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Doug explains to readers:
Alliances should be a means to an end. Their purpose is to increase American security. They aren’t particularly useful where there’s no significant threat to the U.S., Washington can easily deter any significant adversary on its own.
Russia’s Vladimir Putin is a nasty fellow, but he has demonstrated no interest in challenging America.
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is an unpleasant actor, but it is interested in America only because America, in the form of 28,500 military personnel, is next door in the South. Yet South Korea enjoys a vast economic and technological lead, an overwhelming international and diplomatic advantage, and a sizable population edge over the North. Seoul long ago should have graduated from America’s defense dole.
China, like Russia, is a regional power unlikely to seek war with America, which enjoys a large military lead.
Japan, which long possessed the world’s second-largest economy, could have done much more to advance its and its region’s defense for years. Even today Tokyo is well able to deter any Chinese threat to the former’s existence.
No Middle Eastern state directly threatens the U.S. America’s friends all are dominant: Israel is a regional superpower, Saudi Arabia vastly outspends Iran on the military, and Turkey’s armed forces, despite the aftermath of the coup attempt, outrange those of all of its neighbors, aside from Russia, which has no cause for conflict.
Why is the U.S. providing all of these nations security commitments, military equipment, and promises to go to war? What threat to America looms? Which allied states are vulnerable to attack? Which of them truly matters to U.S. security?
The honest answer: not many.
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The Telegraph reports that Germany plans to tell its citizens to stockpile food and water in case of an attack or catastrophe for the first time since the end of the Cold War.
According to details leaked to the German press they include advice to citizens to stockpile enough food for ten days and clean drinking water for five days.
“The population should be urged by appropriate means to keep two litres of drinking water per person per day,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Sontagszeitung quoted a government paper as saying.
Germany is currently on high alert after two Islamist attacks and a shooting rampage by a mentally unstable teenager last month.
The new proposals hark back to the detailed West German civil defense plans of the Cold War, when the country was thought likely to be on the frontline of any conflict between the Soviet Union and the West.
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Here you get a glimpse at the problems facing insurers and baby boomers thanks to the Fed’s zero percent interest rate policy as reported earlier this month in the WSJ.
Insurers reported a messy second quarter plagued by low interest rates and catastrophe claims, highlighted by a $2 billion charge at MetLife Inc. tied to a savings product popular with baby boomers.
Life insurers MetLife, Prudential Financial Inc. and Lincoln Financial Group booked lower premiums and fees, while property-and-casualty insurer Allstate Corp. faced elevated levels of claims for severe weather, including a record hail storm in Texas.
Lincoln Financial was the only insurer of the group to eke out an increase in operating earnings; the other three companies posted double-digit declines.
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“The public dispute over accounting standards is a signal to taxpayers, retirees and political reformers that fundamental flaws remain in how pensions measure their finances,” writes Steve Malanga in the WSJ. At issue, as he correctly points out, is the delusion that government pensions “on average estimate they will earn 7.6% a year on their portfolios.” Using a more realistic riskless rate (as if that exists!) increases the unfunded liability from about $1 trillion to $3 trillion. It’s all funny money. I’ve looked at the numbers in Newport, RI and it’s ugly. The stock market will not come to its rescue. And politicians don’t want to raise taxes and risk losing the next election and employees don’t want to contribute more from their paychecks. Pensions will not survive as they are today. The most natural path of destruction will be a gutting of services (police/firemen etc) which will no doubt increase risks for everyone.
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America’s 1st Freedom explains the anti-gun measures California Gov. Jerry Brown has just enacted.
If you want a horrifying glimpse of what a Hillary Clinton one-party-majority federal government would look like were gun-ban Democrats to take control of the three branches of government after the coming November elections—look no further than California.
With total control of the legislative, executive and judicial branches by extremist gun-banners, there is a nonstop war of attrition on the rights of California firearm owners, with the ultimate goal of eradicating the Second Amendment.
The story begins, “When California Gov. Jerry Brown enacted a sweeping package of gun ownership restrictions this month, including an assault-weapons ban and background checks for bullets, gun-control advocates hailed a legislative victory that’s been impossible at the national level.”
“California’s template is now in progressives’ playbook, and new laws could be coming soon to a blue (or purple) state near you,” predicts U.S. News.
As NRA members, we have changed the course of history in the past. With Second Amendment champion Donald J. Trump in the White House and firm Second Amendment majorities in the U.S. House and Senate, we can save the Second Amendment, save America, and save liberty for the future of our country.
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Why should there be an ideological test when it comes to immigration? Andrew C. McCarthy writes in NRO, “… immigration is a privilege, not a right; and our Constitution is security for Americans, not a weapon for aliens to use against Americans,” If would-be immigrants subvert our constitution, the U.S. Constitution allows those immigrants to be banned. Mr. McCarthy’s explains why Donald Trump—in proposing that “aliens from sharia-supremacist areas be carefully vetted for adherence to anti-constitutional principles”—is right.
- Sharia is a totalitarian societal structure and legal corpus that anti-American radicals seek to impose.
