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Charles Krauthammer on Putin’s good luck.

Vladimir Putin is a lucky man. And he’s got three more years of luck to come.

He takes Crimea, and President Obama says it’s not in Russia’s interest, not even strategically clever. Indeed, it’s a sign of weakness. …

… How to figure out Obama’s foreign policy? In his first U.N. speech, he says: “No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation.” On what planet? Followed by the assertion that “alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War” — like NATO? — “make no sense in an interconnected world.”

Putin’s more cynical advisers might have thought such adolescent universalism to be a ruse. But Obama coupled these amazing words with even more amazing actions. …

… Would Putin have lunged for Ukraine if he didn’t have such a clueless adversary? No one can say for sure. But it certainly made Putin’s decision easier.

Russia will get kicked out of the G-8 — if Obama can get Angela Merkel to go along. Big deal. Putin does care about financial sanctions, but the Europeans are already divided and squabbling among themselves.

Next weekend’s Crimean referendum will ask if it should be returned to Mother Russia. Can Putin refuse? He can already see the history textbooks: Catherine the Great took Crimea, Vlad (the Great?) won it back. Not bad for a 19th-century man.

NY Post editors are scathing. Jimmy obama they call him.  

Vladimir Putin has taken the measure of Barack Obama. He’s found Jimmy Carter.

Like Jimmy Carter, who boasted he was free of any “inordinate fear of communism,” Obama began his term as president vowing to “reset” relations with Russia.

Like Jimmy Carter, who conveyed weakness when Iran took our embassy staff hostage, Obama confirmed his own weakness when he drew a red line in Syria and then backed down from enforcing it.

Like Jimmy Carter, who was rewarded by Leonid Brezhnev with a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Putin has returned Obama’s favor with a Russian invasion of Ukraine.

And just like Carter, who responded with what his staff called “a strong public statement,” Obama responded with his own statement saying he is “deeply concerned” by Russia’s military movement in Ukraine. …

“Shut up!” They said. Jonathan Tobin answers the administration’s defenders who say we’re not supposed to be critical of serial foreign policy disasters. 

Russia’s aggression against Ukraine has led many Americans to re-evaluate President Obama’s mockery of those Republicans like Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin’s warnings about the geo-strategic threat that Vladimir Putin’s regime posed to the West. It turns out that the administration’s assumptions about not only Russia but also about the basic principles of U.S. foreign policy were mistaken. Not only did the magic of Barack Obama’s personality fail to tame Putin, Iran, Syria or North Korea. As our Abe Greenwald noted yesterday, the administration’s belief that America had transcended history and that the use of force was ineffective has again been thoroughly exploded.

But rather than prompt a far-reaching debate about the lessons to be drawn from this episode, many pundits, not all of whom are knee-jerk Obama defenders are calling for Americans to pipe down about whether the policies of the past five years are partly responsible for the mess in Eastern Europe as well as the fiasco in Syria, not to mention the ongoing administration attempt to forge a new détente with Iran. Instead, we are being told to be quiet and to let America speak with one voice, lest Putin or any other foe be encouraged by criticism of Obama. Not for the first time, Arthur Vandenberg’s famous 1947 quote in which he chided Republican critics of President Harry Truman’s foreign policy that “we must stop partisan politics at the water’s edge” is being disinterred in order to give the 44th president some respite from the beating he has been taking from conservatives about his policies. Though, as Robert Lieber wrote last month in the Washington Post, Democrats have ignored that principle in the last decade, Joe Scarborough, MSNBC’s token conservative is sounding that bipartisan theme both on “Morning Joe” and in a Politico op-ed. Scarborough argues that, “There is nothing more frightening to our enemies than a strong, unified American voice.” That’s true. But in the absence of leadership from the president and the administration, such a stance is impossible. Though loyalty to country must always trump partisanship, the effort to suppress a debate about foreign policy at a time when it is desperately needed is antithetical to the cause of creating that “strong, unified American voice.”

Abe Greenwald says hold on a minute to the progressives who say right wing folks are rooting for Putin. Greenwald reminds it was the last GOP presidential candidate who correctly identified the dangers coming from Russia. 

Americans occasionally indulge a certain progressive notion about world affairs: that humanity has become so enlightened and sophisticated as to have outgrown its brutal and tragic nature. The idea that we can transcend our blood-soaked past was behind the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, which sought to outlaw war altogether. Eighty-five years and millions of war dead later, it’s also behind Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent comment that Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was a  “19th century act in the 21st century.” Invasions, you see, belong to that buried thing called history. We’re now in something else.

Unfortunately that something else doesn’t look much better. A Russian strongman is gluing together the pieces of a smashed empire, underwriting biblical slaughter in the Middle East, and standing with a nuclear-aspirant, exterminationist regime. Doubtless, Putin took Kerry’s characterization as a supreme compliment, an indication that he’s a great man of history and a belated product of Russia’s Golden Age.

Pointing out Putin’s aspirations is becoming risky. There’s been much talk lately of conservatives who idolize the Russian leader. But aside from a handful of marginalized eccentrics, the very opposite is the case. It was the last Republican presidential candidate who called Putin’s Russia our “number-one political foe,” and it was the entire Democratic establishment that supported Obama’s five-year-long attempt to be more accommodating to Moscow. Reconciling these facts has been unpleasant for progressives who’ve only just discovered, via gay-rights activism, that Putin is an unapologetic human-rights abuser. One hopes that similar clarity on Iran is soon to follow. …

Tired of hearing about foreign policy defeats? Jonathan Tobin posts on one in the Senate. 

Two days after a shocking defeat, liberals are still grousing about the Senate spiking the nomination of former NAACP Legal Fund Director Debo Adegbile to be head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. What really burns them up is not just that Republicans successfully filibustered one of President Obama’s choices for a government post but that six Democrats joined with them. But rather than take responsibility for putting forward a controversial figure who was sure to provoke bitter opposition from both sides of the aisle, liberals are reverting to form by blaming their defeat on conservative demagoguery and racism.

This is more than disingenuous. Adegbile lost for one reason and one reason only and its name is Mumia Abu-Jamal, the radical who gunned down Philadelphia Policeman Daniel Faulkner in a cold-blooded murder in 1981. Under the leadership of Adegbile, the NAACP Legal Fund worked on Abu-Jamal’s appeal. The White House and Adegbile’s defenders in the press say blaming the lawyer for his client’s crime is both unfair and an assault on our judicial system. But contrary to this spin, Adegbile and the NAACP were not a latter day version of patriot John Adams defending the British soldiers who perpetrated the Boston Massacre. Far from merely writing briefs on Constitutional issues involving Abu-Jamal’s conviction, Adegbile’s lawyers were part of the propaganda campaign aimed at besmirching the victim and the Philadelphia Police Department and portraying a killer who was literally caught red-handed with the murder weapon as a heroic martyr. Under these circumstances, it’s little wonder that some Democrats wanted no part of the nomination, especially those like Pennsylvania’s Bob Casey, Jr. and Delaware’s Chris Coons voted against cloture for the nomination, whose constituents know the facts of the case and despicable work of Abu-Jamal’s cheerleaders. …

The Cartoonists have a good day.

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Another great day when we don’t expend many electrons with items about the Washington DC creeps that our fellow citizens have decided would be really really good at running the government.

MSN – Money has a piece saying the Dow could hit 26,000 by 2016. Seems silly, but some readers will be interested. The argument is the federal government will keep the bubble going.

Market observer Harry Dent claims that the Dow Jones industrials will rally to 17,000 within the next few weeks — before it disastrously plummets to around 6,000 by 2016. Dent makes his case in a new book, “The Demographic Cliff.”

Sounds like fun times for investors — but it sounds like book shilling to many of the rest of us.

Let’s address several important points that explain why Dent is so terribly wrong. The U.S. government, the Fed, Wall Street and the big Banks are “all-in” on the stock market right now. They can’t and won’t allow a serious collapse in the markets.

Ask yourself this question: All those billions of dollars the Fed printed since 2009 . . . where did that money go? It didn’t go to consumers. It funneled to interest-free loans to Wall Street firms, banks and corporations — so that in the end that money wound up in the stock market.

How else can you explain a market that has risen in value despite billions of dollars in net outflows by retail investors from 2009 to 2013? …

Popular Mechanics suggests how cruise ships can become safer.

For the past three decades cruising has been the fastest-growing segment of the travel industry. Eleven new ships were christened last year, and almost 21 million people went on a cruise. Statistically, cruising is relatively safe, but recent failures in seamanship, emergency response, and engineering should sound an alarm. Introduce bad weather or remote surroundings into the equation and an incident like the Costa Concordia shipwreck, which made international headlines two years ago, could result in hundreds of deaths.

Compared with other areas where technology and human behavior impact passenger safety—notably, aviation—the cruise industry is poorly regulated. It has no clear equivalent of the Federal Aviation Administration, which has a broad mandate to ensure air safety. The U.S. Coast Guard conducts prescheduled, biannual inspections of ships that embark passengers at U.S. ports, but most cruise ships are registered, or flagged, overseas, and critics charge that regulations are poorly enforced. Cruise lines have started instituting reforms, but more needs to be done.

The January 2012 grounding of the Carnival-owned megaship Costa Concordia left 32 dead, 157 injured, and a hulking, disintegrating eyesore beached like a whale off the coast of Tuscany, Italy. It started with ego: Capt. Francesco Schettino swung the ship and its 4229 passengers and crew close to shore on an unsanctioned “salute” to the island of Giglio. The vessel hit submerged rocks, which ripped a nearly 200-foot gash in the hull.

The crew never contacted rescue authorities, who found out about the accident from relatives of panicked passengers. And the abandon-ship order didn’t come until 10:54 pm, more than an hour after the collision. The captain himself had already escaped the foundering vessel. “You’ve abandoned ship!? Get the [expletive] on board!” Italian coast guard captain Gregorio De Falco bellowed when he finally reached Schettino by phone.

