Mark Steyn's Blog, page 15

While Bloomberg Slurped

Further to yesterday's post about Nanny Bloomberg's municipal priorities (regulating carbonated beverages), here's a sharp piece by Roger Pielke Jr. on what he could have been doing:

A few excerpts from the New York City Natural Hazard Mitigation Plan (April, 2009, here in PDF) will indicate that absolutely nothing about Sandy and its impacts should have been a surprise to anyone. It would be fair to ask NY politicians why the city was not better prepared for a disaster that it saw coming.

The report more or less laid out Sandy's roadmap:

New York City is particularly vulnerable to storm surge because of a geographic characteristic called the New York Bight. A bight is a curve in the shoreline of an open coast that funnels and increases the speed and intensity of storm surge. The New York Bight is located at the point where New York and New Jersey meet, creating a right angle in the coastline.

Professor Pielke asks:

What is he going to do about the fact that his city was less prepared than it should have been for a disaster that was expected and one of a sort will certainly recur, climate change or not?

A flood barrier is too prosaically municipal for a man of Bloomberg's grand vision. "Saving the planet" is a whole lot easier than saving Staten Island.

Last Dance

Yesterday was apparently National Dance For Obama Day. In Manhattan it attracted all of twelve dancers . Of course, New York has been devastated by Hurricane Bloomberg, but the attendance in undevastated cities was not much better.  Still, I was sorry to miss it, having spent the last six weeks working on my interpretative dance of the Benghazi attack including an extended seven-hour coolly sensuous samba of the President deciding not to decide to do anything.

By the way, for any members of the Obama Youth Dancers reading this, tomorrow is National Hokey-Pokey For The National Debt Day. Timmy Geithner will put a US Treasury Bond in, Ben Bernanke will put it out, and unionized pom-pom heavies from the SEIU will shake it all about. Meet outside the Federal Reserve, 11am.

Nobel Warming

The story so far:

A week and a half ago, hockey-stick progenitor Michael Mann sued National Review for the hitherto unknown crime of "defamation of a Nobel prize recipient".

It was news to me that Dr Mann was a Nobel Prize recipient. It was also news to the Nobel committee:

No, no. He has never won the Nobel prize.

First strike.

Now the actual winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize has weighed in on Dr Mann's claim to be a Nobel laureate. The other day the International Panel on Climate Change in Geneva issued the following statement:

The prize was awarded to the IPCC as an organization, and not to any individual associated with the IPCC. Thus it is incorrect to refer to any IPCC official, or scientist who worked on IPCC reports, as a Nobel laureate or Nobel Prize winner.

Second strike.

On the other hand, as far as I know, Graham Spanier (the Penn State president whose "investigation" exonerated Dr Mann in part on the grounds of his Nobel Prize) still thinks his colleague is a Nobel Prize winner. So there's that. True, he's just been indicted for perjury, conspiracy, obstruction of justice and child endangerment, but that's no reason not to cite him in Dr Mann's amended Statement of Claim.

Psychological Barrier

My weekend column deals in part with what ought to be the national disgrace of Hurricane Sandy's impact. I write of Nanny Bloomberg:

This is a man who spends his days micro-managing the amount of soda New Yorkers are allowed to have in their beverage containers rather than, say, the amount of ocean New Yorkers are allowed to have in their subway system.

And I wondered why he hadn't "expended as much executive energy on flood protection for the electrical grid and transit system". The London Telegraph reports today on a plan for a five-mile storm-surge barrier across the mouth of New York's harbor, similar to the far longer one in St Petersburg - or, indeed, to the Thames Barrier. Whatever the merits of the plan, I was struck by this passage:

Michael Bowman, an oceanography professor at Long Island's Stony Brook University is also involved in the project. He says the plan would cost around $10 billion "a small amount of capital expense compared to the damage from Hurricane Sandy," he told The Telegraph.

That's true. I think Sandy's costs are currently estimated at around $50 billion. But he's missing the more basic point. In contemporary American governmental terms, $10 billion is "a small amount" compared to anything. It's a rounding error. It would have been 1.2 per cent of Obama's laughably misnamed "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act". You could have 83 flood barriers for the cost of one lousy stimulus bill. And yet it never happened - and, if we're honest with ourselves, in today's sclerotic America, you can't even imagine it happening, can you? Let us go to Nanny Bloomberg himself:

But with so many prescient warnings, city authorities are struggling to explain why so little was done. Mayor Bloomberg has said it was difficult to translate such warnings into concrete action.

They can chisel that on the epitaph of the republic. Because with Big Government American-style, no matter how many trillions of dollars are spent, it all goes to makework bureaucracies. What does Nanny B ever translate into "concrete action"? Why, here he is posing with a desktop of carbonated beverages. This is what passes for political leadership in America. Can you imagine this ridiculous man or the spendaholic president he's endorsed ever actually building a flood barrier? As I say in my column, we are governed by men who spend everything but can't do anything.

We need an electoral flood to wash this crowd away. Tuesday would be a good start.

