A Whole New World
March 26th, 2010 - 3:17 pm
The NYT reports that Barack Obama has fulfilled another key part of his foreign policy vision. It writes:
President Obama finalized a new arms control treaty with Russia on Friday that will pare back the still-formidable cold war nuclear arsenals of each country. The agreement brings to fruition one of the president’s signature foreign policy objectives, just days after he signed into law the most expansive domestic program in decades.
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And so our long national suicide continues.
I think the obvious outcome will be the US cuts its inventories and reduces it maintenance and R&D budgets for nuclear weapons.
Russia does none of this.
What kind of fools do the Democrats think we are?
For a number of years, the US has had the problem of disposing of 24 tonnes of weapon-grade plutonium from earlier reductions in weapon stockpiles. Our solution was for the government to fund a MOX (mixed oxides – plutonium plus uranium ceramics) fuel fabrication plant and sell it as reactor fuel for civilian power plants.
Yesterday, the GAO said the the government might not have ENOUGH plutonium to keep this plant running (!) AND that there might not be enough buyers. We had had thoughts of buying Russian plutonium in the future, just like we bought reactor-grade enriched uranium under the “Megatons to Megawatts” program. The latter has fueled 10% of American electricity consumption since the Clinton Administration.
Coincidence? Mixed message? Evil scheme? Or just “good enough for government work” planning?
They must be sleeping a little easier in Teheran tonight.
“They must be sleeping a little easier in Teheran tonight.”
I’m sure they’re sleeping well in Beijing and Pyongyang too.
What’s to worry? As a commentator noted during an EMP trail a few months back “why nuke a country that is commiting suicide”.
As we have mentioned here before, each reduction in strategic arms by the superpowers has produced the opposite effect among smaller powers. The massive reductions from START in the 1990′s were followed by nuclear weapons programs by Pakistan, North Korea, Iraq, and Iran. Then there were the ballistic missile programs of Brazil, Iran, Pakistan, Syria, and North Korea and countries such as Saudi Arabia and Yemen seeking to purchase Scuds.
The big guys stepping away from the brink seems to lead to a lot of little dogs coming down off the porch to play.
Holding the signing ceremony in Prague, the Czechs like the Poles having been betrayed by Obama, is a special bit of triumphalism on the part of the Russians. They should perform their duties as host with all the good will that Obama just showed to Netanyahu. They should pelt the motorcades with rotten eggs.
The plot of Frankenhiemer’s Seven Days in May revolved around an ill conceived strategic weapons treaty. My guess is that Obama once saw it, smirked and then thought “I can pull it off.”
Can this turkey get through the Senate? There are no longer Senators of the standing of Henry Cabot Lodge who faced down Wilson and stopped the Versailles Treaty. Obama is damaged goods but who will stop the train as it heads for the abyss?
This is just another little joke on everybody. For years we and the Ruskies have signed treatys about our nukes and for years Russia forgot, trivialized or negated them.
Of course one thing is different today. We have Comrade President Obamaski running our Politburo now. Putin and Co. have the chance to screw us good without worrying about anyone screaming Rape.
Lets see how this works out.
Papa Ray
Cutting the budget of a largely invisible strategic force requires no particular skill. Why should the Russians bother if the Americans pare down their forces down to nothing? They would even hold Obama’s coat while he is at it. Whoever wrote the article has a career waiting for him as a breathless sycophant.
Good read by Ralph Peters on Obama’s foreign policy failures this week:
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/bam_triple_diplo_whammy_day_QF1zmGPlLy4ZwXZcoCFIEI
The world had much a safer stance
When there were only four
‘Twas us and Russkies, Brits and France
But now, who’s keeping score?
There’s India and Pakistan
And China and the Norks
And Israel and soon Teheran
The road has many forks
And soon the Saudis and Iraq
Will nuke up just in case
The mullahs run it off the track
And then, without a trace
The Middle East just disappears
In flame and smoke and sand
And fighting’s back to bows and spears
Between each camel band
A nuke exchange, if come to pass
Within the Middle East
Would see those countries turned to glass
That we would miss the least
Fortunately, we apparently still have some adults in the system. A couple of months ago the anti-nuke crowd was screaming their dismay that their Nobel Prize winner had – horror of horror’s – actually increased the funding for nuclear weapons.
The planned nuclear weapon out-year budgets continue to increase steadily by an average of $300 million per year through the year 2015, when Obama’s plan reaches a level of $8.036 billion. Inflated to 2015 dollars, President Bush’s last nuclear weapons budget, in FY 2009, amounted to $7.2 billion. So over the next five years, President Obama is proposing to achieve a real increase in annual nuclear weapons spending of $800 million per year by 2015. This is an astonishing turnabout for a President who was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize largely on the strength of his announced intention to pursue seriously the elimination of nuclear weapons. On the contrary, by undertaking a number of long-term nuclear warhead production projects, President Obama’s 2011 budget request reveals a disturbing trend toward increasing US investment in, and continuing commitment to, nuclear weapons modernization for the indefinite future.”
Bottom line: apparently nothing is as advertised in this new Obamaworld, but that’s not always a bad thing.
Pardon my old ears, but what I saw was a grinning Russian General while the translation explained that the US will be giving up nukes on “boomers” and further development of defensive systems. Who will dare call it treason?
Apart from the insanity of the immediate damage, what chaps my ass about his ‘nuclear free world’ BS was that he sure as hell did NOT campaign on that.
Taking nukes off subs is suicide, as they are the most survivable leg of the old nuclear ‘triad’.
It is also insane that the land based missiles are antique Mnuteman IIIs. Yes, I knw they’ve been upgraded many times over the years, but Russia fields a new missile every 3 or 4 yrs it seems.
Doesn’t removing SLBMs and silo missiles make the US more vulnerable to a first strike?
This is probably a way for Obama to make it impossible for the US to intervene militarily abroad: Getting an alibi for doing nothing. “Sorry Taiwan, it would be too risky!”
It increases the risk that South Korea, Taiwan and Japan will get their own nukes.
If Obama is giving up the Trident ICBMs on the submarines then it is game set and match. Five of those boomers on patrol mean more than a thousand silo based missiles did. If that is true then my first reaction is that there is no limit to what I would expect any decent public servant to do to stop him. The wiki implies, and Obama as quoted in The Times states, that Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn are behind this. Even when I disagree with them on an issue I have always considered them responsible adults. Based on that I am going to have to go over this carefully to see what I might have missed.
The Times coverage also claims that the submarine based leg of the triad is not effected.
LifeoftheMind I told you. I told you but you would not listen.
Obama plans a self-coup and surrender to Iran and/or Pakistan, and possibly the Russians and Chinese. The man HATES HATES HATES America and Whites, what other could he possibly do?
Obama’s model for America’s future is Vichy France, with himself as General Petain.
Eventually his coup will fail. But it will cost millions of American lives, perhaps hundreds of millions. So much the better, for Obama’s thinking. Don’t think anyone will stop him either: he’s Black. Therefore any and all opposition to the One is racist and fascist.
And here everybody thought Obama’s middle name was Hussien. Turns out, it’s James Earl. Where exactly do you stash a peanut farm in Chicago?
But, as Instapundit likes to say, a re-run of Jimmy Carter is a best-case scenario with this guy, and even that is increasingly looking wildly optimistic.
When the harsh realities of the jungle collide with the grandiose lies and schemes of this brittle arrogant donkey of a man, the sparks will fly. I just hope I’m nowhere near ground zero when it happens. The world’s monsters lick their fangs as Obama attacks Americans, subverts the Constitution, and farts at our allies.
Many years ago I lived for the better part of a year in Japan. Men drink heavily there, and on occasion I’d find myself with some natives in a bar run by the “Yakuza”. This is supposedly the equivalent of the mafia in Japan. So feared were the Yakuza that if you got your bar tab and the manager decided to add an extra hundred $ to the bill (about 20,000 yen as I recall) the Japanese would become fearful and wide eyed – they’d always pay and skulk out. Perhaps I was very foolish, but I always refused to play along, and though this happened at least 8-9 times and maybe more – I never had them chop off my finger or take me out back for a beating.
My point? The “Chicago Way” is synonymous in America with cronyism, corruption, but most of all political thuggery. We bemoan it all the time, and the bullying and corruption of this vile narcissist seems to have worked its magic with ObamaCare. But contrasting our coddled jackass president against the perverts and sadists who run much of the world, those pathogens and psychopaths who’ve emerged on top of diverse sewers like Saudi Arabia, China, Russia, and Iran, Obama is a genuine wilting little pansy. Nobody is going to pay up if he adds a hundred to their bar tab… But when those global deviants put the squeeze on our prezzO, I bet he’ll pay up real fast and slouch out the bar followed by a thick slug mucous.
World Mourns As Communist Darkness Falls Upon America
Hmm. On further inspection of that website’s OTHER links I’m retracting my recommendation even though the article I linked was an interesting read.
Whiskey, the “Petain” part does not make any sense. He is a narcissist. Why settle for a petain when he could be the most powerful islamoprogsoc there is?
My worst fear is that the Russians do decide to reduce their nuke inventory. By listing them available to the highest bidder on e-bay.
May God help us!
