But the levee was dry
The Associated Press reports that the Corps of Engineers, responding to the political pressure of the Katrina disaster, has built the Rolls Royce of flood protection for New Orleans and turned it over to municipal officials. However the town fathers have neither the capability nor the inclination to do anything but let it rot.
Engineers consider it a Rolls Royce of flood protection — comparable to systems in seaside European cities such as St. Petersburg, Venice, Rotterdam and Amsterdam. Whether the infrastructure can hold is less in question than whether New Orleans can be trusted with the keys.
The Army Corps estimates it will take $38 million a year to pay for upkeep, maintenance and operational costs after it’s turned over to local officials.
Local flood-control chief Robert Turner said he has questions about where that money will come from. At current funding levels, the region will run out of money to properly operate the high-powered system within a decade unless a new revenue source is found.
“That’s been the eternal problem with flood-protection systems,” said Thomas Wolff, an engineer at Michigan State University. “You build something very good and then give it to local interests who are not as well-funded.”…
Congressional investigations found the old Orleans Levee Board more interested in managing a casino license and two marinas than looking after levees. Though the Army Corps of Engineers had responsibility for annual levee inspections, the local levee boards were responsible for maintenance. Still, the boards spent millions of dollars on a fountain and overpasses rather than on levee protection.
The local Corps of Engineers commander consoled himself by noting “this happens with corps civil projects all over the country. That’s the way it works in Iraq, Afghanistan. We have authority to build, but we have no authority to do operations and maintenance.”
But when money is tight where are you going to get it? Another AP article describes the scramble in Washington to keep the gravy train running even at the expense of everyone else.”It’s virtually every group for itself, scrambling to protect 100 percent of each tax break and government payout it now enjoys.”
the adamant positions that major interest groups are taking — and their insistence that sacrifices hit others, not them — underscore the difficulty Obama and congressional leaders face. The tougher a group talks to its members and the public, the harder it is to back down later when a bit of shared pain for everyone emerges as the only path to a deal….
AARP is equally firm in opposing changes to Social Security and Medicare, the mammoth “entitlement” programs that economists say must be reined in soon to avoid disastrously large deficits in future years …
It’s the same tune at universities and other institutions that rely on charitable gifts. They want to fully exempt the charitable gift deduction, which costs the government about $51 billion a year, from a role in the fiscal cliff talks …
And so it goes, group by group, tax break by tax break, payout by payout. Everyone is special. Everyone is deserving.
Everyone is deserving. Everything is priority. No one must be left behind. The world can’t be resource constrained. Yet still the problem remains: as it does for the levee managers of New Orleans. Where’s the money? It’s nowhere to be found. The problem with free stuff is that someone has to pay for it.
To its surprise the elite is discovering that the cupboard is bare. Socialist President Francois Hollande is fending off critics alarmed at France’s rising unemployment and plummeting production by saying that his tax and spend cures haven’t had the chance to work yet.
Labour Ministry data showed the number of jobseekers in mainland France rose by 45,400, or 1.5 percent, to hit 3.103 million, marking the 18th consecutive monthly increase and taking the total to its highest level since April 1998.
France’s 1.9 trillion euro ($2.46 trillion) economy has been virtually stagnant since grinding to a halt at the end of last year, and many economists expect it to contract in the months ahead despite a surprise 0.2 percent rise in the third quarter …
“This run of negative figures on employment only increases our resolve to do something to reverse the trend between now and the end of next year,” Labour Minister Michel Sapin said in a statement.
A little more taxing and a lot more spending and she’ll be right. One can only wonder what Hollande will say when France doesn’t turn around. If it stays prostrate despite all the stimuli; despite all the tax hikes. Then somebody must be gumming up the works; some wrecker, some saboteur.
When things don’t work, there’s always someone to blame. The Washington Post’s Harold Meyerson argues that Wal-mart should be morally and legally responsible for a fire in Bangladesh which killed hundreds of workers because because the practice of buying clothing on price inevitably means that someone in the long supply chain is not playing by union rules.
The Bangladesh factory supplied clothing to a range of retailers, and officials who have toured the site said they found clothing with a Faded Glory label — a Wal-Mart brand. Wal-Mart says that the factory, which had received at least one bad report for its fire-safety provisions, was no longer authorized to make its clothing but one of the suppliers in the company’s very long supply chain had subcontracted the work there “in direct violation of our policies.” …
But Wal-Mart neither pays its own nor takes responsibility for those who make and move its wares. For America’s largest private-sector employer, the emergency exits are always open.
And doubtless when factories are closed because they can’t sell at union prices or prices go up at the store it will be Walmart’s fault too. Thus everything always reduces to a problem in the system. Some ‘ism is always responsible for whatever goes wrong in the world — usually the ‘ism with money to payout. For too long we’ve lived in a world where tort lawyers could bill somebody. This sounds great until one day there’s no money to pay out. And the question will then be: who will they sue then? For surely it must be somebody’s fault that the gravy train has stopped; that there’s no more money for all the entitlements Obama has promised or for France to grow. It can’t not be anyone’s fault.
One No-Fault outcome to cumulative mismanagement is to simply scatter and flee. A State Senator proposed simply dissolving Detroit. To call the whole city off. The plan met with immediate opposition from those determined to defend the “jewels of Detroit”. The money would be found somewhere to allow it to limp along. There had to be an unraided stash somewhere.
Talking to Talk Radio 1270 host Charlie Langton, Detroit’s ex-communications chief Karen Dumas said she would not support such a plan.
