Set aside all the politics over the War on Terror and then ask what Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden have in common.

All three are arrogant and unstable men filled with aimless grievances and animated by the sense that they never received the things that they really wanted out of life. They are in short exactly the sort of people that foreign intelligence agencies recruit when trying to spot weak links in the security chain.

Foreign intelligence agencies look for people with security clearances who go through a lot of money in short periods of time, who simmer with grudges and grievances, who are rootless and dissatisfied. Those descriptions adequately cover Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning; two men who should never have been given any kind of clearance whatsoever on personality alone.

That isn't to say that any of the men are spies. Spying is passe now. Not in China which spies on the same industrial scale that it does everything else. Or in Russia, which may not have pulled the trigger on Wikileaks, but appears to have some links to Assange and through its RT propaganda channel feeds an endless stream of the same sort of stories that the Soviet Union used to run, but stripped of the obligatory Communist angle.

But it's passe in the West where the very notion of treason has long since become an ambiguous thing in the sunset days of the state. The idea of treason depends on the importance of the state as a force representing the interests of the citizenry against other states. And that's not really a Western idea anymore.

When Obama totes around a copy of The Post-American World and seems more eager to represent the interests of the wrong half of the world over those of his own country, he can hardly complain when men like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden take him at his word and follow in his footsteps.

Snowden and Manning just did what Obama has been doing. They leaked classified information and damaged the interests of the United States. The only difference is that they didn't go through the formalities of raising millions of dollars from San Francisco Green Energy tycoons and running for political office first.

That's an important procedural difference, but unimportant from a functional standpoint. If political office doesn't come with any national responsibility or accountability, then Snowden or Manning have as much right to trash national security for their own whims as Obama does. If the state is nothing more than a power prize in a popularity contest, then why bother about its security.

Sure some Americans might get blown up along the way, but who is to say that Obama, Manning or Snowden should care about them? Why would they apart from some outdated notion of nationality, a fact so random that you can become an American without ever speaking the language or showing the least bit of allegiance to the country.

Obama has embraced the rhetoric and ideas of an order in which the state no longer matters and the international community defines all, but his policies haven't fully kept up. That hypocrisy has created a gap into which the Mannings and the Snowdens have jumped.

The Bush Administration could consistently advocate the War on Terror as a means of protecting American interests. Its successors apologize for the existence of the war while carrying it on because despite all the speeches, they really have no other ideas, except the usual gestures of appeasement.

It's not inconsistent to insist that America needs protecting and to then protect it. But it is inconsistent to deny that anything is wrong and to advocate for a post-national order and to then insist that the state has the right to protect itself.

Russia makes no bones about being a state.Neither does China. It's America's jet setting elites who seem confused about the issue. And the confusion percolates on downward.

Amnesty would never be seriously discussed in China or Russia, because neither allow any ambiguity about their national existence. The notion of borders does not confuse their political elites. But they confuse our addled Post-American politicians who don't seem to grasp the relevance of the concept of citizenship in an age when anyone with enough money can just get on a plane and go places.

That is what makes America's elites worse than those of Russia or China. Russian and Chinese leaders may be angling for a way out if the hammer comes down, most of their children have foreign passports and bank accounts, but that is due to their criminality, not their inability to identify with a nation.

America's political elites have a notion of freedom that is as constrained as their Russian or Chinese counterparts, they just believe that outright tyranny of that sort is tacky. They don't run over people with tanks, they run them over with laws. But if the day comes when tanks are necessary in defense of gun control, gay marriage, mandatory abortions, national health insurance or some other liberal cause, there is no real doubt that they will do it. For now they admire their own sophisticated ability to get their way with empty speeches, media bias and social nudges. It hasn't crossed their minds yet that the day will come when that will not be enough.

The War on Terror isn't a war of national interest. It is the contention that we shouldn't be blown up. And while that may seem uncontroversial, so much so that even Obama is prepared to roll with it, so long as he gets to take a pass on Gitmo, the right not to be blown up, as a nation or an individual, depends on the first right of existence. That's the problem that Israel has run into over the years. Most countries and people have to recognize your right to exist in order to oppose violence against you.

An America that goes post-national has made the argument for its own non-existence. And that argument resounds most dangerously with its own citizens.

America's political elites imagine that they can walk the post-national tightrope while papering over all the cracks with some inspirational guff about American Exceptionalism. Amnesty? Sure, it's what makes us great as a nation. A treasonous media? Healthy debate is what makes us great. Giving a pass to terrorists? Tolerance is what makes us great. Handing over authority to the UN? America has always led the way for world peace.

This kind of idiotic pablum comes out of the mouth of politicians at the drop of a hat. But there is only so much you can paper over with empty phrases and easy answers.

Nations have national interests. They don't have to debate every topic to death in terms of abstract ethics, because they can assert that a thing is necessary for them to keep going. Post-National nations that are just waiting to open up their borders and be ravished by the hordes of the brotherhood of man have no national interests. Their leaders assert national interests for international and post-national ventures.

Obama declared that it "was not in our national interest" to let Gaddafi take Benghazi and so he decided to bomb Libya. The closest he came to explaining what in the world our national interest had to do with protecting the Islamist militias who would go on to murder four Americans was some muttering about our national values.

Conflating values and interests is post-national gibberish. It creates international nation building
mandates while denying the right of the nation to pursue its own interests. And it encourages Americans to take action based on those "national values" rather than national interests, to think in terms of an abstract value system rather than the blood and tissue in the streets of Boston.

The debate over Snowden took on a predictable trajectory in light of that. Initial supporters who thought Snowden was a patriot who wanted to expose government eavesdropping seemed put off when he proved just as willing to report on international eavesdropping as on the domestic kind. And why shouldn't he? Internationalists have no national loyalties. To them eavesdropping on Russian or Chinese officials is just as wrong as eavesdropping on Americans.

The Post-American America is internationalized. It's supposed to run on values, rather than interests. Treason is no longer defined in terms of betraying national interests, but the ephemeral national values. Patriotism is treason to the values of internationalism while treason to national interests is the new patriotism.

The family member mentioned in previous roundups has come home from the hospital, but there is still a road ahead. It hasn't been an easy few weeks and I appreciate the understanding and support.