“Read my lips: “no new taxes” is a now-famous phrase spoken by then presidential candidate George H. W. Bush at the 1988 Republican National Convention as he accepted the nomination on August 18. It had been his Peggy Noonan created mantra throughout the campaign.
On July 31, 1991 the US and the Soviets agreed to the Start I Treaty to reduce nuclear arms production. We did but over the next five years plus the Soviets added one new nuclear missile per week to their arsenal.
Juxtapose that with Geo. H. W, Bush’s 1988 promise of “no new taxes” and find the common denominator.
The Socialist Democrats.
They failed to hold the Soviets to the treaty while demanding we adhere to the letter and spirit of Start I. G.H.W. Bush raised taxes after a Democratically controlled House and Senate promised legislation to reduce spending on a dollar for dollar basis. They reneged and left G.H.W.B. with a huge broken promise he had made to the American people. They reneged and allowed the Soviets to increase their nuclear ICBMs.
Now obama has once again given away the store with the Socialist Democrats covering him by virtue of their holding both legislative bodies.
The American gulag now awaits dissenters unless we can knee cap this SOB at the ballot box in November.
I guess what comes to mind for me is why Anyone would even Consider signing a treaty of any kind with Baroque Obama.
Given his general duplicity, lying, history of saying “what I meant to do was” and record of throwing people under the bus, why would you trust?
Would you buy gold bullion for 50 cents a ton from this man?
Unless, of course you were assured that whatever deal he cut, it could be absolutely guaranteed to be a bad deal for the USA.
Habu #24:
Don’t forget that after signing the INF Treaty the Soviets secretly based new theater missiles in eastern Europe. It only became apparent after the USSR collapsed and the Czechs invited everyone in to see the missiles the Soviet forces left behind before the rockets were scrapped.
kaba
“My worst fear is that the Russians do decide to reduce their nuke inventory. By listing them available to the highest bidder on e-bay. “
According to reports (over the years) by the Russians themselves most of their weapons would not work anyway. So the most that someone would get is materials to make “dirty bombs”. Which of course is a bad thing.
Also interesting is the fact that some in the American nuclear community say that a large percentage of our weapons are subject to malfunctions because of their age. One of our problems is that we no longer have the personnel with the expertise to design, produce or even maintain our nuclear arsenal.
Papa Ray
25. RWE:
Thanks! Just drives home the point. Great comment.
My understanding is that Soviets simply got what they wanted and then publicly declared the talks a success and went home , leaving the boy holding his n*ts in his hand. So in true fashion he quickly ran to the front of the parade, assuming the position of community organizer cum nuclear negotiator.
he needs 67 votes to pass this though, right?
One solution to this might be to do what armies have often done when withdrawing artillery; unload through the muzzle. In the case of the boomers (and possibly some others) this means giving nuclear warheads to those that deserve them. Briefly.
It is rapidly becoming unavoidable to believe otherwise than that Obama hates the capitalist ethos that underlies America, hates Jews, and hates whites. He didn’t buddy with lefty miscreants like Jeremiah Wright and Ayers for so long because he disagreed with them.
But even with that underlying mindset he still has to see America as the Great Sugar Daddy that will fund his brand of international social justice. Maybe someday the rubes will catch on that they are being had and revolt but that is not likely to occur for years.
Certainly he has to see that weakening America’s strategic dominance will empower the more ambitious authoritarian governments to expand their sphere of influence and control. How does that help him? Is he so naive to think that he can put Putin or the Mullahs back into the bottle whenever he wants?
From the man on the street’s perspective it’s a lot easier for a Russian to get behind a nationalist like Putin who’s trying to build an empire than it is for an American to get behind a wimp who is taking one apart. You wouldn’t think that a successful culture would be so willing to undermine it’s own national character – but here it is.
ScenarioA @ 12: Bottom line: apparently nothing is as advertised in this new Obamaworld, but that’s not always a bad thing.
Yah. Obama don’t know, he don’t care, he don’t understand. And that’s good. Bubba Clinton knew, and cared, and understood, but he liked to do only small stuff, that was his saving grace. Small stuff, and chubby interns.
Why verify? Trust!
I pray that you’re right Papa Ray. Although a dirty bomb in a major port city would almost certainly push us over the precipice were we are currently perched.
BTW I gather from some of your previous post that you were in Vietnam. I was with the 196th LIB in ’69 and ’70. We were at various points west of Chu Lai. I was medivaced out of Kham Duc in August of ’70. And you?
Whiskey – this story is for you: White men shun Democrats.
I keep asking myself (and others around me), “If our enemies had selected our President, how would he behave differently than Obama has behaved?” Who sent Obama?
Habu:
Few people indeed outside the Beltway know about the deal G.H.W. Bush cut with the Dems in that sequestered meeting at Andrews AFB in which they tricked him on going back on the “Read my lips. No New taxes” pledge. That was done in order to avoid a government shutdown when they could not agree on a budget. And they then beat him about the head and shoulders with that fact.
When Clinton came in and changed his Middle Class Tax Cut pledge into a huge tax hike, I thought it was a sad day indeed for the country when he not only was not lynched on the White House lawn but almost no one but Rush Limbaugh even mentioned what he had done.
A few years later when the Republicans took over Congress a similar budget impasse occurred and Clinton managed to shove all the blame onto the Republicans. Of course they were too polite to mention his failure to meet his earlier pledge, and it would have done no good to call him a liar anyway because his supporters would not have cared and the media would not have pointed out the fact.
And finally, relative to nuclear weapons reliability, let me relate story I heard one night on amateur radio in the DC area.
A nuclear weapons design expert was stuffed in the back seat of a B-57 and rushed to Europe to look at bomb they had some concerns with. He got there and looked at the weapon, finding the inside electronics were coated with mold. He quickly was able to confirm that the weapon was not in danger of detonating, but also discovered the source of the mold.
Someone had left a ham sandwich inside the bomb casing. Talk about quality control problems….
I expected some hyperventilating on this topic from the most frequent Belmont Club commenters, and lo and behold, no surprise they think it’s a bad deal. Here’s the funny thing – Russophobes will say this treaty is terrible for favoring the Russians AND AT THE SAME TIME say how pathetic it is that Russia can’t make its main strategic weapons investment of recent years, the Bulava sub-launched missile, work properly. It’s failed in the last ten tests or so, which is why when that mysterious blue light appeared over Norway earlier this year the Norwegian media immediately speculated it was a failed Russian SLBM test that Moscow hadn’t admitted yet.
‘Morton Doodslag’ (what a handle) calling Russia a sewer is par for the course. I wish Morton, LOTM and others would spend at least a few weeks in Moscow, go to one of the private medical clinics which is superior to anything short of Mayo back home, and drag George F. Will and Jonah Goldberg along with them. They might come back to D.C. and find our nation’s capital positively dumpy in comparison and quasi-socialist American health care far more bureaucratic.
May I suggest one very obvious reason why Obama is doing many things that BCers and conservatives find distasteful in the foreign policy arena? MONEY, namely America’s gigantic pile of debt. Wretchard has alluded to it, and Spengler over at Asia Times has gone down the list of the largest buyers of U.S. Treasury debt. That bow to Japanese emperor? No. 3 on U.S. Treasury buyers list, check. Bow to Saudi prince? Also top five, check. Humiliating Netanyahu at the White House? Gulf Arab countries still buying U.S. Treasuries, check.
The only exception to this list seems to be our inexplicable pissing off the Chinese over Google, but that can be explained by the simple expedient that Google has become another data mining arm of Uncle Sam, and probably some Chinese finance ministry flack screwed up and sent something sensitive via GMail and that started the whole row.
And now you say you hate the ‘reset’ in relations with Russia? Wake up to this – Russian companies own at least 10% of the U.S. steel industry and although Government Motors blocked the Magna deal and pissed off the Germans to do it (alluded to in the famous Channel One Putvedev New Year’s cartoon); you still see Abramovich buying a hundred thousand acres in Colorado (probably keeping the mineral rights to sell to Gazprom later); Prokhorov is on 60 Minutes this weekend talking about why he bought the New Jersey Nets; Deripaska lobbied hard for his U.S. visa thanks to former Sen. and GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole; at least one McCain aide was working for Yanukovich (recent victor in the Ukrainian elections who just finally gave the wildly unpopular cause of NATO membership for that country a well deserved coup de grace) at one point in 2008…and THAT must have made for some funny water cooler talk on the 2008 campaign trail with Randy Scheunemann, McCain’s foreign policy advisor slash lobbyist for the NRA and Misha ‘Tie Eater’ Saakashvili.
If G.W. Bush and the Republicans in Congress had actually cut spending in the last eight years instead of giving America both more guns and more butter while the Fed recklessly blew up this bubble, perhaps Mr. Obama wouldn’t have to bow and scrape now. In other words, take a good look in the mirror GOPers…
Mr. X, you make some interesting arguments, but Google is not the US government, plus the Chinese have been actively attacking (hacking) Google’s infrastructure. Only the Chinese and Google know the details, but it appears serious.
When you say “follow the money”, are you suggesting Obama wants to cut US nukes because Russian oligarchs are spending freely in the US – or simply to save a few bucks on maintaining some cranky old warheads?
