The welfare state’s dirty little secret is out

The New Neo Posted on by

And it’s simple: with low birth rates, the young end up working to support the old, and then the state is likely to run out of money before their time comes to benefit.

It’s starting to happen all over the Western world, as inevitably as taxes and death (yes, I reversed the order for a reason). And the young who voted for Obama—or his equivalents in Europe—are beginning to realize they’re the ones left holding the (empty) bag:

In Athens, Aris Iordanidis, 25, an economics graduate working in a bookstore, resents paying high taxes to finance Greece’s bloated state sector and its employees. “They sit there for years drinking coffee and chatting on the telephone and then retire at 50 with nice fat pensions,” he said. “As for us, the way things are going we’ll have to work until we’re 70.”

The math doesn’t lie:

According to the European Commission, by 2050 the percentage of Europeans older than 65 will nearly double. In the 1950s there were seven workers for every retiree in advanced economies. By 2050, the ratio in the European Union will drop to 1.3 to 1.

It’s everywhere in Europe, the weaker economies having piggy-banked on the stronger and created an even greater mess. And don’t think we’re immune, either; although so far we’ve been less of a welfare state than the nations of Western Europe, Obama and the Democrats are working overtime to remedy that oversight before America catches on to the unraveling of Europe and prevents its own.

But don’t blame the leaders alone. The sad fact is that such policies were only able to be implemented because people like them. In the short run they lead to popularity, re-election, and the good life—until the bills come due. And by then the populace has become accustomed to (and demanding of) a level of benefits, leisure, and protection from the vicissitudes of life that our forefathers would have considered an unrealizable dream.

If so, that’s because ultimately it is an unrealizable dream. Now that people are catching on, they’re hopping mad. Several generations raised with expectations of cradle to grave security find it hard to accept the idea that it was all a sort of Ponzi scheme, and that they’re on the payer side of the pyramid.

But where there is realization, there might be opportunity:

In Athens, Mr. Iordanidis, the graduate who makes 800 euros a month in a bookstore, said he saw one possible upside. “It could be a chance to overhaul the whole rancid system,” he said, “and create a state that actually works.”

It could be a chance—but to succeed, politicians will have to tell some harsh truths, and people will have to accept them. So far, except for a few pockets of beginning sanity (such as, strangely enough, New Jersey) there’s been a lot of resistance and denial.

In France, for example [emphasis mine]:

President Nicolas Sarkozy has vowed to pass major pension reform this year. There have been two contentious overhauls, in 2003 and 2008; the government, afraid to lower pensions, wants to increase taxes on high salaries and increase the years of work.

But the unions are unhappy, and the Socialist Party opposes raising the retirement age. Polls show that while most French see a pension overhaul as necessary, up to 60 percent say working past 60 is not the answer.

It all reminds me a bit of St. Augustine’s plea to the deity: “make me chaste, but not yet.”

The White House stonewalls on Sestak…

The New Neo Posted on by

…because it knows it can.

I don’t know if there might be any fire behind the mild amount of smoke generated so far by Sestak’s allegations that he was offered a job by the Obama administration in exchange for not running for the Senate. But even Congressman Weiner, Democrat from New York, is begging the White House to say something—anything—to silence the talk and damp down the accusations. The administration could certainly do that; the information they give wouldn’t even have to be correct, because there’s zero chance that Attorney General Holder will appoint a special prosecutor to investigate.

But the White House continues a disturbing pattern of arrogantly (I’m so tired of typing those words “disturbing” and “arrogantly” in relation to Obama and his aides) refusing to answer and explain. Press Secretary Gibbs has responded by saying ““I’m not going to get into it, but people who have looked into it assure me the conversations were not inappropriate in any way.” This sort of laughable answer is possible because this group learned early on—during the 2008 campaign, and perhaps even earlier—that they simply do not have to answer because no one of any consequence will hold their feet to the fire.

Members of the press are their toadies. Reporters will take the abuse and like it, or pretend to. Obama and company took their measure long ago, and found them to be toothless and spineless. Those who accuse Obama of wrongdoing will be labeled cranks or targeted or marginalized or ignored. The story will fade as more come to take its place. Most of the American public will neither know nor care.

And Chicago-on-the-Potomac will continue on its merry way, covered with a thin veneer of sanctimonious claptrap about morality and transparency and/or whatever the rhetoric du jour might be.

I put the blame for the creation of this monster squarely on the shoulders of the press. Obama and his group are merely doing what amoral politicians will do if they are given the chance. It’s the press’s duty to make sure they are not given the chance.

But the press abdicated this role re Obama long, long ago. Whatever the reason—his race, his smoothness, his leftism, their own culpability and inability to admit they were wrong about him—the results have been pernicious. And it’s not over yet.