While I was distracted, I was apparently attacked by Paul Krugman, of all people.

Paul Krugman, who has done for economics what Erich Von Daniken did for space exploration, decided to attack me for the article while failing as badly at reading comprehension as he does at comprehending the existence of money.

Writing tongue-in-cheek, I mentioned that Bloomberg’s transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, the granddaughter of a Muslim Imam who worked with Hitler’s Mufti teaching SS men had, “In partial revenge… made many New York streets nearly as impassable as those of her grandfather’s wartime Dresden.”

You would have to be an idiot to take that at face value. Or Paul Krugman who headlined it as Nazi Islamic Bikes From Hell and called it “a wonderful window into the conservative psyche”.

When I was mentioned on Rush, I got emails telling me about it. But apparently no one around here reads Paul Krugman... which is a good thing.




OBAMNESTY

Is it really amnesty or Obamnesty? I have made the argument that it's really all about Obama.

Obama backed what he called “comprehensive immigration reform” back in 2010. In a speech at American University, he laid out the same exact talking points of the current “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” plan, including the claim that the legal immigration system is broken, the promise that a comprehensive plan will begin by addressing border security and the fiction that illegal aliens will be “punished” by being forced to pay back taxes. The whole plan concluded with a path to citizenship.

That plan was loosely based on the Comprehensive Immigration Reform for America’s Security and Prosperity Act of 2009, whose real authors were at the Center for American Progress, which Time Magazine described as Obama’s “idea factory”.

The plan that Pro-Amnesty Republicans have been touting was Obama’s plan all along, word for word. It’s even being sold in exactly the same way and Gang of 8 members often find themselves repeating lines from Obama’s American University speech. Every time you hear a Senate Republican pitch amnesty by saying that the legal immigration system is broken, you are hearing echoes of an old Obama speech.

Obamnesty - How Obama controls the push for illegal alien amnesty





AND THE LIBERTY GOES TO....

News that the National Constitution Center is awarding Hillary Clinton the Liberty Medal sounds impressive, but just remember that Hillary is getting an award that Gorbachev got in 2008, Spielberg got the year before and Hamid Karzai got in 2004.

Here's the award justification from the NCC.

"As the 67th Secretary of State, Clinton broke national and global barriers. She was the first First Lady to serve in a presidential Cabinet. She traveled to more countries than any other Secretary of State. She used social media to engage citizens in the workings of diplomacy, and she paid an official visit to Burma, making her the highest U.S. representative to do so in half a century."

Hillary is getting a medal for being the first First Lady to serve in a cabinet and for visiting a lot of countries… and using social media?

Hillary Clinton to Receive “Liberty Medal” for Spreading Islamist Tyranny




THE HILLARY BLING RING

This morning this button said, “Farber Home Insurance.” But now it wears Hillary’s face. Ready, it says in red letters. Telling, not asking. The toaster now only makes bread with Hillary’s pixel printed face on it. The television keeps showing staticky reruns of Hillary’s campaign speeches. And the dog’s barks have begun to sound curiously like her.

I opened all the envelopes, but they were blank except for a sheer of paper with READY printed on it in red. The phone no longer works. Instead of a dial tone, I hear the whisper of old Hillary talk show appearances hissing over the lines.

Tomorrow, millions of Americans will look into their mirrors and see Hillary’s face looking back at them. “Ready?” she will whisper.

Ready for Hillary’s 3 Creepiest Items Will Give You Nightmares





IMAGINE A VERY EXPENSIVE BOOT...

Bloomberg tended to take that to a whole new level, mixing his private donations and the city’s public donations for a potent combination of political influence that bought him support from some troubling places, including the Newman cult, and pushed his agenda. And most people still didn’t pay much attention.

But Mayors Against Illegal Guns takes that to a whole new level. Bloomberg has created his own private Anti-NRA group using city resources and backed by his own personal fortune.

The precedent is troubling because cities and states generally did this kind of lobbying as secondhand support, passing along money to non-profits that did the actual campaigning. But instead of plowing money into an anti-gun group disguised as gun violence prevention grants, Bloomberg is just running his own national organization out of New York City government.

Bloomberg’s Political Abuse of New York City Resources




THE NEW AIR FORCE DOESN'T FLY PLANES

"Arming cadets with knowledge on the topics of gender and violence isn’t just the right thing to do, he said. It’s good for their careers."

Yes, gender theory is very vital for anyone in the Air Force. How are you going to fly a plane if you don’t know gender theory and fail to recognize the gender stereotypes in your fuselage? How?

Air Force Academy Adds Male Bashing Gender Theory “Male and Masculinity” Course




CAPTAIN PLANET TO THE RESCUE

Obama has failed to fix the economy or win the war in Afghanistan, but give him an imaginary problem and he’s on it like Michelle on a glazed poundcake.

Obama Announces Plan to Save the Earth from a Problem That Doesn’t Exist




THERE ARE NO GREY CELLS IN KERRY'S CRANIUM

Kerry is obviously channeling Baghdad Bob here. And you can see why since they do have some things in common. There are plenty of Saudi fighters on the ground. They are being armed by the Saudi and Qatari governments. But they just aren’t officially part of the Saudi military.

Kerry Channels Baghdad Bob, Claims No Saudis Fighting in Syria



DC COUNCIL LEGALIZES TIME TRAVEL

The District of Columbia Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety has approved a bill that would allow anatomical males and females who have letters signed by a health professional indicating that they have “undergone a gender transition” to legally change the sex listed on their birth certificate. 

DC’s JaParker Deoni Jones Birth Certificate Equality Amendment Act to Legalize Time Travel




BETTER FOR IT

Bill Clinton is always on the right side of every issue. The right side being the one that makes him popular. If he’s not, wait for the next poll and he will be.

Clinton only formally turned on DOMA this year. He did it for the same reason that he signed it into law. He was running for re-election then. Now his wife is running for office.

Bill has been claiming that he signed DOMA reluctantly. This is how reluctantly he did it.

The 60-second spot says President Clinton signed a bill defining marriage as a union between one man and one woman and “wants a complete ban on late-term abortions.”