The crew didn’t perform much better: The industry standard for the evacuation of a vessel is 30 minutes, but hours into the incident there were still dozens of passengers on board. …
… International law calls for passengers to receive a safety briefing within 24 hours of a ship leaving port, but that can be too late. About 700 of the Costa Concordia’s 3206 passengers had boarded just a couple of hours before the accident; their safety briefing was scheduled for the next day. When things went bad, passengers had no idea where to go or what to do. But the timing of drills isn’t the only issue that needs to be addressed. Mike Inman, the vice president of safety for HollandAmerica, another large cruise line owned by Carnival, says that passenger attendance at muster drills hasn’t always been enforced. “HollandAmerica was one of the first lines to make it mandatory, and we have disembarked people who did not attend,” he says. (Even before the Concordia wreck, HollandAmerica held drills before its ships left port.)

Since February 2012 all CLIA cruise lines have pledged to conduct passenger muster drills before leaving port. Technology can help too. In October 2013 Danish safety-equipment company Viking announced the creation of a self-propelled, inflatable raft that holds 200 people and has a chute-like system to ease boarding for children, the elderly, and the injured. The LifeCraft could be on ships within two years; such advances could save lives. “How you get the person in the life raft is the most important part,” Nadolny says. “Lifeboat injuries are probably the biggest killer of crew out there. It’s a fairly complicated arrangement for lifting and lowering the boat, and if it’s not done just right, well, the boat drops and everybody in the boat gets killed.” That’s what happened last year in Spain’s Canary Islands during a drill on a cruise ship called the Thomson Majesty. Cables snapped, killing five crew members and injuring three more. …

The blessings of fracking are extolled in an article from the Hoover Institution. Secure property rights are one of the reasons fracking took off in our country.

Americans should celebrate fracking. By unleashing production of unconventional hydrocarbons, fracking has catapulted the U.S. from being a has-been producer of oil to the world’s largest total supplier in 2013 when we include natural gas liquids, biofuels, and crude oil. The U.S. produced around an average of 12.1 million barrels a day of these liquids, 300,000 barrels a day more than Saudi Arabia and 1.6 million more than Russia, the previous leaders.

This increase in U.S. output has not been matched since 1940 when the country was blessed with flush new primary production from oil fields in Texas, New Mexico, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. Shale-gas production from the Bakken Formation in North Dakota, the Eagle Ford Formation in Texas, and the Marcellus Formation that crosses parts of West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York now accounts for 44% of total U.S. natural gas output, and eventually could account for nearly 70%. …

… New fracking and horizontal drilling technologies are dominantly developed and implemented in the U.S. Why is that? The answer is secure private property rights to subsurface minerals. These are the major reason why the American oil and natural gas industry has been so dynamic and innovative. Except for western Canada, throughout the world, subsurface mineral rights are held by governments, and indeed, the U.S. government also holds the rights to hydrocarbon deposits on federal lands. The incentives for and transaction costs of investing in and using new fracking, pumping, and drilling technologies are dramatically different between private and public ownership.

When private parties own the mineral rights (often surface land owners), they capture any expected benefits from new discoveries and associated production. In North Dakota, land owners above the Bakken Formation are part of a new generation of oil millionaires in a relatively remote and semi-arid region that previously had seen population declines and economic stagnation. These owners also bear many of the costs, including any environmental ones, such as potential ground water contamination or depletion, because these costs generally are localized in the vicinity of fracking wells. Where they are not, rights holders or the companies they contract with may be held accountable for damages inflicted on others.

Bonding requirements to cover environmental damages also can be used both for mitigation and for indentifying the opportunity costs to rights holders and drilling companies of any harm they inflict on others. Bonding requirements and potential litigation instill incentives for careful production practices. …

WSJ’s Walt Mossberg replacement, Geoffrey Fowler, writes on the ubiquitous computer mouse.

I said goodbye to my mouse last month. It was time to advance, I thought, to a higher plane of input, a trackpad that works like a tablet’s screen. Instead of point and click, I’d swipe and flick.

A few weeks in, I was missing my mouse. Moving a folder across a 27-inch iMac screen with the trackpad was like lugging a grand piano across the Sahara—I had to keep taking breaks along the way, as I ran out of pad.

This can’t be progress. Determined, I rustled up a dozen of the latest input devices, regular mice and trackpads, but also vertical mice, pen- and knob-shaped mice, a touch-screen stylus, even a controller that lets you wave your hands around without touching anything, a la “Minority Report.”

What I discovered: Thirty years after the Macintosh took the mouse mainstream, I couldn’t find anything more precise or comfortable for operating a computer. More important, I found the mouse has managed to reinvent itself over the years—it’s like the Madonna of PC peripherals.

One reinvention stood out during my testing, a mouse whose unconventional look belied its natural grip: the Sculpt Ergonomic Mouse by Microsoft.  Other standouts I tested were Apple‘s  Magic Mouse, the Penclic Mouse and Logitech‘s  Ultrathin Touch Mouse. …

This cold and snow-filled winter we’ve had lots of fun with globalony alarmists. However, there are parts of the northern hemisphere with mild winters. Parts as close as Alaska were warmth and lack of snow have created havoc for the iconic Iditarod Race. The Wire has the story. Check out the picture of a dog sled team mushing through a forest on bare ground.

Along the Farewell Burn, returning racer Scott Janssen, known as the Mushin’ Mortician because of his day job, had to drop out of the race after numerous catastrophes. Janssen slammed into rocks and crashed his sled. He hit his head and was knocked unconscious for at least an hour.

He then continued on until one of his dogs got loose. As Janssen walked across a frozen creek to retrieve the dog, he slipped and fell, breaking his ankle. He laid there for another 45 minuted until another competitor, Newton Marshall, caught up to him and offered assistance (Marshall is from Jamaica, by the way).

As of Thursday morning, 12 of the 69 Iditarod competitors have scratched.  Jeff King currently holds a 39-minute lead, although none of the top five competitors have taken their mandatory eight-hour or 24-hour rests. Buser, however, is in sixth and has already gotten his 24-hour layover out of the way. …

This is what Pickings could look like if we didn’t have a predatory government.

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Apparently the president doesn’t think it has done enough damage in foreign affairs, so on the eve of Netanyahu’s visit to our country he insults Israel yet again.  John Podhoretz posts on the president’s interview with Bloomberg’s Jeffery Goldberg.

In an extraordinary—and I don’t use the word in a complimentary way—interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of Bloomberg, President Obama follows his secretary of state in warning Israel and its leader that a failure to “make peace” now with the Palestinians will have terrible consequences. Israel is “more isolated internationally,” and will become more so; there will be more Palestinians and Israeli Arabs as time goes on, not fewer, so Israel had better move now; and not to move now is to create the conditions for a “permanent Israeli occupation of the West Bank….there comes a point when you cannot manage this anymore.”

The wild logical contradictions in his remarks expose the degree to which the American approach in the Kerry peace talks is to haunt Israel with the dire nightmare it will face should the talks fail; Palestinian rejectionism plays almost no role in the Obaman calculus here.

The Palestinians, in Obama’s view, do not actually need to make changes; astonishingly, he says, they’re ready for peace. “The Palestinians,” the president says, overlooking every piece of polling data we have about the opinions of the Palestinians, “would still prefer peace. They would still prefer a country of their own that allows them to find a job, send their kids to school, travel overseas, go back and forth to work without feeling as if they are restricted or constrained as a people. And they recognize that Israel is not going anywhere.”

Ah. So that 2011 poll that says 60 percent of the Palestinians reject a two-state solution is bunk—a poll whose findings have not been  contradicted since. If Palestinians refuse to accept a two-state solution, they do not “recognize that Israel is not going anywhere.” Rather, they are still engaging in a pseudo-national fantasy about Israel’s disappearance or destruction. And they are so eager for peace and coexistence with Israel that they remain the only significant Muslim population that still has a favorable view of suicide bombings, according to a Pew survey. …

Evelyn Gordon corrects the fact-challenged president. 

Since John Podhoretz, Elliott Abrams and Jonathan Tobin have all written excellent takedowns of the fallacies, outright lies and destructive consequences of President Barack Obama’s interview with Jeffrey Goldberg on Sunday, you might think there’s nothing left to say. But there are some additional points that merit consideration, and I’d like to focus on one: settlement construction. Because on this issue, Obama’s “facts” are flat-out wrong – and this particular untruth have some very important implications.

According to Obama, “we have seen more aggressive settlement construction over the last couple years than we’ve seen in a very long time.” But in reality, as a simple glance at the annual data published by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics reveals, there has been less settlement construction during Benjamin Netanyahu’s five years as Israeli premier (2009-13) than under any of his recent predecessors.

During those five years, housing starts in the settlements averaged 1,443 a year (all data is from the charts here, here and here plus this news report). That’s less than the 1,702 a year they averaged under Ehud Olmert in 2006-08, who is nevertheless internationally acclaimed as a peacemaker (having made the Palestinians an offer so generous that then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice couldn’t believe she was hearing it). It’s also less than the 1,652 per year they averaged under Ariel Sharon in 2001-05, who is similarly lauded internationally as a peacemaker (for having left Gaza); the fact that even Sharon out-built Netanyahu is particularly remarkable, because his term coincided with the second intifada, when demand for housing in the settlements plummeted.  …

Jonathan Tobin says Netanyahu’s decision not to engage the president shows Bibi’s strength and Barry’s weakness. 

The last time President Obama ambushed Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, the Israeli gave as good as he got. This time he turned the other cheek. The reason for this turnabout by the normally combative prime minister tells us everything we need to know about the relative strength of the positions of these two leaders.