“No, I don’t think that dissolution is the solution for the city of Detroit; I don’t,” said Dumas. “I think people … with every step we get more and more fearful … and maybe at some point that’s going to make everybody wake up and realize that we need to stop playing politics and come up with a solution for progress. “I don’t know at what point that’s going to happen.“
But maybe when they wake up they’ll finally realize there is well and truly nothing left. And at that point the whole desperate population of dependents will move like refugees in those old black and white newsreels from the Fall of France — and look for greener pastures. At least one thing will be funded to the last: politics and electioneering. Politico headlines: Democratic super PACs get jump on 2014, 2016.
It took Democrats a while to warm up to super PACs, but their glee over 2012 is — for now — eclipsing any moral qualms about big money eroding democracy, and they’re already busy at work courting their wealthiest supporters and planning even more ambitious efforts for future elections.
Shortly after Election Day, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer and top White House aides spoke at a three-day secret meeting of major Democratic donors and officials from liberal outside groups gearing up for 2014, POLITICO has learned.
They’re going to need a lot of Obama Phones for that. And you’re going to pay for them.
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I just hope someone is taking notes on all this, so a thousand years from now they can know it was all Bush’s fault.
However the town fathers have neither the capability nor the inclination to do anything but let it rot.
Lemme guess. They can’t be arsed to invest in their own protection (but oddly enough can find plenty of money to funnel to their developer friends in moronic boondoggle projects that benefits almost no one), but they’ll come crying to the rest of us to pay for on their behalf. And if we balk? Well, that’s evil. Because racism.
the “jewels of Detroit”
*snort*
Can I really say anything more satirical than the original statement? It would take a much more capable wordsmith than I.
That’s the question, isn’t it? Nobody really knows what Americans will do when faced with real self-inflicted privation. When the remaining choice is between knuckling down to rebuild or putting the wreckers and roaders up against a wall. At least the bloody orgy is entertaining for a while. Rebuilding takes time that soon-to-retire Baby Boomers simply don’t have.
I really don’t know what we’ll do when the day comes, and it’s coming sooner than most people think.
When the wheels come off does Msr. Hollande get to blame Bush too? Can Bush make a tidy living renting himself out for the job to governments near and far, from Great Powers to spendthrift municipalities? Could we promote a new growing job category, the House Bush? It would be like the medieval House Jew, there to lend sage advice in good times, and get squeezed for money in rough times, and take the fall in bad times.
The parallels between the feckless inhabitants of New Orleans with their chosen leaders and the Palestinians are close enough to deserve exploration. The Gazans went from destroying valuable green houses to launching missiles at schools. Perhaps Bobby Jindal should invest in some Iron Domes.
- “The Coconuts”
I thought that Bush was an incompetent rube. For someone that intellectually deficient, he sure has been working his “magic” on the Dims for a long time.
Social Security is different from the other benefits, because people who stand to collect have already paid a whole lot into the system. I’m a few years away from being eligible, and while I’m no socialist, I don’t see anything wrong with objecting to my benefits getting stolen for other things, in the name of fiscal conservatism. If they gut Social Security, will they refund all the money they’ve been taking out of my paycheck for the past 40 something years?
You can create the best infrastructure in the world, with the best engineering minds in the world, but if you cannot make it sustainable, why build it? The Corps of Engineers was tasked to do the project. They must have known that the City of New Orleans would not be able or willing to pay for operations and maintenance, but rather get into a political row, and embarrassment, they kicked the can down the road, and it is New Orleans’ problem now. The problem is that it took a huge amount of treasure to build it, and now it will be used for a few years before it fails. A waste of our dwindling er disappeared dollars.
You can throw money at Detroit, but you have not changed the lack of values that have brought that once great city to the wreck that it is now. So…..the decline will continue until it is dead.
We will keep facing this problem of lack of values and sustainability until we change our ways and learn or we go bankrupt. Or both. The can is rusting out.
Anon re: Social Security
Do you normally expect to your taxes back? Because the Supreme Court has said that is all Social Security is, a tax. A brilliantly disguised horribly regressive tax.
It is legaly no different from any other tax that you have paid.
The money is gone, spent, pissed away. There aren’t enough workers with enough wealth to pay the promised benefits, so they won’t be paid.
Even then I think Social Security can still be made solvent, but the benefit age will have to be raised even for those 55 and older.
I think Social Security should be a benefit for living longer than you thought you would. If your life expectancy is 75 then you had better have saved enough to take you to 75. If you then live past that then you may collect. Social Security isn’t something anyone should expect to collect. It should be there if you just happen to live to 100.
Expectations rise to meet the level of handouts. Eventually those expectations become rights in the minds of the recipient. Take away handout phones and the recipients will tell you that their human rights are being violated.
This phone handout nonsense was manufactured in the name of caring progressivism. One fine day, free cell phones and some other handouts will disappear. This will create a whole class in society that believes life has treated them unfairly and that they did nothing to deserve such bad treatment.
How Obama phone recipients respond to disappearing handouts will determine the remaining story of their lives.
Anon #6:
Don’t make me laugh. “In the name of fiscal conservatism”? The money you’ve been paying into the system was diverted to other uses even as you were paying it. You probably even voted for some of the people who set the system up that way in the 80′s. When your government check bounces, look in the mirror for the culprit.
Re: Social Security. If the government issues a promise that calls for them to take something from you now in return for doing something for you in the future you can be sure the second part of the bargain will never be honored.
This story shows what the government’s promise is worth. Almost 80 years ago the Federal government kicked a whole lot of people off farms some had been on for generations to create a national park on the North Carolina Tennessee border. The feds also dammed the river and flooded the only road into the area being emptied of people. As part of the compensation offered these families the feds promised to build a new road so they could easily visit all the little family cemeteries they were leaving behind. Until the new road could be built the feds would ferry people across the man made lake so the cemeteries could be maintained.