Novanglus…who sent Obama?
Why nobody sent nobody, of course.
“US prosecution documents recall Mr Auchi’s suspended jail sentence and €2 million fine for corruption in France five years ago.
Defence lawyers said that Mr Auchi lent the $3.5 million for legal and family expenses. Most of the money had gone directly to law firms and there had been no attempt to flee. “While the Government attempts to besmirch Mr Auchi’s character,” they said, “he is one of Britain’s wealthiest men, has been a guest at the White House and met with two of the last three presidents, was Co-Chair of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, is President of the Anglo-Arab Organisation, and has received numerous awards and honorary positions from heads of state, including Queen Elizabeth II, Pope John Paul II, and King Abdullah II of Jordan.”
Mr Auchi’s lawyers added: “Mr Auchi flatly and categorically denies any wrongdoing in relation to the matters that led to his conviction in France and he is pursuing an appeal against it.” Mr Auchi is also suing the oil company Elf for dragging him unwittingly into the scandal.
Note: we wish to make it clear that, in the original piece “Obama bagman is sent to jail over $3.5m payment by British tycoon” (Feb 1), we did not intend to suggest that there was any connection between the $3.5 loan from Mr Auchi to Mr Rezko and any approaches Mr Rezko may have made to Illinois State Officials. We apologise to Mr Auchi for any misunderstanding. cOugh
Back ground here? and
Mr X, good post. No argument about Bush not spending like a conservative, other than he didn’t buy two car companies or pay 100 cts on the dollar to AIG’s unsecured creditors. Or put a generally useless stimulus plan into place. Or scare capitalists into hiding, so that this economy continues to struggle.
Your logic on follow the money falls apart on China. Not only are we fighting with them over Google, but hardly a week goes by when we don’t badger them over letting their currency float, as if we should be giving anyone financial advice these days. And this administration seems bound and determined to start a trade war with China. Given their solid #1 position as a debt buyer, this makes no sense.
And no arguments about DC being dumpy, but let me know Yellow Cab comes to Moscow.
I have heard that one of the big reasons that President Bush was able to do his most recent, 5-page nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia so easily is that it was a win-win. It allowed us to get rid of old stuff that was getting expensive to maintain; it allowed them to get rid of old stuff that was getting expensive to maintain. It gave both sides cover to do things they wanted to do anyway, which is the only way to get something like this done.
Inherent in this is that we were going to redesign our warhead design to use current technology. We’d end up with smaller, more reliable warheads that use less dangerous material and get slightly less boom but targetted more precisely… thus meeting all possible goals. But of course that hit Congress, and well, I don’t think those new warheads have finished design yet or gone into production.
35. RWE
Re: moldy nuke/ham sandwich …. not very kosher of the chap to leave the sandwich. Must have been before microwave ovens.
16. Lifeofthemind
I was tasked at CIA to be a clandestine courier who carried a good deal of info to Paris for Kissenger during the “Peace Talks” He had a losing hand. Yes, the Dept of State had their own guys but they weren’t getting what we were.
Kissinger is directly responsible for the endgame debacle that became our departure from Vietnam. He was convinced he could negotiate a better deal even with the NVA shelling Ton Son Nhut airbase and tanks rolling into Saigon. The man is an egomaniacal cad.
As a result the indigenous Vietnamese who had worked for our intelligence outfits and promised they would be pulled out were left to the fate of the NVA. It was shameful. I went from Paris to Saigon during the last week to do some housekeeping and successfully got out via my Air America contacts. Sad time leaving such trusting comrades behind knowing death would follow. Kissinger held up the evac because he felt it would reduce his negotiating position. It was surreal since he had none.
Now this treachery.
RWE,
regarding “Read my lips” and the broken pledge…
I can remember dogging out one of my buddies at work who fell for voting for Clinton because Bush the Elder broke his promise….
“Let me get this… you’re mad at the guy who doesn’t like raising taxes and only did so very reluctantly when he was under extreme pressure from the Dems, so you got back at him by voting for the guys who think higher taxes are great? WTF?”
Obama is not the right guy to be cutting back on strategic nuclear weapons because as a leftist his actions will be perceived as appeasement and/or weakness. Also, I doubt that Obama and much of his inner circle understand the subtleties of nuclear weapons. However IMHO much/most/all of our strategic nuclear weapons are obsolete and/or of inappropriate design for use against America’s current set of enemies. The strategic nuclear weapons of the Cold War were intended mainly as a bluff under the Mutual Assured Destruction policy. Those weapons were too powerful to be actually used and also not designed to spend decades sitting inside silos or submarine launch tubes. The nation most likely to be the target of our current strategic weapons would be China but Pacific Ocean weather patterns would cause significant fallout over China to pass over the west coast of North America in a few days, i.e. many Americans would die from our own fallout.
We need to replace all of our current strategic nuclear weapons with clean burning low fallout nuclear weapons that are designed to be extremely stable in storage (“clean burning” means no tritium/lithium and no U-238 in the tamp). We also need to reduce our nuclear weapons inventory such that we could completely destroy any credible enemy without “bouncing the rubble” through over-kill. To be spending taxpayer money on weapons only intended to “bounce the rubble” is Cold War insanity.
Again, Obama (because he is a leftist) is the wrong president to be doing this but the nation needs to begin a massive new research and development program to produce a whole new class of nuclear weapons (new warheads and ballistic missiles) that are intended to be ***Actually Used*** in war. Among these new nuclear weapons should be single warhead ICBM launched weapons that are hardened to penetrate deeply underground before detonation (something like the old Pershing-2). We need to present our potential adversaries with a new America that is not a tired-out/harmless muscle-bound giant but rather a clever/nimble America that is ready-and-able to project exactly the amount of force to destroy any credible threat with minimal collateral damage.
Thanks, Mr. X, for a post that reminds us that we all need to broaden our research.
Some of your assertions make sense, others assume American culture is monolithic. You seem to have invested substantially in following the events and careers of a number of post-Soviet figures, but you completely disregard the underlying poison fed to the world financial system by America’s so-called “community reinvestment act” under which government regulatory officials threatened and bullied banks at all levels of the US economy to abandon long-proven criteria for loan applicants. The implied and explicit threats included additional audits by bank examiners, exaggerated scrutiny and deliberations for applications by banks to offer new services or to expand into new markets, possibly even suspensions of charters for failure to cooperate.
(The power of review of course falls within the normal functions of government but the left – God help us, the ever-zealous and hypocrite left… – never fail to accuse Republican presidents of abuse of power if one of their darlings is subjected to an IRS audit.)
The “expansion of home ownership at all costs” mentality was employed by cynical American politicians (mostly democrat party) as a way of (1) buying more votes from the beneficiaries of loosened loan criteria, and (2) gaming the system to reward themselves and their proxies in FNMA and FHLMA for rigged performance bonuses based on perverted accounting procedures.
Here’s a quote from an article titled “Time to Reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac” published June 20, 2005 under the byline of Ronald Utt, Ph.D. [numbers embedded in the text refer to footnotes provided in the article but not here.]
“The evidence reveals that Fannie Mae’s management team appears to be the chief beneficiary of the federal privileges and the accounting irregularities that were recently uncovered. For example, in 2003, 749 members of Fannie Mae’s management team received a staggering $65.1 million in bonuses, a portion of which was attributable to the overstated earnings that followed from the accounting irregularities.[16] Over the past five years, the top 20 Fannie Mae executives reportedly received combined bonuses of $245 million.[17] This disconnect between reward and mission suggests that any reconciliation with the Securities and Exchange Commission should also require that the FNMA’s management return their bonuses to a fund administered by a bona fide not-for-profit entity, such as Habitat for Humanity, for the purpose of assisting prospective homebuyers of modest means.”
(The full article is available at http://www.heritage.org.)
Interesting coincidence (for those who believe in coincidence) that the people who developed and massively applied the “credit default swap” modality of recent infamy, are precisely the same ones who were given billions and billions of tax-payer dollars to keep their cheating companies in business, and also major contributors to the Obama presidential campaign.
Ah, well, business as usual.
44. Eggplant:
Well stated, although personally I (totally selfish) would keep a few of the biggies around for that special 1812 Overture ending.
H
Newscaper #43: Yes, that reaction to the Bush no taxes pledge is identical to ones I have had with friends. The other big fiction about G.H.W. Bush was that he was disconnected. Compare him to Clinton and you will see that he was far more in tune with reality but simply had a radically different idea about what government should, could and must do. He knew it was no damn good at some things. But I will admit that most of my deluded friends voted for Perot, not Clinton.
Eggplant #44: The Democrats in Congress saw to it that the Deeply Penetrating ICBM Warhead program was killed back in the late 80’s. They hated the idea and I assumed it was a matter of honor among thieves – we won’t blow up the Communist leadership bunkers and they will reciprocate and not hurt our leadership.
Mad Fiddler #45: Latest word I saw is that when G.W. Bush saved Citibank it now appears that it will yield a $3 Billion profit for the Feds.
And by the way, a book I recently read on the housing meltdown said that Janet Reno threatened criminal prosecutions against banks that did not get with the CRA program.