After boasting about Clinton signing the anti-gay DOMA, the ad concludes with the line: “President Clinton has fought for our values and America is better for it.”

Bill Clinton Celebrates Supreme Court Overturning Marriage Law He Signed





A FEW NUMBERS

Obama Inc Finds Way to Waste $250 Mil on UN and Palestinians at the Same Time

100 Afghan Diplomats Defect to Avoid Going Back to Afghanistan

One of the biggest perks of being a diplomat from Afghanistan (as opposed to a diplomat in Afghanistan) is not having to be in Afghanistan. But the bottom line is that the writing on the wall has been read. Obama’s pullout means a Taliban takeover. And the diplomats, like all forms of the rat, are the first to jump overboard.

 Obama Bringing Mother-in-Law Along on $100 Mil African Vacation

 100% of Tea Party Groups Targeted by the IRS



BEYOND THE DSA

“We don’t have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society,” Obama said. “Sticking your head in the sand might make you feel safer, but it’s not going to protect you from the coming storm.”

The Flat Earth Society however objects to being depicted as being skeptical of Global Warming. As devotees of imaginary science, the Flat Earth Society, like Obama, earnestly believes that cow flatulence is endangering the flat planet.

The Flat Earth Society is a real group, and its president says he believes climate change is real.

Flat Earth Society, Like Obama, Believes in Global Warming

The streets of Manhattan are full of smiling white yuppies riding their Citibank bikes, blue lights flashing as they sail through midtown traffic. But the great rack of bike share bikes planted next to a housing project is filled with its cargo of blue vehicles. No one is checking them out here. Instead black kids sit on the locked bikes, occasionally fitfully pedaling them, going nowhere.

The contrast is an apt metaphor for the city. The smiling kids who could just as easily be cashing checks from their parents and working at an ad agency while trying to pay off their student debts in Portland, San Francisco or Seattle. They happen to be doing it in New York City and they expect the same social amenities, the retro bars, the craft beers, the obscure bands and the bike lanes.

The street ahead has been dug up and water has been turned off to half the block. The operation has no other purpose than to turn two lanes of traffic into some kind of complex curved sidewalk on a street where there is hardly any foot traffic and you can wait two minutes to see a single pedestrian during the daylight hours.

Such street planning assaults are happening all over the city as traffic lanes are torn out and eliminated to make way for impromptu sidewalk cafes and expanded sidewalks that often no one needs or wants. And then there are the ubiquitous bike and bus lanes which see about 1 percent of the traffic of the street and the sidewalk, but are approaching equal billing in terms of space.

When I wrote about Bloomberg's bike share program back a few months ago, I was attacked by the New York Times' Paul Krugman, Gawker, New York Mag and the New York Observer. It's easy to see what unites these outlets. They are the voices of the upscale city that doesn't drive to work, but is driven. The one that thinks the city is only a few bike lanes away from being properly European.

Krugman and Co. assumed that I was against bike shares because conservatives hate sharing. I don't claim to speak for conservatives, but most of them, I suspect, like me, are concerned about the political hijacking of urban spaces by a small elite. They are concerned that the new technocracy that men like Krugman and Bloomberg embody, are destroying the country for shallow and silly reasons.

Bikes passionately divide New Yorkers in ways that more commonplace national social issues like guns and abortion fail to do. Most social issues are really a form of class identification. When Obama sneered about poor Pennsylvania whites bitterly clinging to their guns and bibles at a San Fran fundraiser, he was really talking about class.

Gun control is a sharp divide between the regimented urban environment and the rural culture. Abortion is also about class as defined by the stark choices between family or career. They are about the new America and the old. The America of the gun and the gun pop tart. The America of the aborted baby and the replacement illegal alien. The America of the car and of the bike.

The America where everyone is jammed up by space and government and the one where you make your own boundaries.

To many New Yorkers, the bike is a nuisance. To others it's an identity. The issue isn't two wheels over four in some vehicular hodgepodge of animal farm. It's about control of the streets. The city is not its buildings. It is its streets. The buildings house people, but the streets define the purpose of the city. A city with streets full of cars is a working city. A city with streets full of bikes is a leisure city.

The gentrification blitzkrieg is as much social as it is environmental. It's no secret that Bloomberg hates cars. Or that the yuppies or yuckies who have transformed corners of the city into tiny slices of Portland hate them even more. The new bikeshare program is as much about displacing people as it is about placing them. It's about the kind of city that they want to see.

The old loud New York City is being made smooth and quiet. Old noisy bars are making way for fake retro establishments that look like they date back a hundred years ago, but weren't even there last week. Car lanes are giving way to bike lanes. On one side overgrown children gleefully pedal their Citibank bikes, a habit they will abandon when winter sets in. On the other, the grandchildren of factory workers and the children of postal workers, watch them go by.

There are rural parts of the country where walkers are suspect. A man who walks down the street, rather than drives, is suspected of being a bum or a criminal. Solid citizens own cars and drive them to work or to the mall. Indigents walk. The urban centers however are swinging the other way. It's the drivers who are suspect and the bike riders who are the solid citizens of the recyclable state.

Social standing is often a function of wealth signified by leisure. Fat was in when food was scarce and having a rotund belly meant having wealth and freedom from work Now that everyone can eat, fat is out. The mark of the wealthy leisure class is the time to spend on exercise programs that transform their bodies into some ever-shifting ideal. And the peak of that leisure class is Hollywood.

Bikes, once associated with a wealthy leisure class who had the time to pursue their interest in nature and healthy activities, became universal when nearly every child could have one. Now bikes have been priced up into expensive adult toys. Cities are full of grown men and women who spend fortunes on expensive bikes that they hardly ever use except on the weekends, but hang prominently by their doors so that everyone can see.

The car owner is more likely to be a working man, while a bike communicates membership in a leisure class. Like an exercise programs, it says that the owner has the time and the money to take it slow, to not worry about timelines and deadlines, to do his own thing. The biking adult cares, which is the chief hobby of the leisure class. The more someone cares, the less he works. Caring is a full time job for people who don't have full time jobs.

