Bin Laden: How not to flush a turd

Sigh. That's not how it's done, guys. Beautiful op, as one would expect from ST 6, although I imagine the pilot who stalled the Blackhawk must wish he had died.

But, dear God. Did you learn nothing from your Argentine chums back in the late 70s and early 80s when they dismantled the most serious insurgency in Latin America in their own country, and then came up to Central America at your invitation for an encore?

You DISAPPEAR the mother-fucker. Whether he's killed or captured alive, you leave his followers to panic that you've got him and are introducing him to the old telephone hand-crank and the wet or dry submarine. 

Everybody scurries to new hide-outs, tested comms procedures are abandoned, people shed good false identities and scramble to create new cover. And you watch them run, record their conversations and follow the ones you can.

That way you not only maximise the disruption to the terrorist organization, but you can scoop up a whole bunch more people for meaningful chats and seize a lot of electronic and written documentation because people running and looking over their shoulders for helicopters coming for them tend not to cover their tracks too well.

But hey - what's all that compared to getting thousands of yahoos to chant YOU ESS AY and wave the good ol' stars and stripes? 

Maybe the US administration figured they could not possibly keep it a secret for long, but they should at least have tried to maximise the operational as opposed to PR value of the coup.

Europe's unilateral disarmament

Yet another article in NRO warning Americans to back away from the European slippery slope to international futility. "Defense lessons from Europe" is no more superficial than most European writing about the States, but it does underline the low priority given to self-defence by European governments.

We are learning a lot from Europe these days, especially how not to govern a modern democratic nation. Unsustainable social-welfare spending, multiculturalism instead of assimilation for immigrants, and ever-decreasing defense budgets all demonstrate that the path Europe has been following is not the model for a government by the people. And most significantly, we learn that Europe’s defense budgets will continue to decrease unless there is a dramatic rearrangement of priorities among its peoples. The NATO secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, recently warned that “the budget decreases across the continent could have dire consequences: If the cuts are too deep, we won’t be able to defend the security on which our democratic societies and prosperous economies depend. We risk a Europe increasingly adrift from the United States”.

Americans still tend to write more politely about Europe than vice-versa, but their underlying contempt is beginning to wear through the veneer of good manners. Of course Europe is not a model for government by the people: it is explicitly a model for the unrestrained government of an unelected and unaccountable bureaucratic oligarchy.

Europe is now ruled by the form of government that once supplied the palpable continental enemy against which it was necessary to maintain a military deterrent. Now that, thanks to American power, no such immediate threat looms, the Euro-oligarchy's sole priority is to perpetuate its hold on power. Only war could break that hold, therefore the means of war must be abolished.

So it is that the linked article misses the point when it states, "elected officials cannot spend unlimited sums on social-welfare and entitlement programs and expect to maintain a functioning democracy, much less a vibrant economy". But unelected officials can, because they are insulated from the consequences of their policies.

Europe is not an illustration of the dangers of people-pleasing democracy: it is an object lesson in what happens when peoples surrender their autonomy. Those who sacrifice freedom on the altar of collective security end up with neither.   

Mark Steyn - soothscribe

Recommend you read "Dependence Day" for as comprehensive an "as others see us" as you will encounter. Key comments:

To almost all members of Britain’s governing elite, quoting Churchill approvingly only confirms that you’re an extremist lunatic. 

“Anti-fascism” now means attacking the British Empire, which stood alone against fascism in that critical year between the fall of France and Germany’s invasion of Russia. And it’s even sadder to have to point out the most obvious fatuity in those “anti-fascist groups” litany of evil - “the British Empire’s association with slavery.” The British Empire’s principal association with slavery is that it abolished it.*

In cutting off two generations of students from their cultural inheritance, the British state has engaged in what we will one day come to see as a form of child abuse, one that puts a huge question mark over the future. Why be surprised that legions of British Muslims sign up for the Taliban? These are young men who went to school in Luton and West Bromwich and learned nothing of their country of nominal citizenship other than that it’s responsible for racism, imperialism, colonialism, and all the other bad -isms of the world. If that’s all you knew of Britain, why would you feel any allegiance to Queen and country?

Read it all - you won't find a more succinct summary.

*For those inclined to quibble, check out Lord Chief Justice Mansfield's reluctant ruling in R v Knowles, ex parte Somersett (1772). Mansfield was a racist, but he was first and foremost a jurist - and he found no basis in English Common Law for the state of slavery. End of. The home of the brave and the land of the free rebelled 4 years later and did not get around to declaring slavery illegal for another 90 years.

