Reality, Hypocrisy, Pointlessness and Failure...

The usual morning perusal of Investor Business Daily led to a perfect four-topic lead-in.

First of all, Reality:

Barack Obama, understanding the histrionics required in climate change debates, promises that U.S. emissions in 2050 will be 83% below 2005 levels. If so, 2050 emissions will equal those in 1910, when there were 92 million Americans. But there will be 420 million in 2050, so Obama's promise means that per capita emissions then will be about what they were in 1875. That. Will. Not. Happen.

Skeptics about the shrill certitudes concerning catastrophic man-made warming are skeptical because climate change is constant: From millennia before the Medieval Warm Period (800 to 1300), through the Little Ice Age (1500 to 1850), and for millennia hence, climate change is always a 100% certainty. Skeptics doubt that the scientists' models, which cannot explain the present, infallibly map the distant future.
...

Copenhagen is the culmination of the post-Kyoto maneuvering by people determined to fix the world's climate by breaking the world's — especially America's — population to the saddle of ever-more-minute supervision by governments.

But Copenhagen also is prologue for the 2010 climate change summit in Mexico City, which will be planet Earth's last chance, until the next one.

That is reality: there is no way that the US, let alone the industrialized countries of the world, will accept penitence and poverty - for that would be the results of 450 mn people living with the per capita emissions of 1875 - in exchange for ... what? A "scientific consensus" that is a secular religion, complete with preachers and a pope (his Holiness Al Gore)?

Now, this is also reality:

We'll let others comment on the hypocrisy of those who, while trying to force the rest of us into an ever-smaller carbon footprint, will employ more than 1,200 limousines and 140 private jets while producing 880 pounds of CO2 per attendee at their conference.

Or the even-worse hypocrisy of Rajendra Pachauri, the U.N.'s global warming guru, who in one 19-month period flew 443,243 miles — including trips to have dinner at Washington's Brookings Institution and one memorable overnighter to attend a cricket match — but now wants the rest of us to be forced into a "carbon allowance."

That's right: the man chanting sonorously about the horrors that will face the world unless His Will Be Done flew to attend a cricket match. Of course, he won't have to pay the carbon allowance, he's doing The Good Work.

The hypocrisy here is about as bad as that of the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages, thoroughly corrupted and begging for a Martin Luther to nail his theses to the door of the Cathedral at Worms.

Now for something completely pointless:

The Environmental Protection Agency has declared carbon dioxide, a gas necessary for life on Earth, to be a health hazard that has to be managed. What follows will be a useless bureaucratic exercise.

The announcement was made by EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson — the same official who admitted under oath in July that no matter what the U.S. does about carbon emissions, it will have little impact on global CO2 levels if China and India don't limit their output.

...

Carbon dioxide is simply a natural product of the respiration process that keeps animals alive and the combustion that powers and expands economies. Without it, we have none of the lush greenery or old-growth trees that environmentalists pretend to protect.

These environmentalists, who presumably have no problem with naturally occurring carbon emissions, argue that it's the man-made CO2 that's causing the planet to warm. But that's nonsense. CO2 makes up a mere 0.0384% of the atmosphere, and man's contribution to that is only about 3%.

I calculated that out: man-made CO2 is 0,001152% of the atmosphere. For this we should wear hair shirts and live in utter poverty to please our new ecological masters?

This from the left, pointing to their failure:

Getting a health care bill is important on its own, but it's central to establishing Obama's credentials as a domestic reformer and to proving that Democrats are capable of governing.

The Democrats are doing their level-headed best to prove that what they claim to be stereotypes - incapable of governing, given to wild-eyed conspiracy and lunatic fringe theories that have no basis in empirical reality, spendthrifts when it comes to other people's monies, dependent on massive public spending to get anything done, incapable of working with business and commerce, and beholden to special interests like no others - is actually a fairly accurate rendition of reality.

President Obama has no credentials: this should have been apparent during the campaign, but the pet media and the starry-eyed voters willfully ignored this and voted him in. He's their man: he is, right now, heading for failure.

And their contempt for the realities of governing this country are increasingly apparent:

Liberals are absolutely right in their frustration with the Senate. It's become an absurd institution, perhaps the least democratic legislative body in any country calling itself a democracy. It makes no sense that four or five votes can trump 54 or 55 votes. But the Senate is what it is. For now, liberals have to live with this.

