RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the 1956 film The Rainmaker Burt Lancaster portrays a drifter promising a 1930’s small Kansas town he will make it rain for $100. This is during the dust bowl in the American West and people were desperate to try anything to relieve the drought. Today the rainmakers offer the same relief. It is called a carbon tax. If townspeople will pay the rainmakers, they promise it’s not too late to change the weather. So what is the difference between the rainmakers today and in the 1930’s? Not much. A carbon tax: 1) will reduce CO2 in the atmosphere hardly a whit; 2) has huge costs; and 3) needs global participation, which costs will eventually be borne mostly by the American people. Beyond this, the premise by today’s rainmakers that anthropogenic CO2 is the significant driver of global temperatures is arguable.

What links global warming and the ruling class? A fervent belief in the former seems to have a powerful inverse correlation with the impressiveness of the latter.

The ruling class is made up of people from privileged backgrounds. They are usually wealthy. They go the elite colleges and often hold important jobs. They are the class from which many of our important leaders are drawn.

The Italian sociologist Pareto theorized that ruling classes, after time, lose their vigor and sense of purpose. They go soft. When that happens, they are replaced by tougher upward strivers.

Compare two secretaries of state. John Foster Dulles was born in 1888 and was Eisenhower’s during the 1950s. John Kerry was born in 1943 and is the current one for Obama. Both of these men were born into the ruling class.

A “Language Awareness Campaign” at Western University in London has declared a whole host of words and phrases to be offensive and “violent” – including “get over it,” “blind to something,” and “skinny.”

The point of the campaign, which was part of student orientation, was to warn against using language with an “inherently violent nature” — and featured posters of students explaining why certain words and phrases fall into this category.

For example:

“I don’t say that ‘I was “blind” to something’ because it ignores the experiences of differently abled individuals.”

From Sweden in the Baltic to Tartus in the Mediterranean, Russian forces are on the offensive. The consensus among U.S. officials not beholden to the White House is that Mitt Romney was right. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is the most dangerous threat to America.

And not only to America: Russia’s attempts to reclaim its empire spread conflict and misery, prolong war, destabilize the postwar alliance system that has brought security and prosperity to the world, and erode Western values such as freedom, equality, and individualism. Though Russia may no longer espouse global Communist revolution, the consequences of its militarism and aggression are not limited to a small geographic area. The Comintern is gone. But the goals of dominating the Eurasian heartland, Finlandizing Europe, and isolating and challenging the United States have returned. The stronger Putin becomes, the more despotic, poorer, and more corrupt is the world.

Despised by some, admired by others, the U.S. has been the Middle East’s principal power for decades, providing its allies with guidance and protection.

Now, however, with Russia and Iran thrusting themselves boldly into the region’s affairs, that special role seems to be melting away. As seasoned politicians and diplomats survey the mayhem, they struggle to recall a moment when America counted for so little in the Middle East—and when it was held in such contempt, by friend and foe alike.

“It’s the lowest ebb since World War II for U.S. influence and engagement in the region,” said Ryan Crocker, a career diplomat who served as the Obama administration’s ambassador to Afghanistan and before that as U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Pakistan.

From shepherding Israel toward peace with its Arab neighbors to rolling back Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait and halting the contagion of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, the U.S. has long been at the core of the Middle East’s security system. Its military might secured critical trade routes and the bulk of the world’s oil supply. Today, the void created by U.S. withdrawal is being filled by the very powers that American policy has long sought to contain.

Mr. Ferguson, author of a new bio of Kissinger is a tad too kind on Kissinger….who was wrong on detente instead of a muscular position vis a vis the Soviet Union, wrong on abandoning Taiwan as the price for opening relations with Mao’s China, wrong in his harsh treatment of Israel in the aftermath of the 1973 war, when he threatened a “reassessment of relations” if Israel did not bow to the demands of Sadat the aggressor (with Syria) in a combined surprise attack on Israel during Yom Kippur, and probably wrong in delaying arms shipment to beleaguered Israel. When Nixon insisted on the resupply it was never determined whether Kissinger or James Schlesinger, then Sec. of Defense were guilty of delaying the resupply. My bet is on Kissinger…..Mr. “Realpolitik”…..rsk

Henry Kissinger long ago recognized the problem: a talented vote-getter, surrounded by lawyers, who is overly risk-averse.

Even before becoming Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger understood how hard it was to make foreign policy in Washington. There “is no such thing as an American foreign policy,” Mr. Kissinger wrote in 1968. There is only “a series of moves that have produced a certain result” that they “may not have been planned to produce.” It is “research and intelligence organizations,” he added, that “attempt to give a rationality and consistency” which “it simply does not have.”

Two distinctively American pathologies explained the fundamental absence of coherent strategic thinking. First, the person at the top was selected for other skills. “The typical political leader of the contemporary managerial society,” noted Mr. Kissinger, “is a man with a strong will, a high capacity to get himself elected, but no very great conception of what he is going to do when he gets into office.”