The new elite cares. Its claim to caring is also its claim to power. They claim, therefore they rule. America doesn't really make things anymore. It cares. It cares so much that it invades other countries to change their governments. It cares so much that it squanders fortunes on foreign aid. It cares so much that it goes deep into debt to fund social services and then promote them. It cares so much that it bans salt, cars and large sodas while insisting that everyone ride bikes.

Millennials are less likely to drive than any other previous generation. The American Dream in the new Yuckie outposts is compacting down from a home and car to a bike and an apartment just big enough to keep it in, a Netflix account and a small gig at a non-profit to pay down student loans. It's all very European and all very doomed.

"A European country is — like Germany, France, England — those countries are between 60 and 80 million people," Bill Maher told CNN. "We have those 60, 80 million smart people . . . but we just have more people. There’s a great, smart European country in America; it’s just surrounded by a bunch of rednecks."

It would be hard to come up with a more accurate mission statement for the new technocracy than that. Focus on that core few million who can be persuaded to ride bikes to work and get into debt obtaining degrees in useless fields and get rid of the rest. The street lanes being torn up and replaced with sidewalks and bike lanes are the physical embodiment of that philosophy. Europe is only another million miles of bike lanes away.

And that's probably true. But it's not the rational Europe where everything is neat, clean and tidy. Where everything works and no one gets hung up on nationalism or religion. That place only exists in the wishful thinking of American leftists who still carry around an inferiority complex for a mother country that they never knew.

The Europe that they biking toward is a place sharply divided between the unemployed minority youth who burn cars and the unemployed overeducated natives who have six advanced degrees and nothing to do but demand that the government lower university rates further. It's a place where some things are neat and clean, but other things are on fire. Where the only people who believe in nationalism or religion are immigrants and the nationalism and religion they believe in are of their own home countries.

Cities like New York are scurrying to attract the young urban elite with bike lanes and sidewalk cafes, with craft beer and organic food, and confidence that the only thing that can save them is transitioning to a knowledge economy in which people won't drive to work on a 9-to-5 schedule, but will instead leisurely bike around while contemplating some breakthrough social media app that will change everything.

That sometimes happens, but you can't run a city on that. Not even if you get rid of Maher's other 200 million non-Europeans who drive cars or who just sit on the racks full of bicycles and push the pedals while going nowhere.

Europe is a dead end. Its national societies and economics are in a state of deep insecurity and decline. The technocracy dreaming of a United States run to European Socialist standards is riding
a bike lane to nowhere.

Ready for Hillary is the PAC run by an environmentalist sweatshop owner and sleazy Texas storm chasing lawyer whose mission is to pave the way for the coronation of Hillary Clinton at the Democratic National Convention.

And then the cameras will pan to the strategically selected multiracial girls sitting on the shoulders of
their mothers holding up signs reading, "Hillary Taught Me I Can Be Anything I Want To Be" and the same media personalities who trashed her bid in 2008 will be discussing how great it will be to have a female president in 2016.

The name "Ready for Hillary" is a callback to that 2008 election when the country wasn't ready for her. There is no admission that Hillary may have been unready in 2008. Hillary is never unready. Hillary never makes any mistakes. Not even when four Americans end up dead.

It's not Hillary who wasn't ready in 2008. It was the country that wasn't ready for Hillary. And now she will graciously give the nation of fools and ignoramuses another chance to vote for her. It's a noblesse oblige that should touch even the coldest Alaskan heart.

Why vote for Hillary? Because Hillary wants you to vote for her. Because she expects you to vote for her. There is that cloud of unmet expectations that she carries with her everywhere she goes, drifting through the frosty smiles that shift into the overenthusiastic mannerisms of a woman who has never gotten comfortable with audiences because she really doesn't like people very much.

There is no actual reason to vote for Hillary except that she's running. Obama could at least cobble together some stage-managed charisma, a few lifted quotes from African-American writers and a pinch of skeptical leftism into the persona of a political machine. Hillary never even had that. All the charisma is on Bill's side of the family. Hillary delivers speeches with determination, but no heart. Like everything that involves dealing with people, you can tell that she's just trying to get through it.

Ready for Hillary has never really gotten past 2008, the way that some Democrats never got past 2000 and are still obsessed with Bush. With Biden about as likely to become president as the ducks of Central Park are to spontaneously begin performing Hamlet for Shakespeare in the Park, Hillary has inherited the mantle, but has no idea what to do with it. And that's the story of her life.

Hillary Clinton is a talented bureaucratic warrior. Put her in an organization and she will find a way to climb into a position that is the perfect jumping off point for something higher. And then when she makes the leap, she only goes halfway and ends up in an uncomfortable position. Bill Clinton got her to First Lady where she was stuck in a ceremonial role, unable to nationalize health care, but able to fire White House staffers.

Bill Clinton's infidelity got her to the Senate, but then she was stuck again and fell while jumping for the White House. That got her stuck as Secretary of State and she hopes that presiding over the Arab Spring and Benghazi will do more to get her over the top than being First Lady or the Sinecure Senator from New York did. 

The common thread is that Hillary never does the job she has. Instead she neglects it while planning to use it to go somewhere higher up.

Hillary would like to run on being Secretary of State, but she doesn't have a thing to show for her time in the State Department. Nothing good at any rate. Mentioning the Arab Spring is hopeless. And that just leaves her reset button with Russia or the opening of Burma. The trouble with either of those achievements is that they both turned sour fast. The Russian reset button failed and Muslim pressure on Burma over a flood of Bangladeshi Muslims has gotten liberals all worked up over the country.

There's no doubt that Hillary has 1001 stories about all the famous people she met and how she solved diplomatic impasses through creative thinking, but none of the stories add up to anything without an issue or a region or an event that gives people a reason to care. And Hillary doesn't have that.

The classier version of Ready for Hillary argues that she was cut off from authority and that no one listened to her good ideas. That puts Hillary Clinton in the strange position of running against an administration that she was part of. On the one hand, Hillary is running for president based on her work as Secretary of State. And on the other, she's not responsible for anything that happened while she occupied that position because she was really powerless.

There's a cynical posturing victimhood underlying all this. It's always someone else's fault. Hillary tried her best, but they just weren't ready to let her do the job. So the only answer is to give her the biggest job in the land based on eight years in the Senate and a brief term as Secretary of State that she wants credit, but not responsibility for.

