Belmont Club

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Facing the Syrian Dilemma

Richard Fernandez — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 04:11:55 +0000

It’s painful to watch President Obama stretched over the Syrian rack. His basic dilemma is that with Russia’s entry onto the scene he can’t afford to cede ground to Moscow or Teheran. But with al-Qaeda affiliated forces now making up 7 of the 9 main rebel groups he can’t afford to win either. Plus no matter who “wins” in Syria Obama will be left to clean up the mess.

An administration that promised voters never to intervene abroad or get dragged into post-conflict stabilization operations may eventually be forced to do both. There’s apparently a price to pay for everything. The promise to control terror groups by intelligence warfare and drone strikes has revealed its hidden cost: a massive surveillance apparatus whose vast extent is only slowly being discovered. And yet the President’s defenders ask, with some justice, ‘what was his alternative?’

The alternative was finish Assad’s hash when Saddam was done. Ok, so never mind. That’s a nonstarter with half the population, but it was worth mentioning just so it could be excluded. Then there’s diplomacy? Well that’s what internationalized the war in the first place. The process of forging regional coalitions with Sunni powers and getting everyone involved resulted in — everyone getting involved — including Russia.

Maybe there was a time when America could have handed everyone a fait accompli in the region. “There you are, take it or leave it”. But that opportunity was lost and there are now no good alternatives. What is worse, Obama’s is starting to lose his core base.

“The drop in Obama’s support is fueled by a dramatic 17-point decline over the past month among people under 30, who, along with black Americans, had been the most loyal part of the Obama coalition,” CNN polling director Keating Holland said. He also notes that the president’s approval rating among independent voters had plunged, too, dropping ten points in just one month to 37 percent.

Not only is the President facing immense challenges, he’s also losing the mandate to do anything decisive about it. Becoming a true lame duck. In addition to the financial debt, he’s run up a trust deficit — even among his own supporters. As Glenn Reynolds notes:

But President Obama has been telling us that the war on terror is practically over. In fact, maintaining that argument, pre-election, is why the administration falsely attributed the Benghazi attacks (which were by al-Qaeda) to a YouTube filmmaker who was then hustled off to prison for “probation violations.” So if we’re at war — if it’s still like the months post-9/11 — then why has Obama been saying otherwise? Is he lying?

Lying may be an impolite way to put it. ‘Kicking the can down the road’ sounds a lot better. And that’s what makes Syria so hard to sell either way. After saying the war’s over; after proclaiming a new dawn with the Muslim world; after promising grand bargains with Iran; after touting the glories of the Arab spring and a reset button to Russia then how come Syria? It reminds one of the old Soviet Union where everything steadily got better until it finally collapsed.

Syria, following on the heels of Benghazi, IRS and the NSA — not to mention a whole lot of other unfinished economic business — is reminiscent of multiple organ failure: “infection-> sepsis-> severe sepsis-> Multiple organ dysfunction syndrome”. All the injuries begin to run together. The President’s governance blunders are catching with him pretty much all at once.

Adam Garfinkle writing at American Interest argued that while the alternatives were never very good in Syria the President’s artful can-kicking tied them into the Gordian knot we see today:

It’s not clear that senior Administration officials, certainly to include the President, actually understood a year or so ago that the Syrian crucible was not just about Syria, but also about Iran, and Turkey, and Jordan, Lebanon, Israel…… It’s also not clear that they, any more than their predecessors, had a clue about the history and nature of sectarian cleavages in the region between Sunni and Shi’a Islam.

So the Obama Administration did not lead from behind on Syria. Instead, it sat on its behind—and there is a difference. And though many warned (me, too, for what it’s worth) that, left to its own dynamics, the situation in Syria would probably both get much worse internally and spread externally, the Administration still did nothing, even in a case where its humanitarian inclinations aligned perfectly with strategic interests with regard to Iran. It did nothing even when it had at least some chance of reaching an understanding with the Turks early on in the crisis. It did nothing repeatedly…..if such a thing is logically possible.

But that doesn’t answer the question of what President Obama should do now. The classic approach would be to make common cause with one of the two sides, defeat the common enemy first and then turn on your former partner later. After all, that’s how Truman handled the problem of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia back in the 1940s. Take down the greater evil and then settle scores with the remaining one. But to go down that road Obama would have to explain to the public why there’s a problem. He would have to level with them, quit treating them like low information voters and stop telling them fairy tales.

About 70 years ago two British leaders faced the puzzle of what to tell the public about the problems they confronted. One elected to say, “we have peace in our time.” The other was forced to say within months of the first, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat”. The sooner the facts are faced, the sooner both parties lay it all out, the cheaper the solution will be. The Narrative’s fine, but nobody ever beat Arithmetic.

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The Indispensibles

Richard Fernandez — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 22:16:32 +0000

The world is simultaneously less solid and more durable than we think. Take the EU. It isn’t forever. It didn’t even exist at the end of the Second World War. It had a beginning and perhaps it may even have an end. Thus, joining it isn’t equivalent to ‘making it’.

A ratings agency has made Greece the first European country to be an ex-developed nation. “Greece’s long-running crisis has culminated in its downgrade to emerging-market status and its exit from the club of developed nations, according to one index provider.” Erin McCarthy and Prabha Natarajan of the Wall Street Journal say it is an insult to emerging markets.

Countries deemed to be emerging markets by Bank of America-Merrill Lynch are expected to grow an average of 4.9% this year, according to the bank’s analyst. In contract, the International Monetary Fund predicts Greece’s economy will contract by 4.2%….

“You don’t think of a submerging market like Greece when you think of emerging markets,” says Brian Jacobsen, chief portfolio strategist for Wells Fargo Funds Management, which advises on assets worth $225 billion. “Greece is a bit of a sore thumb that will stick out in the index.”

In some universe, probably the present one, it is possible for China and South Korea to overtake Europeans countries. Rudyard Kipling once wrote that to be born British was to “win first place in the lottery of life.” A recent poll says Britain has fallen to 27th place, behind South Korea and Chile, in the current rankings of where people want to be born. It’s entirely possible for the words “I’m an American” to eventually become the equivalent of “I’m from India” someday.

The present changes. Greece has become poor. The Atlantic has a photo gallery of homelessness in Greece set amidst abandoned theaters, public parks. They are former hotel clerks, painters, small businessmen, chefs — not exactly the kind of alcoholic and dysfunctional crowd one might expect; the detritus of an assured future that never was.