Sorry: the Democrats don't want the system of checks and balances, the protection of minorities from the will of the majority. How fast they forget.

I'm sorry: I cannot have any respect for a party that thinks this way. It is abhorrent to the way the US has been governed for over 200 years, and the insinuation is that this is something that needs to be changed. Given this message, my inclination is that it is something that needs to be strengthened to prevent the tyranny of the vox populi that destroys every democracy.

Which is why we have a Republic. If we can keep it.

It's Beginning To Become Clear...and the Green Paradox...

It's beginning to become clear what the warming alarmists have been planning....

First of all, this. That makes it painfully clear what the agenda is behind the warming alarmists' actions has been:

It seems what most concerns Mr. Pachauri now is not climatology, or glaciology, or oceanography—but the way we live. "Today we have reached the point where consumption and people's desire to consume has grown out of proportion," he told the Observer, also on Sunday. "The reality is that our lifestyles are unsustainable."

Mr. Pachauri's actions speak even louder than his words. Last month, he branded the Indian environment minister "arrogant" after his office released a study that called into question whether climate-change is causing abnormal shrinkage of Himalayan glaciers. The IPCC's line is that Himalayan glaciers could be reduced by 80% or disappear entirely by 2035—but for this factoid, it cites no scientists, only the activist group, World Wildlife Fund. Now, the meteorologist and expert IPCC reviewer Madhav Khandekar says on Roger Pielke Sr.'s blog that the 2035 date may have been derived from a typo, based on a 1996 paper on snow and ice edited by V.M. Kotlyakov, which estimates the glaciers could be severely depleted or gone by 2350.

Mr. Pachauri was not available for comment as of press time, but on his personal Website last week he made clear that the science, for him, comes second. Conceding that Copenhagen was "clearly not making much headway," he advocated a focus on "the larger problem of unsustainable development, of which climate change is at best a symptom."

In other words, if Mr. Pachauri is sanguine about the undermining of the IPCC's scientific methods, it's because his chief concern isn't the science at all. Rather, to judge by his recent public statements, he is more focused on an ideological economic agenda in which climate change is little more than a useful tool. Given the cover-ups exposed by the leaked emails, we'll take Mr. Pachauri's remarks as a welcome instance of full and voluntary disclosure.

Key point: Mr. Pachauri has a clear ideological agenda, but not so much the economics (that is secondary and follows from the primary point) as much more the political.

But this is starting to unravel, as can be seen here. Key quote:

As the world prepares to converge on Copenhagen for the COP15 Climate Summit, Denmark's Speaker of Parliament has expressed serious doubts as to the way in which the climate debate has developed.

"The problem is that lots of people go around saying that the climate change we see is a result of human activity. That is a very dangerous claim," Parliamentary Speaker and former Finance Minister Thor Pedersen (Lib) tells DR.

"Unfortunately I seem to experience that scientists say: 'We have a theory' – then that crosses the road to the politicians who say: 'We know'. Who can be bothered to hear a scientist who says 'I have a theory' when politicians go around saying 'I know'" Thor Pedersen says.

Now, this is coming from the Danes, who while enjoying an excellent reputation amongst the Greens, actually are rather intensive energy users despite it all.

Now, let's consider reality:

Here is a recipe that would work: Add 30,000 megawatts of new wind turbines every year between now and 2050 (this is nearly four times what was added in 2008, a record year). Add another 35,000 megawatts of solar photovoltaic capacity annually (more than 100 times what was added last year—a record year for solar, too).

That's just the beginning. Now multiply the nuclear reactor fleet fivefold by midcentury. Retrofit all existing coal-fired power plants with carbon capture and storage technology. And build twice as many new plants, also with carbon capture. Natural gas could substitute for coal, but only with carbon capture too. By 2050, the electric power system would be four times bigger than today. Two-thirds of the car and truck fleet would be powered by electricity, and the rest would run on advanced biofuels.

All of this would indeed reduce carbon emissions by 83%. It would also practically eliminate America's dependence on oil imports. But could it be done?