First the road wasn’t built because of WWII. Then it was Korea. Then the mission of the National Park Service changed from providing city people with access to nature to preserving wilderness and environmentalism became a concern. Land worked as farms a generation earlier was now pristine wilderness in the eyes of the activists. A park When all the approvals and environmental impact statements were finally complete the long promised road was then demonized as pork barrel spending, a road to nowhere. Finally after 75 years the Feds cancelled the road for good and a few local politicians who were particular friends of the Congressman got money to waste on contracts with some cronies as compensation for the broken promise. Meanwhile every year people who were born long after their families were pushed off their land are still being ferried across the river at Fontana Dam by federal workers and hike in to clear the brush and tend to the headstones in those little cemeteries.
Where might the good citizens of The Big Easy find a source of $38 million per year??
BP!
They have been throwing around billions!
What might BP want to do?
How about bringing thousands of well paying jobs in the offshore drilling industry to town?
What might they want in return?
A total humiliation of Obama and his Green Energy cronies, such as George Soros, who invested in Petrobras and drew offshore oil rigs that had been working in the Gulf of Mexico to South America.
What must the good citizens do to earn this largesse?
To the streets coonasses!
American oil patch jobs for American workers, not lazy Portugese speaking Brasilians!!!
We need some major cash flow to “Laissez les bons temps rouler”!
(Hey all you doubters, Huey Long ran Loiusiana as a populist.)
NC Mountain Girl – A road that goes nowhere except a cemetery is almost the definition of a road to nowhere. And why is the federal government paying for people to be ferried across, anyway? If it’s that important to visit a cemetery, pay for it yourself. The “inhabitants” sure won’t mind either way.
Liberals essentially lack maturity. Only the most childish among us believe that everyone can have everything they want and the money will never run out.
It seems like there have been a rash of news stories over the past few months detailing some new “psychological study” that claims conservatives have inferior intelligence and intellect compared to liberals. But why don’t we hear much about studies linking the liberal brain to decreased levels of emotional and mental maturity? I ran across this article awhile back and have been pondering it ever since. It’s about rising levels of immaturity in modern cultures. Unsurprisingly, the theory is that spending too much time in an academic setting leads to increased levels of immaturity; here’s the link:
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2006/06/23/immature_hum.html?category=human
From the article:
“People such as academics, teachers, scientists and many other professionals are often strikingly immature outside of their strictly specialist competence in the sense of being unpredictable, unbalanced in priorities, and tending to overreact.”
Hmm…academics, teachers, and scientists. Imagine that.
The money is less important than the ideas.
Spain has 53% youth unemployment and most of the employed under 25s are on short term contracts because of very heavy redundancy costs. this means they do not develop on the job skills. Spain has a high minimum wage and substantial payroll levies.
Spain is no 113 in the list of countries in which it is easy to start a new business.
Deregulation costs nothing.
The situation will not necessessarily be resolved by the inevitable split up and/or civil war.
“unless a new revenue source is found.”
A 100% tax on corruption and bribery should do quite nicely.
Then somebody must be gumming up the works; some wrecker, some saboteur.
Why, how Soviet of him. Next, we’ll be hearing of Hooliganism and the “Enemies of Progressive Thought” during show trials.
Was Ayn Rand related to Nostradamus?
Just after Katrina hit I recall a former NO city commissioner describing attending a Levee Board meeting. After a while she finally asked when the levees would be discussed. The reply was, “That’s not on the agenda.”
Some years ago I saw a union leader on TV declaring we had to force all those foreign countries to pay US union wages. Today I can well imagine the US invading some place to force that to occur.
Yesterday I heard that since the start of the Great Recession Federal tax revenues are down all of 0.2%. Federal spending is up 18%. Obviously, the problem is simply one of revenue.
Companies are going out of business or laying off workers simply because Obama was re-elected and Obamacare is looming. I can well imagine we will reach the point where laws will be passed forbidding layoffs. Not many years ago Congress even tried to pass a law forbidding DHL from closing its new sorting facility in the U.S.
After tax rates are increased, after the hidden taxes of Obamacare are implemented, after carbon taxes become the norm, aftter all of that, they will move on to the next step, a Wealth Tax. And for me, that’s when the guns come out and go to work. I plan to paint “It’s about fairness.” on the barrel of my M1.
I see three macro trends that will destroy America as we have known it, and probably Western Civilization as well.
Massive immigration of uneducated, tribal, and anti-Western peoples into America and Western Europe is fracturing social cohesion and putting the quality of life into a downward spiral. It was one of the more irony-laden incidents in the history of celebrity social scientists. While in Sweden to receive a $50,000 academic prize as political science professor of the year, Harvard’s Robert D. Putnam … confessed to Financial Times columnist John Lloyd that his latest research discovery—that ethnic diversity decreases trust and co-operation in communities—was so explosive that for the last half decade he hadn’t dared announce it “until he could develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity, saying it ‘would have been irresponsible to publish without that.’” http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/fragmented-future/
Diversity is destructive but the reality must be ignored.
Bruce Charlton insists that genetic intelligence(g) has been declining for at least the last 150 years. This claim is probably difficult to prove to a scientific certainty but an enlightening empirical test is to compare letters written by Civil War soldiers who averaged only a couple years formal education with almost anything written by the average college graduate today.
When large swaths of the population are not challenged to learn grammar, logic, history, and how to reason, and then shielded from their ignorance by the public dole what else can you expect?
The hordes of barbarians that settled in the Western Roman Empire didn’t come to conquer and replace Rome but to be Roman and enjoy the same high standard of living, but without the centuries of hard work it took to get there. It didn’t happen. Within only a couple generations the administrative and craft skills necessary to maintain that standard of living were bred out of society and disappeared.