Ready for Hillary is trying to learn the lessons of the Obama campaign. But the cool is missing. They're trying to make Hillary's pantsuit cool. And they're selling campaign swag that looks like it came from a German experimentalist film made behind the Iron Curtain. Considering that Ready is co-chaired by a woman who ran a major fashion brand, it's a little confusing why the Hillary gear looks like it was designed by a surly teenage girl after five minutes in photoshop and a lot of glue.

The dominant theme is oppressive. There's nothing inspirational here. The design cues seem to have been taken from Shepard Fairey's work, not on the Obama "Hope" poster but on his "Obey" art. Instead of a disembodied face of Andre the Giant, there's a disembodied face of Hillary, looking suspiciously like her British doppleganger Emma Thompson who played her in Primary Colors. Instead of OBEY, it says READY, but the meaning is the same.

After a period of appropriate mocking, the designs will be shaken up. There will be fewer red, black and gray combinations that look like they came from a Goth garage sale, but the depressive spirit of Hillary 2016 will linger on.

Hillary's supporters sometimes identify with her, but they don't really believe in her. The identification is based on that sense of inevitable doom. The expectation that Hillary will get close enough to the big prize that she really wants only to have it unfairly snatched away from her grasp. It's not Hillary the diplomat, the senator or the liberal activist who inspires them, it's their own sense that they can never get as far ahead as they deserve without being slapped down.

They're not ready for Hillary to win. They're ready for her to lose. They want to see her continue on, even through the setbacks the way that they continue on through their setbacks. It's not Hillary the winner that they want, but Hillary the survivor. Hillary Clinton has come to occupy the cultural space of a country song and she can't seem to figure out how to break the cycle.

Ready for Hillary tries to be fresh but it carries a sizable whiff of grievance. Its underlying message is that Hillary should have won in 2008. And that message is true enough. Hillary's qualifications were limited, but they were superior to those of Obama. There were enough votes to put her over the top. And while she would have been a disaster, it's doubtful that the disaster would have been as big and bad as it was under Obama.

But the real reason that she lost was that sense of futility. The plans that she and Bill had worked out came to nothing when the economy overturned and pretending to a Democrat who had national security credentials was suddenly a formula for defeat. Now the plan is to run to the left of Obama on national security. And if her record holds true, then the timing will be just as bad this time around.

Hillary Clinton is big on planning, but is inflexible. Improvisation isn't her strong suit. It's not the
strong suit of the people around her. They're not creative people and they lack the instinct for risk. They wage long term campaigns and then don't understand when they fall short of their goals because the circumstances have changed.

The problem isn't that the country wasn't ready for Hillary. It was that Hillary had once again misread the country. Now she may be misreading it again by promising to solve all our problems with diplomacy instead of violence. Ready for Hillary wants to make "Ready" for Hillary into what "Hope" was for Obama. But Ready is Hillary's slogan. It's what she wants. Hope is what voters want.

Whether it's 2008 or 2016, Hillary still doesn't understand people. The voters don't need to be ready for her. She needs to be ready for them.

Debt is the surest and shortest path to a global economy. Punishing all actors in local economies but those who are “too big to fail” empowers “too big to fail” systems and “too big to fail” economies. Encouraging debt and the eventual assumption of debt passed on and commodified by increasingly larger political and economic entities creates supraentities built on debt and dedicated to economic regulation.

The assumption of state debts by the Federal government was a major step in the federalization of the United States. The growing assumption of micro and macro debts by the United States government and by international bodies allows for greater macro and micro regulation of economic activities.

Rewarding and promoting irresponsible economic behavior creates debt which creates opportunities for intervention. Individuals are encouraged to engage in irresponsible day to day consumer spending and large scale home and college loans. Financial institutions package irresponsible loans into commodities of debt. Governments bail out financial institutions by amassing even more debt to pay for the bailouts.

The buck keeps getting passed on until everyone is in debt from the micro to the macro level, from the citizen who has his own debts, the annual and the lifelong, and those of the nation which he is also being taxed to repay, up to banks and governments, where the same experts move imaginary numbers around until everyone is in debt and also a debt holder and then a global state of debt has become universalized.

The universalization of debt leads to the universalization of economic authority and eventually planned economies. By indebting everyone from the individual to the government, everyone is forced to maintain a bankrupt and broken system. Debts are obligations. Obligating everyone to the same system forces everyone to comply with the system.

Interlinked economies are more unstable and require more regulation. Interlinked national economies become regional economies with common regional regulations imposed on multiple countries. And regional economies link in to a global economy which requires universal global economic regulation of all actors from the lemonade stand to the multinational bank to maintain centrally planned targets.

Growing instability is met with tighter regulation leading to the increased power of oligarchies who regulate the system and the diminishing freedom of individuals. Every action taken to create greater security and stability for the oligarchy has the net effect of subtracting from the economic freedom of all smaller actors.

As debt gets passed up the system from the micro to the macro like a spark of electricity, the assumption of failure becomes institutionalized. Encouraging individuals, banks and governments to fail becomes a pathway for larger entities to capture smaller entities and for smaller entities to capture individuals. Irresponsible spending is promoted from the top down and captured from the bottom to the top so that larger entities promote irresponsible economic behavior and by accepting the consequences of that behavior take on the political and economic power of that assumption until the global economy is one great totalitarian welfare state built on subsidies and debt.

Financial institutions gain by encouraging consumer irresponsibility. Governments gain by encouraging irresponsible behavior by financial institutions. Global entities gain by encouraging irresponsible behavior by governments. Responsibility is traded for freedom, but individuals, institutions and governments, who give up freedom of action in exchange for being able to pass their responsibilities up the ladder, are participating in a shell game.

Responsibility is being passed up the ladder, but accountability isn't. Larger systems cost more and distribute that cost widely. Endowing larger systems with responsibility universalizes the obligations of that system. Passing debt upward to national and global institutions means turning nations and global bodies into collection agencies which distribute the obligation of that debt in accordance with their own social and political agendas.

