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Der Spiegel remembers who, in the West, promoted democratization in the Muslim world.
…The free world has fewer friends outside Europe than it would care to admit. It would obviously be desirable to work exclusively with governments who share our democratic beliefs. That would only leave Israel in the region that we are currently watching with such fascination, as only Israel guarantees full, Western human rights to its citizens, including women, homosexuals and dissidents. But somehow that would also not be right.
The sympathies of many honorable, left-thinking people do not currently lie with the Israelis, who grant the Arab inhabitants in their midst much more freedom than all the neighboring states combined. Astoundingly, their sympathies lie with the Muslim Brotherhood in the surrounding countries, a movement that hates homosexuals, keeps women covered and despises minorities. This is puzzling.
…Painful as it may be to admit, it was the despised former US President George W. Bush who believed in the democratization of the Muslim world and incurred the scorn and mockery of the Left for his conviction. …
In Frum Forum, David Frum makes a good point about how the administration should handle the despicable activists who are going after Bush. It would be worth Congress investigating whether the UN or any countries receiving foreign aid are funding these activists. Budget cuts are needed, and we could reduce the number of organizations that think our leaders should be targets.
CNN International is reporting that George Bush canceled a trip to Switzerland after – and possibly because – a so-called human rights group filed with a Swiss court a request for the ex-president’s arrest.
…It’s hard to know how much of this story is true, and how much is fundraising bluster. But if even a small portion of the news is true, President Obama has a duty to speak up and to warn foreign governments that further indulgence of this kind of nonsense by their court systems will be viewed as an unfriendly act by the United States. It is one more reminder of why the concept of an International Criminal Court is such an invitation to mischief.
And for those inclined to enjoy the mischief: Just wait until somebody serves an arrest warrant in Luxembourg on ex-President Obama for ordering all those drone strikes on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
You won’t believe what Thomas Sowell writes about. With friends like this president…
While everyone’s attention seems to be focused on the crisis in Egypt, a bombshell revelation about the administration’s foreign policy in Europe has largely gone unnoticed.
The British newspaper The Telegraph has reported that part of the price which President Obama paid to get Russia to sign the START treaty, limiting nuclear arms, was revealing to the Russians the hitherto secret size of the British nuclear arsenal. This information came from the latest WikiLeaks documents.
To betray vital military secrets of this country’s oldest, most steadfast and most powerful ally, behind the back of the British government, is something that should set off alarm bells. Following in the wake of earlier betrayals of prior American commitments to put a nuclear shield in Eastern Europe, and the undermining of Israel and calculated insults to its prime minister, this pattern raises serious, and perhaps almost unthinkable, questions about the Obama administration’s foreign policy. …
In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Nile Gardiner comments on the administration giving UK nuclear information to Russia. Perhaps the UK should put out a warrant for Obama’s arrest for espionage (in the style of the obnoxious Swiss activists).
…In December I wrote extensively on the White House’s relentless drive to sign the New START Treaty with Moscow as part of its controversial “reset” policy, despite the fact that it represented a staggeringly bad deal for the United States, and a remarkably good one for the Russians. The Telegraph report confirms the extraordinary lengths to which Washington stooped to meet Russian demands, which stunningly included passing on British nuclear secrets to a major strategic adversary.
As the Prime Minister and senior British ministers head to Germany this weekend to take part in the Munich Security Conference, key questions must be asked of their US counterparts, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as to the exact nature of the deal struck with Russia, and what more has been compromised in relation to British national security.
The matter is serious enough to merit Congressional hearings in Washington as well as parliamentary hearings in London. It is easy to see why the Obama team refused to allow the US Senate access to the negotiating documents for New START, as they would have sparked outrage on both sides of the Atlantic that would almost certainly have killed the Treaty. The Telegraph report clearly contradicts repeated claims by the Obama negotiating team that no side deals were struck with their Russian counterparts. Not for the first time, the current US administration has been eager to appease America’s enemies while shamelessly undercutting her allies.
In the Daily Beast, Andrew Roberts gives us more details on the State Department’s espionage and betrayal of the UK.
…Here’s what happened: According to WikiLeaks, a series of classified cables were sent from the U.S. negotiators to the State Department explaining that the Russians wanted to know the full extent of Great Britain’s nuclear capability. This was hardly surprising, as throughout the Cold War they had been trying to get this information. Now they were insisting on it as a price for Russian support for the New START deal. They could gauge this information from examining the “unique identifier” serial numbers on the Trident missiles that the U.S. has sold the UK over the years. The State Department has called these reports “bunk”.
Instead of telling Moscow that Britain was an independent power not party to the treaty, and therefore information about her nuclear deterrent was non-negotiable, the leaked cables show that the Obama administration lobbied the British Foreign Office and Ministry of Defense in 2009 for permission to simply tell Moscow this data about the number, age, and performance capabilities of Trident.
Needless to say, the U.K refused, because not letting the Russians know the full extent of its deterrent has long been key to its success. Yet astonishingly—and in my view despicably—the Obama administration seems to have simply rode roughshod over British objections and—according both to WikiLeaks and the Daily Telegraph of London—“The U.S. agreed to hand over the serial numbers of Trident missiles it transfers to Britain.”