And yet Greece may become rich again. The Economist argues that the fires of recession have burned out the fevers and leeched out the bad blood. The Germans are coming back to a cheapened Greece and the Russians are buying up everything in sight. “WHAT a difference a year makes.”

This summer should see a record 17m tourists crowding Greek beaches. Bookings from Germany and Russia are soaring, say travel agents. A projected rise of €1.5 billion-2 billion in tourist revenues will give the budget a boost, even though many hoteliers are struggling to service bank debts. Greek contractors expect to resume work in the autumn on €6 billion of EU-financed motorway projects stalled since the crisis. They could create 30,000 jobs.

Privatisation is under way after several false starts. Opap, the state gambling monopoly, has been sold for €712m to a consortium of Greek and east European investors. Gazprom is expected to bid for Depa, the natural-gas monopoly. Sintez, a private Russian energy company, and Socar, Azerbaijan’s state gas producer, are vying for the gas distributor Desfa.

Well who knows? Greece has been a long time dying. Byron famously wondered what had become of classical Greece when he saw its debased state in the 19th century.

THE isles of Greece! the isles of Greece
Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace,
Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung!
Eternal summer gilds them yet,
But all, except their sun, is set

Yet Greece even after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the World Wars and the crash of the EU lives still after a fashion. Perhaps the moral of the story is that the world keeps turning. You and I might not survive, but time marches on.

Populations in the aggregate do what it takes to survive. The Pacific Standard describes a town in Spain that had to make a choice between dignity and cash. Cash won. Juzcar was a former tourist destination groaning under 40% unemployment.

And then, in 2011, the people of Juzcar learned that Hollywood location scouts had tapped the tiny hamlet—it has less than 1,000 residents—to set a feature-length version of childhood classic—and parental nightmare—The Smurfs. As Hollywood does, the producers told Juzcar’s town council that to get the gig, they would have to agree to temporarily paint every one of its classic, bone-white Andaluz stone buildings in a Smurfier baby blue. After the filming, the producers would pay to paint the whole town white again. Juzcar’s mayor quickly agreed.

So welcome to the only all-Smurf blue town in the world, in Spain.

We are often told that we can’t live without … [put your own word here] … government, the Internet, sliced bread, cars … you name it. But as Listverse notes in its enumeration of past financial catastrophes, humanity can take a whole lot of hits and keep trucking. It is sometimes a blessing in disguise as the loss of the old sometimes leads to the new. Apparently neither bubbles nor their dire consequences last forever.

1. Diocletian Destroys Rome’s Economy Fourth Century AD;
2. Pazzi Conspiracy and Medici Banking Collapse 1470s
3. Spanish Inflation 1600s
4. Bermuda’s Hog Money 1616-1624
5. Tipper and See-Saw 1621
6. Tulipmania Hits the Netherlands 1636-1637
7. South Seas Bubble 1719-1720
8. Mississippi Bubble 1716-1720
9. Confederacy Destroys its Economy 1860
10. Railroads and Silver Cripple America 1893

We live in hard times but if history is any guide, people living two generations hence will probably say of our troubles”what was that all about?” One of the more interesting Presidents in 20th century history was Calvin Coolidge, who the Narrative has made a concerted effort to forget because Silent Cal said something unforgivable.

He claimed we could live without a lot of government. Wikipedia says, “The regulatory state under Coolidge was, as one biographer described it, ‘thin to the point of invisibility.’” Silent Cal gave us the Roaring Twenties.

So why don’t we have less government? One reason is the liberal argument that the impiety towards government must always be punished in the historical afterlife. In the manner of ‘Dry Bones’ Coolidge was connected to the Hoover and the Hoover connected to the Dee-presshun, and the Coolidge connected to Dee-presshun, oh hear the word of O! It’s an indirect argument at best, one whose impetus is the force of belief. Most politics, especially Socialist politics, is really religion by other means. Remove the “of course” in government and there’s a whole lot that isn’t obvious. Perhaps the only thing that one can safely say is that many of the immutable givens in this world were once wild-eyed ideas themselves.

Take the IRS.

The IRS itself operates a website titled “Historical Highlights of the IRS” and many will be surprised to learn that the income tax did not exist since the dawn of time. In fact the 1040 form first made its appearance in 1913. The IRS writes:

1862 – President Lincoln signed into law a revenue-raising measure to help pay for Civil War expenses. The measure created a Commissioner of Internal Revenue and the nation’s first income tax. It levied a 3 percent tax on incomes between $600 and $10,000 and a 5 percent tax on incomes of more than $10,000.

1867 – Heeding public opposition to the income tax, Congress cut the tax rate. From 1868 until 1913, 90 percent of all revenue came from taxes on liquor, beer, wine and tobacco.

1872 – Income tax repealed.

1894 – The Wilson Tariff Act revived the income tax and an income tax division within the Bureau of Internal Revenue was created.

1895 – Supreme Court ruled the new income tax unconstitutional on the grounds that it was a direct tax and not apportioned among the states on the basis of population. The income tax division was disbanded.

1909 – President Taft recommended Congress propose a constitutional amendment that would give the government the power to tax incomes without apportioning the burden among the states in line with population. Congress also levied a 1 percent tax on net corporate incomes of more than $5,000.

1913 – As the threat of war loomed, Wyoming became the 36th and last state needed to ratify the 16th Amendment. The amendment stated, “Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration.” Later, Congress adopted a 1 percent tax on net personal income of more than $3,000 with a surtax of 6 percent on incomes of more than $500,000. It also repealed the 1909 corporate income tax. The first Form 1040 was introduced.

It’s sobering to realize that Washington was not always there. Anyone who visits it today will be struck by the sheer imperial vastness of it and more than that, a burgeoning quality. There is a newness, wealth and power about it that contrasts with the older cities of the Acela corridor. And yet that newness is proof of impermanence. The only really permanent thing in this world is that those who cannot cope with change cannot survive.

It’s an interesting context in which to situate the Washington Post’s report that “a group advocating for a flat sales tax is going up with a new nationwide ad buy urging members of Congress to abolish the IRS. Americans for Fair Taxation, a group headed by wealthy super PAC donor Leo Linbeck III, will launch the ads Monday. The ad buy is in the mid-six-figures, according to the group.” The video at the Post site goes:

“Our best chance ever to shutter the IRS is now,” the ad concludes, urging people to visit the EndtheIRS.com Web site and call an 800 number to join the effort. … Linbeck made a splash in the 2012 election by founding a super PAC devoted to unseating incumbents in primaries, called the Campaign for Primary Accountability.

