Further Reflection On The Recent Turkish Sponsored Attempt To Break The Gaza Blockade - And The Aftermath

Eventually, the crew of the blockade runner, M/V Marvi Marmara, returned to Turkey. They were met at the airport by... who else, senior members of the Turkish cabinet. There were reportedly tears and hugs all around. The Turkish charity that sponsored the mission is known in Turkey as a government sponsored non-government organization. How curious. The Turkish Islamist government continues to make its bones within the Islamic world. The irony of this same government being a NATO member seems lost on the western press, which is most interested in figuring out how the West can appease Turkey. While Turkish apologists deny it, apparently the Erdogan government is also using wide spread surveillance, including wiretaps, to ensure that no serious opposition develops. The question is, will serious electoral opposition be permitted to develop? That would be un-Islamic.

The G20 Conundrum - Let 10,000 Bloggers Flower

The Blogosphere at large is abuzz with comments and paroxysms over the closing declaration from the recent G20 meeting. Real economists, such as Paul Krugman, and many simple hand wringers, are adamant in stating that the United States must continue to stimulate its economy. President Obama, and his Treasury Secretary, say yes, so I guess the answer must be yes. For most of the other G20 attendees, the answer is no (for now). So except for the U.S., those running large budget deficits will tame those deficits, and do so in the near term. Dr. Krugman is nearly apoplectic at this. He writes in the June 28 New York Times that such a policy will ensure a "third depression." I'm not sure whether Dr. Krugman is a Keynesian or not, but he sure isn't afraid of deficits, or a rapidly growing U.S. sovereign debt.

Obama, Geithner, Krugman, and company don't seem to get a fundamental truth, to wit: the greatest impediment to continued economic stimulation, i.e., continuing to print money, and taking on government debt, is the EXISTING government debt. It's true that Keynesian theory calls for using government debt to stimulate economies, but it also calls for accumulating budget surpluses in prosperous years in order to have funds available to support those lean year deficits. We forgot that the necessary accompaniment to the lean year deficit is the fat year surplus. It's as old as the Book of Exodus.

At this point, stimulation means wholesale printing of money, which typically leads to inflation. We think that, because we haven't experienced inflation since the Vietnam era, we cannot do so again. I've actually heard supposedly credible journalists suggest that inflation has been permanently tamed, as if it were a living thing, instead of a phenomenon based on mathematical and physical factors. Tamed? According to David Einhorn, of Greenlight Capital, "government statistics are about the last place one should look to find inflation, as they are designed to not show much. Over the last 35 years, the government has changed the way it calculates inflation several times. According to the web site Shadow Government Statistics, using the pre-1980 method, the Consumer Price Index would be over 9 percent, compared with about 2 percent in the official statistics today." Inflating the money supply leads to inflation. No matter how you cook the books, eventually it will happen. The only thing holding it back right now may be our hollowed out industrial infrastructure, and the fake figures.

Mr. President, your counterparts in the G20 are telling their people that they aren't going to be able to have cake and ice cream every night anymore. On the other hand, Mr. Obama, and his acolyte, Treasury Secretary Geithner, are saying "yes, yes, we know, no more cake and ice cream, but we can't stop quite yet. In fact, we're not sure when it's safe to stop. We'll get back to you. Trust us." It's quite true that it was George W. Bush and Company that jacked up the deficit over a trillion dollars, insisting that anything less would bring the country to its knees, but Bush is gone, and suddenly we're projecting trillion dollar deficits out as far as there are meaningful budget figures. How did that happen? Was this a "Bush did it, so we should be able to do it too" moment? How did a one year stimulus turn into a permanent expansion of government? More frightening yet is the fact that all this debt doesn't include the coming unfunded Social Security bomb. It's Armageddon, and the bill is no longer going to our kids, it's coming due in OUR lifetimes.

I hear tell that there's an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond who is tired of non-economist bloggers writing about economics. OK. Here's the deal. I'll stop writing this stuff as soon as the Fed cleans up its act. Fair is fair.

Peace and love...

My Letter To Mr. Thomas Friedman Concerning His 27 June 2010 Column In The New York Times

On Sunday, 27 June, Mr. Thomas Friedman wrote a column in the New York Times titled "War, Timeout, War, Time, ..." The column suggested that it was time for Israel to offer "a daring and assertive political initiative to the Palestinians." While I agree with Mr. Friedman in principle, there are a few wrinkles that the international press could help with. My letter explains.