Perhaps, though not without enormous effort. Operating a power grid reliably and economically with intermittent solar and wind resources generating 40% of the electricity cannot be done today. Carbon capture and storage has yet to be demonstrated on a large scale. Meanwhile, a still vocal group of environmentalists remains adamantly opposed to nuclear energy—even though it is the only low-carbon energy source that is both scaleable and already generating large amounts of electricity.

Yet falling short on any of these decarbonization measures would require even more of the others, or even greater energy efficiency gains. Failing that, the only way to reach the 83% reduction goal would be through slower or even negative economic growth, i.e., lower living standards. This is a matter of arithmetic; it cannot be wished away.

Bingo: we have now hit the hard equations, where science meets reality. The reality of the situation is that to go Green the way the warming activists would demand, insist, require by law for us to do either means a major decline in living standards or ...

or what, exactly?

Actually, there is no "or": for the warming activists to be appeased and mollified, we must prostrate ourselves, don the hair shirt and sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice. After all, it's for the children...or is it?



You see, there are some people who are at least trying to think this thing through. One of them is an economist that I am a big fan of, of Dr. Herbert Werner Sinn, who writes this (only in German, but I'm providing the translation):

The green program has become a replacement religion for many. With the words "we believe in solar energy," the coalition contract (for Germany's new government -ed) pays tribute to the sun god. Politics pays no attention any more about solar roofs and wind mills in terms of reducing greenhouse gases, but rather in order to create new secular monuments for the new belief. Before, however, we allow out industrial base to be driven into the desert by the wind of our emotions, let's stop and think "what are we doing?". Reason and pragmatism must replace the blind activism of the last several years. Germany desperately needs a course correction in its environmental policy.

Dr. Sinn makes sense (my bilingual readers will appreciate that pun). Fundamentally he does not disagree with climate change as such, and he is willing to accept the science (I fear that he will be disabused of this notion before long...). What does he propose?

Basically, he says that if it really is five minutes before midnight, then we can't afford inefficiencies in implementing policies. Simply put, the German laws for renewable energy systems have nothing to do with their support, but are rather, as industrial subsidies usually tend to be, a form of political largesse that benefits a very small number of people at the expense of everyone.

Further, green policies have, if anything, accelerated warming (if you accept the premise, of course, that human activity has a warming effect):

Some argue that green energy will push energy prices below extraction costs for fossil fuels, ensuring that no company would bother to extract them. This is, however, a dangerous illusion, as extraction costs are a tiny portion of the price and this is not going to change. The price of fossil fuels has about as much to do with the extraction costs as the price of a Rembrandt has anything to do with the cost of the paint used. This argument is absurd.

Possible supply changes change differently. The owners of the usable resources always calculate if they can get a higher rate of return if they leave their resources in the ground in order to use them when they are in scarcer supply and can hence be sold at higher prices, or, alternatively, sell the resources now and invest their gains in capital markets. Hence the rate of resource use is dependent on interest rates and the expectations of price developments. If the resource owners wait, so that green policies get even greener, this reduces the value of the resources now in the ground, leading to a direct incentive to use these resources as fast as possible. This leads to more Co2 in the atmosphere, warming accelerates.

This is the green paradox. Policies that are greener and greener threaten resource owners with the destruction of markets and gives them the incentive to dispose of their resources before their markets disappear. This incentive comes in the face of what amounts to the exercise of eminent domain in the near future, leading to an incentive to overproduce in order to gain what can be gained before the resources become valueless. This only serves to accelerate any negative ecological effects. Given that the prices for fossil fuels, in real terms, are today not higher than they were in 1980 and the CO2 emissions have progressively increased, although many EU countries have reduced their emissions, is probably the result of the environmental discussion of the last decade, which has led to resource owners converting their resources to money rather than leaving it in the ground in anticipation of much, much higher prices.

Other countries in this time frame have not only used the amount of fossil fuels that the Europeans have saved, but the oversupply of oil on world markets shows that resource owners have brought their product on the market because of the fears they have that green policies will mean for them.

Woops. That didn't work out well.


I won't get into the rest of the article, as I don't agree with his premise - that anthropogenic warming is real - as anyone who takes an objective look at the politics of the science should be able to understand (given the apparent fudging of the numbers in order to hide the decline), if not agree with. He also argues, basically, for a kind of Tobin tax on financial transactions to make the business of fossil fuel extraction ... unprofitable. Here I cannot agree, but let that be the subject of another post.

Best Quote of the Decade...