Habu,
Morton Kaplan always thought the worst of Kissinger. I have found Kissinger’s books to be worthwhile and thought that his conduct at the end of the Vietnam War was due to his belief that the American people had chosen defeat. Given the conduct of the Congress, who betrayed our Vietnamese ally while the battle was still in doubt with less justification than their predecessors had in cutting off the Nationalist Chinese 25 years earlier, that position on his part was understandable.
Eggplant,
My chief concerns with your well laid out position on moving to fewer but more reliable nuclear weapons are,
1. Congress has killed efforts to create a mix of high thermal/low radiation yield bunker busters or Counter Value weapons and low thermal/high radiation yield (neutron bomb) Counter Force or tactical weapons so the credibility of a move to technical improvement is questionable under the current regime,
2. fewer weapons are inherently destabilizing because they simplify the targeting problem for an enemy contemplating a decapitating first strike such that if you are going to have nuclear weapons you are far better off with five thousand of them than five hundred,
3. I do not understand your desire to abandon MIRV systems that complicate the enemy’s ABM problem as there is no reason to believe that all parties, including China, would verifiably abandon this technology in which we hold an advantage,
4. the multi-megaton city killers of 40 years ago were retired with the Titan launch vehicle and I believe that all US current strategic weapons scale up to the 200 kt range.
To be blogged under the title “Strategic Survivability.”
RWE,
Well said.
—–
BTW, I made blog comments today re. the “Tea Bagger” slur and the Greek bailout.
48. Lifeofthemind:
I know that those I knew in Saigon knew what I already stated and knew it would mean death to those brave souls we had promised safe passage to should the worst occur.
We knew what was going on in Paris and that Kisssinger’s ego was the driver for the delay in getting those people out. It hurt our recruiting for decades for those lessons of deceit in the end echoed around the world and signaled that our word was not our bond. In war, especially covert intelligence in the back office depends on that word. They did and it cost them their lives to the tune of six to ten thousand loyal South Vietnamese.
It was also an eye opener for many of the rest of us. Then Carter and Stansfield Turner showed up and that cooked it for the old OSS hands and more.
C’est la guerre.
Hey are any known and/or existing nukes actually that “clean”?
I mean sure we can make them dirtier with cobalt or whatever, but I thought the radioactive fallout was a given with any kiloton-range fission or fusion candles. Though I guess I never looked into it in gruesome detail.
Fiddler, reward themselves and their proxies in FNMA and FHLMA for rigged performance bonuses based on perverted accounting procedures.
Compared to Goldman Sachs bonuses, were these not piddling?
I am not less exercised about the ones in the private sector, which are 10x to 1000x larger.
Habu,
35 years less 4 weeks ago the NVA drove down Highway 1 with their tanks headlights on. A handful of passes by B-52s would have done to them what we did to Saddam’s army on the road between Kuwait and Basrah. One of the terrible things is that those old OSS hands whose word was a bond were largely Democrats, the last gasp of the patriotic liberals and the self consciously Best and the Brightest who had come from the Ivy League like their counterparts from Oxbridge that had gone into the SIS, and they were betrayed by their own children.
I too had my doubts about Obama. Now I’m sure the guy is no amateur and he’s playing for keeps. The point is: what is his game? And his endgame?
Seems clear now that those who are usually considered America’s enemies are not his and his group’s enemies. Why, if there’s a single grain of truth in the story that has been told about the recently deceased Senator Kennedy, the story that he had actively looked for an alliance with the Soviets against Reagan, I don’t think such a thought would be entirely alien in the current White House.
The one thing we can be sure about this pres and his people is that they love power and that their own good comes before anybody else’s, that meaning the whole of the country they govern. What if they concluded that they have a better chance of keeping power in a weak America than in a strong one? What if they bet on the possibility of being only one major international crisis away from much more and more durable power? Would they, for the country’s sake, opt for a stronger country in the hand of another group?
Americans have been lucky until now in that they have been having administrations that, however good or bad they were, used to be rather patriotic, even if just after their own particular way. Thus Americans have been spoiled: they forgot that there are governments, even democratically elected governments, that may consciously work against the common good of the Republic.
One thing that kept even such mediocre presidents as Carter relatively patriotic while in power was the weight of the tradition, their respect for at least part of the country’s history, a history they wanted to belong to, and even the vanity of being the president of the strongest country on Earth. Thus, there used to be at least some identity between president, country and people.
But, what if the current government thinks differently? What if someone like Obama doesn’t have the least empathy for the US and the Americans, only for himself and his group, and couldn’t care less about the country singularity, its role in the world and so on? This president was obviously elected by the people (and the media etc.), but does he even want to represent the people? And, if not, whom does he actually represent? Maybe a new class, a kind of transnational state bourgeoisie?
Let’s take this last hypothesis and, from it, try to infer how would he be acting. Or, instead of passing judgment on his supposed failures and mistakes, we, taking as granted that all his acts (and omissions) were cleverly intentional (and I mean even his passing an appearance of weakness when losing something absolutely irrelevant like Chicago’s Olympic bid) could try to reverse engineer his so to say master-plan. For instance: Obama seemed weak vis-à-vis Israel for some time, he allowed people to think he had been outsmarted by Netanyahu. But was he? What if his last year’s apparent weakness was actually a trap? What if he doesn’t even want to just weaken Israel in order to impose a bad solution (from the Israeli point of view) on the conflict – I mean: if he actually wanted to get rid of Israel once and for all, how would he act? How would he be behaving if he weren’t even pro-Palestinian, meaning he couldn’t care less about the Palestinians, but actually looking for a way to fulfill Iran’s deepest wishes? Why allow the Palestinians or Arabs to destroy the Jewish State if he can do it all by himself, alone, and thus actually become the world’s greatest living hero? If he feels able to impose a health-care solution against the will of most Americans, why would he behave differently in the international arena?
I’m afraid this can be done. And getting rid of “embarrassing” (no more) allies like Taiwan or South Korea can also be done – before the next mid-term elections. On the one hand, if he has already got to the conclusion that health-care will cost him one or both houses, now he has nothing left to lose and is free to do whatever is in his immediate power. On the other hand he may already have a very good plan to win on November. What would this plan be? It has just been proven that he has enough power to bribe, buy or bully the Democrats. Why shouldn’t he be able to do the same with many Republicans. Obama is, unlike most of those who oppose him, a guy perfectly able to think –maybe brilliantly—out of the box. Even most of those who disliked him from the start thought that, though he started campaigning from the left, he, like Bill Clinton, would eventually be forced to govern from the center. He is proving before our very eyes that he can govern from a position to the left even of that he started his campaign from. This man is no Clinton, he is in a hurry, but he knows how to ouwait his rivals. He is probably the cleverest guy in the White House since Reagan, maybe even cleverer than him. Take a look at his curve or trajectory: from nobody to state politician, to the US Senate to the White House before his 50s. What’s next? Where does the curve point to?
Just one more thing. Ever since he got into the White House, I felt clearly that a huge power vacuum was being created in the world. But this goes beyond that. He has already been the beneficiary of a power vacuum created in the very core of American politics. He is its creature and, understanding this, he is spreading the vacuum that propelled him into power. Chaos, disorder and instability are his medium, and he thrives by propagating them. He has a very good card that, if he plays skillfully, may win him the next elections: a huge international crisis which will make most Americans (because they’re patriotic) to rally around anyone who happens to be their leader. I don’t think this is a matter of if, but of when – a question of good timing. Just consider that he just started fuelling the biggest international crisis of his presidency when he was already sure of the approval of Obamacare, I mean: he made the beginning of the international crisis coincide with the temporary end of the national one. He is not playing to the rhythm of politics as usual, but all his adversaries are.
Deleted.
Habu
I understand your position within the vietnam tragedy, though we had another understanding of the Nixon/Kissinger policy, they wanted to displace the conflict onto USSR/China border, which was rather a success, and that that had a price, ending the Viet Nam war, where the Viets were mainly sponsored by China. Also starting a new policy of trades with China opened more doors in occupying the Chineses with businesses than relegating them into guerillas sponsoring. We could see it was the premise of the future soviets collapsing
I wrote on a german blog about the same subject
Nixon’s vision was more global, inviting China to prosper through trades agreements and Russia to slow down the arms race, were the stakes of his poker game, that he managed brillantly, as also deriving the cold war “est/west” towards China’s borders with URSS, thus occupying his main “enemis
LifeofMind #48:
You are quite right about the existence of more nuclear weapons and delivery systems making a first strike much more difficult. Aside from that no delivery system is 100% reliable and so you need more than you “need” to be sure you get the job done. Some of them might very well be making the rubble bounce but when you hit T-0 for a launch you can’t know that.
I understood that START was going to outlaw MIRVed ICBMs and the MMIII force would be outfitted with one warhead each. We were even looking at launching single warhead MMIII’s for tests from Cape Canaveral because Kwaj is too close to VAFB to get a good evaluation of the range of single warhead MMIII’s. However, this was predicated on START II going through and the dirty little secret is that Clinton totally screwed the pooch when it came to any and all arms control treaties because of his military adventurism.
The young leftie peacenik was a bust when it came to arms control while those old Cold Warriors Reagan and Bush did incredible things to make the world safer. Wait – did I say Clinton was a bust? Worse than bust; he not only did not expand engagement with the Federal Republic of Russia; he made it much worse.