I’m saying no to natto

The New Neo Posted on by

I like food, and I like foreign food especially. But I must confess (shhh!) that Japanese food is not one of my favorite cuisines.

Don’t get me wrong: I eat it and enjoy it. But it’s way down on my list, after Middle Eastern and Greek and Italian and French and Chinese, maybe just a bit above German and Russian (which I really don’t like—sorry, Sergey and Tatyana).

So, because of my lukewarm attitude towards Japanese food, perhaps I’m not being objective when I predict that this effort will not catch on here. At the risk of sounding juvenile, I will add that fermented soy products such as natto are yucky. And I think most of America will agree.

Even a great many Japanese are not keen:

Many Japanese shy away from natto, the slimy fermented soybean found in Japanese cuisine. Yet Minami Satoh is on a mission to get Americans to embrace the smelly food…

Mr. Satoh’s long odds are evident at Ame. The Michelin-starred Japanese-inspired restaurant in San Francisco has offered Mr. Satoh’s natto for the past year as a $2 option to add to a dish with cuttlefish, sea urchin and salmon roe.

“I’ve asked our wait staff to encourage customers to try it out because even if they don’t like it, it’s only $2 extra,” says chef Hiro Sone. But even after the encouragement, only about 60% of the customers request it and most of them are people who were previously familiar with natto, he says.

And remember, these naysayers are folks who are already ordering a dish with cuttlefish, sea urchin, and salmon roe. Not the culinarily provincial, I’d wager.

I’ve never eaten natto, although I’m quite familiar with its cousin tempeh, which I absolutely detest. The difference between the two foods is subtle, but it sounds as though natto is even worse than tempeh—and that’s saying quite a bit:

Natto is soybeans fermented by bacteria, tempeh is fermented by fungus.

I’ve never eaten natto. If the descriptions I’ve read are accurate, it is disgusting; one of the more difficult to acquire tastes you’ll ever find.

And that quote is from an article in a newsletter put out by a naturopathic clinic trying to push natto as healthful, which no doubt it is. Must be really nasty stuff.

Obama, Daniel Pearl, and freedom of the press

The New Neo Posted on by

It seems like a long, long, time ago that Daniel Pearl was kidnapped, held hostage, and then beheaded by jihadists in early 2002. At the time, it was a profoundly shocking event, and part of the horror was the fact that it was recorded on video and posted online (a sight I did not choose to watch and never will).

Despite 9/11, many of us were still comparatively naive back then about what the radical jihadists wanted and what outrages they were prepared to perpetrate to get there. The murder of Daniel Pearl was another wake-up call, and it was followed by many others. For a while, many Americans seemed to understand the nature of the enemy.

President Obama, however, has dedicated himself to undoing that knowledge and replacing it with PC pap. He used the occasion of the signing of the Daniel Pearl Press Freedom Act to continue that mission, as Mark Steyn describes in his piece excoriating Obama for his remarks at the ceremony.

Here’s the full text of what Obama said. Missing, of course, is what he didn’t say. Nothing about who murdered Pearl; just that his “loss” was “one of those moments that captured the world’s imagination because it reminded us of how valuable a free press is, and it reminded us that there are those who would go to any length in order to silence journalists around the world.”

Obama managed to get through the entire occasion without saying that Pearl was killed, much less that he was murdered. He labeled Pearl as a target of “silencing” because he was a generic journalist rather than a specifically Jewish one.

Obama allows “those” who “silenced” Pearl to remain nameless and featureless. But one of them, of course, was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, radical Muslim (are you listening, Eric Holder?) jihadist and mass murderer on whose behalf the Obama administration has been working overtime to secure his day in a NY civilian court rather than a military tribunal.

Obama may be keeping relatively mum. But KSM himself had a bit more to say, and he apparently was a mite more clear on the subject [emphasis mine]:

On March 15, 2007, the Pentagon released a statement that Mohammed had confessed to [Pearl’s] murder. The statement quoted Mohammed as saying, “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan. For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head.

What happened to Pearl was vile and sickening. But it is also outrageous (although in a completely different way) that our current president cannot manage to describe it properly: name the perpetrators and their ideology, say why the victim was actually targeted, and summon up the requisite intensity and moral outrage in response.

Other people will have to do it for him. As Steyn says:

Daniel Pearl was the prototype for a new kind of terror. In his wake came other victims…But Daniel Pearl was the first, and in his calm, coherent final words understood why he was there:

“My name is Daniel Pearl. I am a Jewish American from Encino, California, USA …”

He didn’t have a prompter. But he spoke the truth. That’s all President Obama owed him ”“ to do the same.

President Obama will not pay that debt, and it is no coincidence. It is a conscious decision on his part.