As others see us 3

"Contagion and other Euro-myths" by John Cochrane in the WSJ ($):

This is not, in fact, an Irish bailout. It's a bailout of the European (including British) banks that lent a lot of money to the Irish government and Irish banks. If European governments want to bail out their banks, let them do so directly and openly - not via the subterfuge of country bailouts. Then they should face the music: How is it that two years after the great financial crisis, European banks make so-called systemically dangerous sovereign bets, earn nice yields, and then get bailed out again and again?

As others see us 2

The WSJ speculates how much worse things would have been for the Euro zone if Britain had joined:

Fraught as things are now, imagine how much worse they are in some parallel universe where the UK adopted the euro. After all, even in this world it managed to get itself into arguably more trouble than any developed economy with interest rates a good deal higher than those it would have had from the European Central Bank.

Its orgy of public and private debt-fuelled madness would have been even worse inside the Euro zone than it was out, hard though that is to imagine. The UK’s public-sector net debt was £952.8 billion as of September 2010. Put that in euros, remember that it might well have been higher, and it makes Ireland, Spain and Greece look like well-governed paragons.

Hard not to conclude then that UK eurosceptics missed a trick. They should have been keen to join up. By now their bloated, flailing economy would probably have gone down, taking the whole project with it.

Channel 4 - Trillion Pound Horror Story

As Hemingway's hero Jake Barnes says at the end of The Sun Also Rises, "Wouldn't it be nice to think so?"

I'm a member of the choir Martin Durkin was preaching to, but I do not share his optimism that the British people would rebound if the crushing burden of statism were lifted from their backs.

They - the British people - have voted enthusiastically for every increase in the Welfare State and have furiously resisted every effort to shrink it. There is no constituency - none - for a small state if it means giving up the smallest part of whatever "entitlement" each enjoys.

All generalizations are falsifiable, but the salient characteristics of the British as seen by other nationalities is that they are lazy, drunken, undisciplined and unable either to think things through or to do anything thoroughly. Oh yes - and unconscionably self-satisfied and conceited. 

It is WAY too easy to blame it on the politicians and on the bureaucrats. Agreed, they do little but make things worse - but they are made in Britain, respectively elected and selected to lead this society.

Consider for a moment what would happen to any politician who told the Great British Public the truth about itself, and then explain how democratic change can possibly come about. Britain's biggest export for centuries has been its most ambitious and talented people, seeking fulfillment almost anywhere else on earth.

Nobody imposed our over-priced and under-performing institutions on us. They have evolved in response to the expectations of an envy-rotted society where popular pressure for many generations, from the school-yard to House of Commons, has been to level down.

The most withering judgment was delivered by the most popular prime minister in British history, who saw the country as something to be traded for his personal advancement, and whose administration "created" hundreds of thousands of statist jobs - and had to fill them mainly with immigrants.  

On the madness of voting against The One

The One had discovered why his approval ratings have nose-dived, reports Charles Krauthammer in a droll NRO article. It seems the president has been unwise enough to speak his highly-educated mind. "Facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day", he said, "because we’re hard-wired not to always think clearly when we’re scared. And the country is scared."

Dr. Obama diagnoses a heretofore undiscovered psychological derangement: anxiety-induced Obama Underappreciation Syndrome, wherein an entire population is so addled by its economic anxieties as to be neurologically incapable of appreciating the “facts and science” undergirding Obamacare and the other blessings their president has bestowed upon them from on high.

Krauthammer suggests there is a simpler explanation: Gallup findings that 42 percent of Americans describe themselves as conservative, 35 percent as moderate and only 20 percent as "liberal". He also suggests - and here I believe he overestimates how much people know or care what is happening in other countries - that the example of Europe is the strongest possible argument against The One's political agenda.

Even as we speak, the social-democratic model Obama is openly and boldly trying to move America toward is unraveling in Europe. It’s not just the real prospect of financial collapse in Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland, with even the relatively more stable major countries in severe distress. It is the visible moral collapse of a system that, after two generations of increasing cradle-to-grave infantilisation, turns millions of citizens into the streets of France in furious and often violent protest - over what? Over raising the retirement age from 60 to 62!

Will Heaven - good question wrong answer

"Why do so many Indians put up with mediocrity?" Heaven asks in one article, only to reply in his next article that "Indians are the most patient people on the planet. And it will be their downfall."

OK, let's run those again, only substituting "Britons" for Indians. Still an important Q & A, n'est ce pas?

The answer to the first question may be that Indians know things will get better, while the answer to the second is that Britons suspect they can only get worse.