If it turns out that it is WikiLeaks and not the State Department that is right, this represents a clear violation of the agreement made between Winston Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt at Hyde Park in June 1942 over Anglo-American nuclear cooperation. The idea that any American president would browbeat or simply ignore a British government and give U.K. nuclear secrets to the Russians in order to secure a treaty with Moscow would be unconscionable to Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, Kennedy, Johnson, Ford, probably Carter, certainly Reagan, both Bushes and probably Clinton too. Yet Obama, who has treated Britain with a thinly veiled sneer throughout his presidency, has not only countenanced but actually done it. …
David Harsanyi comments on corporate welfare big government is doling out.
…”Right now, businesses across this country are proving that America can compete,” Obama explained, listing a number of businesses that get it like Caterpillar, Whirlpool, Dow and a company named Geomagic.
All of these phenomenal success stories (thanks to Ira Stoll at The Future of Capitalism blog for pointing this out) also share, in one way or another, the privilege of feeding at gumit’s welfare trough. Oh yes, these exemplars of good corporate citizenry prove they can compete in a marketplace with taxpayer funds. Which will no doubt make them more compliant with the administration’s wishes.
General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt, who Obama recently appointed to lead his new panel on “job creation,” understands this new reality. One of the nation’s most effective cronies, Immelt’s company has benefited from government bailouts, waivers and lines of credit. …
The Streetwise Professor explains the slippery slope of corporate social responsibility.
…imposing some sort of vague duty on corporate officers to “do good” is subject to no such checks. Some may try to do good, but may do ill instead because they lack the incentive or information to do real good. Others may use “social responsibility” to indulge their own preferences while imposing great costs on others whose resources they utilize in the cause.
But more ominously, creating a presumption that corporations have some broader social responsibility subjects them to political pressure… It effectively subordinates corporations…to politicians who arrogate to themselves the role of speaking in the public–”social”–interest. This is exactly why the idea is catnip to progressives like Obama. They don’t like government power constrained by Constitutional and procedural checks and limits. They don’t like limits on their discretion. Passing laws or imposing regulations that are subject to legal challenge are a lot harder than executing a shakedown. Once corporate executives concede that their responsibility is not limited to maximizing shareholder value, they become political puppets always vulnerable to such shakedowns. There are always competing claims on corporate resources, and political entrepreneurs more than willing to exert those claims.
If you want to see extreme examples of how this works, look at Chavez in Venezuela, or Putin, both of whom browbeat corporations and investors to direct resources to their pet causes in the name of “social” objectives. And no, I’m not saying Obama=Chavez. I’m only saying that looking at something in its most purified or extreme forms is often the best way of identifying the essential principle.
The corporate responsibility movement is just another flavor of corporatism. A conscription of private resources to achieve political (and usually redistributive) objectives, but without the procedural hurdles that constrain such conscription via legislation, regulation, or adjudication. Which is exactly why progressives like Obama find it so attractive.
The Economist reports on new military technology: antennas made from seawater.
…To make a seawater antenna, the current probe (an electrical coil roughly the size and shape of a large doughnut) is attached to a radio’s antenna jack. When salt water is squirted through the hole in the middle of the probe, signals are transferred to the water stream by electromagnetic induction. The aerial can be adjusted to the frequency of those signals by lengthening or shortening the spout. To fashion antennae for short-wave radio, for example, spouts between 18 and 24 metres high are about right. To increase bandwidth, and thus transmit more data, such as a video, all you need do is thicken the spout. And the system is economical. The probe consumes less electricity than three incandescent desk lamps.
A warship’s metal antennae, which often weigh more than 3½ tonnes apiece, can be damaged in storms or combat. Seawater antennae, whose components weigh next to nothing and are easily stowable, could provide handy backups—and, eventually, more than backups. Not all of a ship’s antennae are used at once, so the spouts could be adjusted continuously to obtain the types needed at a given moment. According to SPAWAR, ten such antennae could replace 80 copper ones.
Fewer antennae mean fewer things for enemy radar to reflect from. Seawater is in any case less reflective of radar waves than metal. And if a ship needed to be particularly stealthy (which would mean keeping its transmissions to a minimum), her captain could simply switch the water spouts off altogether. …
If you are a “Jeopardy” fan, Monday thru Wednesday will be when IBM’s “Watson” challenges the shows two major champions. WSJ has the story.
Watson paused. The closest thing it had to a face, a glowing orb on a flat-panel screen, turned from forest green to a dark shade of blue. Filaments of yellow and red streamed steadily across it, like the paths of jets circumnavigating the globe. This pattern represented a state of quiet anticipation as the supercomputer awaited the next clue.
It was a September morning in 2010 at IBM Research, in the hills north of New York City, and the computer, known as Watson, was annihilating two humans, both champion-caliber players, in practice rounds of the knowledge game of “Jeopardy.” Within months, it would be playing the game on national TV in a million-dollar man vs. machine match-up against two of the show’s all-time greats.
As Todd Crain, an actor and the host of these test games, started to read the next clue, the filaments on Watson’s display began to jag and tremble. Watson was thinking—or coming as close to it as a computer could. The $1,600 clue, in a category called “The eyes have it,” read: “This facial wear made Israel’s Moshe Dayan instantly recognizable world-wide.”
The three players—two human and one electronic—could read the words as soon as they appeared on the big “Jeopardy” board. But they had to wait for Mr. Crain to read the entire clue before buzzing. That was the rule. At the moment the host pronounced the last word, a light would signal that contestants could buzz. The first to hit the button could win $1,600 with the right answer—or lose the same amount with a wrong one. (In these test matches, they were playing with funny money.)
This pause for reading gave Watson three or four seconds to hunt down the answer. …