That group will consider a lawmaker’s stance on abolishing the IRS as part of its criteria for determining whether to fund primary challenges against them.

Is it a hopeless idea? Given what we know about history, bubbles, Smurfs and the history of the IRS itself — nothing is ipso facto out of the question. Ending the IRS is as radical an idea as creating it in the first place. The IRS had a beginning. And it’s a fair guess to surmise that it will someday have an end or at least change into something else. Hopefully into something better.

The whole point is to adapt. The greatest failure of the current elite is a failure of the imagination; an incapacity to imagine a world without them in control. Without their ideas in ascendancy. Americans for Fair Taxation are at least asking the right question: “do the present arrangements still make sense? What needs to change?” And if so, change it, because nothing man makes is forever.

Perhaps it is possible to find a better tax paradigm and find the world still turning as it has these thousands and billions of years.

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The Age of Men

Richard Fernandez — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 00:33:45 +0000

Most of us will be familiar with Arthur Clarke’s famous observation about ships.

If man survives for as long as the least successful of the dinosaurs—those creatures whom we often deride as nature’s failures—then we may be certain of this: for all but a vanishingly brief instant near the dawn of history, the word ‘ship’ will mean— ‘spaceship.’

Spare a thought for computers. Today we mostly think of computers as electronic brains. But for nearly 2,000 years people computed using mechanical representations of the virtual things. Wikipedia reviews some of the history.

The astrolabe was invented in the Hellenistic world in either the 1st or 2nd centuries BC and is often attributed to Hipparchus. A combination of the planisphere and dioptra, the astrolabe was effectively an analog computer capable of working out several different kinds of problems in spherical astronomy. An astrolabe incorporating a mechanical calendar computer[citation needed] and gear-wheels was invented by Abi Bakr of Isfahan in 1235. Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī invented the first mechanical geared lunisolar calendar astrolabe, an early fixed-wired knowledge processing machine with a gear train and gear-wheels, circa 1000 AD.

Some of the older readers of the Belmont Club may have actually used mechanical computers themselves in the form of the Slide Rule. Collectors among you can obtain the K+E MODEL 4081-3, as used in Los Alamos to design the A-bomb. Here’s what Slide Rules looked like.

Let’s design an A-bomb

Until recently it was believed that only higher forms of life could invent computing devices, though that may depend on how you define a higher life form or a computing device.

How do I compute past 20?

Roger Penrose observed that computation, in some sense, exists in nature, so it is not surprising that we should use nature to compute. He wrote in his foreword to A Computable Universe:

I am most honoured to have the privilege to present the Foreword to this fascinating and wonderfully varied collection of contributions, concerning the nature of computation and of its deep connection with the operation of those basic laws, known or yet unknown, governing the universe in which we live. Fundamentally deep questions are indeed being grappled with here, and the fact that we find so many different viewpoints is something to be expected, since, in truth, we know little about the foundational nature and origins of these basic laws, despite the immense precision that we so often find revealed in them …

Even if all of this is accepted, we may still ask what would be the use of a little bit of non-computable action, from time to time, for the operation of the brain? … How far outside the normal scheme of computational physics would these hypercomputational actions be?

Penrose’s answer to his own question is worth reading the article for in itself. But none of these concerned the Navy men of World War 2. They had a problem to solve, which was then how to hit an enemy battleship, or airplane, maneuvering at considerable speed over distances of miles. And since they had no electronic circuitry to help them, they solved the problem as men had done for centuries previous. They solved it with precisely machined things.

It is almost a retro experience to hear the film narrator say, “a computer cannot do this without men”. We are used to thinking that computers can do stuff without us. But back in the day men to crank in the inputs. More importantly they had to decide which things to point the 16 inch guns at. For an Iowa Class battleship could sink a US destroyer about as easily as a Japanese destroyer. So men. Those things were taken for granted in those days. We can almost hear Penrose whispering in the background asking, “are there decisions the computer cannot make?”

The old World War 2 guys knew there were some things we had to tell the computer. Today we have gone far beyond the gears, working surfaces and differentials of the 1940s. Compared to it the NSA is a wonder, as far from primitive fire control as a Greek god might be from the amoeba. Yet perhaps we may still need men to decide “at what do we point this vast machine at?”. Maybe that is a decision that even the acres of computers at NSA cannot answer for themselves. It requires someone has to crank it in as input. It’s interesting to realize that in this super-duper universe there are still some choices that must be made by men, though we are working on eliminating that.

The Flow of Mistrust

Richard Fernandez — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 01:03:05 +0000

One of the conundrums of delegated power is that to be effective, it also has to be capable of potential abuse. Deprive an agent of discretion and the point of hiring him disappears. He may be able to do many things, but not everything he can legally do should be done. Take the question of whether the NSA has too much power. Commenter RWE3 compared it to the USAF’s even more awesome power. “The question in reality is not whether the NSA is accessing such data. Of course they have the capability to do so; it’s their job. It’s like asking if the USAF has the capability to nuke Chicago; if they cannot they better well explain why the hell not.”

We grant agents enormous power but on the implicit understanding that they selectively use it. Andrew McCarthy makes a similar argument. He says the problem with arguing the NSA has too much leeway is that they simply had a larger version of the power granted to every prosecutor. The problem is not with the grant of power, but the abuse of power.

Again, as noted above, usage records for services, like telephone service, to which a customer subscribes do not belong to the subscriber. They are the property of the service provider. As a result, they have never had any Fourth Amendment protection, and they have precious little statutory protection. Again, we on the national security right wanted this legal reality, long ingrained in routine law-enforcement, to be reflected in national security investigations.

When I was a federal prosecutor, if I wanted phone records for an investigation, I wrote a subpoena and had an agent serve it on the relevant phone company. I did not have to go to court. I did not have to make any showing to a judge that the records were relevant, much less that I had probable cause to believe the customer whose records I wanted was suspected of committing a crime….

It has long been the law that grand juries do not have to suspect a crime in order to conduct an investigation; they can investigate, if they wish, just to satisfy themselves that no crime has been committed. As a practical matter, that never happens. Grand juries, agents, and prosecutors are too busy with real crime to conduct witch-hunts….

I could have compelled the production of phone records of countless innocent people. If I did not have a good reason for doing so, it would have been an abuse of my power. But it would not have been a violation of laws that, quite intentionally, allow the executive branch to compel non-privileged records with virtually no oversight. It would mean we’d need a new, more responsible prosecutor, not new laws.