While the assumption on the part of most pundits was that Obama has Netanyahu in a corner, the latter’s reaction to the assault the president launched at him in an interview with Bloomberg’s Jeffrey Goldberg this past weekend shows us this isn’t true. Though Netanyahu had to be infuriated by the president’s single-minded determination to blame Israel for the lack of peace as well as his obtuse praise for Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, he felt no need to publicly respond to it. Far from feeling threatened by Obama’s tirade, Netanyahu’s decision to ignore the president’s attack shows that he understands the dynamics of both the peace process and U.S. foreign policy actually give him the upper hand over the weak and increasingly out-of-touch lame duck in the White House. …

… Though Obama’s attacks did real damage to Israel’s position, the prime minister is right to refuse to take the bait. Netanyahu cannot have failed to see that, far from offering him the opportunity to effectively pressure the Israelis, the president is floundering in his second term especially on foreign policy. The most effective answer to Obama’s taunts is patience since events will soon overtake the president’s positions on both the Palestinian and Iranian fronts, as well as in other debacles around the globe that have popped up because of Obama’s weak leadership. Though the disparity in the relative power of their positions inevitably means Netanyahu must worry about Obama’s barbs, the bottom line here is that it is the president and not the prime minister who is in big trouble.

Jennifer Rubin posts on the controversy.

Just as Republicans are on the same side as the majority of Americans in the Obamacare, they find themselves lock-step with voters on Israel, Iran and foreign policy more generally. This is a complete reversal from 2006 when Democrats capitalized on the Iraq war to take the House and rack up big Senate wins.

Rep. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) spoke for virtually all Republicans when he bashed the president for his remarks on Israel. Cotton told Right Turn today: “Yet again, President Obama displays incredible naiveté and cynicism about the world at the same time.  Israel isn’t the obstacle to peace; Palestinian rejectionism is.  When the Palestinians accept Israel as a Jewish state, there will be peace.”  He added, “President Obama’s ominous predictions to the contrary should trouble every pro-Israel American, as well as our Israeli allies.” And that is especially true in a state with so many military (active and reverse) and so many religious voters who support the Jewish state. “Arkansans’ support for Israel remains unshakable, and I will continue to work with my colleagues in both parties to preserve and strengthen the U.S.-Israel alliance,” he said.

But as we have heard from speakers and attendees at the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee, criticism is not limited to Republicans. Longtime Democrat and former AIPAC spokesman Josh Block (who now heads the Israel Project) commented to me, “The president’s interview quite peculiar and disappointing. Not only does it betray a deeply flawed approach to how one should treat allies, but it is riddled with basic factual errors. It also makes one wonder if the president is getting accurate information from his staff, or if he has deep personal beliefs that supersede reality and cloud his perspective.”  …

“She loves blood, this Russian land.” - Russian poet Anna Akhmatova sends us back to the problems in Ukraine. A Russian historian once said the first and second world wars could easily be called the first and second Ukrainian wars. Tragedy lives in that country. Yale historian Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands wrote ”Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Was Worse?” for the New York Review of Books. We have it here. It is long, but as we’re wont to do at the end of the week, we will run a little over. Also from Akhmatova – “It was a time when only the dead smiled, happy in their peace.”

… we might ask: who was worse, Hitler or Stalin?

In the second half of the twentieth century, Americans were taught to see both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as the greatest of evils. Hitler was worse, because his regime propagated the unprecedented horror of the Holocaust, the attempt to eradicate an entire people on racial grounds. Yet Stalin was also worse, because his regime killed far, far more people—tens of millions, it was often claimed—in the endless wastes of the Gulag. For decades, and even today, this confidence about the difference between the two regimes—quality versus quantity—has set the ground rules for the politics of memory. Even historians of the Holocaust generally take for granted that Stalin killed more people than Hitler, thus placing themselves under greater pressure to stress the special character of the Holocaust, since this is what made the Nazi regime worse than the Stalinist one.

Discussion of numbers can blunt our sense of the horrific personal character of each killing and the irreducible tragedy of each death. As anyone who has lost a loved one knows, the difference between zero and one is an infinity. Though we have a harder time grasping this, the same is true for the difference between, say, 780,862 and 780,863—which happens to be the best estimate of the number of people murdered at Treblinka. Large numbers matter because they are an accumulation of small numbers: that is, precious individual lives. Today, after two decades of access to Eastern European archives, and thanks to the work of German, Russian, Israeli, and other scholars, we can resolve the question of numbers. The total number of noncombatants killed by the Germans—about 11 million—is roughly what we had thought. The total number of civilians killed by the Soviets, however, is considerably less than we had believed. We know now that the Germans killed more people than the Soviets did. That said, the issue of quality is more complex than was once thought. Mass murder in the Soviet Union sometimes involved motivations, especially national and ethnic ones, that can be disconcertingly close to Nazi motivations. …

… Given that the Nazis and the Stalinists tended to kill in the same places, in the lands between Berlin and Moscow, and given that they were, at different times, rivals, allies, and enemies, we must take seriously the possibility that some of the death and destruction wrought in the lands between was their mutual responsibility. What can we make of the fact, for example, that the lands that suffered most during the war were those occupied not once or twice but three times: by the Soviets in 1939, the Germans in 1941, and the Soviets again in 1944?

The Holocaust began when the Germans provoked pogroms in June and July 1941, in which some 24,000 Jews were killed, on territories in Poland annexed by the Soviets less than two years before. The Nazis planned to eliminate the Jews in any case, but the prior killings by the NKVD certainly made it easier for local gentiles to justify their own participation in such campaigns. As I have written in Bloodlands, where all of the major Nazi and Soviet atrocities are discussed, we see, even during the German-Soviet war, episodes of belligerent complicity in which one side killed more because provoked or in some sense aided by the other. Germans took so many Soviet prisoners of war in part because Stalin ordered his generals not to retreat. The Germans shot so many civilians in part because Soviet partisans deliberately provoked reprisals. The Germans shot more than a hundred thousand civilians in Warsaw in 1944 after the Soviets urged the locals to rise up and then declined to help them. In Stalin’s Gulag some 516,543 people died between 1941 and 1943, sentenced by the Soviets to labor, but deprived of food by the German invasion.

Were these people victims of Stalin or of Hitler? Or both?

Late night humor from Andy Malcolm.

SethMeyers: Although Ukraine has been all over the news for weeks, a survey finds 64% of U.S. students still can’t find Ukraine on a map. Said Vladimir Putin, “Soon, nobody will.”

Fallon: A new survey has found that almost half of dog owners admit to spending more money on their dogs than on their significant others. I tried to ask my wife if that’s true, but she and our dog were out to dinner.

Conan: Newsweek magazine is returning, and this time it will be more expensive. This should work, since everyone’s main complaint with Newsweek magazine before was, “Too affordable.”

Conan: In France, a woman won the right to marry her dead fiancé. Just when he thought he’d gotten out of it

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Before we return to the Ukrainian disaster, we’ll pause for an item by Joel Kotkin, our favorite geographer, who says no matter what the media types say, the Sunbelt is

booming and the coasts are toast.

Ever since the Great Recession ripped through the economies of the Sunbelt, America’s coastal pundit class has been giddily predicting its demise. Strangled by high-energy prices, cooked by global warming, rejected by a new generation of urban-centric millennials, this vast southern was doomed to become, in the words of the Atlantic, where the “American dream” has gone to die. If the doomsayers are right, Americans must be the ultimate masochists. After a brief hiatus, people seem to, once again, be streaming towards the expanse of warm-weather states extending from the southeastern seaboard to Phoenix.

Since 2010, according to an American Community Survey by demographer Wendell Cox, over one million people have moved to the Sunbelt mostly from the Northeast and Midwest.

Any guesses for the states that have gained the most domestic migrants since 2010? The Sunbelt dominates the top three: Texas, Florida and Arizona. And who’s losing the most people? Generally the states dearest to the current ruling class: New York, Illinois, California and New Jersey.  Some assert this reflects the loss of poorer, working class folks to areas while the “smart” types continue to move to the big cities of Northeast and California. Yet, according to American Community Survey Data for 2007 to 2011, the biggest gainers of college graduates, according to Cox, have been Texas, Arizona and Florida; the biggest losers are in the Northeast  (New York), the Midwest (Illinois and Michigan)

For the most part, notes demographer Cox, this is not a movement to Tombstone or Mayberry, although many small towns in the south are doing well, it’s is a movement to Sunbelt cities. Indeed, of the ten fastest growing big metros areas in America in 2012, nine were in the Sunbelt. These included not only the big four Texas cities—Austin, Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth, San Antonio—but also Orlando, Raleigh, Phoenix, and Charlotte.

Perhaps the biggest sign of a Sunbelt turnaround is the resurgence of Phoenix, a region devastated by the housing bust and widely regarded by contemporary urbanists as the “least sustainable” of American cities. The recovery of Phoenix, appropriately named the Valley of the Sun, is strong evidence that even the most impacted Sunbelt regions are on the way back. …

Roger Simon says Putin and the president have something in common, but more differences. 

With Vladimir Putin giving Barack Obama the back of his gloved hand in the Crimea, it’s easy to forget what the two leaders have in common. Neither of them likes democracy very much.

In Putin’s case that couldn’t be more obvious, but Obama has given more than his share of signals to that effect in recent days, informing a complaisant Congress during the State of the Union that he was going to override them and take the law into his own hands by executive fiat if they didn’t go along with his policies. His number one consigliere, Valerie Jarrett, repeated essentially the same thing during a recent interview on The O’Reilly Factor.

Unfortunately, that’s about it in the similarity department (except they both seem to like sports). In two other major categories, the dissimilarities are striking. Putin is one tough dude and a patriot for his country. Obama is neither of these. In evidence I offer one five-letter word: Syria. I could offer a lot more, but I don’t want to bore you.

The point is, as Putin threatens Ukraine and who knows what else, China moves on the Japanese islands, the Iranian mullahs jaw on while moving ever closer to nuclear capability, the already nuclear North Koreans improve their ballistics while starving their people, Venezuela approaches civil war, al-Qaeda and its myriad cousins metastasize across North Africa, the Levant, and beyond, the West has at its helm someone who is not only a documented liar (“if you like your plan,” etc., etc.) but who is also essentially a blowhard. Even worse, and ultimately even more dangerous to our health and/or survival, our president is a monumentally poor judge of character. He is clueless. …

We know our friends don’t think much of the prez, but now liberals see the failure. From Slate we learn Romney got it right and you know who got it wrong.

