As Predicted

This is a time when I hate being right in these previous articles. This is a night I surely wish I were wrong, completely and utterly wrong.

North Koreans are starving once again, and for now it’s the tyrannies and the slave states that will feel the brunt of hunger. Later, if we do not make energy more plentiful it will spread to poor states, not just the failed ones. Growing, transporting, and storing food is energy intensive, the higher energy goes, the higher food price will go. From Washington Post:

The main U.N. aid agency in North Korea, the World Food Program, will resume emergency operations there in the next two weeks to help feed more than 5 million people over the next 15 months at a cost of $500 million, said Jean-Pierre de Margerie, the agency’s country director in Pyongyang.

“The situation is indeed very serious,” de Margerie said at a news conference in Beijing.

The resumption of emergency operations, which were scaled back in 2005 on a request from the North Korean government, was decided after a U.N. survey last month showed the most severe and widespread hunger among North Koreans in a decade. The survey was taken after the Pyongyang government, in an unusual gesture, officially acknowledged a growing hunger crisis and appealed for international aid.

Here’s a short video of what it was like last time North Korea went through Famine.

Warning: Do not watch if you are weak of heart or spirit.

 

Obama’s “Socialism”

Obama is clearly the most socialist candidate ever to win the nomination of a major political party in the United States. In Europe they love him because he matches the politicians that they are used to there. The concepts and proposals that he vaguely puts forth match those of the Euro parties of trade-unionists, elite socialists, technocrats, and populists whose alliance to Marxist principle varies by only faint shades in the reddish rainbow of European politics.

Months ago in political discussion with friends I mentioned that the word “justice” is used very often by Barack Obama, and in this century it’s shorthand for socialist policy. Since that policy is largely discredited they can’t call it socialism, which is why the Communist group “The World Can’t Wait” calls for political justice, social justice, just wages, just…. everything. They are joined in this chorus for justice by international ANSWER, but these really are the new faces of the Communist party in America.

But let’s get back to Barackian “justice,” is it somehow different? Not really if you look at his proposals, as IBD does in detail here.

Following this discredited Marxist model, he believes government must step in and redistribute pieces of the pie. That requires massive transfers of wealth through government taxing and spending, a return to the entitlement days of old.

Of course, Obama is too smart to try to smuggle such hoary collectivist garbage through the front door. He’s disguising the wealth transfers as “investments” — “to make America more competitive,” he says, or “that give us a fighting chance,” whatever that means.

Among his proposed “investments”:

• “Universal,” “guaranteed” health care.

• “Free” college tuition.

• “Universal national service” (a la Havana).

• “Universal 401(k)s” (in which the government would match contributions made by “low- and moderate-income families”).

• “Free” job training (even for criminals).

• “Wage insurance” (to supplement dislocated union workers’ old income levels).

• “Free” child care and “universal” preschool.

• More subsidized public housing.

• A fatter earned income tax credit for “working poor.”

• And even a Global Poverty Act that amounts to a Marshall Plan for the Third World, first and foremost Africa.

His new New Deal also guarantees a “living wage,” with a $10 minimum wage indexed to inflation; and “fair trade” and “fair labor practices,” with breaks for “patriot employers” who cow-tow to unions, and sticks for “nonpatriot” companies that don’t.

That’s just for starters — first-term stuff.

My friends thought that I was loopy when I connected Barack’s constant use of the word Justice and Marxism, and you might also — except WCW and ANSWER are both avowedly communist but trying to appear socialist. If you disbelieve just go to their web sites, or visit Zombietime.com where you can see photos of them selling communist literature and shirts, and expousing communist ideology and websites with their placards.

We defeated the USSR and put Communism on its back, but what’s the point if we give up freedom and capitalism now?

Images again

Artemis by Geoff Hunt RSMA

In case you are wondering about the glut of photos lately I”m fiddling with the gallery feature in wordpress so that I can not only insert them but also manage how they appear easier. (left right, border etc.) Right now if I don’t want defaults of wordpress to take over I have to insert manual coding for each picture which is not fun and it takes time from writing. I have this print on my wall btw, and if you like it you can find it here, along with many more fine paintings of fighting ships from the Napoleonic era.

Well it’s still not working right, so back to manual coding pictures. WordPress releases are becoming more two steps forward, one step back lately.

The Dark Knight of Our Souls

The Hero and Terror

The Dark Knight portrays a quintessential struggle between good and evil in in a fantasy setting that’s an allegory for the real world and the larger struggles within it. It’s the movie about the war on terror that Hollywood cannot and will not force itself to make.

Hollywood has made several attempts at war movies, but they cannot help but be perniciously moralistic in purveying their political views in them.  There’s no choice to make other than to not watch if you oppose those views. Nobody goes to see those movies because you know how they will be. Our troops, the US, our institutions are almost always portrayed in them as bad. Who wants to see them when most people, even if they disagree with the war, know that the US is not wholly bad?