And now for something completely different:

The miracle of national accounts statistics is that all over the world, very incomplete, imperfect, and partly outdated datasets are transformed into complete, consistent, and up-to-date standardized pictures of national economies.

This is my professional economics quote for the last decade. It's by Frits Bos, who works for the CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis, quoted in the Review of Income and Wealth, Series 55, Number 4, December 2009, in his article "The Art and Craft of Compiling National Accounts Statistics and Their Implications for Reliability", on page 930 of that issue.

This is an article that every aspiring economist, especially those who have been working as economists for the last 30 years, should read to understand what the reality of economic statistics is all about. Highly recommended. Really.

Unfortunately (at least I couldn't find it in a short look), not online, but there is a link to his professional home page here. There is an abstract here with access behind Wiley's commercial firewall.

When It's Not Enough...

This made me laugh. Because of the absurdity of it all.

Remember, Mr. Gore owns a big chunk of the carbon offset business. No wonder that he's calling for increased use of carbon emissions trading: if he gets his way, he'll be another Rockefeller. He stands to make not millions - he's already done that with his gloom-and-doom dog and pony show - but rather billions.

But this is what made me laugh:

He also brushed aside questions over the reliability of climate science that have followed the publication last month of leaked e-mails between climate experts. He claimed that the scientific consensus around climate change "continues to grow from strength to strength". He added: "The naysayers are in a sunset phase with a spectacular climax just before they subside from view. This is a race between common sense and unreality."

The race is over, Al. You lost. The unreality is yours, and it is rapidly unraveling.

After all, one of the most practical, pragmatic and realistic countries on this planet - Australia - cut off the grandstanding of their leader just a few days ago, refusing to don hair shirts and tear their clothes in repentance for the fact of their existence (metaphorically speaking).

No Plan B...

Once again the FT, this time in the supplement on the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit (CCCS).

Link to numerous articles here, but I won't go through them, as they simply reiterate the generic "knowledge" of the Climate activists.


Suffice to say that Climategate is not mentioned a single time here, although, as we now know, the data and the science behind the IPCC reports has been severely compromised.


What is especially interesting, though, is this: there is no Plan B for the Climate activists. None.

According to Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, their plan is the only plan that can "beat climate change."

Tellingly, he writes: Human-driven climate change is not a cause but a result of unsustainable economic activity.

Action is the only way to avoid climate disaster.

The solution ... will provide the biggest opportunity since the industrial revolution to rebalance economic activity towards a mroe stable and equitable path for every nation.

What he expects on Dec 17 is that the rich nations commit to economic suicide and impoverishment. Sorry, he puts it this way:

It must record the ambitious commitments of rich nations to cut emissions and provide finance.

What are these ambitious commitments?

Emission reduction targets of 25%-40% by 2020.

Emissions abatement measures for developing countries.

Short-term and long-term financial commitments of at least $10bn/year by 2012 showing who pays what and how long-term commitments are to be financed.

A system that "deploys" this finance to the priorities of developing countries and "respects" the authority of the climate change convention to define how that is done.


Yikes.

Oddly enough, on that same page, Sir David King points out, unwillingly, what the end result will be. You see, regardless of what the world wants the US to do, and what President Obama commits to, the US Constitution, that marvelously subversive declaration of how governments should work, requires that the the US Congress give its advice and consent to any international treaty.

Advice and consent.





Thank God for the US Constitution.



The CCCS is the most brazen and unalloyed power grab in the history of the world, at least to date. Climategate pales in comparison, yet undermines the whole premise on which to grab power.


If emissions must be reduced by 25%-40% within 10 years, this comes only at the cost of outright banning of much industrial production, resulting massive unemployment increases, severe reduction in standards of living - most people will not be able to afford a car, which, given the fact that there won't be any more being made, is a tad moot - and more than a little in increased taxes.

A Modest Proposal...

Niall Ferguson and Laurence Kotlikoff in todays FT make a modest proposal that I'd like to expand on.

Their thinking is quite clear and robust: banks are financial intermediaries, first and foremost. In fact, if you look at how they are described in the industrial classification systems, that is where you will find them, next to insurance companies, stockbrokers and financial advisers.