… Here’s Obama.

Governor Romney, I’m glad that you recognize that Al Qaida is a threat, because a few months ago when you were asked what’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia, not Al Qaida; you said Russia, in the 1980s, they’re now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.

But Governor, when it comes to our foreign policy, you seem to want to import the foreign policies of the 1980s, just like the social policies of the 1950s and the economic policies of the 1920s.

And here’s Romney:

Russia I indicated is a geopolitical foe… and I said in the same — in the same paragraph I said, and Iran is the greatest national security threat we face. Russia does continue to battle us in the U.N. time and time again. I have clear eyes on this. I’m not going to wear rose-colored glasses when it comes to Russia, or Mr. Putin. And I’m certainly not going to say to him, I’ll give you more flexibility after the election. After the election, he’ll get more backbone. 

Romney was right. Why was Obama wrong? Because, I think, he was willfully blurring the distinction between “geopolitical” and other sorts of threats. He was playing to the cheap seats. Voters do not fear Russia, or particularly care about its movements in its sad, cold sphere of influence. They do care a lot about terrorism. And Obama would use any chance he had, in 2012, to remind voters that he was president when Osama Bin Laden was killed.

So you see the politics—they reveal Obama as the player of a cheap trick. …

Here’s a blogger from the leftist New Republic.

In the course of the last presidential campaign, Mitt Romney made a comment about America’s number one “geopolitical foe,” which Romney claimed was Russia. He was mocked by the president and many liberal commentators. Here are Romney’s remarks, in their full context, which came during a conversation with Wolf Blitzer: 

ROMNEY:  Russia…is, without question, our number one geopolitical foe.  They fight every cause for the world’s worst actors.

BLITZER:  But you think Russia is a bigger foe right now than, let’s say, Iran or China or North Korea? Is that—is that what you’re suggesting, Governor?

ROMNEY:  Well, I’m saying in terms of a geopolitical opponent, the nation that lines up with the world’s worst actors.  Of course, the greatest threat that the world faces is a nuclear Iran.  A nuclear North Korea is already troubling enough.

But when these—these terrible actors pursue their course in the world and we go to the United Nations looking for ways to stop them, when—when Assad, for instance, is murdering his own people, we go—we go to the United Nations, and who is it that always stands up for the world’s worst actors? It is always Russia, typically with China alongside.

And—and so in terms of a geopolitical foe, a nation that’s on the Security Council, that has the heft of the Security Council and is, of course, a—a massive nuclear power, Russia is the—the geopolitical foe.

This all seems…exactly right. 

Another New Republic contributor is tired of the administration clichés.

Everyone’s giving President Obama advice about how to handle Vladimir Putin’s adventure into the Crimea. But I want to issue a broader critique, because there’s something that he and his people will need to do to be more effective in this case and in future foreign policy crises: They’ll need to change their rhetoric.

In talking about Putin, as when trying to express disapproval towards other world leaders in the past, administration officials have resorted to language that comes across as either patronizing or out of touch. Let’s examine a couple of the administration’s favorite rhetorical tropes.

1. They are not acting in their own interest. They are only harming themselves.

Secretary of State John Kerry was all over the airwaves this weekend with versions of this line. “He is not going to gain by this,” Kerry told David Gregory on “Meet the Press.” “Russia is going to lose. The Russian people are going to lose.”

Over the years, Obama and his aides have offered similar versions of this line in talking about other foreign leaders who had done or were about to do something of which the administration disapproved: in Syria, for example, or Egypt or Qaddafi’s Libya. And guess what? It’s a useless line of attack. Putin makes his own calculations of what is in his interest. If he believed that sending troops onto Ukrainian soil was a bad idea, he wouldn’t have done it. Bashar al-Assad also makes his own calculations. He’s worried that if he loses to the rebels, he and many of the people around him will be killed. It’s enough of a full-time responsibility for Obama and Kerry to define what’s in America’s own interests without making grand proclamations of what’s in the best interest of other countries or their leaders. …

Back to our friends, Peter Wehner traces the president’s journey from arrogance to incompetence.

… When he ran for the presidency, it was Barack Obama who never put limits on his criticisms of others. He spoke as if the problems of the world would disappear with two events: the removal from office of his predecessor and his arrival as president of the United States. Even in a profession not known for attracting modest individuals, Mr. Obama’s arrogance set him apart.

In 2008 his campaign aides referred to him as the “black Jesus.” He told congressional Democrats during the 2008 campaign, “I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.” During that campaign, while still a one-term senator, Obama decided he wanted to give a speech in Germany– and he wanted to deliver it at the Brandenburg Gate. 

“I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” Mr. Obama told Patrick Gaspard, his political director, at the start of the 2008 campaign, according to The New Yorker. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m going to think I’m a better political director than my political director.” A convention speech wasn’t enough for Mr. Obama; Greek columns needed to be added. During an interview with “60 Minutes,” Obama said, “I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president — with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR, and Lincoln.” (The use of the word “possible” is priceless.) Mr. Obama has compared himself to LeBron James; his aides compared him to Michael Jordan. He clearly conceived of himself as a world-historical figure. Nothing, it seemed, was beyond his power. (If you think I’m exaggerating, I’d urge you to watch this 30-second clip from an Obama speech in 2008.) …

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We interrupt our selections outlining the president’s foreign policy disasters to select an item from Time Magazine on the crisis in student loans. A program the administration decided to nationalize in some of the 2,700 pages of the healthcare act. Why not? There is hardly a thing in this country that government cannot make worse.

Chris Rong did everything right. A 23-year-old dentistry student in New York, Chris excelled at one of the country’s top high schools, breezed through college, and is now studying dentistry at one of the best dental schools in the nation.

But it may be a long time before he sees any rewards. He’s moved back home with his parents in Bayside, Queens—an hour-and-a-half commute each way to class at the New York University’s College of Dentistry—and by the time he graduates in 2016, he’ll face $400,000 in student loans. “If the money weren’t a problem I would live on my own,” says Rong. “My debt is hanging over my mind. I’m taking that all on myself.”

Rong isn’t alone. Across the country, students are taking on increasingly large amounts of debt to pay for heftier education tuitions. Figures released last week by the Federal Reserve of New York show that aggregate student loans nationwide have continued to rise. At the end of 2003, American students and graduates owed just $253 billion in aggregate debt; by the end of 2013, American students’ debt had ballooned to a total of $1.08 trillion, an increase of over 300%. In the past year alone, aggregate student debt grew 10%. By comparison, overall debt grew just 43% in the last decade and 1.6% over the past year.

According to a December study by the Institute for College Access & Success, seven out of 10 students in the class of 2012 graduated with student loans, and the average amount of debt among students who owed was $29,400. There’s no clear end in sight. ”The total amount of student debt is growing basically at a constant rate,” Wilbert van der Klaauw, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York  tells TIME. “The inflow is much higher than the outflow, which is likely to continue in the future as reliance on student loans for college is expected to remain high.”

Debt is painful for many students, and an increasing number of graduates are unable to pay back their loans on time. Delinquencies on student loans have risen dramatically over the past decade: 11.5 percent of graduates were at least 90 days late on paying back their loans at the end of 2013, compared with 6.2 percent delinquencies on student loans in 2003. Moreover, the Fed’s figures on delinquencies hide more stark data: nearly half of all students with debt aren’t currently in repayment thanks to deferments and forbearances and the fact that students are not expected to pay while they’re in school, according to van der Klaauw. What that means is that for the graduates who are actually expected to pay their loans now, the delinquency rate is roughly double the 11.5% figure. …

… Student debt doesn’t just weigh heavily on graduates. Evidence is growing that student loans may be dragging down the overall economy, not just individuals. Think about it this way: if students have significant debts, it means they’re less likely to spend money on other goods and services, and it also means they’re less likely to take out a mortgage on a house. Consumer purchasing is the primary driver of the U.S. economy, and mortgages and auto loans play a huge role as well. There aren’t any comprehensive, hard numbers yet on how much of a drag student debt may be on the economy, but “the associations definitely suggest that growing student debt is a drag on consumption,” says van der Klaauw. “This is still something we’re discussing. There are a range of views on this. My personal view is that the increasing reliance on student loans for financing college education is going to be a drag on consumption for some time.” …

Andrew Malcolm brings us back to Ukraine.

… Of course, it would be ridiculous to suggest Obama’s passivity toward Putin is connected to the American’s overheard promise of post-election “flexibility” to Putin’s predecessor back in 2012. So, we won’t.

Here’s how Col. Putin responded to Obama’s words of warning: He sent more Russian troops into Crimea.

Then, to show how really serious he is, Obama dispatched Secy. of State John Kerry to Kiev to offer cheap symbolic support for the reformers attempting to organize a new, but bankrupt Ukraine government.

Here’s how Kerry quaintly characterized the Russian invasion: “That is not the act of somebody who is strong. That is the act of somebody who is acting out of weakness.”

Kerry is fresh from a series of diplomatic triumphs including alienating Egypt’s new military-backed government, negotiating a Syrian chemical weapons accord that country is now ignoring and agreeing to give Iran six more months to maybe possibly agree to stop its nuclear weapons program, which everyone knows is not going to happen.

Kerry has also failed to reach agreement with Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai on a residual U.S. troop presence after December.

Recently, Kerry announced that global warming is “perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.” Just so we — and Russia — know where this administration’s true priorities lie.

The seeds of Obama’s ongoing diplomatic embarrassments — and dangers to this nation — were sown in the Democrat’s early months in his so-called Russian policy reset. …

LIkewise Craig Pirrong at Streetwise Professor who wants to know why the bien pensants are surprised by Putin’s aggressive instincts and actions.