VDH’s descriptions of life in Central California, what we see in Detroit, Dearborn and hundreds of other places in America and Western Europe suggest that something very similar is happening now.
Perhaps the most destructive trend of all is the popular definition of the human person as nothing more than a pleasure-seeking bag of bones with outsized genitalia. The levees will take care of themselves – for a few years anyway. After that, who cares?
with regard to the lack of budgeting for maintenance: everyone seems to forget that it’s not a bug, it’s a feature!
Think about how large organizations prosper and expand their power, and NOT just bureacracies like the Corps, but all the contractors who they hire and who their execs share revolving doors with: You *have* to continually be involved with big projects. Big, massive, rebuilding of systems allows bureaucracies to justify huge staffs and massive fiefdoms, and allows all politically connected contractors to ride the gravy train for years and years.
AND it allows Congressmen and Presidents to stand up in front of crowds and say “LOOK AT WHAT I AM DOING FOR YOU!!!” while the system that wasn’t maintained and which has now fallen apart can always be blamed on some past group of miscreants who are now on a beach in the Caribbean somewhere. (which is exactly where the current group of hustlers plans to be 20 years from now)
The system doesn’t only “encourage” cycles of massive building and subsequent massive failures, the system DEPENDS on regular cycles of mass failure! EVERYONE PROFITS!!! except the people, of course, but who cares about them when there’s a gravy train to ride?
Peter Boston,
I recommend the book “Mohammed vs. Charlemagne Revisited” by Emmet Scott. A little dry but provides an alternate understanding about what happened to the western Roman Empire. The author (I believe) provides a compelling argument that the Germanic hordes were becoming Roman. In many parts of the empire they did not amount to a significant portion of the population for example in Spain the Visigoths are estimated at only 150,000 ruling over a population of some 4 million. This thesis for the fall of the western roman empire points instead to the Roman-Persian war which led to the Arab Muslim conquest of Egypt and the closing of the Mediterranean.
The writing medium of the roman era was papyrus, because papyrus was cheap and plentiful, but degrades quickly. With the Arab Muslim conquest of Egypt the papyri trade disappeared, leaving western Europe to rely on parchment, which is very expensive to produce. With the loss of writing materials you have a loss of literacy and a subsequent decline in the power of secular bureaucrats and clerks.
Other nuggets of wisdom were that the Romans were struggling with the problem of childlessness and too many wealthy Romans choosing to enjoy the “benefits of childlessness.” Apparently this is one of the reasons Constantine converted the empire to Christianity, at the time there were only two groups in the empire whose populations were growing, Christians and Jews.
Rodney @ 15: “Deregulation costs nothing.”
You are exactly right about deregulation (or rather, selective roll-back of major regulations) as being the logical step forward in the current situation. Would even Keynes himself have supported increasing taxes in the middle of what should really be called a Depression? And how to cut Government Cheese without hurting real people in the short term? Regulatory roll-backs to allow re-industrialization are the clear route forward to create jobs & tax revenue.
However, it does not cost nothing. It will cost millions of government bureaucrats and their “private sector” contractors their jobs. It will lead to massive psychic costs for the Beautiful People, fretting over the lack of windmills and other such esoterica. It would challenge the foundation of the Political Clique’s control of society — because if the path to progress is for the Political Clique to get out the way, then maybe we don’t need a Political Clique.
Deregulation would be as devastating to our rulers as finding themselves on the losing side of a civil war. So deregulation is taboo, and the civil war will come.
Peter Boston (#20) said “benefits of childlessness” “the human person as nothing more than a pleasure-seeking bag of bones with outsized genitalia.” I agree 100%! Progressive/Liberalism has a history all thought the world and it leads to cultural destruction every time! Christianity was the cure, but Freedom with no responsibilities became the Antidote to the church…
“They want to fully exempt the charitable gift deduction, which costs the government about $51 billion a year…”
Yes, 3rd parties that exchange charitable gifts cost the government money. This presupposes that the parties were not free in the first place, that they are effect owned by and at the pleasure of the taxing authority.
“But Wal-Mart neither pays its own nor takes responsibility for those who make and move its wares. For America’s largest private-sector employer, the emergency exits are always open.”
First, if there is a responsibility to be met it rightfully belongs to the Federal Trade Commission. But it is firmly in the mode that their job is to ensure Chinese knock offs produced with forced labor can be imported into the US market. Cheap goodies to suppress apparent inflation and to opiate the masses.
Second, the “largest private-sector employer” is in jeopardy of being surpassed by the largest employer, the federal government itself.
Fedscope reports 2,102,269 federal executive branch employees excluding uniformed military (3.2m) and the Post Office. Wallmart has 2.1m employees.
The bottom line is the US gov run’s its own initiatives promoted by its own advertising and supported its own GOTV apparatus and employee unions. If you do not work for the federal government you are a slave.
Instead of saying its Bush’s fault, get real, just say it’s whities fault. Now that is enlightenment.
11. NC Mountain Girl
That story is both heartbreaking and infuriating.
What Romney really ought to do is come out of the meeting with Obama and announce that they have agreed to disagree. Romney is in favor of offshore oil exploration, whereas Obama imposed an illegal offshore drilling moratorium. What the Deepwater Horizon top kill operations proved is that America needs a modern fleet of dynamically positioned ships to service deepwater drilling operations. Why not have such vessels built at the Avondale Shipyard in New Orleans instead of closing the yard down???
Why not complete the Keystone XL pipeline so as to bring more crude oil to the Gulf Coast, making it available for export, in ships built at Avondale?