Their job, first and foremost, is to bring people with money together with people who need money. They earn their money by charging fees for this and by determining risk for those with money when they lend to those who need money, which is then reflected in interest rate differentials between those who borrow money and those who lend money.

And that is all. Nothing more, nothing less: Ferguson and Kotlikoff call it Limited Purpose Banking or LPB for short.

Under LPB, all limited-liability financial institutes - which right now have transferred all liabilities to the general public in an absolutely horrific example of moral hazard gone dramatically, perversely and criminally wrong - become mutual funds: LPB may process securities and sell them to mutual funds, but would be limited to that and no more. First and foremost: LPBs may not borrow to invest themselves, guaranteeing that if investments go horribly wrong, they do not take down the financial infrastructure with them. Which is exactly what came close to happening last year.

These mutual funds aren't quite what we now understand mutual funds to be, but are nonetheless quite close. They would be small banks with 100% capital requirements, no ifs, ands or buts. That is exactly what the current mutual funds are, albeit they are not called banks.

The goal is to create numerous, small, flexible investment instruments that also carry all risks associated with each and every of their activities. This is the key solution to the monumental screw-up of the financial industry in 2008 and 2009, and allows for consumers to choose their risk portfolios easily: high returns, high risks, a modern God of the Copybook Headings if I ever saw one, but one that was grievously ignored (and is ignored in any bubble, indeed forms the bubble itself).

The mechanism for creating instruments would be straight-forward: create the "FFA" or Federal Financial Authority, which would be charged with verifying prospectii, as well as the credit histories, income statements and third-party custodies of fund securities, hiring external rating companies the rate the securities and value their collateral. Hence a bank when processing a loan or stock issue would send it to the FAA for verification, disclosure and independent rating, and then auction it off to buyers, who would be organized as mutual funds. Mutual funds could be aligned with the LPBs in order to offer financial services using cash mutual funds, and insurance mutual funds would permit diversification of individual risks and the sharing of aggregate risks.

This is the point that Ferguson and Kotlikoff end their analysis, and I'd like to extend it.


A number of years ago Germany abandoned one of the most useful tools it had for industrial and investment policies, largely due to a failure in the government to properly work out how to allocate capital effectively. Failure to allocate capital effectively is a cardinal sin of economic policy, and unfortunately the German government threw the baby here out with the bath water.

What had worked brilliantly for many years was tax credits for closed investment funds. Basically, for any investment there is an investment period where an instrument is developed before that instrument generates a cash flow. By allowing large tax write-offs during this period, sometimes in excess of the sum actually invested, the German government had an elegant method of directing private investments in areas that they deemed useful in terms of industrial investment, largely real estate investments. Why was this abandoned?

Basically, they overdid it in Eastern Germany after unification, with much too much money flowing there to be sensibly invested, resulting in misallocation of capital (remember, a deadly sin) as multiple projects were started up that ended up flooding the market with high-cost real estate investments in a low-wage environment, resulting in the loss of equity for many investors.

But not necessarily financial ruin: the investment phase brought very large tax write-offs for current income, resulting in an almost immediate payback due to tax reductions on current income.

How did this work? Simplified, like this: say an investor had a cash flow (income) of $500k/year. Taxed at an average of 30%, that meant paying taxes worth $150k/year. If the investor invested $100k in a closed fund - i.e. a fund where an investor may first exit after a set number of years - he could write off, in the first year, say, 80% of that in tax breaks during the investment phase of the project. That gives him a tax break of $80k, reducing his taxes to $70k, leaving him with $430k in the first year of his investment instead of $350k otherwise. The investment then proceeds normally, with any income earned taxed at the normal rate. Let's stipulate a closed-end fund with a clear exit 10 years after the initial subscription, with an average 6% return on equity after the investment starts producing income.

The nominal return on a $100k investment would be $54k over 10 years (1 investment year, 9 years of disbursement at 6% of equity for $6k*9=$54k). At the end of 10 years the investment object would be liquidated for $90k (for the $100k initial investment), resulting in taxable income of $44k ($100k-$90k = $10k loss in equity). While this is in and of itself a modestly attractive investment, the real key is the tax write-off in the first year: that nominal $44k profit, which would then itself be taxed, really is a $114k profit: there was, after all, that $70k tax reduction windfall. Again, this is highly simplified, but is how the system basically worked.

That makes such an investment instrument highly desirable for high-income, long-term investors.