Of course the USAF is not in the business of nuking American cities, even if it could. Though that does not prevent Hollywood from imagining scenarios where the President orders New York destroyed, usually to prevent the Zombie apocalypse from spreading or as a last ditch measure against Space Aliens. But the fact remains that as with a guns anything powerful enough to do the job on enemies can do a job — on civilians.

One solution to this problem is to remove all sources of danger. This is the logic behind campaigns to create a world without nuclear weapons, wiretapping or guns. And it’s had to argue against this in principle, other than to point out that we have been unable to figure out how to do it. The bad guys maddeningly insist on keeping their nukes, China will undoubtedly keep its hackers and the criminals will insist on retaining their guns. So while we can decree that henceforth the USAF will no longer have nukes, the wisdom of that course is doubtful for as long as Russia, China or Pakistan keep theirs.

Since we can’t control things the next best approach is to control people through molding organizational cultures and implementing accountability. That is the approach of checks and balances and the role played — until recently — by culture. It is fairly safe to assume that the generals in charge of the USAF don’t spend much time thinking about how to nuke America, and so “as a practical matter” — to borrow a phrase from McCarthy — “that never happens”.

We have confidence in the USAF culture, which is sometimes referred to as “trust”. We trust the gun in the hands of policemen; in the hands of our friends on the firing range. We form trust networks. In the current debate over surveillance it’s useful to ask ourselves, in this instance who do we trust?

Most people who use Google, Facebook or Microsoft self-evidently trust Google, Facebook or Microsoft. If they didn’t then they would not have subscribed to or used their services.

The decline in trust must therefore be attributed to the introduction into the trust network of an untrusted party. In the original web of trust we are “Friends of Google” or Facebook, or Microsoft as the case may be.

The NSA in this case is a FOAF; a “friend of a friend”. They are not our friends. They are Google’s — as mandated by the Patriot Act — or not, as I am unqualified to interpret the law. The problem lies with Transitivity. “In situations where A trusts B and B trusts C, transitivity concerns the extent to which A trusts C.” Since we don’t trust the NSA to the extent that perhaps Google does, our trust of Google doesn’t carry over completely to the NSA. It is less than complete and therefore the overall trust metric declines. Like a convoy that travels at the speed of the slowest ship, the trust network is only as strong as the node that we trust the least.

In a pretty fundamental way the question is not whether you “trust Google” — you already did — but whether you trust Obama. And even if you did trust Obama, would you trust his successor and the one after his successor? In general, do you trust the FOAF?

There is one final wrinkle in this problem. The FOAF is no ordinary “friend”. He is a sovereign; a person with vast power over you. Can you really be “friends” with such an entity or should the friendship have special and limited properties?

It is important to grasp this argument in crafting a solution to the current crisis of trust. You cannot fix the problem of trust by purely technical means; by limiting the fix internally to Google, Facebook or Microsoft. The contagion comes from elsewhere. What you do not trust — not completely anyway — is the new entrant into the trust network.

Therefore the solution to the problem can only take two basic forms 1) either you sever the network connection to the FOAF or 2) you make the FOAF accountable by insisting on an organizational culture of integrity and making it subject to oversight or some other form of review. In other words, you either remove the power or make those who exercise it accountable. Some combination of the two can doubtless be conceived, but basically those are the variables in play.

For this reason the current crisis of trust in tech cannot be dispelled without resort to a political solution, just as the question of trusting the USAF with nukes cannot be severed from the question of whether those in charge of the Air Force daily dream of nuking America or not. The Administration is part of the problem. Though they pretend it is not, the quality of their character is relevant. In fact, the doubts over that quality are the central element in this crisis of trust. It spreading the contagion of mistrust into the system. The vector of doubt doesn’t go from Tech to the Administration. It goes from the Administration to Tech.

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The Attack of the Golem

Richard Fernandez — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 22:30:51 +0000

Before he went to the Guardian, Edward Snowden went to Barton Gellman of the Washington Post with 41 slides and a “demand that the Post publish all 41 slides within 72 hours of receipt”. Calling himself “Verax”, Snowden approached the Washington Post through an implied intermediary. Gellman writes:

A series of indirect contacts preceded our first direct exchange May 16. Snowden was not yet ready to tell me his name, but he said he was certain to be exposed — by his own hand or somebody else’s. Until then, he asked that I not quote him at length. He said semantic analysis, another of the NSA’s capabilities, would identify him by his patterns of language.

The Post dithered and the Guardian got the scoop. In the event, not even the Guardian published all the slides. “The Guardian also refused to publish the complete set. Why? If you saw them, you’d know, Gellman told the New York Times’ Charlie Savage.”

The slides remain in the possession of both the Washington Post and the Guardian, not to mention Snowden himself. Perhaps they’ve been glimpsed by the Chinese in whose territory the Snowden was last seen and may possibly come into the hands of Vladimir Putin, who announced he’d consider granting Snowden asylum if asked. Twitchy rhetorically wonders who decides whether the other 36 slides will be published:

The Post, together with the Guardian, published five PowerPoint slides regarding the government’s PRISM program. However, both papers chose to withhold 36 more slides leaked to them by Snowden. That puts both papers, rather than the government, in the position of deciding what the public needs to know, and what it shouldn’t know about the government’s Internet surveillance infrastructure. Is everyone comfortable with that?

The answer is obvious: Snowden, Russia and/or China get to decide if the 36 slides get released. Nor is it to be discounted that Snowden has more in his possession than just the slides. A little noted detail in Politico hints there may be more: “additionally, according to Gellman, Snowden requested that the Post publish online a ‘cryptographic key’ so he could prove to a foreign embassy he was the source of the document leak.”

This strongly suggests that Snowden was going to post the material online together with a key allowing its decryption – so it could be read – and a digital signature proving that he alone encrypted it — so they would know it came from him. He might have posted it anyway as a form of insurance.

There may exist a trove of unreadable NSA classified material already in the hands of a number of people simply awaiting a key and signature. Snowden may have arranged for the key to be released on a schedule unless he resets the timer at intervals through some instrumentality. This would be insurance against “disappearing” because if he vanishes, then who resets the timer?

The size of that potential bomb is difficult to estimate. What’s in the 36 slides? Now imagine that you are Google or Microsoft trying to estimate your possible exposure to a class action suit, the kind of which nearly sank AT&T in the Hepting vs AT&T case, whose amounts were potentially “ruinous”.