In 2007, in my 60th post on SWP, I wrote a post about Putin and the Euros, titled “A Man in a Hurry.”  If you look at Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, and the utterly pusillanimous European response to this aggression, that post from more than 7 years ago is quite clearly prophetic, to the last jot and tittle.

The closing paragraph:

“I think that most Europeans, and those few Americans who seem to pay much attention to these issues, are nonplussed by Putin’s audacity in large part because they are projecting their attitudes onto him. They cannot envision why someone would engage in such seemingly short sighted actions. As a recent Newsweek story puts it, they wonder why Putin is risking severe “blowback.” However, their attitudes have evolved and developed in a completely different institutional, economic, and political environment than Russia’s. The Euro-American environment is much more conducive to taking the longer view that the unsettled (and unsettling) environment that characterizes Russia today. So, the Europeans–and Americans–should be ready for more “surprises” from Putin–which shouldn’t be surprises at all.”

My main question is why a blogger, and amateur student of Russian politics, could figure this out, but the State Department, the intelligence agencies, the national security community, the vast bulk of think tanks, and the editorial pages of every major US paper couldn’t.  And why they haven’t been able to do so despite all that has happened since.  Georgia.  The castling move whereby Putin resumed the presidency.  The unrelenting crackdown on civil society.  It’s one thing to ignore reality when it’s lying around.  It’s another to ignore it when it is hitting you in the goddam face. …

Even the Washington Post’s editors are gagging on the policies of the one they enabled saying his “foreign policy is based on fantasy.”

FOR FIVE YEARS, President Obama has led a foreign policy based more on how he thinks the world should operate than on reality. It was a world in which “the tide of war is receding” and the United States could, without much risk, radically reduce the size of its armed forces. Other leaders, in this vision, would behave rationally and in the interest of their people and the world. Invasions, brute force, great-power games and shifting alliances — these were things of the past. Secretary of State John F. Kerry displayed this mindset on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday when he said, of Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine, “It’s a 19th century act in the 21st century.”

That’s a nice thought, and we all know what he means. …

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Even though Putin’s pace is such that things are unfolding very quickly, there is still time for Krauthammer’s column on Ukraine from last Thursday.

Henry Kissinger once pointed out that since Peter the Great, Russia had been expanding at the rate of one Belgium per year. All undone, of course, by the collapse of the Soviet Union, which Russian President Vladimir Putin called “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century.”

Putin’s mission is restoration. First, restore traditional Russian despotism by dismantling its nascent democracy. And then, having created iron-fisted “stability,” march.

Use the 2008 war with Georgia to detach two of its provinces, returning them to the bosom of Mother Russia (by way of Potemkin independence). Then late last year, pressure Ukraine to reject a long-negotiated deal for association with the European Union, to draw Ukraine into Putin’s planned “Eurasian Union” as the core of a new Russian mini-empire.

Turns out, however, Ukraine had other ideas. It overthrew Moscow’s man in Kiev, Viktor Yanu­kovych, and turned to the West. But the West — the E.U. and America — had no idea what to do.

Russia does. …

… Secretary of State John Kerry says Russian intervention would be a mistake. Alas, any such declaration from this administration carries the weight of a feather. But better that than nothing. Better still would be backing these words with a naval flotilla in the Black Sea.

Whether anything Obama says or does would stop anyone remains questionable. …

Talk about two incomprehensible world views! Paul Mirengoff posts on the 90 minute chat between the president and Russia’s Putintate.

As John noted below, President Obama spent an hour and a half on the telephone with Vladimir Putin discussing the Russian invasion of Ukraine. What was the conversation like?

We can probably get a good sense of it by considering the account of President Bush’s conversations with Putin set forth by Peter Baker in his excellent book about the Bush presidency, Days of Fire.

It’s well known that Bush and Putin got on well at first. But when the relationship soured, Bush became exasperated by his talks with the Russian bully.

Putin seemed to delight in debating Bush. But according to Baker, Bush hated debating Putin. “He’s not well informed,” Bush complained. “It’s like arguing with an eighth grader with his facts wrong.” Bush described another encounter as “like junior high debating.”

One of Putin’s tactics was to present absurd analogies between his abuses of power and events in the U.S., a tactic also favored by Nikita Khrushchev in Soviet times: …

More on the dithering president from Jonathan Tobin.

… Weakness and irresolution are fungible commodities in international diplomacy. The Obama administration gave up the formidable military, political and economic leverage they had over Iran last fall by signing an interim agreement with Iran that gave Tehran what it wanted in terms of recognizing their right to enrich uranium as well as loosening sanctions in exchange for almost nothing. If the Iranians had good reason to think they had nothing to fear from the Obama administration before this latest humiliation of the president at the hands of Putin, their conviction that they can be as tough as they like with him without worrying about a strong American response can only be greater today.

It is too late to save Ukraine from the theft of its territory. But it is not too late to reverse the U.S. retreat from the world stage that has been going on in the last years. President Obama can begin to regain some of his credibility by taking a strong stand on sanctions against Russia and sticking to it. But if he doesn’t no one should be under the illusion that it won’t affect Obama’s ability to prevail in the Iran talks. The cost of Obama-style weakness and isolationism will not be cheap, either for U.S. allies or for an American people who must now understand what it is like to live in a world where no one respects or fears their government.

Unchecked aggression abroad is matched and complimented by the increasing nastiness of the left in our country. Holman Jenkins writes on climate-change freaks and their growing attacks on the un-persuaded.

Surely, some kind of ending is upon us. Last week climate protesters demanded the silencing of Charles Krauthammer for a Washington Post column that notices uncertainties in the global warming hypothesis. In coming weeks a libel trial gets under way brought by PennState’s Michael Mann, author of the famed hockey stick, against National Review, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, writer Rand Simberg and roving commentator Mark Steyn for making wisecracks about his climate work. The New York Times runs a cartoon of a climate “denier” being stabbed with an icicle.

These are indications of a political movement turned to defending its self-image as its cause goes down the drain. That’s how thoroughly defunct, dead, expired is the idea that humanity might take charge of earth’s atmosphere through some supreme triumph of the global regulatory state over democracy, sovereignty, nationalism and political self-interest, the very facts of political human nature.

Let’s restate more accurately a plan recently announced by Thomas Steyer, a California hedge-fund billionaire whose idea is to make the coming midterms about climate change: He would spend $100 million to flog an issue voters don’t care about, to defeat Republicans whose defeat would have no impact on climate change, in order to replace them with Democrats whose election would have no impact on climate change.

Mr. Steyer’s thinking is puzzling unless his goal is to make $100 million disappear. If his purpose were to elect Democrats, wouldn’t his money go further attacking Republicans on matters of interest to voters? If he wants to move the ball on climate change, wouldn’t a better place to start be undoing the damage his fellow climate lobbyists have done to the cause with their hysterical exaggerations, false statements and moral bullying? …

Peggy Noonan calls them the “aggressive left.”

… We are suffering in great part from the politicization of everything and the spread of government not in a useful way but a destructive one. Everyone wants to help the poor, the old and the sick; the safety net exists because we want it. But voters and taxpayers feel bullied, burdened and jerked around, which again is not new but feels more intense every day. Common sense and native wit tell them America is losing the most vital part of itself in the continuing shift of power from private to public. Rules, regulations, many of them stupid, from all the agencies—local, state, federal—on the building of a house, or the starting of a business. You can only employ so many before the new insurance rules kick in so don’t employ too many, don’t take a chance! Which means: Don’t grow. It takes the utmost commitment to start a school or improve an existing one because you’ll come up against the unions, which own the politicians.

It’s all part of the malaise, the sclerosis. So is the eroding end of the idea that religious scruples and beliefs have a high place that must culturally and politically be respected. The political-media complex is bravely coming down on florists with unfashionable views. On Twitter  Thursday the freedom-fighter who tweets as @FriedrichHayek asked: “Can the government compel a Jewish baker to deliver a wedding cake on a Saturday? If not why not.” Why not indeed. Because the truly tolerant give each other a little space? On an optimistic note, the Little Sisters of the Poor haven’t been put out of business and patiently await their day in court. …

George Will says the left will always take care of themselves.

The many jaundiced assessments of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on the fifth anniversary of its enactment were understandable, given that the sluggish recovery, now drowsing through the second half of its fifth year, is historically anemic. Still, bleak judgments about the stimulus spending miss the main point of it, which was to funnel a substantial share of its money to unionized, dues-paying, Democratic-voting government employees. Hence the stimulus succeeded. So there.

This illustrates why it is so sublime to be a liberal nowadays. Viewed through the proper prism, most liberal policies succeed because they can hardly fail. Each achieves one or both of two objectives — making liberals feel good about themselves and being good to liberal candidates.

Consider Barack Obama’s renewed anxiety about global warming, increasingly called “climate change” during the approximately 15 years warming has become annoyingly difficult to detect. Secretary of State John Kerry, our knight of the mournful countenance, was especially apocalyptic recently when warning that climate change is a “weapon of mass destruction.” Like Iraq’s?

Blogger Steven Hayward noted that Kerry, he of the multiple mansions and luxury yacht, issued this warning in Indonesia, where the average annual income ($3,420) suggests little latitude for people to reduce their carbon footprints. …

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Niall Ferguson writes on our country’s global retreat.

Since former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke uttered the word “taper” in June 2013, emerging-market stocks and currencies have taken a beating. It is not clear why talk of (thus far) modest reductions in the Fed’s large-scale asset-purchase program should have had such big repercussions outside the United States. The best economic explanation is that capital has been flowing out of emerging markets in anticipation of future rises in U.S. interest rates, of which the taper is a harbinger. While plausible, that cannot be the whole story.

For it is not only U.S. monetary policy that is being tapered. Even more significant is the “geopolitical taper.” By this I mean the fundamental shift we are witnessing in the national-security strategy of the U.S.—and like the Fed’s tapering, this one also means big repercussions for the world. To see the geopolitical taper at work, consider President Obama’s comment Wednesday on the horrific killings of protesters in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev. The president said: “There will be consequences if people step over the line.”

