Huckabee’s Solution for the Debt: Eliminate Disease

By guest columnist Al Rodbell

I watched the entire event with the ten leading candidates, and the other major force on the screen, the “media” in the form of CNBC who were accused of tormenting the candidates. If the directors had a squelch button for each candidate’s microphone, they didn’t use it, so there were times when several candidates were speaking over each other with the moderator trying to gain control. On several occasions, such as the accusation that Ben Carson was associated with a shady supplement company, he simply denied it in spite of his appearance on the home page of their website. CNBC had not seriously investigated his relationship, so his denial not only stood, but supported the accusation that the mainstream media was antagonistic to the brand of conservatism that this group represents.

Unlike last election’s debate, there were no questions asked to every candidate except the opening one, that most ignored in favor of an opening statement. This leaves holes in the ability to compare and generalize. One issue was addressed by most of the candidates, which is whether they support the pending budget/national debt increase bill. Rand Paul did state that he will be launching a filibuster, “tomorrow, on the Senate floor”. No one opposed his actions.

Now a step back, on why this position is popular not only among Republicans, but a large number of voters. I remember last time we had this showdown, and I posed this question to a highly educated man I play tennis with. “Do you know the difference between passing the national debt increase and passing appropriations that increase the national debt?” He, thought for a second, and then said, “No, what is the difference.” I would suggest that a majority of Americans would answer as he did. Why not try it out yourself on some friends.

Because of this, Republicans can support vast wasteful programs of military procurement, and the development of bombers such as the B2 that cost over $40 billion and was cancelled early with only 20 planes built. That’s $2 billion each. And of course supporting the Iraq war, where the long term dollar costs alone, which includes the New GI Bill, deferred medical costs and pensions, will be in the multi-trillion dollar range; this astronomical cost rarely realized as each appropriation is separate, with some being “off budget.” The public does not realize that each one of these appropriations increases the national debt, an intentional obfuscation created by the biannual extravaganza of every Republican grandstanding against the legislation to pay the bills for what they, as a party, have individually authorized.

The capstone of the “Debate Show” last night was the final statement by the Reverend Governor Mike Huckabee. He had a solution to America’s long term fiscal challenges that obviously no one had thought of that he delivered with the conviction and moral fervor of those who expound the word of God.

That’s it; the solution to not only the national debt of this country and Medicare’s long-term costs, but sickness and disease itself. Governor Huckabee offered this solution, a “War on Disease”, which is orders of magnitude more absurd than our Wars on drugs, poverty and crime. None of the nine Republicans on the dais said the obvious, that this “war” has been going on for centuries in thousands of research labs around the world, something he must not have noticed. Neither of the two medical doctors, Rand Paul and Ben Carson, who are benefiting from the prestige of this profession, commented of the absurdity of Huckabee’s comment.

Does he want more funding for research? No, of course not. Good Republicans do not want taxes for anything. So, the entire contingent of candidates tacitly accepted his new “war” — something that is intrinsically a government operation — at the very same time that they are opposed to paying our debts for the previous wars they have supported. This is the current Republican party in a nutshell. As the candidates — doctors, lawyers men of substance and achievement — continue with this drumbeat. Those in the national audience who listen uncritically to their mantras become inured to irrationality — only responding to the stimulus of repeated buzzwords.

At the very least those who oppose this mentality must condemn it even when — especially when — it surfaces in their own ideologies. If progressives choose to ignore reality for what plays well to a clueless electorate, then any victory will be a Pyrrhic one. Winning an election, in the long run, is less important than fighting for the principle of expanding incisive analysis of our complex system of government, so nonsense such as this will not pass unnoticed. If this quality of our public is lost, and our democracy is approaching this sad state, which side holds the reins of political power for a given term will become a footnote in the course of our inevitable decline.

                       A more extensive version of Al’s essay can be found at AlRodbell.com.

Belief In Global Warming Has Become a Religion, Say Deniers

That the Pope published an encyclical over the summer saying we must protect “our common home” and then said to a joint session of Congress that “it seems clear to me also that climate change is a problem which can no longer be left to our future generations” made it irresistible for deniers to again say that the cause of global warming mitigation has itself become a religion.