Josh #50: Not putting U-235 in the external cases on H-bombs made them a lot cleaner right there. Less bang for the buck but less fallout, too.
bartok
‘Chaos, disorder and instability are his medium, and he thrives by propagating them.”
bartok, your comment above looks like a compilation of comments I have seen on the net (and myself made) over the last two years.
The only thing you left out implicitly is WHO shepherded him and financed him from when he was a young man? We know that the Saudis gave him money but who else and what is THEIR plan? We know that the socialists from [e]urope have been courting the democrats and him for years. We know that Soros is involved with all of the dirty dealings and money in the world, but do we know what his game plan is? It is not to get more money but more power, as is all socialists, fascists aim.
But in the end does it make any real difference? We know who is the enemy enough to fight them. But if we are looking for the Republicans to do it, we will be looking forever. They are almost as bad as the democrats and bigger cowards to boot.
The Americans who are going to fight this in the long run and take it to it’s conclusion be it peaceful or not are going to have to forget the Republican Party until they have a come to Jesus moment when they remember that they are Americans first and Republicans second.
And yes, Obama is following the Alinsky rules to the letter (and improving upon them). We need to change our tactics to confound, confront and defeat them, but it appears that they counter our ire and anger with their bought media and it only makes us look like the aggressors and them as the victims. Just as Alinsky’s teachings portend and intend.
It’s time we got smarter than they and turned their rules around on them, if we don’t or can’t we will have to resort to the teachings of our Founders.
Papa Ray
‘The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed – where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.”
2009 Judge Alex Kozinski
In case you missed it:
“THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK”
Papa Ray
O’narcissist:
“*This is his sole legacy: a massive post-traumatic stress disorder.”
…-
“It’s over: MPs say the special relationship with US is dead
BRITAIN’S special relationship with the US — forged by Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt in the second world war — no longer exists, says a committee of influential MPs.
Instead, America’s relationship with Britain is no more special than with its other main allies, according to a report by the Commons foreign affairs committee published today.
The report also warns that the perception of the UK after the Iraq war as America’s “subservient poodle” has been highly damaging to Britain’s reputation and interests around the world. The MPs conclude that British prime ministers have to learn to be less deferential to US presidents and be “willing to say no” to America.
The report, entitled Global Security: UK-US Relations, says Britain’s relationship with America is “extremely close and valuable” in a number of areas, particularly intelligence co-operation. However, it adds that the use of the phrase special relationship, in its historical sense, “is potentially misleading and we recommend that its use should be avoided”.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article7078844.ece
…-
*O’narcissist:
http://www.globalpolitician.com/25109-barack-obama-elections
OT but I have been wondering of late about several regulars we have not heard from in quite a while. Or maybe I have just missed their posts.
Anyone know what’s up with:
buddy
Mongoose
Nahncee
??
Papa Ray,
it would be nice if we could have a better idea of who’s really who right now in the American government, I mean, not only the official list, but the unofficial ones as well. One day we (or our grandchildren) will know, but not now, because (1) most of the country’s investigative capacity (the press, the electronic media, the universities etc.) is in the administration’s hand, and (2) because the situation itself is fluid (did, for instance, the German high-command in WW1 know, when they sponsored Lenin’s trip to the Finland Station, that 25 years later they would be fighting a guy called Stalin?). Revolutions do actually eat their children and it is still too early to know whether Obama and Soros will be trying to eat each other, and who’ll succeed.
Among other things, the current American scene has been described as a putsch or a civil war, but I think it most closely resembles a revolution. Obama has often been compared to Carter, but in the end Khomeini may become his most adequate and useful simile – and the president may be trying to change the country not only in ways so radical, but also so unforeseen as the ayatollah did with Iran. Without really knowing it, when the American voted for president, they were not choosing, as they have long been used to, between two parties, not even between two views and programs which, though radically opposite, still belonged in the same universe: they were choosing between universes. Obama and whoever he works with, for or against represent a true paradigm shift in American politics and, consequently, in the international system.
bartok you are to be commended to putting a very strange and difficult situation in plain words. I and others have tried but you nail it down and paint it.
“they were not choosing, as they have long been used to, between two parties, not even between two views and programs which, though radically opposite, still belonged in the same universe: they were choosing between universes.”
Sometimes I think that the average American has little imagination or at least not in everyday life. It could be very dangerous, in fact I will say it not only could be but is.
As an aside, I will post this link here in case someone is not aware of this:
Specter Opens Door on White House Felonies
We will see just how much pull Obama and his thugs have. Can they keep this from becoming front page news, can they pay off the right people and can they or will they make people just “go away”.
Continuing…
Papa Ray
Here are a few simple suggestions:
1) Republicans, led by Ron Paul (R-Surfside) should introduce a bill to drop the Embargo against Cuba – with the explicit claim that they’re doing it to open up that country 90 miles from our shores to U.S. medical tourism and allow more Americans to go ‘Galt’ from Obamacare.
Let Obama have his historic handshake with Raul Castro on the White House lawn, etc.
When Americans find out that they can put a few thousand on their credit card to get the treatment their HMOs squeezed by Obamacare will deny them, nothing will crumble this entitlement in middle class eyes faster (the poorest won’t know any better). Ditto for laws making it easier for state medical boards, if necessary, to certify clinics in India, Mexico and Costa Rica. The AMA won’t like it but tough. It is not enough to bash Obamacare as ‘socialism’, you have to create a West Berlin that the victims behind the Wall of Obamacare can see or at least imagine as a better world.
2) Get some major right wing donors together and create a 529 called Save Our Farmers. Put billboards up along major routes in D.C. highlighting the plight of the California Central Valley farmers getting squeezed to death by federal court orders cutting off their water supplies. Make it so that the EPA workers have to see those signs on the D.C. Metro on their way to work. Invite Willie and Toby Keith back for FarmAid Save California. Have Dwight Yoakum sing the In the Late Great Golden State. You get the idea. Show the top enviros for the inhumane misanthropes who don’t give a damn where the organic produce comes from that they are.
Those are just two immediate suggestions that spring to mind. The former requires balls and the latter requires PR saavy to shame the Federal Government, but if the Left can do it, why can’t the Right?
On the foreign policy points – responding to Josh, no I wasn’t suggesting it’s all about the oligarchs spending in the U.S. (and losing a hell of a lot of money on their investment in our steel mills), but rather Russian ownership of Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac paper, among other U.S. government guaranteed debt. Before Paulson tried to cover his butt by blaming Moscow in his new book, he mentions that the Russians would have regarded a default on Fannie and Freddie, alongside the Chinese and Arabs, as an ‘expropriation’ by the U.S government on assets they previously understood that Washington had an implicit obligation to support. How very ironic, after all of Washington’s whining about Yukos since 2002 (which in the end, even at $100 billion evaluation of Mr. Khodorkovsky’s empire, was chump change compared to the nationalization of America’s banking and health care industries).
Thanks to RWE for pointing out that relations with Russia began to go into the dumper not when Bush invaded Iraq but far earlier – in 1999, when Clinton bombed the hell out of their Slavic Orthodox Christian little brothers the Serbs. Suddenly NATO expansion into Ukraine or Georgia didn’t look so benign viewed from Moscow and the Kosovo precedent paved the way for the 2008 Russo-Georgian War.
#50 Josh: See here for info on weapon effects: http://www.fas.org/nuke/intro/nuke/effects.htm.
Air bursts produce less radioactive fallout than ground bursts.
I’m ok where I live unless they pop a 40+ kt weapon on the Mall.
Papa Ray,
thanks for that;
if I have actually been able to find a sound definition for part of what’s happening, that’s probably due to the fact that I’m writing from a country (Brazil) where similar things, starting earlier, have been happening, though in a smaller scale, for some time already.
People here at first thought the president (Lula), who once upon a time (and for a very short time)used to be a blue-collar worker, was just a naive idiot. Then, without much previous warning, we found out how well he had outsmarted many of his smartest rivals — and allies too. The guy who was at first thought of as an almost accidental president, a kind of Chauncy Gardner, proved to be a sly –and dangerous– manipulator.
the president may be trying to change the country not only in ways so radical, but also so unforeseen as the ayatollah did with Iran
From “Game Change” by Heilemann & Halperin:
“What exactly do you think you can accomplish by getting the presidency?” Michelle Obama
“Well, there are a lot of things I think I can accomplish but two things I know. The first is, when I raise my hand and take that oath of office, there are millions of kids around this country who don’t believe that it would ever be possible for them to be president of the United States. And for them the world would change on that day. And the second thing is,I think the world would look at us differently the day I got elected, because it would be a reaffirmation of what America is, about the constant perfecting of who we are. I think I can help repair the damage that’s been done.” Barack Obama
I don’t too much mind the first part of Obama’s statement, but I am very uncomfortable with the second part, which reflects an uneasy and tenuous meeting of traditional progressive ideology with the practical realities of the unpopular reaction to American foreign policy choices in the Middle East.
American politics has always been part public service, part public spectacle, and part public projection – a national sport more apple pie than baseball and bowling combined.
Obama critics declaim that the Chicago political machine will never scale to the national level. (That is either true or laughable, I’m not sure yet.)