A Tale of Two Crises

In political terms, Hurricane Sandy and the Benghazi-consulate debacle exemplify at home and abroad the fundamental unseriousness of the United States in the Obama era. In the days after Sandy hit, Barack Obama was generally agreed to have performed well. He had himself photographed in the White House Situation Room nodding thoughtfully to bureaucrats (“John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism; Tony Blinken, National Security Advisor to the Vice President; David Agnew, Director for Intergovernmental Affairs”) and tweeted it to his 3.2 million followers. He appeared in New Jersey wearing a bomber jacket rather than a suit to demonstrate that when the going gets tough the tough get out a monogrammed Air Force One bomber jacket. He announced that he’d instructed his officials to answer all calls within 15 minutes because in America “we leave nobody behind.” By doing all this, the president “shows” he “cares” -- which is true in the sense that in Benghazi he was willing to leave the entire consulate staff behind, and nobody had their calls answered within seven hours, because presumably he didn’t care. So John Brennan, the Counterterrorism guy, and Tony Blinken, the National Security honcho, briefed the president on the stiff breeze, but on September 11, 2012, when a little counterterrorism was called for, nobody bothered calling the Counterterrorism Security Group, the senior U.S. counterterrorism bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, FEMA rumbles on, the “emergency-management agency” that manages emergencies, very expensively, rather than preventing them. Late on the night Sandy made landfall, I heard on the local news that my state’s governor had asked the president to declare a federal emergency in every New Hampshire county so that federal funds could be “unlocked.” A quarter-million people in the Granite State were out of power. It was reported that, beyond our borders, 8 million people in a dozen states were out of power.

#ad#But that’s not an “emergency.” No hurricane hit my county. Indeed, no hurricane hit New Hampshire. No hurricane hit “17 states,” the number of states supposedly “affected” by Sandy at its peak. A hurricane hit a few coastal counties of New Jersey, New York and a couple of other states, and that’s it. Everyone else had slightly windier-than-usual wind -- and yet they were out of power for days. In a county entirely untouched by Sandy, my office manager had no electricity for a week. Not because of an “emergency” but because of a decrepit and vulnerable above-the-ground electrical-distribution system that ought to be a national embarrassment to any developed society. A few weeks ago, I chanced to be in Saint Pierre and Miquelon, a French colony of 6,000 people on a couple of treeless rocks in the North Atlantic. Every electric line is underground. Indeed, the droll demoiselle who leads tours of the islands makes a point of amusingly drawing American visitors’ attention to this local feature.

If you’re saying, “Whoa, that sounds expensive,” well, our government is more expensive than any government in history -- and we have nothing to show for it. Imagine if Obama’s 2009 stimulus had been spent burying every electric pole on the Eastern Seaboard. Instead, just that one Obama bill spent a little shy of a trillion dollars, and no one can point to a single thing it built. “A big storm requires Big Government,” pronounced the New York Times. But Washington is so big-hearted with Big Government it spends $188 million an hour that it doesn’t have -- 24 hours a day, seven days a week, including Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Ramadan. And yet, mysteriously, multi-trillion-dollar Big Government Obama-style can’t doanything except sluice food stamps to the dependent class, lavish benefits and early retirement packages to the bureaucrats that service them, and so-called government “investment” to approved Obama cronies.

So you can have Big Government bigger (or, anyway, more expensive) than any government’s ever been, and the lights still go out in 17 states -- because your president spent 6 trillion bucks and all the country got was a lousy Air Force One bomber jacket for him to wear while posing for a Twitpic answering the phone with his concerned expression.

Even in those few parts of the Northeast that can legitimately claim to have been clobbered by Sandy, Big Government made it worse. Last week, Nanny Bloomberg, Mayor of New York, rivaled his own personal best for worst mayoral performance since that snowstorm a couple of years back. This is a man who spends his days micro-managing the amount of soda New Yorkers are allowed to have in their beverage containers rather than, say, the amount of ocean New Yorkers are allowed to have in their subway system -- just as, in the previous crisis, the municipal titan who can regulate the salt out of your cheeseburger proved utterly incapable of regulating any salt onto Sixth Avenue. Imagine if this preening buffoon had expended as much executive energy on flood protection for the electrical grid and transit system as he does on approved quantities of carbonated beverages. But that’s leadership 21-century-style: When the going gets tough, the tough ban transfats.

Back in Benghazi, the president who looks so cool in a bomber jacket declined to answer his beleaguered diplomats’ calls for help -- even though he had aircraft and special forces in the region. Too bad. He’s all jacket and no bombers. This, too, is an example of America’s uniquely profligate impotence. When something goes screwy at a ramshackle consulate halfway round the globe, very few governments have the technological capacity to watch it unfold in real time. Even fewer have deployable military assets only a couple of hours away. What is the point of unmanned drones, of military bases around the planet, of elite special forces trained to the peak of perfection if the president and the vast bloated federal bureaucracy cannot rouse themselves to action? What is the point of outspending Russia, Britain, France, China, Germany, and every middle-rank military power combined if, when it matters, America cannot urge into the air one plane with a couple of dozen commandos? In Iraq, al-Qaeda is running training camps in the western desert. In Afghanistan, the Taliban are all but certain to return most of the country to its pre-9/11 glories. But in Washington the head of the world’s biggest “counterterrorism” bureaucracy briefs the president on flood damage and downed trees.

