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Our favorite Brit contributors were less than impressed with the PM’s speechmaking during the his visit to America. Toby Harnden is first.
… Then comes what must surely be one of the most obsequious things Obama – who is well used to adulation – has ever heard. Obama, says Cameron ‘has pressed the reset button on the moral authority of the entire free world’.
What? Pass the sickbag. Whichever way you look at it, that’s ridiculous. Under Obama, despite his campaign promises and indeed an executive order when he took office, Guantanamo Bay has remained open. Drone strikes have increased exponentially – it being judged easier to kill suspects than capture and interrogate them. Military trials outside the federal system continue, as does indefinite detention without trial.
Certainly, Obama has delivered some ‘beautiful words’ around the world, starting in Berlin before he was even the Democratic nominee and continuing in Cairo. In Strasbourg, he apologised for the times when ‘America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive’ towards its allies.
But Obama has certainly shown arrogance and dismissiveness towards the UK in a way that President George W. Bush never did. Israel considers the US an unreliable ally under Obama. Iran’s green revolutionaries might question Obama’s ‘moral authority’ after he allowed them to be crushed by Tehran’s theocratic regime, as might the Syrian rebels and civilians currently dying at the hands of President Bashar Assad.
Then there was this passage, in which Cameron chucks in the names of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King for no apparent reason at all – other than, presumably and patronisingly, because Obama is black: ‘Half a century ago, the amazing courage of Rosa Parks, the visionary leadership of Martin Luther King, and the inspirational actions of the civil rights movement led politicians to write equality into the law and make real the promise of America for all her citizens.
‘But in the fight for justice and the struggle for freedom, there is no end, because there is so much more to do to ensure that every human being can fulfill their potential. That is why our generation faces a new civil rights struggle, to seek the prize of the future that is open to every child as never before. Barack has made this one of the goals of his presidency, the goal he’s pursuing with enormous courage.’
What on earth is Cameron talking about? …
Nile Gardiner next.
… The prime minister and his team made a conscious decision this week to do everything they could to curry favour with a Left-wing administration with a track record of sneering at Britain and other key US allies, including Israel. They also chose not to meet with a single conservative leader, even though the Republicans currently control the House of Representatives. In addition, Cameron allowed himself to be used as an Obama campaign prop, cynically wheeled out at a basketball game in the crucial swing state of Ohio, as well as agreeing to a state dinner stuffed by the White House with fundraisers for the Obama re-election team. Even US liberal commentators are now mockingly referring to David Cameron as “Obama’s guard dog”, an undignified image that may haunt him post-November.
David Cameron’s wholehearted support for Barack Obama has significantly harmed the image of the British Conservative Party among US conservatives, who revere its greatest figures Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill. This was not an example of British leadership, but a sad exercise in hero-worship before an extremely liberal White House that has taken every opportunity in the past to insult America’s closest friends across the Atlantic, and which continues to knife London in the back over the Falklands. The prime minister has nailed his flag this week to the Obama presidency, a short-sighted and disastrous move that undercuts conservatives in America who are the real friends of Great Britain and the Special Relationship.
The White House has produced a film praising – guess who? Turns out the film makers put the lie to an administration excuse about the economy. Jennifer Rubin has the story.
President Obama and his economic team promised that if the stimulus passed, unemployment would not go above 8 percent and we would now be at 6 percent.
When that didn’t happen, the administration claimed, “Oh, we didn’t know at the time how bad things were.” …
… we now have definitive proof that this excuse is false. And it comes straight from the mouths of Obama advisers in his campaign spin-umentary, “The Road We’ve Traveled.” The New York Times provides a helpful summary:
The story narrated by [actor Tom] Hanks starts with elation on election night in 2008 and quickly segues to despair with the beginning of the Great Recession.
David Axelrod, the president’s senior campaign strategist, likens watching the president’s first major economic briefing to a horror movie. “All I was thinking at that moment was: ‘Can we get a recount?’ ” he says.
Adds Mr. Hanks, “Not since the days of Franklin Roosevelt had so much fallen on the shoulders of one president.”
Umm. So I guess they did know what they were facing. The stimulus just didn’t perform as advertised.
You see, Obama can’t have it both ways. He either knew the depth of the problem and his policies were not up to the task of reviving job growth, or he was in the dark and made the right decision based on available facts. …
Back in the day of CB radios, a trip to the west coast of the country was a trip to the “shaky side” in reference to earthquake prone California. Oregon and Washington state were just along for the ride. Nobody thought of earthquake dangers there. Turns out folks were wrong - to a fault. Discover Magazine features a piece on the dangers in the Cascadia Subduction Zone.
