When Admiral Mike Mullen told the Senate that Pakistan directed the attack on the US embassy in Kabul it probably surprised no one. And when the Spectator sadly concluded that the Euro has finally been proved a swindle, probably not many were shocked many either. America has been stabbed in the back by it’s allies; its ‘partners against terrorism’. And Europe has been misled by its leaders. So ho-hum.
Did anyone expect the US to reorient its position away from Afghanistan and confront Pakistan? Does anyone believe the EU will give up the Euro, even if it is manifestly ruining them? Policy is no longer the art of doing the right thing. It is the craft of carrying forward a narrative.
Mullen said that “with ISI support, Haqqani operatives planned and conducted that truck bomb attack, as well as the assault on our embassy,” and “we also have credible evidence that they were behind the June 28th attack against the Inter-Continental Hotel in Kabul and a host of other smaller but effective operations.” Most tellingly he added “the Haqqani network acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency.” Pakistan attacked the national territory of a country at which it was at peace, that had supported it in the past diplomatically and from which it receives billions of dollars in aid. It was an act as perfidious as the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Nor is this the worst of it. It is not inconceivable to think that al-Qaeda was also a “veritable arm of Pakistan’s ISI, though perhaps with assistance from the Middle East.
Of the Euro, Peter Osborne and Francis Weaver at the Spectator write:
Very rarely in political history has any faction or movement enjoyed such a complete and crushing victory as the Conservative Eurosceptics. The field is theirs. They were not merely right about the single currency, the greatest economic issue of our age — they were right for the right reasons. They foresaw with lucid, prophetic accuracy exactly how and why the euro would bring with it financial devastation and social collapse.
Meanwhile the pro-Europeans find themselves in the same situation as appeasers in 1940, or communists after the fall of the Berlin Wall. They are utterly busted.
But just as the appeasers have now about abolished the last remaining justification for national self defense and as the Left continued to operate on the Western side of the Berlin Wall in the guise of their transnational schemes, nothing in recent history indicates that being correct about an issue settles anything. Being right has nothing to do with politics. It’s what you can sell that counts. The price of keeping those product lines going was on full display on the world markets today. Stocks plunged all over the world, the 10-Year Treasury yields hit their lowest level since 1940s.
A weak reading on manufacturing in China contributed to the slowdown fears. Adding to the grim mood was a lack of appreciable progress in containing Europe’s debt crisis, which has weighed on markets for months.
The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index shed 37.20 points, or 3.19%, to 1129.56, after touching its lowest intraday level since early August. The technology-oriented Nasdaq Composite slumped 82.52 points, or 3.25%, to 2455.67. Among New York Stock Exchange-listed issues, decliners outnumbered gainers by just over 7 to 1, while the Nasdaq losers outpaced rising issues by about 6 to 1.
All blue-chip stocks finished in the red, as did all S&P 500 sectors. Materials and energy stocks were hit hardest, falling as investors acted on their economic slowdown worries and in reaction to the fast rise of the U.S. dollar.
“They’re selling literally everything,” said Alan Valdes, director of floor trading at DME Securities at the NYSE. “It’s the realization that things aren’t getting better that has traders concerned. They’re selling gold; they’re selling copper; they’re selling everything.”
The market is writing down the value of the world economy. Right across the board. It is making a judgement on what they think the future is worth. By recent numbers, not much. Not just because policymakers have gotten it wrong about the “root cause” of terrorism, or the Euro; but also about “Too Big To Fail”, population policy, multiculturalism, a crippling environmentalism and Global Warming, to name a few. The financial, national security and educational systems of the world are in utter collapse because they are stuffed with lies, which even when they are shown to be obviously false suck up trillions of dollars in their pursuit . And nothing will turn the global elites from continuing their ruinous path until they have spent the last nickle and dime they can lay their hands on. Certainly not the media. As Osborne and Weaver wrote:
One urgent lesson concerns the BBC. The corporation’s twisted coverage of the European Union is a serious problem, because the economic collapse of the eurozone means that a new treaty may be needed very soon — plunging the EU right back into the heart of our national politics.
The problem is that the BBC’s record is dreadful. It simply cannot be trusted not to become part of a partisan propaganda operation.
Neither the BBC nor any of the similar organizations which have jointly created our fantasy world will return to honesty. Not until it annihilates itself into bankruptcy along with all the other causes it touted and supported. The bad news is that by then most of us will have sunk beneath the waves.
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