Several have made that case to characterize those who believe the planet is warming as being in the grip of blind faith. “Global Warming has become a religion”, wrote Richard Lindzen two years ago. For 30 years a professor of meteorology at MIT, he has been a leading figure working to discredit the science behind global warming claims, and in an article in a medical journal goes so far as to liken the climate “movement” to the eugenics mania of the early 20th century and the bogus genetic theories of Lysenkoism in Stalin’s Soviet Union. He says about believers that what “gives meaning to their lives is the belief that they are saving the planet”. They will “defend their religion with jihadist zeal”.

“Global warming really has become a new religion”, says Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever, “because you cannot discuss it…like the Catholic Church.”

Another celebrated physicist, Freeman Dyson, long a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, is of like mind, calling climate change “both a science and a religion. Belief is strong, even when scientific evidence is weak.”

A Wall Street Journal op-ed by Congressman Lamar Smith (R-TX) tells us that a top United Nations climate scientist, Rajendra Pachauri, acknowledged “the faith-based nature of climate-change rhetoric” when he declared that protecting Planet Earth, its species and ecosystems, “is my religion and my dharma“. Nowhere else in the article is climate change branded a religion, yet in the zeal to affix that label, the one mention is enough for the article’s title to be “The Climate-Change Religion”.

The far-right Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) wrote an editorial on the occasion of the Pope’s visit titled, “Why Leftist Greens Love Pope’s Global Warming Speech” that says, “For left-wing adherents of global warming, their faith holds all the comforts of a religion”. It then belabors the notion with bullet points to show parallels that make the climate change movement a religion:  in it one finds “Faith” in place of hard evidence; the “Original Sin” suffered by believers for “being born into a carbon-fuel using society”; believers face “Skeptics”, just like in the medieval church; their “Indulgences” are carbon offsets and recycling; there is even the “Ritual” of Earth Day every April. “Heaven” is the day the world quits fossil fuels.

Incidentally, we found that this conceit was cribbed without attribution from a 2012 article at a website named American Thinker, which had much the same contrived list. It went on to say that the belief in “man-made global warming or climate change, or whatever it’s called this week” has the essentials of any religion in that its pronouncements must be accepted on faith, and that faith in climate change “is a religion as well” that “like other forms of socialist totalitarian worldviews…is the top-down centralized government’s last best hope of controlling the masses”.

The editorial writers at IBD think along the same lines. Climate change believers — that could be you, the neighbors on your street, the folks in the office — are all Marxists who have “lost their faith in Marxism” and have “joined the Church of Climate Change”.

no one we know

Both sides of the argument have their zealots, but the claim that it has become a religion for those in the general population who believe change is happening seems a desperate attempt to slap a pejorative label on the opposition when their own case is slipping away. One article titled “Global Warming as Religion and not Science” leads off with the Blaise Pascal quote, “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction”. The implication is clear: the climate change religion does evil.

To argue that the millions who are persuaded that Earth is warming and the climate is changing operate on unshakable faith, follow rituals, etc. is way wide of the mark. What is common to them is worry and apprehension and fear and a concern that maybe we should be doing something about this. But that’s not religion.

The public absorbs its beliefs from the media, and a stroll through the media over the last several years shows exactly that — anxiety over what’s to come, as this sample of article headings makes clear:

“Climate report offers a grim forecast” (2014).
“Panel’s warning on climate risk: Worst is yet to come” (2014).
“Climate signals, growing louder” (2014).
“In Greenland, ice and instability” (2008).
“Arctic melt unnerves the experts” (2007).
“A swiftly melting planet” (2007).
“Not even close: 2012 was hottest ever in U.S.” (2013).
“Antarctic warming is speeding up, study finds” (2012).
“Antarctic thaw now unstoppable” (2014).
“By 2047, coldest years may be warmer than hottest in past, scientists say” (2013).
“In sign of global warming, 1600 years of ice in Peru’s Andes melted in 25 years” (2013).
“Scientists warn of rising oceans from polar melt” (2014).
“Heat bleaches coral and a threat is seen” (2010).
“Swarms of stinging tentacles offer hint of oceans’ decline” (2008).
“Starving puffins, stray whales, invading shellfish: something is very wrong on the East Coast” (2014).
“Clinging to a way of life on a disappearing land” (2014).
“Climate change seen posing risk to food supplies” (2013).
“Pentagon signals security risks of climate change” (2014).
“Sounding the alarm on climate change” (2014).
“Scientists trace extreme heat in Australia to climate change” (2014).
“The military takes on climate change deniers” (2014).
“Warmer water cited for rapid Antarctic melt” (2014).
“Greenhouse gases hit record high” (2014).
“Global warming concerns grow” (2014).
“2014 breaks heat record, challenging global warming skeptics” (2015).
“Climate strange — forget global warming and get ready for global weirding” (2014).
“In face of skeptics, experts affirm climate peril” (2009).
“Snow down and heat up in the Arctic, report says” (2014).
“Who cooked the planet?” (2010).
“Antarctic ice shelves are shrinking, study says” (2015).
“Baked Alaska” (2015).
“Study forecasts 70% loss of West Canada’s glaciers” (2015).
“Is it global warming or just the weather?” (2015).
“Hotter planet fuels drought, scientists find” (2015).
“Asian glaciers melting faster” (2015).

(We didn’t clutter the text with links, but ask for the source of an above story heading and we’ll supply.)

If you are a doubter, your immediate reaction is probably “no wonder people believe, propagandized by this constant drum beat”. Or you might say there are as many headlines that argue the opposite. But it’s not a question of whether you find these article titles questionable or alarmist (also a preferred word along with “religion”). The point, once again, is that this is what has been influencing people, making them uneasy, causing them to think something worrisome is happening, filling them with foreboding — but, again, that is neither faith nor religion.

Rather — and here we risk a name-calling spat — those who are convinced that the planet is changing have the better case that the religious among us are the deniers. The believers read of or view evidence everywhere — glaciers and ice caps and permafrost melting, reefs bleaching and dying from oceans acidifying, monthly and yearly temperature records set. They ask, if the deniers reject it all by their blind faith through which nothing penetrates, isn’t that the verifiable religion?

The deniers want proof. The IBD editorial attacks global warming claims as “faith-based — lacking hard evidence”. The AmericanThinker piece says, “The essential feature of any religion is that its pronouncements are to be accepted on faith, as opposed to hard evidence”. A British website called “Numberwatch” calls out “Global Warming as Religion and not Science”. It tells us that “Faith is a belief held without evidence” and summons Thomas Huxley to proclaim, “scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin”.

But insistence on “hard evidence” before according belief poses a unique problem in the case of climate change. If it is happening to the degree that some of the climate models predict, we cannot wait for absolute proof from Nature, which is under no obligation to provide proof to humans. Doing nothing is analogous to not attempting to treat a mystifying disease until medical research conclusively discovers its pathology, while in the meantime the patient dies. The evidence may not be “hard” but the evidence abounds. Shutting out the evidence we see all over the planet because it doesn’t come with correlative proof of cause is what fits well with religion’s hallmark of permitting no deviance from doctrine.

China’s Master Plan: Drive Us Out of “Their” Pacific

On the first day of September, China staged a military parade of staggering size with 12,000 goose-stepping troops, missile
Chinese sailors on the bridge
carriers, and jet over-flights as the centerpiece of a new 3-day national holiday commemorating the end of World War II. Simultaneously, President Xi Jinping announced a 300,000 reduction in the size of the army. It was, Xi said, a gesture to show that other countries have nothing to fear from a China “loyally committed to the sacred duty of safeguarding world peace”.

But it was the army that got trimmed. Just as with Obama’s “pivot” to the Pacific, so is the Pacific China’s pivot. “The traditional mentality that land outweighs sea must be abandoned”, states China’s new military strategy announced in May which explains the troop reduction. “Great importance has to be attached to managing the seas and oceans”.

“Safeguarding” is the key word in Mr. Xi’s pledge. China wants to take over the role so far played by the United States Navy of guarding the shipping lanes of the Pacific to guarantee that its own needs be met — China is a food importer and 80% of its oil passes through the South China Sea. Its method of safeguarding is to claim that sea as its own, building island outposts with an airfield, radar, and lighthouses, while ignoring the claims of neighboring countries to those same islands and reefs.

