Thoughts, Rants & Raves, and Useful Info

Really? Libya? WHY?

Does anyone remember Operation Cyclone? In 1979, Jimmy Carter began arming the Mujahidin in Afghanistan, and ordered the CIA to begin stirring Islamic unrest in the region to “destabilize” the area and help repel the “oppressive” Soviet Union. This action may well have made things more difficult for the Soviets, but it also set in motion the creation of Al Qaida and the Taliban! And, of course, Carter’s policies regarding Iran allowed the creation of the Islamic Republic, now the largest state sponsor of terror on the planet! One could well argue that Carter and his policies were contributory if not causative to the events leading to and following 9-11!

In his first 2 years in office, Barack Obama’s policies toward the Islamic World (and, concurrently toward our allies) have caused a lot of head scratching! It would be a lengthy and distracting tangent to pursue his history in this regard here. Suffice it to say that there are many examples where his foreign policy has been either incoherent or antithetical to our historical understanding of friend and foe.

But with his singlehandedly committing to military action in Libya, he has made an epic blunder which will be history-changing. (By single-handedly I mean without congressional consent . UN authorization and the cries of the Arabs notwithstanding!) Isn’t it interesting that Al Qaida is cheering for our intervention to oppose Khadafy? WHY? If Khadafy’s demise is desirable to Al Qaida… isn’t that reason enough to question our complicity with it?

Remember that, despite his being a despotic and brutal dictator (what Islamic nation IS NOT under a brutal and dictatorial regime?) Khadafy was a muzzled mad-dog. After Reagan rang his bell with bombs falling around him he shut up. He did try striking back with the Lockerbie incident, but got slapped down again after that. When he saw what happened to Saddam Hussein… he shut down his nuke research, invited inspectors in, and began COOPERATING with us by providing intelligence. He kept Al Qaida at bay in northern Africa. So while he was a dictator ruling his country with an iron fist… he was actually SERVING the US vital interests!

So, with the current unrest – why should we get involved at all? Is there a vital US interest requiring us to commit US blood and treasure? Not according to Secretary Gates! He says we had no vital interests in the region!

President Obama tells us we are acting on the authority of the World Community! (So if the UN says “Jump”, he says “how high?” now?) Isn’t CONGRESS supposed to authorize military action? Is the Constitution now subordinate to the United Nations… that organization that’s been such a good friend and strong defender of America’s Vital Interests? (Sarcasm here.)

Obama claims “This is how the international community SHOULD work”. Really? The UN “authorizes” action and our military acts on their wishes without consent of Congress? Obama touts a “coalition”, yet Bush had twice as many countries on board HIS coalition when we initiated action against Iraq! Bush sought and received authorization from Congress to use military force. We had authorization from the UN as well, to use military action. Yet Bush was blamed for starting an “ILLEGAL” war and a “war for oil”.

(Interestingly, France and England, who were among those CALLING for a no-fly zone in Libya, did so in their own vital interests in the hope of securing Libyan oil… thus, a war for oil! America imports essentially NO Libyan oil so it’s of little to no vital interest to us!)

Joe Lieberman tells us that we’re doing the will of “the Arab street”! Are our military now taking orders from the UN and the Arabs? And what kind of allies have the Arab nations been to the US?

Having failed to make a case for this intervention on the basis of US vital Interests… the Administration is now trying to appeal to America’s humanitarian nature calling it a humanitarian cause to end “attrocities”. They trot out the case of a woman claiming to be raped by pro-Khadafy forces, for example. Tragic, if true, but pick up your local newspaper and you’ll find rapes and murders committed daily! Should we send in Tomahawks to New York, or Detroit, or DC because crimes are committed?

There is not a single Islamic nation on the planet where “atrocities” are not committed on a daily basis! There is civil unrest in most of them. Look at Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Rwanda and the Ivory Coast for example! People are hacked with machetes, limbs are cut off, people are buried to the waist and stoned, and kids have truck driven over their arms. That world is a brutal one. Should we intervene in all of them? (The Ivory Coast is the world’s largest producer of Cocoa… producing more than half the world’s supply. Should we intervene there to insure the free flow of chocolate at market prices? That would be a greater “vital interest of the United States” than is to be found in Libya!)