No one took that warning seriously—Ukrainian government snipers kept on killing people in Independence Square regardless. The world remembers the red line that Mr. Obama once drew over the use of chemical weapons in Syria . . . and then ignored once the line had been crossed. The compromise deal reached on Friday in Ukraine calling for early elections and a coalition government may or may not spell the end of the crisis. In any case, the negotiations were conducted without concern for Mr. Obama. …

Power Line with a picture of  what can happen when diplomacy fails. 

The Obama administration’s Syria policy has been a fiasco. I don’t think anyone seriously tries to defend it. That said, the humanitarian tragedy that is unfolding in that country is not the responsibility of the U.S. government. It is the fault of Bashar Assad and his minions, and al Qaeda and other radical Muslims who have forcibly taken over the opposition to Assad. The human catastrophe in Syria is almost beyond reckoning. You can look up the numbers, but what stunned me was this photograph, taken late last month. The scene is Yarmouk, a district of Damascus that is populated largely by Palestinian “refugees” and has been the scene of heavy fighting. The U.N. gained access to Yarmouk and passed out food there. These people are hoping to get something to eat.

Craig Pirrong has added president “uncontested arrival” to the lexicon of president bystander, president news cycle, etc., etc. . . .

I have repeatedly called the administration’s policies in Syria and vis a vis Russia “feckless.”  This was intended to be a damning insult.  But it just isn’t insulting enough.

Why do I say that?  The White House told CNN that the Russian takeover of Ukraine isn’t an invasion.  Get this: It’s an “uncontested arrival.”

You know, just like the Rhineland, the Anschluss,  the Sudetenland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, etc.

Only Orwell can do justice to such a monstrous formulation:

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. ” …

More on Ukraine from Prof. Pirrong.

… Why is Putin moving so quickly?  I think this is overdetermined.  A mixture of personal/subjective and objective/pragmatic considerations.

First, as I said from the very early days of this blog, Putin is a man in a hurry: it is part of his nature.  His impatience was no doubt increased by the burning desire to revenge what he views as a personal humiliation inflicted on him by the Ukrainian revolutionaries at the climax of his Olympic extravaganza.

Second, Ukraine is in a chaotic state, as is every government in the immediate aftermath of a revolution. The military is no doubt reeling and riven by dissent and rivalry.  The government has little idea of which units and commanders it can rely on.  There is no experienced competent authority in place, especially in the defense and interior ministries.  There cannot be a unity of command in such circumstances.  Moreover, parts of the country are ripe for putsches by fifth columns supported and guided by Moscow.  (During the Cold War, Soviet operational plans for an invasion of Europe included extensive provisions for sowing chaos in rear areas, including by fomenting civil unrest.)  A disorganized, chaotic polity is much easier picking than would be the case in a few months, or even a few weeks, when it has had time to get its feet under it.

Third, Putin has taken the measure of his opponents in the West, and found them lacking.  Note the timing.  Within mere hours of Obama’s craven and empty warning, Putin moves to war.  He knows he has nothing to fear from Obama. Obama’s warning turned out to be less of a deterrent, and more of an invitation. …

… A couple of other points must be made.

First, this has to be the most complete public humiliation inflicted on any American president ever.  Obama gave what he thought was a stern warning, and within hours Putin defied it with relish.  Such defiance is a sign of complete disrespect. …

Remember when Sarah Palin was mocked during the 2008 campaign for saying obama’s evident weakness of character would tempt Putin to invade Ukraine? Breitbart remembered.

Palin said then:

“After the Russian Army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama’s reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia’s Putin to invade Ukraine next.”

For those comments, she was mocked by the high-brow Foreign Policy magazine and its editor Blake Hounshell, who now is one of the editors of Politico magazine. 

In light of recent events in Ukraine and concerns that Russia is getting its troops ready to cross the border into the neighboring nation, nobody seems to be laughing at or dismissing those comments now. …

John Lott who was roundly abused by Piers Morgan gets to pen the send-off.

Sunday’s announcement that Piers Morgan had lost his show at CNN was hardly unexpected.

The ratings for the coveted 9 p.m. time slot were abysmal, dropping last week to just 270,000 viewers — about one-eighth of what Fox News’s Megyn Kelly got in the same time slot.

Some, such as Variety magazine, have speculated that the low ratings are due to Morgan’s single-minded push for gun control. That might have something to do with it, but much more is going on.

In all the thousands of television and radio interviews that I have done over the years, my appearances on Morgan’s show have generated more immediate e-mails than any other show that I have ever been on.

The response made one thing immediately obvious: Only the most diehard gun-control advocates watched his show. But even some of them were unwilling to listen to his abuse.

Americans like a lively debate, but Morgan failed one basic rule: to debate the issue itself rather than make everything personal.

For instance, he yelled at Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America: “You’re an unbelievably stupid man, aren’t you?”

He has referred to me as a “liar” and a “clown” and attacked the shape of my “weird pointy bushy eyebrows” that are deformed because of surgery that I had as a kid to remove a tumor. …

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Victor Davis Hanson says this president’s mendacity and constant failures, mean nothing to the bien pensants as long as he says the right things. 

Losing a job is freedom from job lock. A budget deficit larger than in any previous administration is austerity. A mean right-wing video caused the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi. Al-Qaeda was long ago washed up. The Muslim Brotherhood is secular. Jihad is a personal journey. Shooting people while screaming Allahu akbar! is workplace violence. Unaffordable higher premiums and deductibles are the result of an Affordable Care Act. Losing your doctor and your health-insurance plan prove you will never lose your doctor and your health-insurance plan — period! Being a constitutional lawyer means you know how to turn the IRS and the FCC on your enemies. Failure is success; lies are truth.

President Obama’s polls are creeping back up again. They do that every time the latest in the series of scandals — the IRS, AP, NSA, Benghazi, and Obamacare messes — recedes into the media memory hole. The once-outrageous IRS scandal was rebranded as psychodramatic journalists being outraged. The monitoring of AP reporters and of James Rosen is mostly “Stuff happens.” The NSA octopus was Bush’s creation. You can keep your doctor and your health plan — period — begat liberation from “job lock” and the ability to write poetry because you don’t have to work.

There will be more momentary outrages on the horizon, as a president who would fundamentally transform America continues to circumvent the Constitution to do it. The latest are the failed efforts of acting FCC director Mignon Clyburn — daughter of a Democratic stalwart, Representative James Clyburn. She dreamed about monitoring news outlets to ensure that they prove themselves correct in matters of race/class/gender thinking.

Yet after all the 24-hour outrages, and all the op-eds pointing out that a self-described constitutional-law professor has been the worst adversary of the Constitution since Richard Nixon, and after perhaps even a slide in the polls of a point or two, we will soon forget Ms. Clyburn and her idiotic attempts to diversify the news by seeking uniform expression in the media. …

One of the tribe though, in the person of WaPo’s Richard Cohen, seems to have had enough as he writes on Susan Rice and the retreat of American power.

Susan Rice ought to stay off “Meet the Press.” The last time she was on, she misrepresented what led to the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya. On Sunday she was back, this time misrepresenting critics of the Obama administration’s Syria policy. Last time her misrepresentation was unintentional. This time it wasn’t. I prefer it, though, when she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

In a frustrating colloquy with host David Gregory, Rice initially said all the right things about Syria. She called the war there “horrific,” which indeed it is. She said it had “spilled over and infused the neighboring states,” which indeed it has. And she said the United States had “every interest in trying to bring this conflict to a conclusion.” Yes. Yes, indeed.

“But if the alternative here is to intervene with American boots on the ground, as some have argued, I think that the judgment the United States has made and the president of the United States has made is that is not in the United States’ interests,” she continued.

Gregory, usually as alert and twitchy as a squirrel, flat-lined. He did not ask Rice who, precisely, advocated boots on the ground. He did not ask her to name just one prominent critic or to wonder why this is “the alternative” when there are so many others. He just pushed on, leaving this straw man to crinkle and crackle under the hot TV lights and allowing Rice, who is the president’s national security adviser, to get away with rebutting an argument that has not been made. She did, though, exhibit an administration mind-set — all or nothing — that, in practice, amounts to nothing.

Rice’s was a splendid performance, characteristic of an administration that values the sound of policy over its implementation. …

Jennifer Rubin says the administration’s foreign policy needs a reset.

The American people may not follow foreign policy regularly, but they know failure when they see it. They know when the wheels are coming off the bus. Gallup reports: “For the first time, more Americans think President Barack Obama is not respected by other world leaders than believe he is. Americans’ opinions have shifted dramatically in the past year, after being relatively stable from 2010 to 2013.”

It is not hard to see why. Around the world the president has generated contempt, dismay, or disappointment — but rarely respect. He has shied from enforcing his own red line. He has failed to articulate a U.S. policy toward the countries undergoing turmoil in the Middle East. He’s pushing a rotten deal with Iran. He bugged out of Iraq entirely, and now an al-Qaeda flag flies over Fallujah, where  just a few years ago Americans lost their lives by the dozens to turn back jihadists.

Perhaps the president needs to do his own reset. A speech would be in order to try to recalibrate his foreign policy and halt the slide into chaos and irrelevancy. …

For those mystified by the continued opposition to the healthcare act, Noemie Emery reminds us of its illegitimate birth in 2009.

… Whenever it could, the public went out of its way to express its displeasure: voting for Republican governors in Virginia and New Jersey, states won by Obama, a “go slow” sign which was wholly ignored by the president’s party, as it plunged ahead, pushing the bill through the Senate the day before Christmas, after the last two reluctant red-state dissenters had been showered with millions of dollars in favors. This wasn’t what voters wanted to find under the tree, but Democrats still had their 60 votes in the Senate, or would have again in January when Martha Coakley won the special election in Massachusetts to fill the seat of Edward M. Kennedy, who had died in August. Massachusetts would never send a non-Democrat to fill “the Kennedy seat,” as David Gergen had put it. But then Massachusetts did.