But there was still another Obamic peculiarity about that signing ceremony the other day. The bill that was named after Daniel Pearl was designed to, as the president said:

…[S]end…a strong message from the United States government and from the State Department that we are paying attention to how other governments are operating when it comes to the press. It has the State Department each year chronicling how press freedom is operating as one component of our human rights assessment, but it also looks at countries that are — governments that are specifically condoning or facilitating this kind of press repression, singles them out and subjects them to the gaze of world opinion in ways that I think are extraordinarily important.

And yet, at the end of the ceremony, the following exchange occurred between the president and the US press:

Q Speaking of press freedom, could you answer a couple of questions on BP?

THE PRESIDENT: You’re certainly free to ask them, Chip.

Q Will you answer them? How about a question on Iran?

THE PRESIDENT: We won’t be answering — I’m not doing a press conference today, but we’ll be seeing you guys during the course of this week. Okay?

By the standards of the world, this hardly qualifies as press repression or intimidation. But it’s a continuation of Obama’s contempt for and lack of cooperation with a press that remains for the most part his admiring, excuse-making lapdog. What’s more, Obama has singled out Fox News for special snubbing and criticism (see this, for example)—which is not exactly intimidation or repression, either, but is antithetical to the functioning of a free press.

And remember this incident during the 2008 campaign, when Obama’s lawyers threatened FCC license challenges to stations that aired campaign ads he didn’t like? Seems a bit intimidating to me.

The Orwellian ironies abound.

[ADDENDUM: At his blog “Had Enough Therapy?” Stuart Schneiderman sums it up well, I think:

A president who has expressed outrage against the indignity of asking an illegal immigrant to show his papers when caught speeding has nothing to say about the decapitation of an American Jew.]

Survival and chance: Air India IX-812

The New Neo Posted on by

By now you have probably heard the news of the crash of Air India Flight IX-812. The plane overshot the runaway and broke into pieces, bursting into flames. Fire seems to have claimed the lives of most of the passengers who died.

Horrible, horrible.

Since the plane was on the ground when the accident occurred (it tumbled down a wooded hill), there was a chance of survival for some people. The common denominator for the eight who lived to tell the tale appears to have been a combination of two things: being in the right location, and quick action. The survivors all were situated by chance near the breaks—they saw a hole or crack, made an almost instantaneous decision, and jumped out.

We like to think that we control our destinies. And to a certain extent we do—but not to as large an extent as one might think or wish. Those of you who are religiously inclined might want to say a prayer for the victims and their families, and likewise for the survivors, who have a long road ahead of them.

That ball gown: does Michelle Obama read neo-neocon?

The New Neo Posted on by

Yeah, yeah, I know she doesn’t. But a while back I recommended a better look for Michelle Obama at state functions—something like the Oleg Cassini ball gown once worn by Jackie Kennedy at a 1962 White House dinner honoring Nobel laureates.

Here’s the Kennedy dress again; I suggested a different color for Michelle, but a similar cut:

kennedydress.jpg

And here’s what Michelle Obama wore at a dinner honoring Mexican president Felipe Calderon and his wife. It certainly not up there with Jackie’s Cassini (what is?)—the lines are not nearly as elegant, and the material has a tacky metallic thing going. But its not bad—although reminiscent of Whitney Houston in happier days. All in all, I think it’s uncharacteristically flattering. But what’s up with that rag on Calderon’s wife Margarita Zavala?:

obamadress.jpg

obamadress2.jpg

Bye-bye to the euro?

The New Neo Posted on by

Are reports of the euro’s imminent demise greatly exaggerated? Or will we see its end in the not-too-distant future, because the life support system its richer members are trying to construct is doomed to failure?

Jeff Randall thinks it’s the latter. The euro may have been doomed to fail from the start. Almost anything can seem like a great idea and be quite successful in a boom economy (such as, for instance, subprime mortgages). But when harder times come—and they will, they will!—the piper and the bill collector must be paid:

You cannot run indefinitely a single currency with one interest rate for 16 economies, when there are such huge fiscal disparities.

What was once deemed unthinkable is now, I believe, inevitable: withdrawal from the eurozone of one or more of its member countries…

The euro was a boom-time construct. In the biggest bust for 80 years, it is falling apart…Protecting the euro has become a project via which profligate states dip their fingers in Berlin’s till…

As for the United Kingdom, we must be grateful that those frightfully clever Europhiles, such as Lord Mandelson and Kenneth Clarke, did not get their way. Had they been able to scrap the pound and embrace the euro this country would be even closer to ruin.

The surprise is not that the euro is doing poorly. The surprise is that the leaders of Europe thought it would be a good idea in the first place to hitch all of their wagons together despite the wide disparities in economies, and not expect that something like this would happen some day. But just as in this country, the prosperity was expected to go on forever—although anyone with any knowledge of history and economics (or even a modicum of common sense) should have known it could not.