Why does Obama have such a hating attitude toward one of the primary businesses of Louisianans, the oil business?? Is it because you hate Coonasses? Or is it that you just hate states with Republican governors? Didn’t the Republicans just add more governors to their growing majority in the recent elections? Are you anti-democratic?
Why are you such a hater Mr. President?
Like many I was very disappointed with the election results. This latest post of Wretchard’s only increases my lack of confidence in our country’s future.
The election indicates to me a majority of the electorate falls into 3 categories:
1. Apathetic and/or oblivious.
2. Get all you can while the getting is good.
3. Prefer to be subjects rather than citizens.
We’ve always had all three but it’s the growth of the third I find so disheartening.
My father taught me that if I can’t control myself, control will be imposed upon me. Whether it be the laws of economics, Jacobin mob rule or strongman (pseudo) salvation I fear at least one will soon come to pass.
I grieve that so many of my countrymen find so little value in what is being lost. Pearls before swine, indeed.
Why do young people no longer care about rebellion or freedom? Now it’s cool to be controlled and opressed?
20. Peter Boston
The hordes of barbarians that settled in the Western Roman Empire didn’t come to conquer and replace Rome but to be Roman and enjoy the same high standard of living, but without the centuries of hard work it took to get there. It didn’t happen. Within only a couple generations the administrative and craft skills necessary to maintain that standard of living were bred out of society and disappeared.
22. Samozrejme
I recommend the book “Mohammed vs. Charlemagne Revisited” by Emmet Scott.
…………..
Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy
http://www.amazon.com/Mohammed-Charlemagne-Revisited-History-Controversy/product-reviews/0578094185
Scott argues that the collapse of Latin-Greek civilization in Western Europe happened not in the 5th century during the migrations of the Goths, Vandals and other Germanic peoples, but was delayed until the 7th century.
Among other evidence of continuity after the fall of Rome, Scott writes the the barbarian kings issued coins with the face of the Eastern Roman Emperor on them until about 640AD. He also shows that learning, long distance trade, building, intensive agriculture, and other facets of Latin-Greek culture continued until about that date.
Archeologist cited in the book have found serious soil erosion only after that same 640 date. This is true not only for all of Western Europe but also for North Africa and much of the Middle East.
So, what happened in the Mediterranean world about that time? The Arab-Islamic conquests. Which effectively forced trade across the Mediterranean to be given up, the abandonment of coastal agriculture, and the building of the first castles near the sea. The pirate raids and looting carried out by the Arabs destroyed Roman civilization, not those Germans, who only wanted to benefit from the culture they took over.
There is other evidence on the state of early Islam that counters the standard model of the first Islamic civilizations being good, and post-fall-of-Rome civilization in the west being bad. That is the failure of archeologists to find any evidence of large cities in early Islamic lands. No massive ruins in 8th or 9th century Baghdad or Cordoba, supposedly centers of large, prosperous Islamic civilizations, with beautiful palaces and Mosques. I found this very surprising and evidence that clinched the author’s arguments.
A very well argued book that attacks several recent books on the fall of Rome and the benefits of Islamic culture.
And then at the end of the book, Scott goes off on a tangent suggesting…
Well, read the book.
“But the levee was dry…”
Led Zep said it all in arguably the most terrifying tune in rock ‘n’ roll history…..
http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=When+the+Levee+Breaks&mid=F8AF303CB794987BA691F8AF303CB794987BA691&view=detail&FORM=VIRE1
OT:
Chinese police plan to board vessels in disputed seas
By Ben Blanchard and Manuel Mogato | Reuters – 5 hrs ago
http://news.yahoo.com/chinese-police-plan-board-vessels-disputed-seas-034120436.html
The way to deal with this is to have all the navies of south, southeast asia and Oceania more or less continually sail through these waters which are considered by the rest of the world to be international waters.
@8. Samozrejme
My attitude is that if there isn’t money to pay my Social Security, then there isn’t money to pay public employee pensions, nor to sustain the Welfare State.
Spread the pain around widely.
OT:
The Left Owns the Election Law Industry
http://frontpagemag.com/2011/j-christian-adams/the-left-owns-the-election-law-industry/print/
Liberal Stealth Groups Paved Obama Win
http://blog.heritage.org/2012/11/29/liberal-stealth-groups-paved-obama-win/
#32 Charles,
IIRC, China has claimed the entire South China Sea, all the way to the low-tide mark in the Philippines, Borneo and Vietnam, as “Chinese territorial waters” for some time now – so that any vessel leaving harbor in Manila, Haiphong, Saigon or Brunei is “violating Chinese territory”. Does Beijing think the Obama administration is so weak and feckless they can start enforcing that claim?
Our world is in crisis. Bankrupt cities, failing infrastructure, pointless wars, governments in statis. Has our civilization reached its apogee? Will America break into two or more countries? Will cities be abandoned? It surely seems to be our future.
A few years back I had to have a beloved hound put down due to a incurable disease. I still feel his lose. These days I see the same symptoms in America. Is the disease incurable? Can drastic intervention save it? I think not. “Apre moi, le deluge”.
Fletcher@13: “And why is the federal government paying for people to be ferried across, anyway?”
Um…because it was the feds that kicked the people off their land? That’s why eminent domain is, by and large, total crap. They steal stuff from people, give them a take-it-or-don’t-we-don’t-care offer for what they stole (never, EVER the going market rate and for sure never factoring in the total violation the transaction represents) and never count the human cost.