The gubernatorial elections in November 2009 had been taken as proxies for health care reform, but the December special election in Massachusetts was the third kick of the mule, and by far the most telling. Symbolically, it was held for the seat of the Father of Health Care, and one of the bill’s most conspicuous backers. The governors of two big states couldn’t do much to stop health care reform, but a single vote in the Senate was critical. Newly elected Senator Scott Brown had run as the “41st vote” against Obamacare. There were many reasons for people in Virginia and New Jersey to vote for (or against) their new governors. There was only one reason for people in Massachusetts to be voting for Brown.

“Elections have consequences” is a prime rule in politics, but Democrats went out of their way to make sure that this one would be the exception, as their first move after the results in Massachusetts became evident was not to rework the bill to bring it in line with the will of the public, but to game the system to close off the need for a second vote in the Senate, the will of the public be damned.

Medicare, Social Security, and the Civil Rights Act all passed by huge and bipartisan margins, with public opinion strongly in favor. Health care reform passed by 7 votes in the House, losing the votes of 34 Democrats (and all the Republicans), with a strong tide of public opinion running against it. Had there been a Senator Coakley, Republicans would have groaned, but accepted the bill as having been passed by the regular order of business. As it was, they loathed it almost as much for the way it was passed as for what was in it, and never accepted its moral authority. A Gallup poll taken on March 30, 2010, found that 53 percent of Americans considered the way the bill passed an “abuse of power” by Democrats as against 40 percent who found it “appropriate,” with 86 percent of Republicans and 58 percent of independents concurring in this negative judgment. Time has done nothing to soften these views.

Ultimately, acts of Congress gain their legitimacy in the way they win or reflect the will of the public, as expressed in the way they are passed. The Civil Rights Act, as Michael Barone reminds us, took place against a background of violence, but the careful and orderly way it was passed helped defuse opposition, and the much-feared resistance to it would never materialize. Full compliance, he notes, was not immediate, “[b]ut after Congress acted in such a deliberate fashion .  .  . white southerners largely acquiesced.” No such deliberation was ever to be seen in the passage of the Affordable Care Act, and acquiescence eludes it, as does the conviction that it is legitimate. It isn’t—and never will be.

Thomas Sowell on fairness.

It seems as if, everywhere you turn these days, there are studies claiming to show that America has lost its upward mobility for people born in the lower socioeconomic levels. But there is a sharp difference between upward “mobility,” defined as an opportunity to rise, and mobility defined as actually having risen.

That distinction is seldom even mentioned in most of the studies. It is as if everybody is chomping at the bit to get ahead, and the ones that don’t rise have been stopped by “barriers” created by “society.”

When statistics show that sons of high school dropouts don’t become doctors or scientists nearly as often as the sons of Ph.D.s, that is taken as a sign that American society is not “fair.”

If equal probabilities of achieving some goal is your definition of fairness, then we should all get together — people of every race, color, creed, national origin, political ideology and sexual preference — and stipulate that life has never been fair, anywhere or any time in all the millennia of recorded history.

Then we can begin at last to talk sense. …

Late night humor from Andrew Malcolm.

Conan: Two ex-Pussy Riot punk rock members were detained by Russian police. If convicted, they could face two weeks in a Sochi hotel room.

Letterman: Charlie Sheen is marrying an adult film star. Not only is he marrying her, but she’ll be working the bachelor party.

Conan: President Obama has apologized for saying an art history degree holder doesn’t earn a lot. Then Obama turned to an art history major and ordered a tall frappucino with soy.

SethMyers: The brassiere turns 100 years old this week. And so does everyone who still calls it a brassiere.

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John Fund highlights a moment in Ukraine when journalists were no longer able to lie for the regime.

… for many Ukrainians, there was another moment when they realized the ground was shifting beneath them. It came last Friday evening, during one of the most popular talk shows on Inter, the most-watched Ukrainian network. Lidia Pankiv, a 24-year-old television journalist, was invited on by host Andriy Danylevych to discuss the need for reconciliation following the agreement signed by Yanukovych and dissidents earlier that day. While reporting on the Maidan protests, Pankiv had helped persuade the Berkut riot police not to use further violence against the activists, and she had disclosed that one of the Berkut officers was now her fiancé. But reconciliation was not what Pankiv wished to discuss. As relayed by journalist Halya Coynash, Pankiv had a different message:

“You probably want to hear a story from me about how with my bare hands I restrained a whole Berkut unit, and how one of the Berkut officers fell in love with me and I fell in love with him. But I’m going to tell you another story. About how with my bare hands I dragged the bodies of those killed the day before yesterday. And about how two of my friends died yesterday. . . . I hate Zakharchenko, Klyuev, Lukash, Medvedchuk, Azarov. I hate Yanukovych and all those who carry out their criminal orders. I came here today only because I found out that this is a live broadcast. I want to say that I also despise Inter because for three months it deceived viewers and spread enmity among citizens of this country. And now you are calling for peace and unity. Yes, you have the right to try to clear your conscience, but I think you should run this program on your knees. I’ve brought these photos here for you, so that you see my dead friends in your dreams and understand that you also took part in that. And now, I’m sorry, I don’t have time. I’m going to Maidan (Independence Square). Glory to Ukraine.”

Danylevych immediately tried to return to the night’s topic of reconciliation. But he was stopped by guest Konstantin Reutsky, a human-rights activist from Luhansk. Reutsky agreed with Pankiv, saying that Inter journalists had “lied and distorted information about Maidan over the last three months.” …

Roger Simon says that after Ukraine we should think about the need for an American Spring. Pickerhead thinks that could happen when journalists here stop lying for the regime.

We are not in the situation of the Ukraine, however that turns out, but the events in that Eastern European country should remind us all of the sad condition of our nation, how much we now need an American Spring in the USA.

Not a Spring like the Arab Spring, of course, which was and is a nightmare beyond anyone’s wishes, but something more like the original Prague Spring that remade the Czech Republic into the vibrant country and society it is today.

The Obama administration has been the culmination of the advancement of state intrusion into our lives that began roughly a hundred years ago and has reached such a point that the originality and the intentions of our country are barely recognizable.  The results of this have been disastrous both economically and socially, most of all in terms of the personal freedom and liberty of our citizens. We have gone backwards in many ways, not the least of which is that race relations have deteriorated during the administration of the first African-American president, largely due to state meddling. We are divided as we have never been since the Civil War, and for really no good reason.

The people aren’t the problem. It’s the state. …

Charles Krauthammer examines the myth of settled science.  

I repeat: I’m not a global warming believer. I’m not a global warming denier. I’ve long believed that it cannot be good for humanity to be spewing tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I also believe that those scientists who pretend to know exactly what this will cause in 20, 30 or 50 years are white-coated propagandists.

“The debate is settled,” asserted propagandist in chief Barack Obama in his latest State of the Union address. “Climate change is a fact.” Really? There is nothing more anti-scientific than the very idea that science is settled, static, impervious to challenge. Take a non-climate example. It was long assumed that mammograms help reduce breast cancer deaths. This fact was so settled that Obamacare requires every insurance plan to offer mammograms (for free, no less) or be subject to termination.

Now we learn from a massive randomized study — 90,000 women followed for 25 years — that mammograms may have no effect on breast cancer deaths. Indeed, one out of five of those diagnosed by mammogram receives unnecessary radiation, chemo or surgery.

So much for settledness. And climate is less well understood than breast cancer. If climate science is settled, why do its predictions keep changing? And how is it that the great physicist Freeman Dyson, who did some climate research in the late 1970s, thinks today’s climate-change Cassandras are hopelessly mistaken? …

Howard Kurtz posts on the intolerant left that attempts to quiet Krauthammer.

Charles Krauthammer says it right up front in his Washington Post column: “I’m not a global warming believer. I’m not a global warming denier.”

He does, however, challenge the notion that the science on climate change is settled and says those who insist otherwise are engaged in “a crude attempt to silence critics and delegitimize debate.”

How ironic, then, that some environmental activists launched a petition urging the Post not to publish Krauthammer’s column on Friday.

Their response to opinions they disagree with is to suppress the speech. …

John Hinderaker of Power Line posts on yet another attempt by the left to silence critic – we allude to the Mark Steyn suit. You can follow the link and read Mark’s latest brief.

As all the world knows, climate buffoon Michael Mann is suing Mark Steyn, National Review and others for disagreeing with him about global warming–not just disagreeing, but doing so in colorful language. As happens so often on the Left, Mann found himself losing the debate on a public issue of great importance. Rather than admit that he was wrong about the hockey stick–one of the most notorious errors, or frauds, in the history of science–he is trying to shut his opponents up through litigation.

Steyn was unhappy with how the lawsuit was going, so he dismissed the lawyers that were representing him and National Review and is now pro se. Rather than engage in further procedural maneuvering, Mark wants to fight out what he sees as the central issue–free speech–in the court of public opinion. So yesterday another shoe dropped: Mark served an answer and counterclaim against Mann in which he requested damages from the discredited scientist. You can read the pleading here. It is entertaining; it should be, Mark wrote it himself. ..

Salon on the foods supposed to be bad for us and turned out to OK, and even beneficial at times.

In the future, when we’re zipping around the biosphere on our jetpacks and eating our nutritionally complete food pellets, we won’t have to worry about what foods will kill us or which will make us live forever.

Until then, we’re left to figure out which of the food headlines we should take to heart, and which should be taken with a grain of unrefined, mineral-rich sea salt. Low-fat or high-fat? High-protein or vegan? If you don’t trust what your body tells you, remember that food science is ever evolving. Case in point: The seven foods below are ancient. But they’ve gone from being considered healthy (long ago) to unhealthy (within the last generation or two) to healthy again, even essential. …

… Old Wisdom: Coffee equals caffeine equals bad for you.

New Wisdom: Coffee is loaded with antioxidants and other nutrients that improve your health. Plus, a little caffeine makes the world go round.