I don’t know whether Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan can fix things, but I do know that Barack Obama and Joe Biden won’t even try -- and that therefore a vote for Obama is a vote for the certainty of national collapse. Look at Lower Manhattan in the dark, and try to imagine what America might look like after the rest of the planet decides it no longer needs the dollar as global reserve currency. For four years, we have had a president who can spend everything but build nothing. Nothing but debt, dependency, and decay. As I said at the beginning, in different ways the response to Hurricane Sandy and Benghazi exemplify the fundamental unseriousness of the superpower at twilight. Whether or not to get serious is the choice facing the electorate on Tuesday.

But let him keep the bomber jacket.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012 Mark Steyn

Penn State Faculty News

Following the full-page ad National Review took out in yesterday's edition of the Penn State student newspaper, I thought readers might be interested in more news from the faculty lounge:

State Attorney General Linda Kelly is expected to announce today that former Penn State University President Graham Spanier has been charged in relation to the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal, according to sources close to the investigation.

The sources, who requested anonymity, said Mr. Spanier is charged with perjury and obstruction of justice.

The longtime Penn State president was forced to resign in the wake of charges being filed against Sandusky a year ago and has been long identified as a target in an investigation of a possible coverup by university administrators.

Mr. Spanier also presided over the "investigation" that supposedly exonerated fantasy Nobelist Michael Mann -- and thereby led to his suit against us. Aside from the generally risible nature of the investigation, it relied on his fake Nobel Prize for its central argument -- that Dr. Mann's eminence speaks for itself: 

Moreover, Dr. Mann's work on the Third Assessment Report (2001) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change received recognition (along with several hundred other scientists) by being awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.Clearly, Dr. Mann's reporting of his research has been successful and judged to be outstanding by his peers. This would have been impossible had his activities in reporting his work been outside of accepted practices in his field.

Unfortunately, "Dr. Mann's work" on the 2001 report was not "awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize," and neither he nor it "received recognition" or even a mention en passant in the Nobel citation or the lecture. Given the concerns over the Penn State investigation, and given the very serious charges against the man ultimately responsible for it, might it not be time for Rodney Erickson, Mr. Spanier's successor, to launch an investigation into Penn State's previous investigation?

Anthropogenically warmed sunlight is the best disinfectant, Dr. Erickson.

[UPDATE: More here:

Penn State’s Ex-President Accused of Perjury, Endangering Children in Jerry Sandusky Case.

Although he resigned as president, Mr Spanier remains on the Penn State faculty - because in peer-reviewed academe that's how they do things.]

[UPPERDATE: Disgraced Penn State prez Spanier faces up to 39 years in jail.]

Covering All the Bases

As the president says, women are not an interest group. No, sir, they're several interest groups, and one can't but admire the generational thoroughness of the Democratic campaign with their precisely targeted advertising: Barack Obama will satisfy your lady parts, deflower your daughter, turn your grade-schooler into a glassy-eyed Kim Jong Il extra, and get gran'ma mouthing like a gangsta ho.

What, nothing for the horny-cougar demographic?

Rain of Terror (Revisited)

So all of a sudden the media are a-flutter with talk of postponing the election -- even though Election Day is a week after the storm hits.

And the president says, "Right now the key is to make sure that the public is following instructions".

Don't say I didn't warn you, a mere two months ago:

No dictator will ever need to declare martial law in America. All he’ll need to do is issue a “severe weather advisory” and everyone will stay indoors until they’re told it’s safe to come out.

As Sinclair Lewis said, when fascism comes to America it will have the name of Olivia Newton-John's character from Grease . . .

Trial of the Century Update

While I wait for Hurricane Sandy to shatter my woodlot into delicatessen-sliced tree-rings, some readers have asked for a progress report on Nobel laureate Michael Mann's* suit against NR. So here's a couple of outside takes: This gentleman compares it to Oscar Wilde's suit against the Marquess of Queensberry, while this analyst compares it to Napoleon invading Russia.

Personally, I think it's more like Oscar Wilde invading Russia, but each to his own.

[*splendid photograph of the Nobelest Nobel of them all here]

Benhoozi?

Someone at the highest level of the United States Government made the decision to abandon American consular staff to their fate and cede US sovereign territory to an al-Qaeda assault team - and four out of five Sunday news shows don't think it's worth talking about.

In the smoking ruins of that consulate in Benghazi, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods fought for hours and killed 60 of the enemy before they were overwhelmed, waiting for the cavalry that never came. They're still waiting - for Candy Crowley, David Gregory, Bob Schieffer and George Stephanopoulos to do their job.