You talk like it’s nothing to take people away from their ancestral homeland against their will. It happened to the indians and everybody talks endlessly about how they were done wrong. And I agree. But they have nothing on those people in Appalacia, or me for that matter. I was born here and lived here all my life every bit as much as the most native of all native Americans that ever existed, but the feds will, if I sit in one spot long enough, come and drive me off of that spot just as they did to them. Count on it.
That’s why one of two things will happen with absolute certainty. Either the federal government will be weakened to the point where it is a barely-discernable shadow of what it is today, or we will witness, within the lifetime of a middle-aged person alive right now, an American revolution, probably after a complete societal collapse. Period. Full stop. Our political leaders have arranged it so that those are our only options. Pick one.
My money is, quite literally, on the second option. Because it’s a monkey trap. The only way the politicians can allow us to escape is to let go of the power they’ve seized for themselves…and I just don’t see that happening. The only…ONLY…politician I’ve ever seen or heard of that ever did something like that was George Washington when he left the presidency and went back to his farm. That’s a once-in-the-history-of-our-species decision based on what I’ve ever been able to learn. It ain’t happening again, and certainly not in our lifetimes.
So anyway, THAT is why the feds pay for the ferry. And they won’t for long, as things start to get even tighter. Count on it. Hey, what’s the cultural and family heritage of Americans when kickbacks and campaign donations are at stake?
Does Beijing think the Obama administration is so weak and feckless they can start enforcing that claim?
In 1974 the North Vietnamese realized the South Vietnamese were literally running out of ammunition. They still responded to the NVA attacks, but weakly and cautiously. That told the North something, emboldened them to try further actions and finally to schedule the Big Push in 1975.
So there are probably debates within the Chinese politburo to the effect of: “how far can we push? And when?” Not a question of if but when if they find they are unopposed. Hanoi had a concept known as “Fighting within the Treaty” to gain advantage while waiting. I have no doubt that China has the same idea.
The Obama administration has cannibalized everything it can lay its hands on to hand out largesse to its favored constituencies. The liberal public may not know this, but the Chinese do.
There are a number of countries who know they are “waiting for it”. Israel is one. Southeast Asia is another.
A very dangerous situation is in the offing; and this is why Japan, as noted previously, is re-arming. The timescales here are uncertain, but two to three years should bring the full crisis on us. We are, to employ an overused analogy, in about 1936. As Rick Blaine said, “the people are asleep all over America”.
Someone said we labor under the “Dead Hand” of history. The North Vietnamese were astonished to find that South Vietnam did not collapse after the US withdrawal in 1973 because they thought America was fighting a “colonial war”. They did not realize, nor perhaps did the US, that South Vietnam was on its way to being a real country as South Korea has become a real country. Both the North Vietnamese and the American left saw the South Vietnamese as “puppets”. In fact it was the Viet Cong who were “puppets” — they were actually directly controlled by the North.
Somewhere in Beijing and perhaps ironically in Obama’s Washington there are people laboring under the impression that the shitty little countries of Southeast Asia are colonial leftovers or something — you know, like Israel. But perhaps there are those in Washington who buy into that to, who see the region as “naturally” China’s. To quote Rick again, “I don’t buy and sell human beings”. But it’s a habit that dies hard in self-appointed elites, and Marxists are no different.
Evil Cheese@36: “Has our civilization reached its apogee?”
Almost certainly.
“Will America break into two or more countries?”
Almost certainly.
“Will cities be abandoned?”
Yes.
“It surely seems to be our future.”
Indeed. I see no way out anymore.
“A few years back I had to have a beloved hound put down due to a incurable disease. I still feel his lose. These days I see the same symptoms in America.”
I too had a beast of that kind. He ran 160 pounds and was what some call my “lifetime dog”. It was only after his death on sunny Sept. 2, 2005 that I learned he was a Tosa Inu (I thought he was just some sort of mongrel mastiff). He came up lame at the age of 9–a year or so past his breed’s life expectancy–and the vet said he had some sort of cancer in one of his leg joints. He lived another 6 months until one day he couldn’t get up and we had to call the vet out to put him down since I couldn’t lift him down the steps to the garage.
I too still feel his loss and always will. And you’re right, what’s happening to the country I love is so very much like what happened to the beast I loved so much. It’s come up lame. 30 vets are screaming 30 different diagnoses and nearly all are saying he’ll be fine if I just buy their medicine and force it on him, but I know in my heart of hearts that it’ll all be over in just a little while. Not sure how long…but I know it won’t be long.
I’m so unutterably sad about the whole state of affairs, but I don’t have time to be sad. I have to get my affairs in order before the storm, and there’s still so much to be done. Sigh.
THE GRAVY TRAIN
The roadbed crew laid down the stones
The ties set down and square
The gandy dancers drove the spikes
The rails lay straight and fair
Behind the crews the engines sat
Their boilers banked and low
Each carriage filled with screaming folk
Enraged the pace was slow
The rails crept forward, gathering speed
Across the fruited plain
And at each stop more people climbed
Aboard the gravy train
RE: Why do young people no longer care about rebellion or freedom? Now it’s cool to be controlled and oppressed?
It is easier to be controlled and oppressed, hence the conscious or subconscious decision that it therefore is “cooler”. This is why the War on Success has been so fruitful – Success is hard. It is tough. It is demanding. Therefore, instead of putting oneself through that, why not just make behaviors that lead to hedonism, sloth, indolence, and failure…. “cool” and “hip”, make the very behaviors that lead to wealth creation and success “square” and “oppressive”, and then demand the same fruits that those who have actually worked for success are getting. All you need is a political and social culture that will tell you they agree with you if you will support them / vote for them, and viola. Done.
“Let’s just choose the easiest, most hedonistic way forward, and tell everyone that it is super cool and hip to be so”. (i.e. “Rock n Roll is a way of life, man!”)