But China has much larger ambitions. It has designs to control the Pacific itself, as revealed by the successive semi-circles that show up on Chinese maps like dreamed-of spheres of influence, reaching to Okinawa and Guam and, ominously, even the Aleutians and Hawaii. China wants the U.S. out and is building a navy to make it happen. (See Part I of this series in these two articles).

just friends

The Chinese are transparent yet our military often seems clueless. China’s navy chief, Adm. Wu Shengli wants deeper exchanges with the U.S. Navy and has met four times with U.S. Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Jonathan Greenert, over the past two years. The two have grown close. The stated objective is to develop guidelines for how Chinese and U.S. vessels can safely interact, but Adm. Wu openly seeks to learn carrier operations from the U.S. Navy and how better to educate Chinese naval officers. Their navy lacks combat experience and the admiral hopes the U.S. could help remedy its weakness. He wants to send his navy’s “experts” aboard an American aircraft carrier to learn about “maintenance and tactics.” He wants to send his officers to top U.S. universities and is miffed at rules that allow those officers to visit but not attend U.S. defense colleges.

Adm. Greenert is all for accepting Adm. Wu’s invitation for a U.S. aircraft carrier to pay a port visit to mainland China. One can readily imagine successive waves of Chinese naval officers touring every inch of the ship with Bluetooth devices hidden in their hats sopping up terabytes of data from ship communications and equipment. Pentagon officials have never been allowed to visit the headquarters of the Chinese armed forces.

The Pentagon nixed the port visit, for obvious good reason. Invited in 2014 for the first time to participate in the Rim of the Pacific naval exercises, maneuvers attended by 22 nations that sent over 50 ships, the Chinese were discovered to have sent an electronic intelligence ship to spy on the exercises.

What is symptomatic that “guidelines” for safe interaction don’t seem to be the motive for Adm. Wu’s overtures is China’s unwillingness to reach agreement on a code of conduct for unexpected encounters between military aircraft to avoid serious conflict. This avoidance is at precisely a time when the U.S. will test China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea with fly-throughs. It suggests that China wants no rules to inhibit the provocative behavior we recounted in Part One.

A code for naval encounters was signed by 21 Western Pacific powers a year ago April, China among them. It is voluntary, though, and a senior Chinese naval officer said that Beijing has signaled that it may not
follow the code if it encounters foreign ships in the disputed waters of the East and South China seas that it now claims for itself.

Adm. Gary Roughead, the retired U.S. Chief of Naval Operations, says that Wu “doesn’t want to build a navy that’s equivalent to the U.S. He wants to build a navy that surpasses the U.S.”

In the op-ed cited earlier, Gen. Clark said a young, well-connected Communist Party leader said to him, “China knows that you and Britain were best friends, and Britain gave you leadership of the world; China wants to be America’s best friend, so you will give us leadership of the world.”

goodfellas

America fell hard for the “peaceful rise” assurances, heedlessly importing staggering quantities of Chinese goods while China covertly used the proceeds of vastly imbalanced trade to build the military that is meant to drive us from the Pacific. From 9/11 forward, all attention has been paid to the Middle East. The Bush administration ceased speaking of China as a “strategic competitor” in order not to provoke, and we rationalized that a strong partner helping to keep the sea lanes open and free of pirates meant our carrier groups could better be deployed in the Persian Gulf.

China saw unparalleled opportunity. The threat of the Soviet Union on its border had collapsed in the 1980s. As this century dawned, America began to look like a failed state, its debt rising from about $6 trillion in 2000 to over $18 trillion today, wasting assets in the Mideast for almost all that time, with a government so polarized that it had even shut down. The U.S. looked vulnerable to being replaced as the world’s leader.

the view from china

Our strategy with Russia during the Cold War convinces China that, once again, the U.S. is following a policy of containment. China’s answer, driving its naval and advanced missile buildup, is “sea denial” — to push the United States away from the mainland and ever further into the Pacific. “It is for the people of Asia to run the affairs of Asia, solve the problems of Asia and uphold the security of Asia”, Xi Jinping signals the West. The question is the extent of China’s plot for its future suggested by the term it uses: “far sea defense”. In what the Pentagon calls its “A2/AD”, or or “anti-access/area denial”, policy for the western Pacific, does China have in mind challenging and targeting our air-force bases in Okinawa, South Korea and even Guam as we covered here?