- (S)haria is antithetical to the Constitution, to the very foundational American principle that the people may make law for themselves, live as they see fit, and chart their own destiny.
- (T)here is an Islamic tradition of rational inquiry, deeply influenced by Greek philosophy, that has been overwhelmed for nearly a millennium by the fundamentalist tradition.
- (There) are Muslims who … help us infiltrate terror cells and prevent attacks. They are Muslims who fight in our armed forces, work in our intelligence services, serve in our police departments, and thrive in our economy.
- If we want to win the crucial ideological component of radical Islam’s war against us, we should be empowering these pro-Western Muslims rather than inviting the sharia-supremacist Muslim Brotherhood into our policy-making councils.
- Like protecting our nation, empowering pro-Western Muslims requires an immigration system that welcomes those who will support our Constitution, and turns away those who would sweep it aside.
Read more from Andrew McCarthy here.
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Writing at The American Conservative, Pat Buchanan makes the shocking case for a surprise de facto U.S. ally in the Syrian war.
Our Congress appears again to have abdicated its war powers.
Consider the forces that have turned Syria into a charnel house with 400,000 dead and millions injured, maimed and uprooted.
On the one side there is the regime of Bashar Assad and its allies — Hezbollah, Iran and Russia. Damascus buys its weapons from Moscow and has granted Russia its sole naval base in the Mediterranean. And Vladimir Putin protects his interests and stands by his friends.
To Iran, the Alawite regime of Assad is a strategic link in the Shia crescent that runs from Tehran to Baghdad to Damascus to South Beirut and Lebanon’s border with Israel.
If Syria falls to Sunni rebels, Islamist or democratic, that would mean a strategic loss for Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, which is why all have invested so much time, blood and treasure in this war.
If they are going to lose Syria, Assad, Iran, Hezbollah and the Russians are probably going to go down fighting. And should we decide to fight a war to take them down, we would find ourselves with such de facto allies as ISIS and the al-Nusra Front, an affiliate of al-Qaida.
Have the hawks who want us to target Assad considered this?
Pat Buchanan on The Laura Ingraham Show (8/16/2016)
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Insurance companies, which are in the business of not evaluating risk wrong over time and across categories, pay good money to people who work for them as actuaries. These actuaries are trained in the evaluation of different sorts of risk, and work to make sure that the insurance companies are more than covered should any of their policies be called on to cover a large loss on the part of an insured. They evaluate small but relatively likely risks as well as enormous but rare dangers.
Evaluating risk in national security is hard, but not as hard as the national security establishment would have you believe. For decades, the smartest American security thinkers have worried that in order to do their jobs, they need to have a reasonably good grasp on the future. As I wrote in the National Interest in 2007,
The father of American strategic analysis, Sherman Kent, grappled with these difficulties in his days at OSS and CIA. When Kent finally grew tired of the vapid language used for making predictions, such as “good chance of,” “real likelihood that” and the like, he ordered his analysts to start putting odds on their assessments. When a colleague complained that Kent was “turning us into the biggest bookie shop in town”, Kent replied that he’d “rather be a bookie than a [expletive] poet.”
If there was a bookie who built himself a casino evaluating the threat from terrorism correctly, it’s John Mueller. Mueller had the temerity to publish in the summer of 2002 an essay titled “Harbinger or Aberration?: A 9/11 Provocation.” As we were being instructed on how to duct tape ourselves into our homes and the people responsible for our security were figuring out how to set a trillion dollars and almost 5,000 Americans on fire, Mueller shrugged his shoulders, arguing that
rather than foreshadowing the future, the [September 11] attacks may turn out to have been a statistical outlier, a kind of tragic blip in the experience of American national security.
To term this a “provocation” was to understate things. Or rather, it would have been a provocation had more people in Official Washington read it. Most of them were too busy picking up the rap video’s worth of money raining down on their heads from the subsequent “gusher” of spending inaugurated on September 12.
If John Mueller had been running a hedge fund evaluating terrorism in 2002, he’d be our era’s J. Paul Getty, and the entire national security commentariat would’ve made Bernie Madoff look like BlackRock. But John Mueller wasn’t trying to make money, and the national security establishment enjoys far less meaningful oversight than the financial industry.
Rather, if Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky are to be believed, societies do not evaluate risk on the same basis that insurance companies or hedge funds do; such a view ignores the central role of culture and identity in selecting which dangers to emphasize and which to downplay. How much relative weight does the citizen picked at random place on the risks posed by:
- Violent crime in inner cities;
- The risk of climate change;
- Terrorism;
- Guns?
 When put this way it is impossible to imagine a citizen who judges these dangers based on the same factors that the insurance company actuary would use.
 For his part, John Mueller has taken up with a specialist in risk analysis and published a book and a series of recent articles amplifying his earlier claims. For its part, the national security establishment has continued its profligacy and recklessness, all on the back of claims that could not withstand, and likely were not built to withstand, even perfunctory risk analysis.
Say what you will about hedge funds: they wouldn’t try to get away with this.
What Are the Risks of Terrorism? (with John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart)
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