This can be used by government to direct publicly useful but highly risky investments using private equity to meet industrial and investment policy needs: if the US, for instance, were to decide that it wants a watch industry once again, it would simply change the tax code to reflect this, directing high-income investors into those fields. Such funds could also be set up as cooperatives to allow corporations directly involved to participate in order to acquire productive assets after a set time period. Risk is carried by the investor, who can lose every penny of their investment.


Join the ideas of Ferguson/Kalikoff and the use of tax credits for directing investment activities for industrial and investment policy, and you have an enormously efficient method for governments to achieve policy goals with little or no direct outlays.

The downside?

Of course: governments making mistakes that lead to misallocation of capital. This was the biggest problem with the system, but if the FFA were also able to veto such tax policies to refute the ability of politicians to exploit and corrupt the system, then this can be defused (but not totally eliminated).

Again; a modest proposal. Which would give government enormous leverage on directing private investment to achieve policy goals without having to issue bonds or spend taxpayer monies to do so.

The cost? Foregone tax income. Cheap at the price, I say.

Timing...and Quite A Surprise

So President Obama has revealed his plans for Afghanistan.

By setting a deadline for withdrawal.


Ah, the best plans of mice and men...


When reading that article, one thing becomes apparent: President Obama wants US involvement over by Summer 2011. If this is not accomplished, he knows that his base, the lunatic left, will create massive problems for his re-election.

So what does he do?

In the name of political expediency, he wants the war over as soon as possible. So 30 000 new troops head to Afghanistan.

But they're not going there methodically and with adequate preparation:

Reflecting the increased sense of urgency, Obama is to speed deployment of an extra 30,000 American troops to Afghanistan within the next six months – a much faster timetable than the 12 to 18 months that had been briefed by US officials up until today.

...

The White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, spoke today of "an accelerated timetable". During a round of television interviews he said the faster the US forces move in, the faster they will move out. "We can't be there forever," he said.

Obama was looking for an "end game" and wanted to "get in there quickly" and transfer responsibility for security to the Afghan military as rapidly as possible, Gibbs said. An administration official said the US aimed to begin winding down troop numbers in July 2011.

Gibbs indicated that there would be no further escalations beyond the one Obama approved on Sunday. Asked on Good Morning America if this would be the last order for extra troops, he said: "The president sure believes so."

US officials said Obama wants almost all the US troops out before the end of his first term in office in January 2013, leaving behind a small contingency force. Gibbs said the president did not want to leave the problem to his successor.

Whoa.

The President does not want to leave the problem to his successor?

Does this mean that Obama is not running for a second term? Gee, how can anyone have missed that?

That's the surprise of the title.

I know, get real: the only reason that President Obama is doing what he is doing is in preparation to being re-elected.

But think about this: the best laid plans come to naught when in war. No plan survives contact with the enemy (and any commander who insists on carrying a mission through without regard to what the enemy does is a fool) and this one will certainly not either: the Taliban now know that all they have to do is lie low for the next 12 months and wait for the Americans and their allies to leave. In this regard, the President is an idiot: you never tell your enemy what your plans are. This is sheer stupidity.

Unless, of course, you want to lose while pretending to want to win.

The risk for Obama is that the extra 30,000 troops may not be enough to counter an increasingly confident Taliban and that the timetable for training the Afghan army and police is over-optimistic.

Two brigades, one from the US marines and one from the army, plus reserves, amounting to 30,000, are to be sent to Afghanistan over the next six months, bringing American troops in the country to 100,000. They are to be based in the south and east, where US and British forces are under pressure and badly in need of reinforcements. The first of the marines are due to arrive before Christmas.

Britain has already committed to sending more troops. Extra troops for Afghanistan will be on the agenda at a Nato meeting scheduled for next week.

There are 95,000 Afghan troops at present and the US wants that number up to 134,000 by October 2010, three years earlier than originally envisaged, and then to 240,000 by 2013. There are about 92,000 Afghan police and the US target is 160,000 by 2013.

There is scepticism about whether the Afghan army and police can be trained up that quickly to take over. At present, the Afghan army has a loss rate of about 25% of its members trained by US and its Nato allies, the bulk of whom just walk away.