And it worked. And here we are. Not sure how “cool” will fill a hungry belly, stop a tyrant (neighborhood or global), or pay for that vaunted and all-important “education” the same people are “entitled” to free-of-charge, but I am just not as wise as the Kool Kidz, I guess.
“It is easier to be controlled and oppressed, hence the conscious or subconscious decision that it therefore is “cooler”.”
It was easy. All the teachers had to do was advocate safe sex and remedy against testosterone. The kiddies have sex and do not have anything other than the female flocking instinct. Instant zombies t easily controlled.
New Orleans is a conquered city several times over, and before that it was a colonial city that looked elsewhere for direction. It isn’t called “The Big Easy” for nothing.
When one is conquered, one does not take responsibility for communal functions. That becomes the responsibility of the conquerors. To expect New Orleans to take responsibility for itself would imply that New Orleans is culturally an integral part of the United States of America.
Were it not for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the natural outlet for the Mississippi River would be the Atchafalaya River and its principal river port would be Morgan City. Why not let Morgan City become the Mississippi River’s premier port and let New Orleans linger on as a tourist trap? It would be more cost effective in the long run, and a new river port would create opportunities for New Orleans “evacuees” to create new lives for themselves.
As for New Orleans itself, we need to realize that those with the “get up and go” have long since got up and left.
#37 Agoraphobic Plumber
Regarding that road, my former neighbor, Jesse Helms, fought for the completion of that road for years. He endured the wrath of the Sierra Club, the Park Service and about every liberal institution in DC. His position was the same as yours. The Feds pushed these people off the land that had been family owned for generations, promised them a road and then reneged. People in southwestern NC stll hate the Federal Government over this. How much local help did the FBI get trying to catch Eric Rudolph–ha, with over a hundred agents they never managed to find him. He was caught a couple of years later by a deputy sheriff while dumpster diving.
regards—knothead
Michael,
There are many flaws in our Social Security system. But the basic, underlying flaw – and the one flaw that is a plus from the perspective of Big Gov – is that citizens’ monies are deducted from their paychecks BEFORE the earner can take possession of them.
Why does this benefit Big Guv? First, the government does not need to prove that the “security” they are selling is a reliable, cost effective method of saving for retirement in order to secure the citizens’ funds. My credit union’d have to sell you on our service and reliability in order to get you to sign on every year. But the governent-run system does not. This monopolists’ redoubt removes SS from the sort of accountability that market-based funds must contend with.
Second, the mandatory payments expected to be seized from future generations represent an oversized, unquantifiable, and surely fraudulent datum in the Federal Government’s “assets” side of the balance sheets that is, of course, leveraged to the hilt pell mell by Big Gov’s preferred lenders. Give the guys from Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan a year to chew on this windfall, and they’ll sow a whirlwind or two.
Last, this unmeasureable, opaque, unwelcomed, ginormous glob of (fake) dough distorts the rest of the nation’s financial markets, crowding out both vendors and buyers alike. Anyone hoping to sell retirement planning in today’s markets must stumble over the toe of Big Gov’s size 15 wides at every step. To make my point, try selling a system identical to SS, but make the program voluntary, and see how well it sells. For starters, folks will say, “But, I already have a SS-like program. It is run by the Federal Government. Why should I also buy yours?”
Get the government out of retirement planning, though, and suddenly your private SS system might get some takers.
Nibbling around the edges might make more sense, though. Like, say, what if the SS premium’s “blind” paycheck deduction were repealed, and the duty to pay manually into the system kicked back to the citizens? It’d make for interesting politics: Really, who could oppose giving more responsibility to fiduciary adult-citizens?
I’ll be the Democrats’ll have a thing to say or two.
”The only…ONLY…politician I’ve ever seen or heard of that ever did something like that was George Washington when he left the presidency and went back to his farm.”
There was also ”Mr. Sam” Rayburn, one of the best/most powerful Speakers of the House, who retired to his farm outside Bonham TX. As I recall he didn’t have a govt pension and lived off savings and the earnings of his farm.
His earlier story in the TX Legislature was typical of the man: he joined a prestigious Texas law firm but refused to accept retainers, etc from lobbyists, stating he didn’t want anything to interfere with his judgement as to what was best for the citizens of his district and the state.
Nuthin’ to do but score some dank and cut some krunk……’>……….
”One No-Fault outcome to cumulative mismanagement is to simply scatter and flee. A State Senator proposed simply dissolving Detroit. To call the whole city off. The plan met with immediate opposition from those determined to defend the “jewels of Detroit”. The money would be found somewhere to allow it to limp along. There had to be an unraided stash somewhere”
Wayne County Michigan will be the ‘beneficiary’ if Detroit is dissolved. Michigan will simply spread the wealth from Grosse Point and other Wayne County communities to Detroit.
anon@6: “Social Security is different from the other benefits, because people who stand to collect have already paid a whole lot into the system.”
The boomers are the first generation of Americans to pay more into SS then they will receive in benefits. And, that’s not counting accrued interest. Time and Atlantic magazines are now touting the seizure of 401K retirement plans. After all, they claim, because no taxes were paid on the income invested in the plans and no taxes were paid on the plan’s earnings, all such subsidized plans should revert to the control of the government.
I was worried the Pubs would just roll over for some promise of entitlement cuts with huge huge tax increases,
but Buraq may have asked for a bridge too far:
From Ace:Obama’s Offer: Give Me $1.6 Trillion in Tax Increases and An Unlimited Ability To Rasie the Debt Ceiling on My Own Authority And I’ll Give You… Nothing In Return
New spending allegedly outpaces cuts, at least initially, in Buraq Hussein’s new plan. Oh and about that deficit thing?