What is Google’s liability? It may not in fact know, not only because it is uncertain what liabilities arise from the current exposure, there is no way of estimating what liabilities may arise from a future exposure. What else is in the trove? Have health records been accessed? What about financial records? How big can this hit be? Google has tried to get out in front of the issue by “asking the Obama administration for permission to disclose more information about requests it gets from national intelligence agencies for its users’ emails and other online communications.”

It needs daylight between itself and the administration. This is the first step in pointing fingers.

The technology giant made the request in a letter to Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III on Tuesday.

Google is trying to counteract damaging media reports that the company allows the National Security Agency access to users’ online communications.

The BBC is now reporting that Facebook and Microsoft have joined Google in requesting the government explain things. “Microsoft added that “permitting greater transparency on the aggregate volume and scope of national security requests, including FISA orders, would help the community understand and debate these important issues”. Ted Ullyot, Facebook’s general counsel, said the social networking leader wants to provide “a complete picture of the government requests we receive, and how we respond”.

They are unlikely to be completely successful, however. Some kind of court is in the cards. And any litigation is likely to involve trade secrets, patents, etc of tech companies. This could cost a lot of money.

For the NSA, things are only slightly better. Unless they can put a lid on this, or somehow restore public confidence in the broad intelligence gathering effort, then they may be the object of Church Committee-style hearings, which in the 1970s severely clipped the wings of the CIA. The lawyers and the budgets rivals to the NSA are probably orbiting like vultures right now, waiting for it to die or get downsized.

Putin probably believes that offering asylum to Snowden is a good investment. Because he can sell Snowden back to Obama in exchange for a whole lot more than he can screw out of Snowden on his own. But not before he gets Snowden’s stash, and not before he gets stuff to hold US tech over a barrel.

The enormity of the potential catastrophe facing US intelligence and US tech can hardly be overstated because we don’t even know what it is. It’s not just a ‘known unknown’. It’s an ‘unknown unknown’. The only way out is for everyone who stands to down the tubes to be held harmless. The political system has to absolve the citizens who just went along. “Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine gubernatio, et populorum, et lex.”

Do you think “in nomine Obama” will be enough?

Most problems in human history, but politics in especial, have been solved through human sacrifice. We just call it something different now. To restore legitimacy to the system, the system needs a human sacrifice. Someone or something has to take the rap, accept responsibility, take a bullet for the team so we can all agree to move on.

Who’s going to take the rap?

Sometimes that person is a US President. For example Lyndon Johnson resigned after his Vietnam policy failed. Richard Nixon, who had just won a landslide election shortly before, resigned after Watergate. They did this because they were in the way of keeping the system going; while they remained things were paralyzed. In the end Johnson and Nixon went because hanging on to the Oval Office was bad for politics, bad for business, bad for everybody.

A political crisis is usually about the establishment coming to a consensus decision of who has to go. But somebody has to go. The NSA’s intelligence collection system is too valuable to lose. And so are the banks and tech companies and whatever else might be caught up in this. Somehow the governance system has to be purged of what is paralyzing it so life can go on. One blogger writes to say that the “Golem of Government” is running rampage through the system.

You see, for generations now you have collectively built and nurtured a massive, living, metabolizing creature. From the inanimate, intellectual detritus of “progressivism” and your unending and increasingly all-consuming narcissism you have kneaded it into a shapeless husk, pouring in rank mud like “Save the Planet,” “Global Warming,” “The American Dream of Home Ownership,” “The War on Drugs”, “Mothers Against Drunk Driving”, “The War On Terror”, “Speculators”, “Too Big To Fail”, “The 1%”, and of course the essence and spark of its life, “…if it saves just one child.” In conjunction with (but far more so than the other buckets of intellectual mud) “…if it saves just one child” has created the Golem of Government.

And it grew, and grew, and grew until it blew a fuse. Nobody knows how to turn it off any more. It ain’t just the Tea Party guys any more. Now it’s after Google! So it’s serious. Something has to stop it or slow it down before it smashes everything in its agony. Now let’s see whether the political system is up to the task.

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The Destroyer of Words

Richard Fernandez — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 22:30:31 +0000

The latest scandal story about the State Department coverup of a US ambassador who was allegedly soliciting prostitutes in a public park brought two things to mind. The first, unbidden and unsupported, was that factions in the bureaucracy were at war with each other and the target of the one faction was Obama and the target of the other was She Who Must Not Be Named.

But that was speculation. The more tenable line of thought was a reminder that humans are fallible and often corrupt. This has always been true so how do we live with ourselves? At first simply by surviving the worst we could do to ourselves.

For much of history our ability to harm ourselves was fortunately limited by the crude nature of our means. But by the dawn of the 19th century it became obvious that the lack of technology alone could not forever protect us. Men were inventing more and more lethal devices. Dynamite, when it was first introduced, produced almost the same fear in futurists as the atomic bomb. It is widely believed that Alfred Nobel endowed the ‘Nobel Prize’ to assuage a guilty conscience.

In 1888 Alfred’s brother Ludvig died while visiting Cannes and a French newspaper erroneously published Alfred’s obituary. It condemned him for his invention of dynamite and is said to have brought about his decision to leave a better legacy after his death. The obituary stated, Le marchand de la mort est mort (“The merchant of death is dead”) and went on to say, “Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday.” Alfred was disappointed with what he read and concerned with how he would be remembered.

The same kind of apocalyptic powers were ascribed to the machine gun, poison gas and the bomber. In 1932 Stanley Baldwin wrote “the time has now come to an end when Great Britain can proceed with unilateral disarmament … the bomber will always get through.” But it remained for J. Robert Oppenheimer to put the thought in its iconic form. Looking on his own creation Oppenheimer described how he was mentally transported back to ancient battlefields of the Bhagavad Gita to face the inevitable fruit of his inventiveness: “I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds”.

That was nearly 70 years ago and the world is still here. What happened to keep it going?

The answer, ironically, lies in corrupt, sinful and foolish man himself. Somehow he found a way till now to put his creations under control. What he has not managed to achieve is to uninvent knowledge. We know how to make better explosives than Nobel, more efficient automatic weapons than Maxim and now even the Pakistanis have their own Destroyers of Worlds. But we have also found ways to deal with them.