The obligations themselves cannot be escaped; only the direct responsibility for making the difficult decisions can be passed upward along the chain. If the frogs don't want to make their own decisions then they elect a king who makes all their decisions for them. The assumption of debt elects kings who decide how the debt must be repaid and who is first in line to collect and who is first in line to pay.

Larger systems do have more resources to tackle a problem than smaller ones, but those resources are less efficiently managed. When it comes to the individual distribution of those resources, the larger system has less to offer than the smaller one. All that it really offers is the evasion of responsibility.

When failure is institutionalized then the primary task of each failing system is the evasion of responsibility. Institutionalizing failure also universalizes failure so that no one is responsible, but everyone is responsible. No single person, company or government can be assigned the blame, but all of them are obligated to pay upward into the larger system which has assumed the debt.

The universalization of debt breaks the direct connection between debtor and debt holders, both the real one and the moral one. Class warfare colludes with debt collector economics to go after the most prosperous individuals and nations first. And then down the line so that those who amass the most debt are also the last to be asked to pay it. This institutionalization of failure rewards failure economies and implements feudalism with those who have the most accepting responsibility for the welfare of the serfs and implicitly gaining power over them. The more the serfs run up debt, the more the power of the barons grows. This is a formula for mutual resentment and class warfare.

The broken connection hides the forms in which debt is collected as the assumption of failure requires higher taxes and more structured systems that deprive people of economic freedom without alerting them to the real reasons why this is done. The institutionalization of failure raises the cost of every part of the institution that engages in the assumption of failure. This cost is universalized to hide its sources.

Protecting the sources of failure is a primary goal of those who benefit from institutionalizing and universalizing failure. If the failure sources are addressed, isolated and treated then smaller systems and actors will reclaim economic responsibility robbing larger systems of their regulatory power. Creating entire sectors dedicated to economic irresponsibility in the name of greed and idealism is a means of weakening smaller systems and individuals in order to subsume them into a global failure economy.

Every local failure where the responsibility remains localized creates a mandate for local regulation, whether it is the individual regulating his own spending or the municipality or company learning the lessons of their own setbacks or governments addressing their own monetary policy. However every local failure where the loci of responsibility are passed upward creates mandates for regulation at the level to which that responsibility has been passed on to.

The assumption of debt increases regulatory mandates to the highest level of its assumption. And as the mandates increase they tip from regulating risk to mandating activity much like the way that universal health care went from offering health care to mandating health insurance purchases. The federalization of power reduces the natural limits of that power. Expanding economic authority within a central system leads to a planned economy.

The more debt is assumed, the more authority is assumed. Maximizing debt also maximizes and centralizes control over spending. Central planning reduces economic flexibility and diversity in order to meet target goals which can never be met because the very system created to meet them is incompatible with the efficiency and productivity necessary to achieve them.

An ever more expensive system that produces ever diminishing results and warps the economy around itself creates another economic black hole. It's an economic black hole whose event horizon could be seen in the declining days of the Soviet Union when the failure of the agricultural collectives took it deep into debt buying American wheat or in the Obama Administration’s obsession with government stimulus plans to revive an economy even as that spending is pushing the country closer to default on its debts.

Grandiose political and economic systems come wrapped in ideologies that reinforce assumptions about an ideal state of human behavior. A state which does not exist in the real world. Drawing links between an ideal state of behavior and an ideal economic state inevitably results in ideologically driven economic disasters as leaders and regulators assume that enforcing and enacting ideal behavior will yield an ideal economy.

The cloistered nature of central institutions makes them all the more vulnerable to ideological mapping. Ideologies thrive in hothouse atmospheres alienated from the real world where the ideal is easily mistaken for the real and passion for castles in the sky construction outweighs the mud and dirt challenges of building actual structures. The further an institution is detached from the consequences of its policies, the less capable it is of experiencing negative feedback and the less reliable the reports that reach it are.

When failure comes it is never attributed to the ideology or to the entire structure, rather to a failure of comprehensive control. Each attempt at deepening control expands the system that is the cause of the problem and deepens the level of failure in areas affected by the system. The more the ideal is pursued, the more the real declines until the entire system implodes with devastating consequences.

Having exploited the failure of the preexisting systems to amass authority and responsibility within a centrally planned economy, the failure of the central system destroys the decision making capacity for all areas under its responsibility. A central system creates a culture of failure by robbing individuals and smaller entities of power. When it gives out, the smaller entities have lost their capacity for making their own rational economic decisions and have to start from scratch. Having turned everything under its control into one giant welfare prison where the inmates are cared for by the nanny state, the collapse of the system leaves the inmates, whether they are individuals, municipalities or nations with no available skills to care for themselves.

The economics of planned global failure threaten to repeat the consequences of the decline and fall of the Soviet Union on a global scale. While such a system is never likely to successfully come into being, it has been the long term progressive aim throughout the twentieth and now the twenty-first century. It is now closer to coming into being than at any time before. The distillation of free market economics into the crony capitalist corporation which looks to the government to take care of the messes It makes even as it campaigns for a borderless world is tipping the globe closer into the black hole of a planned global economy where universal debt leads to universal power and universal failure.

Two years ago, the media had a prolonged belly laugh at a group that predicted the end of the world. Now media outlets from The New York Times to The New Republic to The Economist are wrestling with the question of why their own ideology's doomsday predictions are not coming to pass.

"If scientific models can’t project the last 15 years, what does that mean for their projections of the next 100?," the New Republic asks. It means that the world isn't going to end.

Even as Obama exploits Global Warming to launch a War on Affordable Energy, the doomsday environmentalists look as foolish as any other group that set a date for the end of the world, only for the world to stubbornly go on existing.

True believers in Gore would say that's the difference between science and eschatology. But when bogus science warns us of an apocalypse if we don't follow the tenets of their ideology, then how much difference is there anyway?

Of course no one expects MSNBC to do sneering reports of global warming activists freezing at a protest or Al Gore being forced to watch a count down of a solidly frozen North Pole. Such mockery is only directed at people who believe in more unpopular forms of apocalypses. At least unpopular at the broadcasting studios of Manhattan.

It's fashionable to mock religious leaders for hypocrisy, but there isn't a peep when the Vice President turned Prophet of Gaia lectures on watching our carbon footprint and then flies on jet fueled carbon wings to another concert on behalf of the planet.