Obama, who has already set a timetable for withdrawal of a sizeable chunk of US forces from Iraq by 2011, is keen to shed the label of "war president" and increase his chances of re-election to a second term. Public opinion in the US is steadily turning against the Afghanistan war in the face of mounting American casualties and lack of faith in Hamid Karzai's government.

Obama spoke to Karzai for an hour late on Monday night to brief him about the new strategy that will include "benchmarks" for the Afghan government not only to train more members of the Afghan army and police but also to take steps to tackle government corruption.

So, we see the various outs: 

1) Blame the Afghanistani for failing to be like us, failing to change their culture to be "civilized", and let the inevitable corruption be the reason for wallking away ("We were there to help, but darn it, those guys were so corrupt that we just couldn't stand it any more")

2) By publicly chastising Karzai for corruption, the US government is doing its level best to support a self-fulfilling prophecy, while at the same time being the ones most responsible for corruption (the incompetence of the State Department, ever desiring to be everyone's friend, as well as that of the NGOs, is already legendary) in Afghanistan: hence the US can easily generate, if it so desires, a reason to get out whenever it wants.

3) Unrealistic plans and a deliberate ignoring of reality means that the White House plans are a recipe for failure.

What should have Obama done instead?

First and foremost, don't tell the world and the enemy what your plans are. Really. Doing that is really, really ... stupid.

Go with what the military wants: an orderly and deliberate escalation to keep the Taliban engaged and thinking that they are the ones controlling the fighting (guerrilla forces usually are until a counter-insurgency nails them), such that when the additional forces are in-country and ready, that a kind of reverse Tet can be accomplished, with the insurgents losing both the political and military conflict.

Third, work closely with the Pakistanis to eliminate the safe havens.

Fourth, and this needs to be done simultaneously, rebuild Afghanistan as Afghanistan: you are not going to rebuild the country as anything other than a tribal society. It will be corrupt (unless you understand that this isn't corruption, it's the way things work there) and it will be to a certain degree dysfunctional, but it will work: that is all that matters.

The only time to leave is when the last madras closes because the hate is gone.  The hate will be gone when everyone there realizes that the only path to heaven is a virtuous life and not martyrdom.

Who Will Rid Me Of This Troublesome...

The Archbishop of Canterbury was a troublesome man to the King. He consolidated Church holdings and took revenue from the King, King Henry II, to support the activities of the church.

Taking money from the King is rarely a good idea. Henry, in order to control the Church in England, largely to finally reduce corruption amongst the clergy, made the clergy subject to the secular court, meaning that the Church was no longer supreme over everything (but, perhaps, the King). The conflict came to a head at the Constitution of Clarendon, where the independence of the clergy was to be tamed and the link to Rome weakened. While the Archbishop of Canterbury didn't reject the reforms, he didn't sign on to them either. Because he failed to sign the 16 Constitutions of Clarendon, he was convicted of contempt of the court and fled the country.

He did return when the King backed down some under threat of excommunication from Rome. A diplomatic solution was found: however, the young King was coronated by the Archbishop of York, in defiance of tradition, and the Archbishop of Canterbury excommunicated the Archbishop of York, as well as the Bishops of London and Salisbury, and didn't stop there: he was on a roll, excommunicating his opponents.

The King was sick, but rose and cried thus:

What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?

This is a tad long, so it's been shortened in the popular history to "Who shall rid me of this troublesome priest?"


Which brings me to this.

Dr. Phil Jones, infamously now of the leaked emails, wrote this regarding an editor:

I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.


Well, that puts a lot into perspective, doesn't it?

The arrogance, the theological nature of discussion, the extreme intolerance of those behind AGW is now clear and visible to everyone.

Let us be thankful that the fate of the skeptics is not that of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was murdered in the Church for his transgressions agains the King.


History, thankfully (and despite probably how the AGW folks now feel about the skeptics), doesn't always repeat.

On the road...

I'm on the road right now and while there's a lot to say, it's gonna have to wait.

Suffice to say: the AGW proponents really have to prove their case now, rather than claim "we're the consensus": a manufactured consensus, one that deliberately represses legitimate dissent while claiming the sanctity of science.

We now know that science here has not been serviced well. The politicization of the subject can be clearly laid to the feet of folks like Hansen who quite apparently now have politicized this since Day One...

And you can get some mighty fine cheeseburgers in Ohio... :-)