As a baby boomer with parents who were relatively old when I was born, I was raised on stories of the Great Depression. It was a cautionary tale I never forgot. What’s Europe’s excuse?

Another military imposter

The New Neo Posted on by

Seems there’s a rash of military impostors, although this one certainly differs in kind and degree from the Blumenthal case:

A Texas man with no military experience managed to trick the Army into letting him enter a reserve unit as a noncommissioned officer earlier this year, putting an untrained soldier in a leadership position in a time of war…

We don’t know exactly how Jesse Bernard Johnston III managed to deceive the army or what documentation he used, so we don’t know how great their negligence may have been in failing to properly check him out. But it is very troubling indeed. One would think that, in this day of heavy computerization of records, this sort of thing would be impossible. Apparently not.

Churchill and the EU

The New Neo Posted on by

Timothy Garton Ash says that Europe needs a new Churchill to add “dynamism” to the moribund EU:

The European Union is still the world’s largest economy. It has enormous resources of hard and soft power, at present much bigger than those of the emerging great powers. But the trend is against it, and it punches far below its weight. If it still wants to shape the world in the interests of its citizens then it must close the gap between its potential and its actual power. It’s not doing so. Why?…

Instead, we have a set of new rationales for the project. They include global challenges such as climate change and the globalised financial system, which increasingly impact directly on the lives of our citizens, and the emerging great powers of a multipolar world. In a world of giants, it helps to be a giant yourself…For standard of living and quality of life, most Europeans have never had it so good. They don’t realise how radically things need to change in order that things may remain the same.

It would take a new Winston Churchill to explain this to all Europeans, in the poetry of “blood, sweat and tears”.

Ash seems to think that Churchill acted mainly as a cheerleader, and that Europe’s present deficiency is primarily a lack of pep talks. Churchill did, of course, function somewhat that way, in remarkably eloquent prose and delivery. But what gave him his extraordinary gravitas, conviction, and force was not just messaging or communication skills—it was the principles and beliefs behind his message. After all, he was much the same eloquent genius back in the 30s when he was warning Europe of the Nazi menace and no one was listening (in fact they were laughing at him). And after the war, the British wasted no time in throwing him out.

If you’re asking what Churchill would do right now about the EU, my guess is that he’d say “disband it, it’ll never work.” Only he’d say it much more gracefully (and/or bluntly) than that.

We can’t know, of course. But the British welfare state and the EU are the result of trends that began with the immediate postwar repudiation of Churchill, not as war leader but as economic leader.

Ash thinks the later EU drive was fueled by memories of the devastation of WWII and a desire to combat Communism, as well as to rehabilitate and integrate Germany. No doubt he’s correct as far as that goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. The forces that led to the EU included a leftist economic system and the desire to get away from the pesky troubles of nationalism, and it is my firm opinion that neither impulse would be one Churchill would get behind.

One of the comments to Ash’s article notes that Europe doesn’t need a new Churchill, it needs a new Thatcher. But perhaps it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other—either would probably give the same message, and it wouldn’t be one Europe would like. If Churchill or Thatcher miraculously returned to speak in full-throated voice, would Europe be interested in listening? That’s the real question.

[NOTE: I realize that Thatcher is still alive, so technically she could speak on the issue. But unfortunately, like her friend and colleague Reagan did before her at the end of his life, she now suffers from dementia.]

More on PA-12 and the 2010 election in general

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an excellent analysis by Jay Cost.

And John Podhoretz has some observations (surprisingly, Joe Trippi says much the same thing):

The era of political stability for incumbents and veteran political players has truly reached its end.

The point is not that every incumbent is vulnerable — certainly Chuck Schumer isn’t — but that every incumbent might be.

The threat might come, as it did to congressional Republicans in 2006 and 2008, from Democrats taking advantage of voter exhaustion with the GOP in districts and states that should have been safe conservative territory. Or it might come, as it has over the past month, from within the incumbent’s party itself.

[NOTE: I think these anti-incumbent trends are generally good—or at least they have the chance of being good. But they are hardly inevitably good. I am reminded of this, for example.

I am reminded, also, of the fact that although backlash to Barack Obama’s presidency can be seen as contributing to and exacerbating this mood, Barack Obama’s campaign and election were early reflections of it. That is, he campaigned on a vague platform of difference (“change”) from Washington business-as-usual, as an outsider and fresh face who would offer something less corrupt and more unifying. That he has clearly failed to deliver what he promised does not change the fact that he was elected in large part because people believed him at the time (in spite of a paucity of evidence)—so great was their desire to believe.]