Other aspiring prophets like Prince Charles, who admires poverty, but lives in privilege, are no better. Or Obama who told Americans that they couldn't heat their homes as they pleased, while keeping his thermostat up to Hawaiian standards.

If the invariably prosperous believers in Death by Global Warming really believed in the creed, wouldn't they be selling their homes and cars, and going off to live a simpler life in the Himalayan mountains. But it's easier to believe in something than to practice it.

Like all liberal social engineering projects, environmentalism is meant to change everyone's life. And there's no point in its proponents doing more than paying lip service to it, as they make it the law of the land. If Osama bin Laden could preach Islamic morality while stocking up on X rated tapes, surely Al Gore can foretell the doom of the North Pole and still take a private jet around the world.

If liberals have turned to doomsday predictions, it's because they have discovered that religion and the apocalypse can be a marvelously effective way of controlling human behavior. But their religion is materialistic, concerned with the human presence in the natural world. Even its materialism is consumeristic.

The Reds had no truck with environmentalism. To a Communist, the natural world was a mass of raw resources to be used to build socialism. But to the children of the capitalists, concerned more with what they buy, than with what they do, environmentalism restraints and directs their buying habits. As religions goes, environmentalism is the Consumer Reports of theologies.

For all the talk of apocalypse and melting poles, the environmentalists really only care about your economic activity. Buy or don't buy. But preferably buy, so long as you're buying green, or buying carbon credits along with whatever you're buying.

The sinner fills up on paper towels, but the righteous man buys paper towels with a green stamp on the box. The man of little faith may drive an SUV, and the faithful may also drive an SUV, but the faithful man's SUV has a bumper sticker warning everyone to conserve something or other. Such hypocrisies are constant, pervasive and little commented on.

What began as a movement for the responsible stewardship of the earth has been corrupted from the ethical to the fanatical. Conservationism kept humanity in the picture. Environmentalism rages at humanity. Behind its colorful drawings and its dolphin key chains is the vision of a world in which humanity and its fire sticks are the original sin.

That primal rage has been channeled and diluted into a million businesses, into countless regulations and profitable ventures. The new environmentalists are regulatory robber barons like Al Gore, green rent seeking tycoons looking to use cap and trade, and a thousand mandatory revenue streams to fleece both the faithful and the unfaithful. There is no further way to corrupt environmentalism, its existence is already an abiding corruption. For the false prophets, the lab coated peddlers of junk science and the writers dreaming up ever more fanciful depictions of the day when the oceans rise and man finds himself paddling for safety besides the polar bear, there is nothing left but the lie.

The religious apocalypse is the break between a fallen world and a better world. But in the environmental apocalypse, it is only the end. Materialistic eschatology cannot see any way past the end or any purpose for it. Only a Waterworld in which some of us develop gills and others have to learn to kayak.

The threat of their end of days is meant to badger us into bowing our heads and opening our wallets. Buy Green or the North Pole will end in 5 years. Bicycle to work or a polar bear will chew your ear off. Their end of days lacks imagination and proof. It is constantly imminent, yet never arrives. It is held to be proven so thoroughly that it can never be disproven. And who would want to disprove it, except someone who doesn't already have a grant to prove it.

There's hardly a problem in the world that the media doesn't blame on Global Warming. When it's hot, they point to Global Warming. When it's cold, they also point to Global Warming. Earthquakes,civil wars and the end of WiFi are all laid at the door of one single phenomenon. The difference between religion and science is that one is revealed truth and the other is theory. But when men and women in lab coats start predicting the end of days if the heretics don't repent and cast out their incandescent light bulbs and SUV's, then what you have is theory as revealed truth. An experiment in eschatology.

Science requires objectivity. Combine science with ideology and you get a mandatory belief in absurdity. Everyone who self-righteously insists that global warming is science misses the point. The scientific orthodoxy of every generation has embraced ridiculous and wrongheaded theories. Science is not a pure form of revealed truth, it is the trial and error process by which we crawl toward a better understanding. A less flawed picture of the universe. Turn the scientific orthodoxy of any era into a mandatory ideology and you have killed the science and left only another belief system.

Environmentalists parade around the corpse of science on their shoulders, mount it on their walls and proclaim that science is on their side. Once you completely murder a system of using trial and error experimentation to confirm a theory, then you might as well use it as a banner on a flagpole or a trophy in your living room. But the environmentalist' science has as much relation to a living field, as the head of a dead moose mounted over a bed and breakfast's fireplace does to a living creature.

Ideology has killed science and now claims its intellectual credibility for its own. But purging dissenting scientists, burning books and silencing all critics with jeers is not science, no more than what passed for it in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany was science. It is the fanaticism of an ideology, the championing of backwardness, the exploitation of titles and terminology to silence debate and betray the ethical trust of inquiry.

The end of the world? The same people who ridicule religious people waiting for the end, are waiting for their own end of the world without any real faith in it.

Their end of the world is only another consumeristic strategy for convincing people to buy the right brands and donate to the right causes. It is as hollow as everything else

No one will hang around with a count down clock in 2014 and wait for the North Pole to end. Not even if Gore's prediction were better known. Those who believe in Global Warming, paradoxically don't really believe that the world could actually end. They may eat up the cinematic spectacle of oceans rising, cities sinking underwater and whales doing belly flops over the Grand Canyon, but it never really touches them.

To understand why is to understand the purpose of environmentalism. Its harsh criticism of consumerism turns it into a moral activity. The Whole Foods shopper is elevated above the Wal-Mart shopper. The woman who buys sneakers made of recycled tires isn't shopping, she's engaged in an ethical communion with the earth. Environmentalism is the theology of consumerism, uplifting it rather than proscribing it, taking a cut of ordinary economic activities in exchange for its blessing.

Environmentalism is the religion of the comfortable, and the theology of the convenient. It injects a false spirituality into the materialism of the faithless. There is nothing to it but greed. From the false prophets spinning tales of the end, to scientists doing a more elevated version of the same for grant money to scribes envisioning the end for a lucrative book or movie deal. It's not the end of the world they're waiting for, but a commercial break.