There is now an effort underway to provide arms to the Libyan rebels. Hearken back to Operation Cyclone! Isn’t that what CREATED the Taliban and Al Qaida? When Khadafy falls, WHO will fill the void? Who’s going to ultimately follow Mubarak in Egypt? The protesters cry “Democracy”, but what does that mean? Does anyone truly believe that a constitutional republic will be the result of the fall of these regimes? “Democracy” is Mob Rule – literally! (Look it up!) It has been said that Democracy is 2 wolves and a sheep taking a vote on what to have for dinner! Let us remember that “democracy” does not necessarily lead to freedom and individual liberty! Look at what happened in Gaza when they had “democratic” elections. They elected HAMAS! As a wiser man than I said in this context… “Democracy” means one-man, one-vote, ONE TIME! After that they’ll be right back under totalitarian rule… but this time it will be under a theocratic rule and Shari ‘a Law.

So, what is the meaning of all this unrest in the Middle East? CALIPHATE! Remember, the acolytes of the 12th Imam – the “Islamic Messiah” for lack of a better explanation – believe he will not come until the world is plunged into chaos. Iran’s Ahmadinejad IS such a 12th Imam believer and has STATED his goal to BRING ABOUT his return. This “popular uprising” among the Islamic nations has been fomented by Iran and other Jihadi influences. This is NOT a cry for western style freedom and liberty. It is a move to establish a world-wide caliphate.

And President Carter 2.0 is playing right into their hands, whether thru Carter-like incompetence or intentional complicity. Either should disqualify him from service as our Commander in Chief.

Fukushima - Reason to Abandon Nuclear Power?

Before entering into any political discussion relative to the events following the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, I must first express my sympathies with and support for the people of Japan! What a horrific series of events they have endured and continue to face! “Tragedy” doesn’t begin to approach the magnitude of the impact on the nation of Japan and its people. Our thoughts and prayers are with them.

As I write this, the efforts to cool the Fukushima nuclear plants are still ongoing. The scale of the event is approaching that of the Three Mile Island accident, but at this stage is still well short of the Chernobyl disaster – and it is unlikely to ever progress to that level. There is hope that power will soon be restored and cooling will be enabled – which will be the first step to resolving the situation.

The problems with the Fukushima Nuclear Facility have re-ignited the debate and re-invigorated the Anti-Nuke crowd who now point to this incident as reason to abandon nuclear power.

It seems to me that this puts the Anti-Nuke, Anti-Fossil Fuel Enviro-nuts on the horns of a dilemma. If we can’t meet our energy needs with nuclear, and we can’t burn fossil fuels, how will they plug in their Chevy Volt? Windmills and solar panels blanketing our landscape couldn’t BEGIN to meet our energy demands!

To their argument that the Fukushima incident exemplifies an inherent flaw or failure of Nuclear Power, the clear answer is, “NONSENSE!”

Let us examine a few facts: There are many hundreds of nuclear power generation plants operating around the world. Sixteen countries depend on nuclear power for at least a quarter of their electricity. France gets around three quarters of its power from nuclear energy, while Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Slovenia and Ukraine get one third or more. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf01.html

Japan’s 55 plants produce 1/3 of the electrical power for that nation. Nuclear power generation has been around for over 40 years. In all that time and with all those plants operating, there have been so few incidents that the 2 big ones, 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl, are seared into our memory, and the more minor incidents are all but forgotten.

Most of these incidents involved short-lived releases of small amounts of radioactive contamination. But even the more serious events were hardly catastrophic… Who remembers October 5, 1966 when the core of an experimental reactor near Detroit, MI experienced a partial meltdown when its cooling system failed? http://www.atomicarchive.com/Reports/Japan/Accidents.shtml

Hundreds of nuclear plants have operated for decades without incident, and the last significant incident before the Fukushima event was in 1999 when workers at a Japanese plant mixing uranium with nitric acid to make nuclear fuel used too much uranium and accidentally set off an uncontrolled reaction. A number of plant workers were exposed to radiation, and local residents were ordered to stay indoors for a time. Not exactly a world-shaking event.

The point being that nuclear accidents are rare, and usually overblown. Even the 3-Mile Island incident has had few lasting effects.

Still, the radioactive material involved in nuclear power generation is indeed quite dangerous. Therefore, significant safeguards must be in place. The fact of the matter is… they ARE!

Let’s look at the Japanese situation. First, they experienced a 9.0 earthquake and HUNDREDS of 5+ pre and aftershocks. ALL 55 Japanese reactors WITHSTOOD this level of seismic activity! The Richter scale is logarithmic, where each whole number is 10 times the intensity of the previous number. Southern California has rarely experienced a quake above magnitude 7. Yet the Japanese quake was 100 times more powerful, and ALL their nuke plants withstood it! Fukushima was a unique situation unlikely to ever be replicated anywhere else in the world. A nuke plant built ON the San Andreas would never have experienced the intensity of quake that ALL 55 reactors in Japan successfully endured!