… Cascadia, however, is classified as the quietest subduction zone in the world. Along the Cascadia segment, geologists could find no evidence of major quakes in “all of recorded history”—the 140 years since white settlers arrived in the Pacific Northwest and began keeping records. For reasons unknown, it appeared to be a special case. The system was thought to be aseismic—essentially quake free and harmless.
By the 1970s several competing theories emerged to explain Cascadia’s silence. One possibility was that the Juan de Fuca plate had shifted direction, spun slightly by movement of the two larger plates on either side of it. This would reduce the rate of eastward motion underneath North America and thus reduce the buildup of earthquake stress. Another possibility was that the angle of the down-going eastbound plate was too shallow to build up the kind of friction needed to cause major quakes.
But the third possibility was downright scary. In this interpretation, the silence along the fault was merely an ominous pause. It could be that these two great slabs of the Earth’s crust were jammed against each other and had been for a very long time—locked together by friction for hundreds of years, far longer than “all of recorded history.” If that were true, they would be building up the kind of stress and strain that only a monster earthquake could relieve.
In the early 1980s, two Caltech geophysicists, Tom Heaton and Hiroo Kanamori, compared Cascadia to active quake-prone subduction zones along the coasts of Chile and Alaska and to the Nankai Trough off the coast of Japan. They found more similarities than differences. In fact, they found that the biggest megathrust events in these other zones were directly related to young, buoyant plates’ being strongly coupled to the overlying landmass at shallow angles—which fit the description of Cascadia perfectly. Bottom line: If giant ruptures could happen there—in Chile, Alaska, or Japan—the same would probably happen here, in the Pacific Northwest.
The problem, as Heaton explained it to me, was that there was no direct physical sign of earthquakes. All the comparison studies in the world could not prove unequivocally that Cascadia’s fault had ruptured in the past. What everyone needed and wanted was forensic evidence. In the breach, significant doubt and strong disagreement had separated the scientists into opposing camps. “There was plenty of skepticism out there among geophysicists that the zone really was capable of doing this stuff,” confirms paleogeologist Brian Atwater of the U.S. Geological Survey at the University of Washington in Seattle.
The only thing that could put an end to the back-and-forth debate would be tangible signs of past ruptures along the entire subduction zone. If the two plates were sliding past each other smoothly, at a constant rate, and without getting stuck together, then there should be a slow, continuous, and irreversible rise in land levels along the outer coast. On the other hand, if the two plates were stuck together by friction, strain would build up in the rocks and the upper plate would bend down along the outer edge and thicken inland, humping upward until the rocks along the fault failed. In the violent, shuddering release of strain during an earthquake, the upper plate would snap to the west, toward its original shape. The clear signal—the geodetic fingerprint—of a large subduction earthquake would be the abrupt lowering of land behind the beaches when the upper plate got stretched like taffy, snapped to the west, and then sank below the tide line.
That was something Atwater figured he could probably measure and verify—or disprove. “When they said the Pacific Coast was rising three millimeters a year relative to Puget Sound, I said, ‘Aha! Three meters per thousand!’?” He would go out to the coast and find out whether a 3,000-year-old shoreline was now 30 feet above sea level, simple as that. …
… It turns out that Cascadia is virtually identical to the offshore faults that devastated Sumatra in 2004 and Japan in 2011—almost the same length, the same width, and with the same tectonic forces at work. Cascadia’s fault can and will generate the same kind of earthquake we saw last year: magnitude 9 or higher. It will send a train of deadly tsunami waves across the Pacific and crippling shock waves across a far wider geographic area than all the California quakes you’ve ever heard about.
Based on historical averages, the southern end of the fault—from Cape Mendocino, California, to Newport, Oregon—has a large earthquake every 240 years. For the northern end—from mid-Oregon to mid-?Vancouver Island—the average “recurrence interval” is 480 years, according to a recent Canadian study. And while the north may have only half as many jolts, they tend to be full-size disasters in which the entire fault breaks from end to end.
With a time line of 41 events the science team at OSU has now calculated that the California–Oregon end of Cascadia’s fault has a 37 percent chance of producing a major earthquake in the next 50 years. The odds are 10 percent that an even larger quake will strike the upper end, in a full-margin rupture, within 50 years. Given that the last big quake was 312 years ago, one might argue that a very bad day on the Cascadia Subduction Zone is ominously overdue. It appears that three centuries of silence along the fault has been entirely misleading. The monster is only sleeping.