My hope is that public pride becomes part of the Obama administration’s political equation, if for no other reason than that any street fighter knows you don’t rumble with your eyes down.
Anyone know what’s up with:
buddy
Mongoose
Nahncee
Mongoose got fed up with the posters on this site who blamed financial services for (at least part of, if not wholly) the financial meltdown of 2008. Including me, but I doubt that was the precipitating event. More of a dismal tide sort of thing.
Buddy keeps his own schedule because he’s buddy and probably has his own dismal tide issues.
NahnCee? One might want to check into that. With her voice, foul play is not out of the question (I joke.)
RWE @ 47 said:
“The Democrats in Congress saw to it that the Deeply Penetrating ICBM Warhead program was killed back in the late 80’s. They hated the idea and I assumed it was a matter of honor among thieves – we won’t blow up the Communist leadership bunkers and they will reciprocate and not hurt our leadership.”
Late 1980s was Cold War mentality. The new enemies are Iran, Islamic fascist states, Norks, emerging tyrannies like Venezuela, etc.
Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) is stupid and unethical. It’s stupid because we put our entire population at risk when our quarrel is only with an elite clique of bad guys running a totalitarian state. It’s unethical because MAD is really the ultimate form of terrorism and puts the United States on the same level as an Al Qaeda monster blowing up an elementary school with a suicide bomb.
It was a miracle that the United States and the Soviet Union survived the Cold War (there were many close calls). We must make it a non-negotiable matter of state policy that we will never again tolerate suffering risk from MAD, i.e. we will launch preemptive nuclear strikes with appropriate weapons to prevent this situation.
Lifeofthemind @ 48 said:
“1. Congress has killed efforts to create a mix of high thermal/low radiation yield bunker busters or Counter Value weapons and low thermal/high radiation yield (neutron bomb) Counter Force or tactical weapons so the credibility of a move to technical improvement is questionable under the current regime”
I agree. Because he’s a leftist, there’s no way Obama is capable of a rational nuclear weapon’s policy. Hopefully Obama will be an unpleasant memory after 2012 and the next President will address this problem.
“2. fewer weapons are inherently destabilizing because they simplify the targeting problem for an enemy contemplating a decapitating first strike such that if you are going to have nuclear weapons you are far better off with five thousand of them than five hundred”
I disagree. More nuclear weapons means more nuclear technicians and soldiers working independently with nuclear weapon systems. Simple probability means there are more opportunities for human error. I would argue that not less than 500 and not more than 1000 nuclear warhead and launcher systems are sufficient to destroy a credible enemy. We probably need only four functioning Ohio class boomers, i.e. three at widely spaced patrol locations with one boomer at port being serviced. Also a new class of nuclear weapons should be deployed that are more reliable, have a much longer shelf life and require less testing to maintain nuclear readiness. Less testing means less opportunity for a screwball to do something stupid.
“3. I do not understand your desire to abandon MIRV systems that complicate the enemy’s ABM problem as there is no reason to believe that all parties, including China, would verifiably abandon this technology in which we hold an advantage”
MIRVs are part of a MAD strategic policy, i.e. a cluster of RVs detonating over a single city at the the same time with overlapping blast waves. You don’t use MIRVs to take out an underground isotope separation facility or for leadership decapitation. For either of those tasks it’s best to use a single maneuvering reentry vehicle with a clean burning low fallout nuke housed inside a penetrator warhead. The strategic goal should be leadership decapitation and/or destruction of nuclear weapon’s capability and/or economic castration. Genociding the bad guy’s population should be taken off the table as an acceptable US strategy, i.e. we don’t make war against unarmed civilians, children and the elderly. If a bad guy choses to attack our innocent civilians then we will respond by killing their leadership and destroying their military/economic capability. Their population will survive but the leaders making the bad choices are assured of death.
“4. the multi-megaton city killers of 40 years ago were retired with the Titan launch vehicle and I believe that all US current strategic weapons scale up to the 200 kt range.”
That is mostly correct. Supposedly the W87 has a yield between 300 and 470 kt. The Titan-2 used the Mk-6 RV armed with the 9 megaton W53 warhead. The Titan-2/W53 was late 1950s technology and made obsolete for good technical reasons by the Minuteman armed with MIRVs. However again, this was an example of the Cold War / MAD mentality that is no longer appropriate against America’s modern enemies. Our current weapons are not credible because they are too powerful. Many of our current enemies seriously believe with good reason that we would not actually use these weapons. This is one of the reasons why our enemies feel they can develop their own nuclear weapon’s capability with impunity. If we had precision clean burning nuclear weapons then most likely under the Bush administration we would have already destroyed Iran’s nuclear weapon’s development capability.
On the subject of clean burning nuclear weapons, there is a nuclear fusion reaction that has never been investigated for use in a weapon. This is the proton-boron reaction. This is an aneutronic reaction that in theory could produce very little fallout. However getting a proton-boron reaction to ignite is hard to do and represents a significant R&D effort. If I was king, I would initiate such an R&D effort and test the weapon prototypes in deep space (inside the orbit of Venus). The all up weapon system with the maneuverable RV and nuclear warhead could be tested in the atmosphere of Venus with a following vehicle doing data collection. It might also be useful to test a nuclear weapon on a dark part of the Moon when it was plainly visible in the Iranian night sky preferably during a Moslem holiday.
Again, the mindset is that we have the capability and we’re not shy about using it.
Ah, so people that were saying “This is starting to look like Brazil” (movie) were coincidentally quite on the mark (country).
Josh @ no. 51,
I don’t have much sympathy for the money-changers, considering (1) they game the system, using rules set up by their cronies in the regulatory agencies, (2) They are consistently shown to cheat, getting fined massively even by the sweetheart regulators many of whom come directly from the private sector financial industry, and (3) their purpose is generally to accumulate wealth in any way that doesn’t get them jailed.
The story that follows is supposed to illustrate my point that, yes, the business community has its share of soul-less bastards who look only at the short term.
ON THE OTHER HAND, no one is forcing investors to fork over their money to any particular company.
Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac were doing their shenanigans, thank you very much, on the TAX PAYER’s DIME. The whole thing was set up by the government, staffed by government cronies, “regulated” by government agencies, and “Overseen” by Congressional and Senate committee chairs. Liars, perverts, cheats, crooks, and MORAL LEPERS, stealing taxpayer money that had been collected from taxpayers who have no option of refusal.
So, please Josh, keep that distinction in mind.
== == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == ==
I can cite a number of specific examples of lawful behavior I regard as atrocious in principle and hideously destructive to the culture and society. Do a little research on the children’s software industry. Look up Softkey, which acquired The Learning Company by a “hostile” – i.e., leveraged – buy-out, took the company name and goodwill and proceeded to acquire and gut just about every independent children’s software manufacturer in the market (i.e., any company with a reasonably lucrative list of titles and no parent like Disney or Microsoft to protect’em…)
By “gut” I mean, approximately a month after each new acquisition, approximately half of the staff were cast loose, and replaced by inexperienced newbies fresh out of school maybe. Spinnaker, Purple Moon, MECC, Broderbund, Mindscape, and a sh*tload of other mid-sized companies were gobbled up, their experienced production teams put on the streets, and their titles simply stopped evolving, except for cosmetic touches. Manuals were no longer provided, just the CD in a jewel case. Prices dropped, and the games and software was still the same award-winning stuff from before the acquisition, but the group mostly stopped developing new material.
In a few years TLC swelled to a massive conglomerate of a score of formerly independent companies, and offered an impressive list of successful titles. Superficially, because it had hired so many replacements, the company appeared to have the potential to continue cranking out winning titles, but its seemingly streamlined overhead was the result of canning all its experienced designers and producers. It had become in fact, a hollow shell.
Jill Barad, the much-touted CEO of the children’s toy manufacturer Mattell pushed the company for almost $4BILLION about 1998, and quickly found that the income stream it could actually depend on was drying up. Instead of the $50 Million profit expected in the third quarter of 1999, TLC posted a LOSS of $105 Million. The first year’s performance was a dismal $206 Million loss on revenues of $750 Million, which forced Mattell to post a net loss of $82 Million. The previous year (before the transaction) the company showed $206 Million net income. Ms. Barad found herself in much hot water, and there were accusations of hanky-panky and murmurings of criminal investigations into a transaction that was so conspicuously carious.
Simply, other companies were bringing out new titles which were designed to take advantage of the expanded capabilities of newer faster technologies, while because of TLC’s owners’ sleight-of-hand, their titles were quickly becoming obsolete, regardless of lower retail pricetags. It should not have been a mystery to anyone who’d been paying attention.
In any case, the new owners of TLC (i.e, the group from Softkey) had done very well for themselves. Besides the sale to Mattell (for something like 3 x the money they’d paid for the component companies) they’d all the while been selling off TLC stock that rose a bit with each new acquisition and each new round of layoffs. Those had been interpreted in the market to suggest a leaner more efficient company when in fact, those moves were turning the company into a mere “factor” set to take in only revenues from existing products, not develop new ones.