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Sir, I read your Sunday column, and heard you reprise it on CNN. It seems to me that there is a fallacy at the core of your assumption about what Israel should do with respect to the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank. You've given the Palestinians a free pass. Yes, the Palestinian English language media sounds pretty reasonable, but you know what their Arab language media says. I'll bet you know what their text books say (especially their geography books). Do you remember the deal that Arafat walked away from in the late 90's? He said that he had to do it, because he would be assassinated if he took it. What he was essentially saying was that he could only settle for 100 per cent (his chunk of Jerusalem, right of return for everyone, to wherever they said they were uprooted from). If so, then there really isn't any negotiating to be done, is there? We're just waiting for Israel to give the Palestinians everything they want. The amount of negative, anti Israel, and anti Jewish activity on the Palestinian side is extraordinary, but it's only in Arabic, and Israelis appear to be the only ones who know about it. It's not AIPAC or West Banker propaganda, but the West appears afraid to talk about it, for fear of upsetting the Palestinians. Is Palestinian governance that fragile? This behavior runs from the unauthorized, and destructive digs on the Temple Mount, through the blatant Palestinian attempt to "prove" that Jerusalem was never a Jewish city, and right into the hate and bogus history fed to Palestinian school children. In the face of this, how exactly is an Israeli Prime Minister supposed to take on HIS radicals? It would be nice to see a little unbiased, consistent light shined on these items. Could you you stand the heat of writing a series of columns on this subject?

A Short Comment On The Departure of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal

This will be very short. The boy was insubordinate. He had to go. Anything more would be blather. Have a nice day.

More Fiddling As

On 15 June 2010, Mr. Thomas Friedman published a column in the New York Times titled “Letter From Istanbul.” Mr. Friedman is worried that we are “losing” Turkey. He places some of the blame on the Christians in the European Union, who apparently haven't made good on their promise to invite Turkey into their midst, after promising to do so, and on weak United States foreign policy. Tom Friedman should be smarter than this, but ever since his “The World is Flat” franchise began to fall flat, his judgment has seemed pretty poor. Let me get this straight, Tom. You went to a country that's actively building an alliance with the barbarians ruling Iran, Syria, and the Hezbollah organization. Turkey is a country led by a prime minister who sponsored a run against the Israeli blockade of Gaza, then stocked the lead vessel with radio coordinated thugs, ready to attack the Israeli borders with pipes and knives, then claim the Israelis brutalized them. Now, you ask this country's prime minister why he's so busy setting up a common command center with all these thugs and international criminals, and the answer is something to the effect that the EU has made it clear that it is for Christians, so Turkey is turning its attention elsewhere. Do you really believe anything that comes out of this guy's mouth, Mr. Friedman? What possible reason would an Islamist have for wanting to unite with a Europe that would not want in its midst an Islamist state? Mr. Friedman thinks that Turkey spent the last four years jumping through hoops, trying to qualify for EU membership. Gee, if Mr. Erdogan, the buddy of Iran and Syria, says so, it must be so, but let's try this. Erdogan spent the last four years purging the armed forces of professionals, replacing them with politically reliable Islamists, and otherwise solidifying his party's position.

Mr. Erdogan's Islamist party changed its name to “Justice and Development” after being disqualified from elections under Turkey's secular state laws. It was a name change, only – a sham. Now that he's in power, Mr. Erdogan has invited most of the Muslim world's monsters to Ankara to play, including the criminals running Iran and Sudan. No, Mr. Friedman, nothing the EU could have done would have changed what has happened in Turkey. Nothing. From the moment the Islamists took power, it was clear that Turkey was on the path to an Islamic state. That means that another state might be full of mass murderers, but it can be a good friend of Turkey, simply because it is “Islamic”. How charming. Mr. Friedman can now go back to his laptop, where he can prepare subsequent columns, lecturing us on how we in the West could have prevented Turkey from slipping away into the Islamic camp, if we had only offered it the right enticements, just as, throughout the ages we in the West failed to offer just the right “enticements” to the Nazis, Soviets, North Koreans, Palestinians, Iranians, Sudanese, Serbs, and the rest of the butchers whom we've let march through the world because we just didn't give them the one last thing that really would have made them behave. The West always screws up and sets off the bad guys who really wanted to be good.

The day the Justice and Development party won election, Turkey's path into the Islamist camp, with all the radicalism that entails, was set. Q.E.D. Now Mr. Friedman, having gotten a shot at putting Mr. Edrogan on the journalistic couch, can begin writing what western intellectuals write best – why the western democracies are responsible for everything bad that happens. If all international murderers will line up single file on the left, Security Council personnel will be passing out free passes to all who need them.