Beginning with Deng Xiaoping, China adopted a policy of “peaceful rise”. China would present itself as a peaceful nation interested only in trade and investment with no sign of threat even to Taiwan. The United States was so overjoyed with cheap goods that it now seems as if everything we own has “Made in China” stamped on the back. Now that China has achieve tremendous growth and expanded its military with the proceeds of that trade, it has given notice that the “peaceful” part of “peaceful rise” is no longer guaranteed. An official strategy “white paper”, which China even had translated into English lest we overlook it, put it more forcefully, that China promises “to seize the strategic initiative in military struggle, pro-actively plan for military struggle in all directions and domains, concentrate superior forces, and make integrated use of all operational means and methods.” Xu Guangyu, a retired major general involved in arms control, gives notice that “China will actively build up its military capability and deterrence, just to make sure no one dares fight with us”.

america’s response

As China’s power rises, the concern — made clear by Chinese actions recounted in the first part of this series — is that China will begin to disrupt the world order carefully set down after World War II. At least in its part of the world it will begin to dictate whose ships can sail where, what areas are forbidden to fly through, who gets to trade with whom and what resources are restricted to all but them.

We counter this with bluster — Defense Secretary Ashton Carter saying, “”We will remain the principal security power in the Asia-Pacific for decades to come” — and timidity from elsewhere — a State Department spokesman saying the Obama administration would “continue to monitor China’s military developments carefully”.

After years of Chinese cyber theft of U.S. technology reaching a crescendo this year with their spiriting away the complete dossiers of hundreds of thousands of persons working for the government, President Obama said, on the eve of Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington that he is “preparing a number of measures…countervailing actions” in retaliation. The boom would not be lowered before the visit, but afterward is increasingly likely.

Or perhaps not. “My hope,” Mr. Obama added, “is that it gets resolved short of that.” So much for retaliation.

The Pentagon is reportedly weighing the idea of sending ships and aircraft within 12 nautical miles of the rocks and reefs in the South China Sea that the Chinese have been turning into bases. Staying 12 miles off is as good as acknowledging that China owns the disputed artificial islands. Even so, “some U.S. military officials fear that would be ‘needlessly provocative'”. So Secretary of State John Kerry has simply asked the Chinese to stop making islands. Ashton Carter said China’s actions in the area run counter to “international norms that underscore the Asia-Pacific’s security architecture”. Such harsh words!

In his recent book, “The Hundred-Year Marathon — China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower”, Michael Pillsbury, a China expert who has advised every president since Nixon, has this to say: “I was so gullible. We believed that American aid … would help China become a democratic and peaceful power,” but “every one of the assumptions behind that belief was wrong—dangerously so.”

Some voices counsel doubling down on laser weapons and anti-missile technology, developing a long-range bomber, clamping down on corporate technology transfers, and imposing a tariff on all Chinese goods in retaliation for cyber thefts.

Others advise drawing China closer by emphasizing our common interests and persuading them to take on a more responsible role in world affairs — as with the climate discussions Obama expects to have with President Xi on his visit — by taking on their share of the burden of global governance. Nonsense, effectively says a recent Council on Foreign Relations report by former U.S. diplomats Robert Blackwill and Ashley Tellis. These past four decades of bringing China along and welcoming them into the World Trade Organization, whose rules they would flout, have been a mistake. They say that China isn’t interested in becoming a “responsible stakeholder” in any U.S.-led liberal international order, period.

Still others advise the U.S. to cede primacy in the region to China and make the best deal we can before they make further military progress. A policy of containment would be far too costly for a U.S. so deeply in debt — this time against a powerful China, not a weakened Russia — and would trigger a new Cold War. In making a deal we could offer to take such steps as withdrawing troops from Korea and leaving the area’s waters in exchange for China pledging not to attempt a takeover of Taiwan. That would require trusting a nation that has stolen our intellectual property, counterfeited our goods, grabbed our industrial and military secrets… It’s a shame these advisers have not heard of the aphorism that begins, “Fool me once…”.