The paradox is that those who hate the West believe that its science destroyed Paradise. In their minds the most destructive moment in human history came when iron-armored men armed with guns set foot on the unspoiled New World. And their efforts since have been to uninvent technology, an impulse that lives in the Green Movement. ”We are stardust, we are golden. And we’ve got to find our way back to the Garden.”

Except that perhaps the Garden was always full of weeds, and snakes too, lost the moment men — wherever they might have been — first discerned the difference between Good and Evil and chose Evil. And it is perhaps an even greater paradox that cafe leftism thinks even greater progress on the road back to Paradise can be obtained by purging the West of its remaining sense of the numinous. Kill morality and you kill evil. Perhaps they’ve got it backwards.

It truth the sense the numinous is all that stands between us and destruction. The deep dark secret of the disarmament movement is that it never relied on the control of arms. It has always relied on the control of men. And the control of men relied upon the acceptance of taboos; in the submission to a kind of accepted set of values, in the belief in the odiousness of betrayal. The key to controlling the nuclear bomb lay in governance. It lay in the accountability of the possessors of these things to the general public.

There are dozens of nuclear-capable states in the world today. Canada, most of Western Europe, Australia, South Korea, Japan. But we are not worried about those countries, or worry only a little, because we trust them. They possess legitimacy, which is a mixture of popular acceptance, perceived responsibility and the sense that they’ll keep their word.

The problem of North Korea is not a problem of technology. It is a problem of legitimacy.

In recent weeks the world has become aware of yet another wonder weapon. The full power of information technology has been revealed by reports detailing their use to capture nearly every aspect of modern communications. We have now glimpsed the virtual counterpart of the Destroyer of Worlds — the Destroyer of Words. And yet a moment’s reflection must reveal that we always knew that technology could do this. What we had not suspected was that the Obama administration would do this.

Many of those who are concerned about national security are appalled by the actions of the whistleblower now hiding in Hong Kong. Yet the damage he caused was not in revealing capability. Edward Snowden’s explosive payload was in ascribing intent. The warhead on the tip of the revelations was Barack Obama, or more precisely, Barack Obama’s lack of credibility. To understand this, we have to go back to Benghazi.

Prior to Benghazi, when Obama’s reputation for honesty was relatively unscathed, Snowden’s expose might have been treated like Julian Assange’s. “America has great power, but so what?” The President might still have escaped at that point by saying ‘trust me’. All that began to change with Benghazi.

The coverup of that incident, followed in quick succession by reports the Associated Press was wiretapped en masse, the IRS persecutions, the secret-email shennanigans, the EPA nonsense, etc. had progressively and perhaps fatally eroded the President’s credibility to the point that when the NSA was finally forced to admit to its activities it could not easily invoke legitimacy.

The government’s ultimate defense is to say “I work for you”. But that only works when people believe it. Unfortunately too many now believe the country works for Obama.

It was not ipso facto the NSA’s fault that the mistrust was so rife; their task is technical. The job of providing political acceptance and legitimacy belonged to the President, and more generally, to Washington in general. By slow degrees Washington has kept losing that trust; and the system by keeping the surveillance programs black even in principle and perhaps lying about their very existence, bought the protection of secrecy at the expense of trust.

Washington forgot the main lesson from the nuclear age: that the existence such powerful weaponry can never be protected by secrecy or technology. Their only defense in possession lies in legitimacy.

Snowden’s torpedo, unleashed perhaps by himself or by some third party, struck at the government’s most vulnerable joint, the weld between Washington and the governed.

Snowden said what many were already prepared to believe — even Obama’s liberal supporters — that the administration is a lying, corrupt, power-mad collection of unscrupulous men. Like a jilted woman, people didn’t believe Snowden because they knew him; they believed in Snowden because they knew Obama. The sense of betrayal may have even been more acute on the Left. In Snowden’s words: “I believed in Obama’s promises”. And how many of those said to themselves, ‘so did I and chose poorly.’

The solution to the current crisis of privacy is not technical. It is political. It cannot be found in uninventing the computer; only in creating institutions the public can trust to control such power; in the same way it trusts certain governments to control nuclear weapons.

Returning to the example with which this post started, the problem of ambassadors soliciting prostitutes cannot be solved by expecting human nature to change. Rather it must be found by accepting that we have to watch each other; and if the President can watch the people, then the people must reserve the right to watch the President. For there will always be ambassadors out for action in the park. The only question is whether there is a State Department that cares about stopping it.

The Founders knew this from the outset. A government will always be made up of men. And these men must never be allowed to become so powerful, so exalted or considered so irreproachable that they are left alone to do as they please. Only one thing can stop the Destroyer of Words. Accountability has to be restored to the system. The principals responsible must go. If legitimacy is ever to be restored those who have no more credibility can no longer lead it. That is inevitable. What remains is to watch it play out.

The End of Innocence

Richard Fernandez — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 00:35:49 +0000

Bruce Schneier, who writes prolifically on computer security issues, argues on CNN that revelations about NSA data mining programs prove that ‘resistance is futile’. He cites the case of two individuals, manifestly more computer savvy than the average Joe, who were ultimately unable to escape the toils of the FBI.

Hector Monsegur, one of the leaders of the LulzSac hacker movement, was identified and arrested last year by the FBI. Although he practiced good computer security and used an anonymous relay service to protect his identity, he slipped up. …Paula Broadwell,who had an affair with CIA director David Petraeus, similarly took extensive precautions to hide her identity. She never logged in to her anonymous e-mail service from her home network. Instead, she used hotel and other public networks when she e-mailed him. The FBI correlated hotel registration data from several different hotels — and hers was the common name…

Schneier concludes, “Welcome to an Internet without privacy, and we’ve ended up here with hardly a fight.”

Well I wouldn’t say that.

Governments have been fighting over the information owned by civilians for a long time. China has been engaged in reading data and metadata (which Drudge intentionally misspells as “megadata”) for a long time. The Financial Times has just described a 21st century instance of war. It’s no longer conducted by sweaty armies marching on leather boots. It’s done virtually. Think about it. The President of the US just met with the President of China, not to talk about ships, artillery or planes. They were talking about bits.

Beijing is engaged in systematic cyber spying on the US military and private businesses to acquire technology to boost military modernization and strengthen its capacity in any regional crisis, according to the Pentagon. …

In its report, the Pentagon paints a picture of a formidable and highly organised adversary which is using multiple methods to acquire technology, ranging from state businesses to students to old-fashioned human espionage.