Thank G-d, the medical situation mentioned in earlier weeks is improving. Hopefully this coming week will bring better news. This week was surprisingly all original articles, despite the conditions.

The roundup will still be brief as I am typing this up with not that much time left before I have to head out to the hospital. A place which I hopefully will never have to see for a very long time afterward.



OBAMAWAR 2: THE SEQUEL

To invade Libya, Obama lied and told the American people that the residents of Benghazi were about to suffer a massacre that would stain “the conscience of the world.” No such massacre had taken place or was ever going to take place. The only innocent people who wound up massacred in Benghazi were the Americans sent there by Hillary Clinton.

This time, swap out Aleppo or Homs for Benghazi as the cities badly in need of American protection. Never mind that the Christians of Aleppo and Homs, the only innocent parties in a religious war between a Shiite government and Sunni terrorist groups, are in far more danger from the Islamist Sunni terrorists that Obama is proposing to arm.

The Free Syrian Army’s Farouq Brigades went door to door expelling Christians in Homs. Of the 160,000 Christians in the city, there are now barely a 1,000.

In Qseir, the city recently recaptured by the Syrian Army from the Sunni militias, whose loss partly triggered the rush to war by the Western allies of the Muslim Brotherhood, most of the Christians had fled a place where they were once 10 percent of the population following Sunni Muslim persecution.

The 10,000 Christians of Qseir were ordered to leave the city by loudspeakers on mosques. If Obama’s intervention helps the Islamist militias retake Qseir; there will soon be no Christians left in the city at all. And the same goes for Homs and Aleppo.

Obama Lies America Into Another War



A FEW NUMBERS

Israel Spent $126 Billion on Security Due to Palestinian Peace Process

Amnesty to Expand Obamacare, Medicare, Medicaid Spending by $512 Billion

70% of Americans Oppose Obama’s Plan to Arm Syrian Terrorists

Obama Inc. Gave Syrians $815 Million in Aid

ObamaCare Could Result in $250 Billion Tax Fraud

Detroit Offering Creditors 10 Cents on the Dollar

Obama Brings 10,000 Syrians to America

Shaunnah Turner

THIS IS THE NEW EGYPT

Last year Morsi freed one of the monsters behind the Luxor Massacre. Now he appointed another member of The Islamic Group as the Governor of Luxor. His plans for increasing tourism reportedly involve a massive ad campaign followed by a major massacre.

A survivor of the Luxor massacre remembers that the gunmen “took all the young women, the girls, and disappeared with them. I don’t know where they went with the women, but they hurt them. We could hear screams of pain.”

The foreign dead included 31 Swiss, 10 Japanese, five Germans, four Britons one a child a Bulgarian, a Colombian and a French citizen.

The youngest victim was 5 year old Shaunnah Turner.

Morsi Appoints Member of Al Qaeda Allied Group that Massacred European Tourists in Luxor, Governor of Luxor




OF RELIGIOUS WARS

What strikes me about this is that Obama is obscenely eager to describe the troubles in Northern Ireland in religious terms, but completely refuses to acknowledge that his Syrian Civil War is a religious conflict.

Conflicts involving Christians can be religious, but not conflicts involving Muslims. Muslims never kill for religious reasons.

Irish Bishop Blasts Obama’s Anti-Catholic Bigotry




THE MIDDLE THREAT

The one consistent thing with Obama is that the middle class is always the enemy. The middle class the enemy of the poor. The middle class is the enemy of big government. The middle class is even the enemy of the planet.

Darn that middle class. If only there was some way to tax and regulate it out of existence.

Obama Warns Growing Middle Class is Threatening the Environment




 BUSINESS AS USUAL

Denmark Refuses to Deport Al Qaeda Soldier Who Raped 10-Year-Old Because He is “Well Integrated”

Taliban Attack Air Base, Kill 4 US Soldiers, After Obama Praises Them for Agreeing to Negotiations

6 Muslims Sentenced to Community Service for Gang Rape of 15 Year Old Swedish Girl

Imam of Largest Sacramento Mosque: “When People Listen to Music, They Ask for Alcohol, Which Will Lead to Adultery”





RUBIO CAN'T CUT IT

Marco Rubio is likable. That likability is his chief asset. Even as he champions a wildly unpopular bill among his own base, his numbers remain high. It’s not just magic.

Rubio is everywhere. If you tune in to Univision, you can hear him promising legalization. If you watch FOX News, you’ll hear him express disappointment in his own bill, almost sounding as he might not vote for the very thing that he has staked his entire career on.

There are many Rubios. At times it seems as if there are as many Rubios as there are Obama. A flock of smiling men with neat black hair who can talk Tupac, the American dream and anything in between for as long as you want them too.

The real Rubio isn’t likable. The real Rubio wants to be liked. The real Rubio is desperately insecure and desperate to please everyone at the same time. The real Rubio is in over his head.

Rubio Can't Cut It



DOING THE MATH

Let’s start with the more “intact families” thing. 42 percent of Latino kids are living in single parent homes. That’s better than the number for African-Americans, but much worse than the white 25 percent number. And the Latino broken home numbers have been steadily rising.

Jeb Bush’s Immigrant Fertility Welfare State Solution



A NATION WITH AN ECONOMY

I don't really have much time to read or link to things, but I thought that the NR rejection of Amnesty made a very important point.

While there are some persuasive economic arguments in favor of expanding legal immigration, the United States is a nation with an economy, not an economy with a nation.

BUSINESS AS USUAL II

Obama Official Says White House in Complete Control of Gang of 8

Hillary’s State Department Covered Up Hooker Escapades in Italy, Forced Out Whistleblower

Scottish Police Worry Breakup of 2 Muslim Paedophile Rings Will “Increase Community Tensions”

He folds a napkin in what looks like some expensive oyster bar, but is probably just a television studio backdrop. "The government has to get us back to work."
Liberalism has become sick with its own disease. It is as dogma-ridden as any Red drinking sour beer in 1920s Chicago. It has nothing to offer to anyone except the ideological denunciation of thought crimes and the attendant superiority of being on the right side of the guillotine. And it has the misplaced self-righteousness of those who are busy pretending that they are angry about what is being done to other people, rather than their own egotistical anger with which they confront their sense of futility.