Fiscal Cliff- Huh?- from my way of thinking this plan brings on a recession all by itself.
If the Pubs can’t beat this “plan” like a drum and Buraq Hussein along with it, they are either total cowards or totally incompetent. They have the opportunity to really humiliate Buraq with this stupid and egregious plan of his and should do so with impunity. This “plan” is a really bad and entirely unfunny joke on the American People.
Wretchard #38
“shitty little countries…”
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
My dad, a New Orleans native, observed acidly after Hurricane Katrina that the Democrat-run Levee Boards (there were over a dozen of them) were all corrupt as hell, and used their money for everything BUT levee maintenance. He wasn’t at all surprised when the levee broke. (Cue Led Zeppelin.. . .)
Seems like nothing has changed. And the fools keep voting for the same crooked crowd. The only real pity is that we, their fellow citizens, have to pay for their folly. Let them buy their own damn levees.
Beverly @ 51 – Ask Dad what he thinks of this strategy. BP is on the verge of concluding compensation agreements with private parties harmed by the oil spill, and also resolving criminal charges against the corporation. So they will have undercut Obama’s leverage on jail time. Having settled the criminal charges, they cannot be charged again under the doctine of double jeopardy. So they will be free to really defend themselves in the civil trial.
That would be the time for Chairman Hoc Hastings in the House Natural Resources Committee to invite the Chief Counsel to The President’s Oil Spill Commission to put on a public presentation of his “Chief Counsel’s Report” http://tinyurl.com/4mmtygm
There are things in that report that you have never seen. Note that the overall commission’s final report was dated 1/11/2011 http://tinyurl.com/4flx7yg and the co-chairmen testified before Congress in late January 2011. So the stuff in the chief counsel’s report is the kind of stuff you’d expect to find in a follow up report issued late in the afternoon on Black Friday, that is, it’s got all the bad news for Obama.
Then BP will get its chance to reveal the details of Chu’s role in the top kill operation.
CHU LIED, DOLPHINS DIED!
Les bon temps roulez!
“Then somebody must be gumming up the works; some wrecker, some saboteur.”
And the Bolsheviks dance on a foundation of 100 million graves.
The Federal government has been living far above our means since WWII.
It dawned on me twenty years ago that we would not be able to afford to maintain the standard of living to which we had grown accustomed.
We roared along throughout the ’90′s and ’00′s with the occasional hiccup until suddenly, the credit crisis exposed the charade. To reinflate our balloon, we print money day and night only to have it hoarded by bankers who do not want to lend it at historically low interest rates. Meanwhile, the consumer (70% of GDP) is stuck with crushing debt and ruined credit histories.
Get ready for austerity.
Forbes – http://tinyurl.com/cevufh6
The plot thickens. Kurt Mix is the former BP guy who ran the top kill operation and subsequently the static kill which actually “plugged the damn hole”. So he would be a hero if his story saw the light of day, as it must if he actually stood trial.
The rank attempts at intimidation are running up against some guys with, as our Hispanic amigos would say, CUJONES!
From Ace:
Walk Away” Gaining Steam
—Ace
Charles Krauthammer calls for it.
“It’s not just a bad deal, this is really an insulting deal. What Geithner offered, what you showed on the screen, Robert E. Lee was offered easier terms at Appomattox, and he lost the Civil War. The Democrats won by 3% of the vote and they did not hold the House, Republicans won the house. So this is not exactly unconditional surrender, but that is what the administration is asking of the Republicans.
This idea — there are not only no cuts in this, there’s an increase in spending with a new stimulus. I mean, this is almost unheard of. What do they expect? They obviously expect the Republicans will cave on everything. I think the Republicans ought to simply walk away. The president is the president. He’s the leader. They are demanding that the Republicans explain all the cuts that they want to make.”
RIGHT ON. Walking away includes walking away from raising the deficit ceiling, as Krauthammer envisions it , btw. Finally someone on the Right showing Leadership.
Do it. Stuff it down insulting Buraq’s throat.
For thirty years I paid social security for my grandparents and then parents.
This worked out ok. There were more kids than adults in my generation and the old people all seemed to have a pension or something squirreld away to make all the ends meet.
Now for us kids in my family , we have on average one kid for every two parents. I have two. My brother has none. similar story with all the cousins.
On a macro scale the country claims to not want immigrants but it brings in as many as it can. It has to.
Since on average no one has saved up anything to retire on we are looking at a 30 year depression. I am saving as much as I can. The idea of ss was sold to us as a retirement pension. And it could still be if we basically tripled ssi to be the same size as a rational 401 (k) deduction. No one will stand for that because we know the money would not be around for us and govt wouldnt know how to manage it anyhow.
The only chance for us geezers is this: we gotta sabotage the young kids birth control. the kids are going to have to squeeze out 4 kids per family and the old people will have to work till they are 80.
Then we taper back to a normal 2 kids per family for a sustainable poulation. either that or the old people all starve.
But even so the newest generation will have to go back to 2 kids per family or its game over.
The most reliable security is family security, not social security, as John noted above.
That’s why I’ve invested (!) in five children. Three have a nice little business together, one’s in college getting a physics degree at a decent state college, and the fifth is learning cooking and small business in high school.
So far I’m good for 6 grandkids with the last two children still to reach the childbearing ages so I should have a few more coming.
An alternate course could have been to NEVER have children. If each cost a quarter a million to raise (easy!), I’d have well over two million dollars in the 401k today (with compounded interest).
My cash savings are meager but dollars will be near worthless anyway, given the current administration. But smart, healthy grown children are one’s best hope in an uncertain world.