The essence of the situation was that these guys saw a chance to dismantle an entire industry (mid-level children’s software) and pocket the money, and damn well went ahead and did it. It raised no “anti-trust” or “monopoly” flags because the regulatory agencies did not distinguish children’s software as a distinct entity or separate market. Everything was legal, just utterly predatory and not in the slightest degree productive, except of profits to the actors.
But they weren’t as far as I know, using money extorted from TAXPAYERS to do it.
oops.
“Jill Barad, the much-touted CEO of the children’s toy manufacturer Mattell pushed the company…”
should have read:
“Jill Barad, the much-touted CEO of the children’s toy manufacturer Mattell purchased the company…”
I agree with Steeple @ 28 that Buraq probably will not get 67 Senate votes for this suicide. That said, does it really matter?
Is there any legal recourse if Buraq, as our Commander in Chief, just orders the destruction of our nuclear weapons systems?
Next year, a Republican Congress could put funding restrictions in the budget on the destruction of weapons systems for 2012, but what of the rest of 2010 or 2011?
Bartok raises some interesting issues. Here’s my take.
A possibility is that while Obama and his allies intend to destroy Liberty and the republican form of government in the US and elsewhere, that Obama would maintain the military as a means to establish a (real) American empire with him as emperor. And if his allies don’t agree, well they like other useful idiots would be betrayed when they least expect it and their destruction served as bait for the next lot of useful idiots.
If so, then he would gain his strength from misleading his strategic or tactical allies into believing that he works for them, that he is simply a talented implementer of their agenda. He pretends to his opponents that he is too weak to be a threat. All these lies are to discover and create weaknesses and lull the victim into complacency, so that the surprise betrayal is all the more effective.
I think it would be a (fatal) mistake for the Russians, Chinese, Islamists or others to assume that Obama intends to destroy US military and economic power as he seeks to destroy the Republic.
Stephen Koch mentioned in his book (and article) on Willi Muenzenberg that Stalin entered his pact with Hitler fully intending to betray him and expecting that Hitler would do the same, but was still surprised by Hitler’s speed.
I have some info on the “missing” regulars:
1. After a long hiatus, Buddy has returned once more to drawing his comic strip, “The Far Side.”
2. Mongoose has been tied up helping GI Joe fight Cobra, which expanded its activities into the US health care system under the direction of its evil leader, “The One.”
3. Now that the warmer weather has at last arrived, Nahncee is one more fully occupied with her Playboy Playmate of the Year duties.
Hope this clears things up.
Senate will approve this agreement; Russia won’t agree to meaningfully different terms, and in any case it makes little difference. Who can imagine the radically altered combination of geopolitical events that would allow the initiator of a first strike to retain a shred of legitimacy in the “international community?” Nor would amphibious invasion across the Formosa Straight or even Russia rolling into Poland justify, in the mind of any conceivable US government, a nuclear strike. Even if Iran were to nuke Israel, the US would not launch. There is no use to which the Reasonable Governments could actually put nuclear weapons.
The issue is not that we have reduced our arsenal below a servicable minimum nor that the Russia will never abide by any agreement that would require it to voluntarily abandon a hard advantage in return for a nebulous soft one. The issue is that the “Russian Mafiya” trades Afghan heroin for small arms, RPG-7s, ammunition, money; the issue is that the other half of the SCO, China, is according to recent State Department testimony not even talking to us, let alone cooperating with us, in any way concerning the war on terror. It was even left to a Democrat Congressman from Georgia to raise “Unrestricted Warfare” and ask the State reps – impliedly – whether Chinese non-cooperation in the signal strategic problem of the day suggested that they might be working with the other side, or at least self-consciously benefitting from it. Of course the answer from the Admiral for Pacific Command was that they could not talk about it in open session.
Since the primary tools deployed against us are strategic deniable terror and political and economic subversion, I can’t get too excited about this agreement. If we have been subverted to the extent that is evident every day on and offline, what does it matter if we only retain 700 warheads?
bartok:
I have quoted your #53 comment in its entirety at both Grouchy Conservative Pundits and Neo-Neocon, with links and proper attribution, of course. That was brilliant and chilling in its implications. Good God, if he is really trying to implement the Cloward-Piven strategy on a global scale, then we may be in worse shape than we think.
I have in the past made a couple of comments to the effect that Obama might try to foment an international crisis of such magnitude and danger that it would practically force the American people to rally behind him, and enable any opposition to be characterized as “unpatriotic” and swept aside. But you made the case far better than I could.
It’s ironic that this scenario is almost exactly what the Left and the “truthers” accused Bush of doing. But we know that when the Left is in power, they are deadly serious and they play for keeps.
Mad Fiddler – Interesting timing to your remark – tomorrow is Holy Monday, when Christ drove the Money Changers from the Temple.
“Nor would amphibious invasion across the Formosa Straight or even Russia rolling into Poland justify, in the mind of any conceivable US government, a nuclear strike.” I think a Russian invasion of Poland is about as likely as a U.S. invasion of Canada. One of the reasons nuclear force modernization is so important to Russia is because of the relative weakness and shrinking size of its armed forces – not compared to the small NATO countries or America (none of whom are ever likely to invade), but mainly vis a vis China. Russia however would be better served with a force of 300,000 professionals than 1,000,000 conscripts sprinkled with 100,000 kontrakti. (BTW, They just brought chaplains back to the Russian armed forces, mostly Orthodox priests but also a handful of imams, one or two rabbis and Buddhists, a development little remarked of in the West but a return to pre-Russian imperial traditions. If you watch the bad movie Admiral, everyone crosses themselves before going into battle with the Germans in WWI – not necessarily historically accurate, but how they would like to portray the past)
While relations are good now (to the point that I would not be surprised to see one of the Russian Orthodox Churches destroyed during the 1900s Boxer Rebellion re-open, at least on the territory of the Russian Embassy, as a symbolic gesture by the CCP), it is difficult to say what China in a state of economic collapse due to a collapse of its trading partners in the West would look like.
The so-called Yellow Peril in demographic terms has been wildly overhyped for a variety of reasons – first because if you read Gordon Chang China may not be ready to conquer the world even in economic terms, especially if demand weakens for the low-quality stuff China thus far has excelled in exporting. And I think that is happening. Fewer huge houses in America’s future to fill with cheap Chinese manufactured goods.
Second, China has had to quietly drop the one child policy because it realized it was hurting its birth rates/aging the population prematurely. But even if this change is realized overnight (and the CCP still moves slowly in terms of such bureaucratic legacies) it will take years to see the effects, just as it has taken Russia nine years of consecutive economic growth after the devastating 90s to finally achieve a more or less replacement level in population (and some doubt that the generation of Russian women born in the 90s will have the same birth rate that the daughters of perestroika have had thus far). Hence China will get old before it gets rich, even if it does not have to reach U.S. or EU levels to shake the world due to sheer size. No less a China bull/enthusiast than Thomas P.M. Barnett has been writing about this since at least 2008.
Third, Eastern Siberia is the last place most unemployed young Chinese men are likely to go for adventurous pursuits – East Africa seems more hospitable territory for colonial ventures. Any natural resource swaps or large scale investment by Chinese corporations in Siberia has to be done at the state to state level, and indeed is already happening. Some of the Chinese colonialists in Africa might become Christian like their indigenous African partners. See Phillip Jenkins’ new book on the rise of Chinese Christianity (and The Next Christendom). The house Church movement is winning many more converts than the megachurches the authorities shut down out of fear of any large mass gatherings the CCP doesn’t control (Boxer Rebellion legacy, the same reason they cracked down so hard on Falun Gong). Better to be discreet while winning converts in the New Rome in the East than feed the CCP’s lions.
For the next fifteen years I feel the world is in for a very bumpy ride thanks to the mountains of fiat money debts out there and (as Wretchard keeps pointing out) the cultural delusions that led our civilization to create them. But by the 2030s (when I’m hitting middle age) I see renewed world economic growth and more peace and prosperity than ever, much like the postwar boom that followed the Great Depression. And contrary to all Mark Steynian doomsaying, I expect Russia to still be a player on the international stage and along with a renewed Germany the engine of the European economy even if Britain and France stagnate with 1/3rd of their populations Muslim.
Spengler concludes:
“Obama is following Gates’ and Brzezinski’s recommendation to the letter, but also the point of absurdity. It is the stupidest, most reckless, and most destructive foreign policy action the United States has taken in my lifetime.”
…-
“Obama’s Alliance With Iran
Wednesday, March 24, 2010, 10:09 AM
David P. Goldman
Ralph Peters’ op-ed in today’s New York Post shows that our putative allies in Afghanistan as well as Iraq are in bed with Iran. He argues that it’s a blunder. It will be a blunder, but it’s actually Obama’s policy, and it was spelled out by now Defense Secretary Gates and Zbignew Brzezinski back in 2004. It’s as bad as Peters says it is, and then some.
“It’s wretched enough that our ‘friend’ Ahmed Chalabi has become Iran’s point man in Iraq. Now ‘our man in Kabu,’ President Hamid Karzai, is quietly shifting his loyalty to Tehran,” Peters writes.
Peters continues:
Beyond Iranian President Mahmud Ahmedinejad’s recent chummy visit to Karzai — reported by the media but played down by Washington — Iran’s been training Taliban forces to kill our troops more efficiently.