“China continues to leverage foreign investments, commercial joint ventures, academic exchanges, the experience of repatriated Chinese students and researchers, and state-sponsored industrial and technical espionage to increase the level of technologies and expertise available to support military research, development, and acquisition,” the report says.

Like a old-time striptease show we see a little more with each wave of the fan. The next big revelation is probably going to be about financial wiretapping. PBS says “Obama Defends NSA’s Surveillance of Phone, Web and Credit Card Use”. Well why not? It’s a very short distance from “you didn’t build that” to “you don’t own that”. In fact they are equivalent statements. But whether there will be anything left to own after the vultures have their way is another question.

The world economy depends to a very great extent on information. And our great leaders are doing everything they can to make us mistrust it. As every applications developer and network professional understands, information flows demand some level of trust. That is why billions of dollars are invested on security systems. A currency is largely about trust. Proven insecurity will certainly undermine a financial institution or communications system, as Michael Bloomberg learned.

A multibillionaire, dissatisfied with being just a business tycoon, starts a media division, brands it with his name and starts to gobble up competition and talent. Then he decides to run for office …

Meanwhile, it appears that his news company, like him, doesn’t like to adhere to the rules of the road. It turns out they have been using the terminals named after the billionaire and that made his fortune to peep and pry into the personal activities of important clients, including the nation’s biggest banks and even top government officials.

But this isn’t happening in a foreign country, it’s a homegrown embarrassment by American oligarch Michael Bloomberg.

Michael Bloomberg is now worried the market will punish him, because it will. Bloomberg’s predicament creates a competitive opportunity for rivals who can demonstrate they are more secure than Bloomberg’s service. Glenn Derene of Popular Mechanics writes that the Federal Government’s surveillance efforts will manifestly affect US tech companies.

Think for a second about just how the U.S. economy has changed in the last 40 years. While a large percentage of our economy is still based in manufacturing, some of the most ascendant U.S. companies since the 1970s have been in the information technology sector. Companies such as Microsoft, Apple, and Google are major exporters of information services (if you can think of such a thing as “exportable”) through products such as Gmail, iCloud, Exchange, and Azure. Hundreds of millions of people use these services worldwide, and it has just been revealed to everybody outside the U.S. that our government reserves the right to look into their communications whenever it wants.

If you lived in Japan, India, Australia, Mexico, or Brazil, and you used Gmail, or synced your photos through iCloud, or chatted via Skype, how would you feel about that? Let’s say you ran a business in those countries that relied upon information services from a U.S. company. Don’t these revelations make using such a service a business liability? In fact, doesn’t this news make it a national security risk for pretty much any other country to use information services from companies based in the U.S.? How should we expect the rest of the world to react?

Here’s a pretty good guess: Other countries will start routing around the U.S. information economy by developing, or even mandating, their own competing services. In 2000, the European Union worked out a series of “Safe Harbor” regulations mandating privacy protection standards for companies storing E.U. citizens’ data on servers outside of the E.U. For U.S. companies, that means applying stronger privacy protection for European data than for our own citizens’ data. And now there is considerable reason to believe that Prism violated our Safe Harbor agreements with the E.U.

Has it come to this? Are we really willing to let the fear of terrorism threaten one of the most important sectors of the U.S. economy?

The answer to is “yes” as in “yes we can”. But no one else seems to have learned the lesson. Question: what do you do after spending millions of developer manhours to secure a system? Why you build a backdoor. And then maybe the Chinese come along and … On the eve of Pearl Harbor the commanders worried that saboteurs were going to blow up the army’s P-40s. So to prevent that they were all ordered parked in the middle of the runway where no saboteur could possible get them.

The NSA leaker is actually a contractor who is in Hong Kong. A surveillance task had been outsourced. What could go wrong? Even if the administration proved the leaker was working for the other side it would prove the point.

“We Can’t Spy . . . If We Can’t Buy!” the article said. Right and if you can Buy then you can Spy.

I think Derene is wrong about ascribing consumer of surveillance fears to counterterrorism efforts. Publics will accept a certain amount of intrusion as part of the price of good governance. If the public believed that Obama administration were only accessing records of terrorists pursuant to a court order, or that adequate due process protected privacy, few would mind.

What consumers are scared of is politics. What they are really terrified of is caprice; the possibility they will be punished or harassed, not for being enemies of the law, but enemies of Obama. That they will be found guilty as charged of holding a political opinion or subscribing to an innocent belief that is out of fashion with the powers that be.

Companies and users have long factored in the known risks of engaging in criminal activity. They understand that criminal behavior carries risks. But now the consumers and service providers must live with the risk of ‘unknown unknown’; secret courts, guided by secret jurisprudence and executing secret actions. If the message of the administration is that privacy is ‘no big deal’ it will find that nobody who wants to tax the information economy can be so cavalier.

One can only imagine the results of lawsuits related to the European “Safe Harbor Law”, which ostensibly “sets comparatively strict privacy protections for EU citizens. It prohibits European firms from transferring personal data to overseas jurisdictions with weaker privacy laws, but creates exceptions where the foreign recipients have voluntarily agreed to meet EU standards under the Directive’s Safe Harbor Principles.” Especially when the Europeans learn the “Safe Harbor” law is actually spelled Information Roach Motel.

Information technology, like nuclear weapons, will never be uninvented. The best anyone can hope for it is to put it under control. Harry Truman had the wit not to point nuclear weapons at anyone randomly. Our better educated leaders have lost the knack. If we wish to enjoy the enormous benefits of information technology, it is necessary to bring it under control. To restore it to its legitimate uses. And as for those who have undermined its legitimacy, well they have lost theirs and one hopes the political process will reflect this.

Finance was virtualized by Richard Nixon’s decision to go off the Gold Standard. Warfare was largely virtualized by the nuclear age. Now legitimacy is being virtualized by the narrative. To a degree never before since Genesis, “in the beginning there was the Word and the Word has 64 bits”. To survive in that virtual age, average citizens are going to learn that the 4th Amendment is really the equivalent of the 2nd Amendment; and that encryption, private networks and the limits of government power over such things are the price of liberty.

Obama promised to usher in the age of idealism. Ironically he rang down the curtain on innocence. But maybe he was never that; for how would we know the truth in a wilderness of mirrors?