There's an interesting bit of irony at work in Turkey. Turkish authorities have blocked access to Google and Wikipedia, because it's possible to find information with these sites that is demeaning to Atatürk, the founder of the modern Turkish state. Such information is unlawful in Turkey. Simultaneously, the Turkish government is dissolving the secular state that Atatürk created. These information controls help isolate the population, facilitating the change. China has shared with Iran the software that it uses to isolate it's population from “harmful” Internet content. Perhaps Iran can now share this software with Turkey, to help preserve the facade of he modern Turkish state. Watch this space.

Freedom, Liberty, Permissiveness

This post is in the form of a quote from Alistair Cooke. At this point in our existence, it is a cautionary note worth considering. We are currently much more interested in fine tuning our rights than our responsibilities. Enjoy:

"As for the rage to believe that we have found the secret of liberty in general permissiveness from the cradle on, this seems to me a disastrous sentimentality, which, whatever liberties it sets loose, loosens also the cement that alone can bind society into a stable compound -- a code of obeyed taboos. I can only recall the saying of a wise Frenchman that `liberty is the luxury of self-discipline.' Historically, those peoples that did not discipline themselves had discipline thrust on them from the outside. That is why the normal cycle in the life and death of great nations has been first a powerful tyranny broken by revolt, the enjoyment of liberty, the abuse of liberty -- and back to tyranny again. As I see it, in this country -- a land of the most persistent idealism and the blandest cynicism -- the race is on between its decadence and its vitality."
-- Alistair Cooke

China: The Great Irredentist, With Demands Coming To A Border Near You

The northeast Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh has long been claimed, by China, as part of Tibet (although when Tibet was an independent nation a century ago, it agreed that Arunachal Pradesh was part of India). Arunachal Pradesh has a population of about a million people, spread among 84,000 mountainous square kilometers. This is not an area of great apparent value. China and India fought a nasty little war over Arunachal Pradesh in 1962.

Since the conclusion of the Sino-Indian War, India has looked more to Pakistan than China as a threat, but that is rapidly changing. Recently, China began improving the military support infrastructure on its side of the border. Additionally, Chinese troops have crossed the border into Indian territory and built small structures. India is responding accordingly.

Why does China claim this little bit of India? Because it was once part of Tibet, and Tibet was once part of China, and now is again. As far as China is concerned, if any square inch of another country was ever part of China, it must be re-absorbed into China. To ensure there would be no ambiguity in the case of Tibet, China invaded in 1950, and has spent the last sixty years destroying Tibetan culture, primarily by destroying the Tibetan religious infrastructure, and re-settling hundreds of thousands of Han Chinese in Tibet. As in China itself, the Han Chinese are coming to dominate, whether they are in the majority or not. China also spends a great deal of time "proving" that there never really was a Tibetan culture, and that Tibetans are now better off than they ever were before.

The Tibet situation can seem a bit silly (to everyone except Tibetans) when it's pressed before the public by such Hollywood buffoons as Richard Gere, but it is illustrative of a larger issue that the international community will be facing, whether it wants to or not, in the next few decades.

China has major claims to many of its neighbor's territory, and to international maritime territory. While it may attempt to enforce some of these claims via international legal bodies, China will be pleased to enforce its claims by force if it considers the costs low enough. What would the gains be? That may be difficult for westerners to understand. China is one of the great victim cultures of the modern era. She is convinced that the only reason that every bit of territory that was ever hers is not still hers lies in her victimization by western colonial powers. She knows that, no matter what she may do to recover what she believes is hers, the west will eventually accept her conquests if she just holds on long enough. As a Permanent Member of the UN Security Council, no Chinese misdeed, however grievous, will ever come before that august, if hapless body. There can be no sanctions on China. Where would we get our cell phones and toaster ovens?

Chinese claims are not well understood by most westerners. Online research suggests that, aside from the Taiwan and Arunachal Pradesh claims, few westerners are aware of the extent of Chinese claims, many of which rely on ancient history, and conflict with settled international law. Given China's rising military power, lack of respect for the rule of law, status as a Permanent Member of the UN Security Council, role as primary manufacturer of much of our technical infrastructure, and initiator of several major information warfare attacks on the United States, perhaps we should be a little concerned, no?

Here are a few areas of concern:

Area: Taiwan
Counter Party: Republic of Taiwan

Area: Arunachal Pradesh
Counter Party: India

Area: Koguryo
Counter Party: North Korea

Area:Various
Counter Party: Vietnam (this has been "settled" twice - watch for more)

Area: South China Sea
Counter Party: All Bordering Nations

China essentially claims the entire South China Sea, up to the territorial waters of all other coastal nations. This would contravene current international law and treaties. China claims a long standing historical claim. The British, based on their colonial period, may have a more compelling claim (only kidding).

Good places to search for Chinese territorial claims are maps in current textbooks, and current postage stamps. Both carefully reflect official policy of the one party state.