Why? Actually, most of the world never bought into the whole caffeine/coffee scare that made so many Americans start to swear off coffee, or heaven help us, switch to decaf. But these days, the U.S., chock full of Starbucks, has come around. Several prominent studies conducted over the last few years unearthed a bounty of benefits in the average cup of joe. As everyone knows, caffeine boosts energy. Based on controlled human trials, it has also been proven to fire up the neurons and make you sharper, with improved memory, reaction time, mood, vigilance and general cognitive function. It can also boost your metabolism, lower your risk of Type II diabetes, protect you from Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, and lower the risk of Parkinson’s. Whew.

3) Whole Milk

Old wisdom: High-fat milk lead to obesity. Exposing children to lower-fat options keeps them leaner and healthier and instills the low-fat habit.

New Wisdom: Ha

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Another Pickings day without items on DC creeps. First an ode to Elm trees showed up in Sunday’s NY Times. Although the writer was primarily concerned with the trees along Fifth Ave. the accompanying picture was of Pickerhead’s favorite site in New York, the Literary Walk in the Southeast corner of Central Park. That picture, which was too large a file for Pickings, led to a “seasons” of pics of the Walk starting with winter. Then a couple of impressionist paintings are included.

THEY looked, at first glance, like trees in a paint-by-number picture, snow outlining branches in idiot-proof chiaroscuro — a child’s “Winter Scene.” Yet as I stood in a recent wet snowstorm on 110th Street, looking down Fifth Avenue along Central Park, I saw that the elms flanking the sidewalk had an aspect in winter less observable in other seasons, when their branches are cloaked in leaves.

Joined overhead, the topmost limbs rose airily to form a long vaulted corridor stretching to 59th Street and the park’s southern perimeter. It was as if on this west side of Fifth Avenue there existed a chamber, a “tabernacle of the air,” to use a purplish phrase the 19th-century orator and abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher favored when describing groves of elm.

High-canopied, in shape either fountain or vase, the American elm is by habit and nature conducive to a grandeur and elegance not lost on Frederick Law Olmsted, Central Park’s designer. Olmsted saw in the American elm, a favorite of his, a tree conducive to creating canopied spaces intended to evoke the tranquil intimacy of ecclesiastical chambers.

So it seemed to me in the snowy stillness of that recent storm. …

… the American elms here remain among the glories “of world urbanism,” as the architect Andrés Duany once said; that the elms on Fifth Avenue stand as unacknowledged reminders of a civic culture in which elms played an important role, since settlers first hauled them from forests to plant as the tree of choice on New England town commons; and that these sentinel giants embody, as Charles Dickens noted, “a kind of compromise between town and country; as if each had met the other half-way, and shaken hands upon it.”

Dickens was writing about New Haven, a city whose 19th-century appearance was in large part defined by the arcades of venerable elms that arched above its streets. …

… “If you think about it, you can spot an elm at midnight,” Mr. Hansel, of the American Elm Institute, noted, referring to the American elm’s distinctive high branching habit, its way of descending in an elegant fountain of limbs. But why postpone pleasure till midnight? Stand on Fifth Avenue between 59th and 110th Streets any time of day or night in this cold season. Look up.

Thomas Wolfe writes for The Atlantic on another Thomas’ abuse of stuff shirts from Europe. This starts slowly. Stick with it. You’ll be rewarded. Wolfe was asked to write on the origin of the “American Idea.”

Since you asked … the American idea was born at approximately 5 p.m. on Friday, December 2, 1803, the moment Thomas Jefferson sprang the so-called pell-mell on the new British ambassador, Anthony Merry, at dinner in the White House. Oh, this was no inadvertent faux pas. This was faux pas aforethought. Jefferson obviously loved the prospect of dumbfounding the great Brit and leaving him speechless, furious, seething, so burned up that smoke would start coming out of his ears. And all that the pell-mell did.

Jefferson had already tenderized the ambassador three days earlier. Merry was the first foreign diplomat to take up residence in Washington. Accompanied by Secretary of State James Madison, he shows up at the White House wearing a hat with a swooping plume, a ceremonial sword, gold braid, shoes with gleaming buckles—in short, the whole aristocratic European ambassadorial getup—for his formal introduction to the president of the United States. He is immediately baffled. Jefferson doesn’t come to greet him in the grand reception hall. Instead, Merry and Madison have to go looking for him … Bango! All at once they bump into the American head of state in some tiny tunnel-like entryway to his study. What with three men and a sword in it all at once, the space is so congested that Merry has to back himself and his sword out of it just to have room to shake hands. When he shakes hands, he’s stunned, appalled: The president of the United States is a very Hogarth of utter slovenliness from his head … to his torso, clad in a casual workaday outfit thrown together with a complete indifference to appearances and a negligence so perfectly gross, it has to have been actually studied … down to his feet, which are stuffed, or mostly stuffed, into a pair of down-at-the-heels slippers, literally slippers and literally worn down at the heels in a way that is sheer Gin Lane. “Utter slovenliness,” “negligence actually studied,” “indifference to appearances,” and “down at the heels” were Merry’s own words in the first of what would become a regular jeremiad of complaints and supplications to Lord Hawkesbury, the foreign secretary, all but coming right out and begging him to break off relations with the United States to protest such pointed insults toward His Majesty’s representative. Merry was ready to bail out … and his wife, a notably not-shy woman née Elizabeth Death (yes), even more so. …

… Jefferson’s pell-mell gave America a mind-set that has never varied. In 1862, 36 years after Jefferson’s death, the government began the process of settling our vast, largely uninhabited western territories. Under the terms of the Homestead Act, they gave it away by inviting people, anybody, to head out into the open country and claim any plot they liked—Gloriously pell-mell! First come, first served! Each plot was 160 acres, and it was yours, free! By the time of the first Oklahoma Land Rush, in 1889, it had become a literal pell-mell—a confused, disorderly, headlong rush. People lined up on the border of the territory and rushed out into all that free real estate at the sound of a starter gun. Europeans regarded this as more lunacy on the part of … these Americans … squandering a stupendous national asset in this childish way on a random mob of nobodies. …

 

… The Jefferson frame of mind, product of one of the most profound political insights of modern history, has had its challenges in the two centuries since the night Jefferson first sprang the pell-mell upon the old European aristocratic order. But today the conviction that America’s limitless freedom and opportunities are for everyone is stronger than ever. Think of just one example from the late 20th century: Only in America could immigrants of many colors from a foreign country with a foreign language and an alien culture—in this case, Cubans—take political control pell-mell via the voting booth of a great metropolis—Miami—in barely more than one generation.

America remains, as it has been from the very beginning, the freest, most open country in the world, encouraging one and all to compete pell-mell for any great goal that exists and to try every sort of innovation, no matter how far-fetched it may seem, in order to achieve it. It is largely this open invitation to ambition that accounts for America’s military and economic supremacy and absolute dominance in science, medicine, technology, and every other intellectual pursuit that can be measured objectively. And it is absolute.

Yet from our college faculties and “public intellectuals” come the grimmest of warnings. The government has assumed Big Brother powers on the pretext of protecting us from Terror, and the dark night of fascism is descending upon America. As Orwell might have put it, only an idiot or an intellectual could actually believe that.

Der Spiegel examines reports on DNA retrieved from a child who died in Montana 12,000 years ago.

It must have been a pretty special child, otherwise the two-year old wouldn’t have been buried in such a ceremonious manner. The boy was sprinkled with celebratory red dust and given distinctive stone artifacts for his last journey.The characteristic fluting of the stone weapons serve as archeological evidence that the boy, who died some 12,600 years ago, came from the Clovis culture. It was one of the earliest New World groups, disappearing mysteriously a few centuries after the child’s burial in present day Montana. From the summit of a hill towering over the burial site near the YellowstoneRiver, the boy’s Ice Age contemporaries could monitor their hunting grounds for mammoth and bison.

Now a team of scientists led by the Danish geneticist Eske Willerslev has analyzed the boy’s origins and discovered that he descends from a Siberian tribe with roots tracing back to Europe. Some of the boy’s ancestors are likely even to have lived in present-day Germany.

Their findings go even further: More than 80 percent of all native peoples in the Americas — from the Alaska’s Aleuts to the Maya of Yucatan to the Aymaras along the Andes — are descended from Montana boy’s lineage.

Surprising Similarities

Last week, the scientists published the results of sequencing the child’s DNA in the scientific journal Nature. Late last year, the same team published the decoded genome of another early human: A juvenile buried near LakeBaikal in Siberia some 24,000 years ago. Their genomes showed surprising ancestral similarities.

Ever wonder where GDP numbers come from? Tyler Cowen, George Mason econ prof with a bent towards free markets, reviews two books that try to answer that question.

‘May my children grow up in a world where no one knows who the central banker is” is a wise saying. One also can hope for a world where arguments about measuring GDP (gross domestic product, the sum total of the goods and services produced within a nation) or the inflation rate are rare. In good economic times, we tend to take reported economic numbers for granted, but more recently, conspiracy theories have run wild. It is sometimes claimed that “real GDP” or “true inflation” is much higher or lower than what is officially proclaimed. For instance, both Ron Paul and Sen. Tom Coburn have mistakenly charged that inflation is actually running at or above 8 percent a year, which would mean Social Security benefits are not indexed upward enough and real GDP is plummeting, both implausible conclusions.

Fortunately, the popular economics book sector has come to the rescue with two new and useful entries on what our economic statistics mean and why we should (mostly) trust them. This topic is no longer for wonks only.

If you are going to read only one book on GDP, Diane Coyle’s “GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History” should be it. More important, you should read a book on GDP, as many of the political debates of our time revolve around this concept. Can we afford our current path of entitlement spending? Was the Obama fiscal stimulus worth it? When will China overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy?

The answers all depend on GDP. In 140 pages of snappy text, Coyle lays out what GDP numbers measure, what roles they play in economic policymaking and forecasting, and how GDP numbers can sometimes mislead us, albeit not in the way many current critics suggest. …