Time it was, and what a time it was, it was
A time of innocence, a time of confidences
Long ago, it must be, I have a photograph
It’s still unphotoshopped, they’re all that’s left you

The Three Conjectures at Amazon Kindle for $1.99

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All We Are Saying …

Richard Fernandez — Sat, 08 Jun 2013 02:56:50 +0000

In the halcyon days before the Verizon and PRISM revelations gave the subject a sinister cast, the New York Post examined President Obama’s attempt to end the War on Terror by declaring peace. The signed editorial read: “President Obama’s speech at the National Defense University calling for an end to the war on terror forces the question of who gets to declare peace.” Could he actually do that?

The Left wing in our political debate has been agitating for some time to repeal the authorization to use military force that the Congress passed after 9/11. The President boarded the bandwagon yesterday. He vowed he would sign no laws designed to expand the mandate and declared outright that he looks forward “to engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine, and ultimately repeal” the congressional mandate to use force. “This war, like all wars, must end,” he said, declaring: “That’s what our democracy demands.”

“Suppose”, the NY Post asked further, “the President or the Congress do want to end the war with al-Qaeda but al-Qaeda doesn’t want to end its war against us. Is it constitutional for the president or the Congress to declare an end to the war if our enemy is still in the field levying a war against us?”

The problem of declaring victory against an enemy who refuses to concede defeat is not new. The World War 2 generation solved the problem by continuing until the foe threw in the towel. Although President Obama may believe that victory consists in convincing one’s countrymen that “we won”, historically it consisted of convincing the enemy that he lost. In World War II for example, both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were defeated as a military fact by early 1944. But they were not convinced of the fact. The remainder of the war was spent knocking the idea into their consciousness.

But the allies did not declare peace in 1944. They went on and by mid-1945, Curtis LeMay’s bombers were incinerating one Japanese city a night; US battleships were shelling coastal towns, harbors everywhere were being mined and submarines kept ships from leaving or entering ports. Victory as an objective fact was not debatable. But to the Axis accepting defeat subjectively was unthinkable. One of the supreme ironies of World War II was that the Japanese high command needed the A-bomb more than the Americans. They needed it not to change any military fact, they were as defeated before the Bomb as after it, but in order to change a mental perception. The bomb provided the pretext to accept defeat.

But in the bad old, unenlightened days you convinced the enemy they lost. Today we’re smarter. We convince ourselves the whole misunderstanding should never have happened in the first place.

What is the administration’s pretext to accept victory? As near as can be seen, it consists in convincing ourselves that we never had an enemy to begin with. We just misunderstood things. There is no such thing as a Clash of Civilizations, nor rogue states, nor even a militant version of Islam. That’s all a conservative invention. There are just only misunderstood people who, if we got to know better, we would not drive to workplace violence.

Maybe that’s why the White House erroneously refers to its authority to bug domestic communications as deriving from the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act. Not the “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act”, which actually exists, but by some slip of the fat finger, the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act, which are the words which occur in the White House transcript.

The most peculiar thing about not having a War on Terror to fight is that for some reason you have to keep on fighting. Just who is problematic. Neither Bush nor Obama ever got around to naming an enemy. And now that Obama wants to say it is over, we can say that maybe we never had one at all.

Instead, the administration undertook an expensive “outreach program” to people who are not the enemy to recruit Muslim Brotherhood operatives into American national security agencies to convince us they were never bad guys in the first place. And presumably having convinced enough of us, well then the war’s over.

So if peace is busting out all over what was the purpose of the PRISM and Verizon operations? What Conor Friedersdorf of the Atlantic called “all the infrastructure a tyrant would need”. Why nobody knows. It was the ‘whoops’ dump. The British Empire, it was said, was acquired in a ‘fit of absentmindedness’. Why then should not the NSA pick up terrabytes of records in the same accidental manner?James Clapper told Congress that any interception of domestic communications under the FISA — the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act or Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, as you prefer — was purely unwitting.

“Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” committee member Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Clapper during the March 12 hearing.

In response, Clapper replied quickly: “No, sir.”

“There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect [intelligence on Americans], but not wittingly,” the U.S. intelligence chief told Wyden and the rest of the committee.

So there you have it. There”s nothing to worry about. You may say the means are disconnected from the ends. But in fact there are no ends. There’s no War on Terror, remember? At the root of this difficulty is an absurdity, which Walter Russell Mead calls “public peace, secret war“.

But as the MSM reels with Nixonian revelations about a man it has lionized, something important is being missed. There’s a connection between the President’s May 23 speech on the COFKAGWOT (the conflict formerly known as the global war on terror) declaring an end to the “war phase” of the struggle against terror and the secret intelligence system his administration has put in place. The two policies are joined at the hip, and while the President has likely understood this for a long time now, the political success of his foreign policy depended on keeping this truth concealed from his political allies in the US.

From the President’s point of view, the public belief that we have been engaged in a “war on terror” is part of the many sided problem he inherited from his predecessor. As long as that kind of military mindset dominates public thinking, even Democratic presidents will have to spend lots of money on defense. Tensions between America and Islam will fester, with the risk of more attacks and confrontations making things yet worse. The flexibility of presidents in reaching out to Islamic movements and governments, and perhaps also pressuring Israel to make more concessions in the hope of further reducing regional tensions, will also be limited. When they think the country is in danger, Jacksonians are vigilant and engaged; when they think all is well, they go back to sleep. This President wants them asleep, clinging to their guns and Bibles all they want, but not bothering their pretty little heads about American foreign policy.

The readers of this blog will remember all the posts which warned of the dangers of falsely abolishing war by redefining it as a law enforcement problem. The result, I wrote, would either grant all enemy combatants the rights of citizens or to reduce all citizens to the status of enemy combatants. It was an act of supreme intellectual dishonesty, a self-deception so obvious it was hard to see how anybody but a man of the Left could fall for it. The whole thing was a con pulled off by President Obama on a voter base so eager to see itself as intellectually sophisticated and morally superior they were willing to call a horse chestnut a horse.

President Obama’s solution to the problems of the world are those of a con man. And he had no difficulty convincing his base it had no enemies, faced no unemployment, that it could look forward to free healthcare. And that it could have free Obamaphones. He forgot to say there was one problem with those phones ….

Don’t worry he’s building a world without nuclear weapons, without provocative “unproven missile defense systems”; and as for those millions of records, well trust him. His is the most transparent and ethical administration in history.

Rush Limbaugh says “America is in the midst of a coup”. You might quibble with that dire interpretation, but the one sure thing is that someone’s in the middle of a joke. Maybe the joke is on us. The audience in the video below should be glad they’ve gone to college. Now they know better than to worry.