The earthquake triggered the procedures to shut down the reactor. This occurred as designed. The chain-reaction was stopped. The quake took out the local electrical power grid. The backup generators kicked in as designed. These backup generators had redundant backup generators behind them. And behind them, there were batteries. These redundant systems would keep the cooling system operational until normal electrical power could be restored. Except… the Tsunami struck.

The tsunami took out the generators. All of them. It also insured that electrical power from the grid wasn’t coming back anytime soon. When the batteries had been expended, cooling was lost and the problems began. Fukushima is a unique situation. A “perfect storm” of cataclysm converged on this plant – one unlikely to ever be replicated anywhere else on the planet!

There is virtual certainty that the Fukushima situation will not progress out of control to anything approaching the Chernobyl disaster. Yes, some radiation was released and this is a significant mishap. But the reaction to this event is overblown. In the immediate vicinity of the plant, during the period of time until the radiation is contained, there is certainly a danger. But the panic in the USA and the run on potassium iodide is mere hysteria. The effect on the USA will be little more than going thru the TSA’s naked scanner a time or two!

Once power is available to re-enable cooling, the situation will be brought under control in short order thereafter. The Fukushima plant may well be damaged beyond the point of ever bringing it back online to produce electricity… but the “fallout” from the incident will likely be far more impactful politically than physically.

The Uncomfortable Truth - We CAN'T Soak the Rich ENOUGH!

Soaking the rich as a revenue remedy to Government’s fiscal woes is a mathematically provable myth!

Perhaps the math might have worked (though the logistics still would have failed) back in the days of President Bush, whose worst deficit (2003) was only around $420 Billion, and whose tax cuts raised revenues enough to reduce that deficit down to 120 Billion the last year before Pelosi/Reid took the reins of Congress, and tripled that in one year, and tripled it AGAIN the next year! But given the realities of the damage done by the 110th and 111th Congresses, we have spent ourselves into an oblivion that the so-called “rich” cannot bail us out of if we confiscated EVERYTHING THEY EARN!!

But here are some figures you MUST LEARN and be able to use to dispel the myth when the leftists try to use the REVENUE side of the equation when it comes to getting the Government’s fiscal house in order.

Our Deficit is 1.6 TRILLION DOLLARS. To make that more understandable to those confused by big numbers… that is 1600 Billion dollars, or 1.6 Million Millions of dollars.

The Deficit is not the DEBT. The deficit is our annual shortfall of OUTGO versus INCOME! It has been said, “When your outgo exceeds your income, your upkeep will be your downfall!”

There are approximately 330 million people (men, women AND children) in the USA. That means this year’s Federal Spending will exceed tax revenue income by around $4850 for each and every one of us, including our infants and our elderly and our infirm! Our DEBT is around 14 Trillion, or 14,000 Billion. The debt is the cumulative shortfall of all our deficits since Washington, less all our surpluses. That’s on the order of $42,500 for each of us.

But these numbers, while disturbing, don’t prove my initial postulation that it is impossible to soak the rich and resolve our fiscal crisis!

So, here’s the proof:

According to the latest Government Figures, the earnings total of all people in the USA was around 7.8 Trillion Dollars a year. Of that, those earning $200,000 a year represented 17.5% of the total, or approximately 1.37 Trillion.

If we TOOK EVERYTHING MADE by those earning $200,000 or more, we fall significantly short of our 1.6 Trillion deficit!

But remember, these people are ALREADY paying taxes out of that number! If we estimate a current net tax burden after deductions and “loopholes” of 25%, that means we can only appropriate another 75% of that $1.37 Trillion - if we took EVERYTHING from EVERYONE earning $200,000 or more! So we could further reduce our deficit by not 1.37 Trillion but by only 1.03 Trillion! In other words, we’d STILL have a deficit of $600 Billion… almost 50% higher than Bush’s worst deficit with a GOP Congress!

Remember also that on the spending side, Discretionary Spending is only around $1.3 Trillion of our $3.7 Trillion budget. If we eliminated ALL Discretionary Spending, and funded ONLY Entitlements and interest payments on the debt, we’d be left with a $300 Billion deficit!

Cutting a billion here and a million there from our Discretionary Budget might make for politically expedient rhetoric that might help an incumbent gain more re-election votes… but it is merely arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic!

The Uncomfortable Truth is that this ship is going DOWN unless we tackle the real and ONLY real problem: Entitlement Spending!