When you start from the concept that all war is bad no matter the motive, then you end in a moral quagmire where the good becomes the bad and evil gets ignored, or worse, justified.

The Dark Knight is breaking records and many will see this movie multiple times. They will see it not because of the special effects, not because of the great acting, not because of the superb editing or directing. They will see it instead because it portrays heros who must make moral choices over and over throughout the movie. They must choose between life and death, good and evil, they must choose between happiness and misery, they must weigh and judge.

I’ll not spoil the movie with specificity about those choices, but among them are the choice to confront or submit to terror, to sacrifice happiness for the greater good, to choose between life and death, to submit to venality and easy path or to persist through pain and horror.

Most of America and our troops will love this movie because in every scene those moral choices are made during The Dark Knight moment by moment by moment. They will recognize those choices for they also have to choose, to judge, to decide. In the case of our troops every choice in the movie is one they’ve already confronted and chosen rightly on.

The poster says “Welcome to a world with no rules” but the nihilistic and Nietzschean statement gets overuled by laws and choices: those laws that the universe and reality present us with, and those choices we make to build purpose within it. Watch for the choices in this movie if you would grasp meaning from it.

The Audacity of Hopelessness

Today Senator John McCain gave a speech in Denver, and this segment bears repeating:

Senator Obama and I also faced a decision, which amounted to a real-time test for a future commander-in-chief. America passed that test. I believe my judgment passed that test. And I believe Senator Obama’s failed.We both knew the politically safe choice was to support some form of retreat. All the polls said the “surge” was unpopular. Many pundits, experts and policymakers opposed it and advocated withdrawing our troops and accepting the consequences. I chose to support the new counterinsurgency strategy backed by additional troops — which I had advocated since 2003, after my first trip to Iraq. Many observers said my position would end my hopes of becoming president. I said I would rather lose a campaign than see America lose a war. My choice was not smart politics. It didn’t test well in focus groups. It ignored all the polls. It also didn’t matter. The country I love had one final chance to succeed in Iraq. The new strategy was it. So I supported it. Today, the effects of the new strategy are obvious. The surge has succeeded, and we are, at long last, finally winning this war.

Senator Obama made a different choice. He not only opposed the new strategy, but actually tried to prevent us from implementing it. He didn’t just advocate defeat, he tried to legislate it. When his efforts failed, he continued to predict the failure of our troops. As our soldiers and Marines prepared to move into Baghdad neighborhoods and Anbari villages, Senator Obama predicted that their efforts would make the sectarian violence in Iraq worse, not better.

And as our troops took the fight to the enemy, Senator Obama tried to cut off funding for them. He was one of only 14 senators to vote against the emergency funding in May 2007 that supported our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. …

Three weeks after Senator Obama voted to deny funding for our troops in the field, General Ray Odierno launched the first major combat operations of the surge. Senator Obama declared defeat one month later: “My assessment is that the surge has not worked and we will not see a different report eight weeks from now.” His assessment was popular at the time. But it couldn’t have been more wrong.

By November 2007, the success of the surge was becoming apparent. Attacks on Coalition forces had dropped almost 60 percent from pre-surge levels. American casualties had fallen by more than half. Iraqi civilian deaths had fallen by more than two-thirds. But Senator Obama ignored the new and encouraging reality. “Not only have we not seen improvements,” he said, “but we’re actually worsening, potentially, a situation there.”

If Senator Obama had prevailed, American forces would have had to retreat under fire. The Iraqi Army would have collapsed. Civilian casualties would have increased dramatically. Al Qaeda would have killed the Sunni sheikhs who had begun to cooperate with us, and the “Sunni Awakening” would have been strangled at birth. Al Qaeda fighters would have safe havens, from where they could train Iraqis and foreigners, and turn Iraq into a base for launching attacks on Americans elsewhere. Civil war, genocide and wider conflict would have been likely.

Above all, America would have been humiliated and weakened. Our military, strained by years of sacrifice, would have suffered a demoralizing defeat. Our enemies around the globe would have been emboldened. …

Senator Obama told the American people what he thought you wanted to hear. I told you the truth.

Fortunately, Senator Obama failed, not our military. We rejected the audacity of hopelessness, and we were right. Violence in Iraq fell to such low levels for such a long time that Senator Obama, detecting the success he never believed possible, falsely claimed that he had always predicted it. … In Iraq, we are no longer on the doorstep of defeat, but on the road to victory.

Senator Obama said this week that even knowing what he knows today that he still would have opposed the surge. In retrospect, given the opportunity to choose between failure and success, he chooses failure. I cannot conceive of a Commander in Chief making that choice.

h/t Powerline