Karzai hasn’t complained. Nor has he objected to Tehran’s expansion of its support for its clients in western Afghanistan. He wants that support for himself.
Where I disagree with Peters is in the matter of the administration’s intent. In a March 16 “Spengler” column for Asia Times Online, I quoted State Department officials’ on-record invitation to Iran to play a major role in Afghanistan. Getting Iran involved IS the administration’s “exit strategy.” Obama wants an ALLIANCE with Iran. And that’s why he picked a fight with Netanyahu over the non-issue of apartment construction in a part of North Jerusalem that every draft piece plan agrees will remain Israeli. If Israel hits Iran’s nuclear capacity, the deal is off.
As I wrote March 16:
Despite the enormous difference in outlook between the last administration and the present one, there is an underlying continuity in Washington’s stance towards Iran, due to the facts on the ground put in place by Iran itself. I wrote on this site in October 2005, shortly after Ahmadinejad came to power:
I do not believe any formal understanding is in place, but the probable outcome is that Washington will refrain from military action to forestall any Iranian nuclear arms developments, while Tehran will refrain from disrupting Washington’s constitutional Potemkin Village in Iraq. Tehran thinks strategically, as befits a country with a government newly elected by an overwhelming majority, while Washington thinks politically. President George W Bush is struggling to persuade the American public of the wisdom of his nation-building scheme in Iraq, and badly wants the Iranians to keep their hands in their pockets. Iran is prepared to do so as long as America keeps its opposition to its nuclear program within the confines of the diplomatic cul-de-sac defined by the International Atomic Energy Agency. (See A Syriajevo in the making?, Asia Times Online, October 25, 2005)
Nation-building in Iraq is the tar baby that has entrappedAmerican foreign policy. The notion that the United States should take responsibility for the political evolution of a country cooked up by British cartographers with the explicit purpose of keeping Sunni Arabs, Shi’ite Arabs and Kurds at each others’ throats, ranks as one of the great political delusions of the past century. Since the American invasion in 2003, it always has been in Iran’s power to make the country ungovernable. More important to Iran, though, is the potential acquisition of nuclear weapons. Should it become a nuclear power, Iran could set its cats’ paws in Iraq, Lebanon and Afghanistan to whatever task it chose with far less fear of American retribution.”
[...]
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/spengler/2010/03/24/obamas-alliance-with-iran/
Interesting how we (at BC but many other places, as well) are STILL trying to figure out what Obama is all about, what are his goals, what motivates him…
Yes, he wants a very big, controlling and paternalistic government, there’s never been any doubt about all that (tho he managed to confuse a lot of people for the critical few months in 2008)… but larger goals as expressed in foreign policy? We really are just groping.
All offensive nukes must be on American soil. There go the subs.
We will remove missle defenses so they can hit us. I thought the idea was that we were going to give the Russians a missle defense!
We will make sure other nations follow our example and get rid of their nukes. Israel. But not Iran. North Korea but not S. Korea.
No verification. Trust is key.
What is Barry Soetoro up to and why did he change his name?
‘Spengler’ at least has some good sense with regards to Russia, unlike other so-called conservatives who loved McCain when he pointlessly pissed off the Russians because his top foreign policy advisor was a paid lobbyist for the President of Georgia and insanely sought to drag Ukraine into NATO over the objections of 2/3rds of its people.
“The George W Bush administration has squandered a great strategic advantage in a sorry lampoon of nation-building in the Muslim world, and has made enemies out of countries that might have been friendly rivals, notably Russia. Americans question the premise of America’s standing as a global superpower, and of the promise of upward mobility and wealth-creation. If elected, Barack Obama will do his utmost to destroy the dual premises of America’s standing. It might take the country another generation to recover.”
Well Russia recovered faster from the Yeltsin years faster than most expected. I still have the ‘Russia is Finished’ headline from The Atlantic cerca 2001. I’m looking forward to sending the same to Mark Steyn in a few years. If Russia with half the population can bounce back, I think America can too. But we may need our own right wing version of Putin to do it. I can imagine twenty years hence the American equivalents of Garry Kasparov carping about the resurgence while they sit on the board of think tanks in Paris or Beijing.
Even the antagonizing of China with Google and threatening a trade war over the yuan makes no sense, given that Obama has either made peace with (Russia) or kowtowed to (Gulf Arab countries) other nations that own considerable stockpiles of U.S. Treasuries and dollar-denominated assets. Like some of the other commenters here, I too wonder if there is an international version of the Cloward-Piven strategy at work.
This is consistently some of the most informed discussion on the net, that is public. But to old farmer, I would not buy a pick up from him.
However, he seems to still be a Vizer and a front man but for who. Who funded Soros? Who funded the Chicago New Party and frank davis, the family of Val Garette, and Alice Palmer and SDS Ayers/Hayden/Rathkes, etc – all lead to Obysmal.
It seems obvious but?? FBI/CIA should know.
Why has the media not fully picked up on the background of Obama from his pak friends at occidental or the rest of the wack jobs in his past.
But they have considered this for many years and know the numbers making us center or center right, so they knew they would lose the house and senate, what is the end game in three years or before?
The new CBS poll shows Obama with horrible numbers. Pretty soon the only place to find health care will be the Mao Clinic.
They are determined to paint the USA SEIU purple, as he campaigned, and now have that goofy Becker to help seize assets. Had a friend in IL baby sitting for 12 kids, with an assistant. State made her sign up with a union last month. sick
gonna be a long three years.
Mr. X makes some good points, but let’s not forget he’s a one-note Russian mouthpiece. Pass the salt…
I hope no one’s buying Mr. X’s b_llsh_t. propaganda: russian and chinese communists are the aggressors, as they have ever been.
His latest point is impliedly correct: political analysis which proceeds from the rule that rulers are bound by their domain’s economic trends is of a completely secondary order in comparison to political analysis proceeding from an understanding of the leadership’s personality. Personality rules all. Mr. X. is correct: how could Russia be finished? Russia experienced a collapse in population so catastrophic between 1914 and 1945 that one would have expected it to vanish into a black hole of negative economic/demographic trends, sucking the earth into a singularity. But did that happen? No. Does China not have 600,000 dirt farmers? So what if they have 200,000 capitalists: the capitalists are licensed by the government, controlled by the Chinese KGB and – as we have seen – fair game for whatever tactical economic gambits they intend to try. American companies operating in China are, effectively, prisoners of war. Of course, you won’t hear any news reports coming out of China about how American companies are on the brink of flight because the corruption is so terrible, as we heard about Russia last week – wouldn’t want to provide a pretext for a Chinese provocation and make things difficult for our American friends over there, now would we?
The strategy is destabilization through strategic terror and domestic subversion. Take today’s suicide bombings below the Lubyanka, for example. I presume it was a KGB or GRU operation. Perhaps not, but we will know better from the reaction, if indeed there is a public one.
Mr X, could you help to save the site of Godorino ?
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/article/settlement-on-napoleons-battlefield-to-be-razed/402669.html#no
Save Borodino, the battle field of Napoleon
84. dan: Russia experienced a collapse in population so catastrophic between 1914 and 1945 that one would have expected it to vanish into a black hole of negative economic/demographic trends, sucking the earth into a singularity. But did that happen? No.
I’ll answer the implied question with another question, Has it escaped your attention that the former soviet states are full of really hot women?
bogie – As a long regular now operating under another pseudo:
I moved to Texas.
Seems I am not missed.
Ha! No – you’re right, that probably explains it.
“I’ll answer the implied question with another question, Has it escaped your attention that the former Soviet states are full of really hot women?”
Marie Claude understood the root of my fascination with Russia many threads back, and I think SpeakEasy is the same fellow who nearly by himself battled all the hysterics who argued that the Evil Empire was back in August 2008 when Georgia instigated its useless (but perhaps McCain campaign approved?) war with Russia.
One can’t stomach hearing that ones in-laws live in a repressive hell hole knowing how far that propaganda is from reality, anymore than MC should have to listen to the cheese eating surrender monkey bit all the time.
And Dan…I’m sure you’ll say this is just another elaborate trick of the security services, just like your John Birch manual tells you that the Soviets faked their collapse (this theory incidentally reminds me of a certain Simpsons episode called ‘Homer Tide’ where the Russian Ambassador to the UN says ‘The Soviet Union vil be happy to accept your vayvard vessel’. When asked by the American Ambassador, ‘The Soviet Union? I thought you guys broke up?’ he cackles ‘Yeeeeess, that’s vat ve vanted you to think. Bwahahahahaha!’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGNo6H16rDU&feature=related)
Lenin zombie says – Death to Capitalism – gwrrrrrrrrr
BBC News – Russia media criticise Kremlin over Moscow Metro bombs
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8594375.stm
Mr X
http://twitter.com/Rogozin
I enjoy reading Rogozin posts on Twitter (BTW he was following me first !)
I looked at Rogozin’s book when I was in Moscow and it had him on the hardwood at NATO headquarters in Brussells pounding the boards with some Western military guys. I wonder how he would do against Obama one on one.
an interview here, he seems senseful
http://adresno.ru/K76iS My interview about the upcoming visit of Mr.Victor Ivanov, head of Counternarcotics Service, to NATO next week