane–Apple computers, knitting, whatever–becomes the center of one’s social world.  Instead of talking Isuzus, he’s talking about how to spend lonely weekends, why people don’t like him, how to succeed with women (which he apparently never does), and pretty much everything under the sun.

From his writings, it’s clear that Reeves was, in a word, pathetic.  He is frequently mocked for being a virgin by his online “friends.”  With occasional shame, but more often resignation, he announces his general frustration with others, women, life in general.  There was even a (now creepy) post from last New Years about what he was going to do.  Like many school shooters, there were even half-joking suggestions he might go on a killing spree someday. A perusal of these forums reveals the keys to understanding this case: this Aspbergerish guy was unhappy and frustrated with life and particularly so with women and social situations.  He couldn’t succeed with women in spite of his superficial professional success.  So he was filled with resentment.  This is a bad combination, usually harmless, but obviously magnified to the point of murder-homicide by alcohol, guns, perceived disrespect by his love interest, and whatever other screws he had loose.

Reeves is somewhat reminiscent of the LA Fitness Shooter a few years ago, a man who also complained of his lack of success with women and was filled with rage and resentment, in spite of having a few bucks and being presentable.

I don’t have the answers. There are none.  There were always be a bell curve of social and sexual success, and there were always be some guys who just can’t get along socially and then become more and more resentful.  Most are harmless or harmful only to themselves.  Some learn from mistakes and figure things out.  Very few, thankfully, go on homicidal rages.  But of those that do, particularly in seemingly “random” rages, we can see that the multiplier effects of failure and resentment have a lot to do with it.

God help these poor families. Reeves’ family undoubtedly did not see this coming; he had all the indicia of a young man in the prime of his life.  And the victims, David and Karen Reis, were also all-American, very close, and well liked.  David Reis, to his and the family’s credit, died a hero trying to save her.  Sadly, Reeves’ toxic combination of alcohol, jealousy, and social awkwardness did them all in.

Romney won Iowa, but just barely. Eight votes in fact. (Notice how in Republican primaries you don’t see anyone demanding recounts or complaining how they were too stupid to figure out the ballots.) Santorum, of all the anti-Romney candidates, made a last minute rally, beating out Bachman, Perry, Paul, and Newt who have all been switching places as the “conservative” candidate.  Other than perhaps Bachman, he’s the best of that bunch.  He’s weak on immigration and, like Bachman, a little too interventionist and fanatically pro-Israel for my taste, but overall he has had a good track record as a conservative.  He seems more sober in tone and intelligent than the alternatives.  Of course, folks seem to forget he got walloped in his home state of Pennsylvania a few years ago, which is not a rousing endorsement for national candidate potential.  At least they were able to figure that out re: Newt.

One of the worst things in Iowa and a few other states are the “open” primaries. A political party is picking its candidates, when the other party has a candidate locked up.  Nothing stops independents and in some places Democrats from coming along and purposely spoiling our races or simply voting their minds and picking a candidate highly unreprensentative of Republican views.  CNN’s data showed that nearly half of Paul’s supporters in Iowa were a) 18-29 and b) registered Independents.  The influence and confusion created by these various non-Republican voters in the Republican primary do much to dilute the quality of choices that would otherwise be much starker in the general election.  Also, insofar as Romney is concerned, this is probably a net positive as he seems the most palatable to independents of an ordinary nonpartisan, moderate streak, whereas Paul appeals to those truly alienated with the mainstream.

It got me thinking of something I read a long time ago by G.K. Chesterton in the Everlasting Man, which I reprint below:

Most modern histories of mankind begin with the word evolution, and with a rather wordy exposition of evolution, for much the same reason that operated in this case. There is something slow and soothing and gradual about the word and even about the idea. As a matter of fact it is not, touching these primary things, a very practical word or a very profitable idea. Nobody can imagine how nothing could turn into something. Nobody can get an inch nearer to it by explaining how something could turn into something else. It is really far more logical to start by saying ‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth’ even if you only mean ‘In the beginning some unthinkable power began some unthinkable process.’ For God is by its nature a name of mystery, and nobody ever supposed that man could imagine how a world was created any more than he could create one. But evolution really is mistaken for explanation. It has the fatal quality of leaving on many minds the impression that they do understand it and everything else; just as many of them live under a sort of illusion that they have read the Origin of Species.

It’s not even ironic that in the wake of a massive financial crisis driven by the Federal government’s relentless pressure on lenders to relax lending standards and make more home loans to minorities, one of the few actions Eric Holder’s Justice Department has taken in this sphere is to charge a bank with unfair lending practices to minorities. And not just any bank, of course, but the Typhoid Mary of minority-outreach lending, Countrywide. I’m not surprised – are you? No, I didn’t think so – saw it coming a mile away.

It’s not just that our powerful and otherwise efficient country can’t do anything, allowing riots at its malls, mass illegal immigration, and revolving door justice of violence criminals.  Rather, it does some things well–making sure people with respectable jobs pay taxes, keeping businesses straight-jacketed by regulations, forcing the military to integrate gays–while it does others poorly, if at all.  And it’s worse, the things it does poorly are essential and required of civilized societies everywhere at all times, while the assiduously enforced PC responsibilities are luxuries, if they are goods at all.  And, finally, it’s pretty obvious who the good and bad guys are in this drama.

I think banking and the housing crisis are also intimidating to regulators because of their complexity.  By way of comparison, the EEOC doesn’t even know how to do standard deviations.  In this case, it’s comparatively easy for the DOJ to say:  you, big bank, you are the bad guy for not giving money away to even more broke minorities than you already did.  It’s a lot harder to look at how underwriting was done wrongly or how structural flaws in mortgage securitization led to over lending or how trade with China and low interest rates had much to do with this.  Obama and Holder both do not seem particularly curious or quick to figure things out when it comes to the crimes of Wall Street.  They’re still stuck on the obsessions of their youth, i.e., black power politics.

The inconsistencies of enforcement are far from random.  We have a two tiered society and a two tiered government:  tyranny for the traditional elites, the majority, the wealth producers, the middle class, and the generally law abiding, and preferential treatment and benign anarchy for the newcomers, the antisocial, the parasites, the swindlers (great and small), the lazy, and the crooks and criminals among them.  It’s what the late Sam Francis perceptively described as  “anarcho-tyrrany.”

Marine Gen. Jim Mattis, commander of U.S. Central Command, ordered commanders in Afghanistan to improve coordination of operations along the Afghan-Pakistan border with Pakistani military, and ensure that all border stations are listed correctly on maps.

Mattis also ordered commanders to confirm border post locations before beginning operations along the border. And he ordered commanders to share military practices and procedures with the Pakistanis so they can better understand U.S. operations [no reason not to share that senstive intelligence, I'm sure]

It’s not certain the orders will solve the problems, because Pakistan refused to participate in the investigation [see we just need to make the first move, it's all about "communication" like in a marriage where one party is already a serial adulterer]. It still is unclear why Pakistani troops initially fired on U.S. soldiers who had landed by helicopter near a village close to the border as part of a mission to go after insurgents [details details, like who fired first.  We just need to talk it out. I'm sure the Pakistanis thought that Apache or Blackhawk belonged to the Taliban or some other hostile force]