Mark Steyn's Blog, page 45

Lebensraum in the Maternity Ward

Germany has just set a new national record for the biggest baby ever born. Break out the lederhosen and start slapping those thighs:

Doctors were left astounded after a gigantic baby set a new record for Germany’s heaviest-ever naturally born newborn Friday. The boy was named Jihad.

That would be a wee bit too perfectly symbolic if you put it in a novel. But, for us paranoid demographic alarmists, real life in the new Europe disdains the subtle approach.

More More More

I see Andrea True died earlier this month. The late disco diva enjoyed a brief moment of global celebrity in 1976 with her ubiquitous glitterball favorite: 

More More More 

How do you like it?

How do you like it?

More More More

How do you like it?

How do you like it?

In honor of Andrea’s passing, I have asked my congressman to propose the adoption of this song as the U.S. national anthem. True, Miss True wrote the number as an autobiographical reflection on her days as a porn-movie actress but, consciously or not, it accurately distills the essence of American governmental philosophy in the early 21st century: excess even unto oblivion.

#ad#When it comes to spending and the size of government, only the Democrats are officially panting orgasmically, “More More More, How do you like it?” while the Republicans are formally committed to “Less less less.” This makes for many dramatic showdowns on the evening news. In the summer, it was the “looming” “deadline” to raise the debt ceiling. In the fall, it was the “looming” “deadline” for the alleged supercommittee to agree $1.2 trillion of cuts. The supercommittee was set up as a last-minute deal for raising the debt ceiling. Now that the supercommittee’s flopped out, “automatic” mandatory cuts to defense and discretionary spending are supposed to kick in -- by 2013. But no doubt, as that looming deadline looms, the can of worms will be effortlessly kicked down the room another looming deadline or two.

In return for agreeing to raise the debt ceiling (and, by the way, that’s the wrong way of looking at it: more accurately, we’re lowering the debt abyss), John Boehner bragged that he’d got a deal for “a real, enforceable cut” of supposedly $7 billion from fiscal year 2012. After running the numbers themselves, the Congressional Budget Office said it only cut $1 billion from FY 2012.

Which of these numbers is accurate?

The correct answer is: Who cares? The government of the United States currently spends $188 million it doesn’t have every hour of every day. So, if it’s $1 billion in “real, enforceable cuts,” in the time it takes to roast a 20 lb. stuffed turkey for your Thanksgiving dinner, the government’s already borrowed back all those painstakingly negotiated savings. If it’s $7 billion in “real, enforceable cuts,” in the time it takes you to defrost the bird, the cuts have all been borrowed back.

Bonus question: How “real” and “enforceable” are all those real, enforceable cuts? By the time the relevant bill passed the Senate earlier this month, the 2012 austerity budget with its brutal, savage cuts to government services actually increased spending by $10 billion. More more more, how do you like it?

But don’t worry. Aside from spending the summer negotiating a deal that increases runaway federal spending, those stingy, cheeseparing Republicans also forced the Democrats to agree to create that big ol’ supercommittee that would save $1.2 trillion. Over the course of ten years.

Anywhere else on the planet that would be a significant chunk of change. But the government of the United States is planning to spend $44 trillion in the next decade. So $1.2 trillion is about 2.7 percent. Any businessman could cut 2.7 percent from his budget in his sleep. But not congressional supercommittees of supermen with superpowers thrashing it out across the table for three months. So there will be no 2.7 percent cut.

#page#That means the “sequestration” from defense and discretionary spending will now be enforced, starting in 2013. That would be so brutal and slashing that by 2021 it would reduce U.S. public debt by $153 billion! Which sounds kinda big if you say it in a Dr. Evil voice and give a menacing mwa-ha-ha laugh, but in fact boils down to about what we borrow currently every month.

But don’t worry. Slashing a month’s worth of spending over a decade is way too extreme. So that’s not going to happen, either. Instead, CNN and Meet The Press will just interview bigshot senators and congressmen about it day in, day out, and then normal service will resume: More more more, how do you like it?

In the course of a typical day I usually receive at least a couple of e-mails from readers lamenting that America is now the Titanic. This is grossly unfair to the Titanic, a state-of-the-art ship whose problem was that it only had lifeboat space for about half its passengers. By contrast, the USS Spendaholic is a rusting hulk encrusted with barnacles, there are no lifeboats, and the ship’s officers are locked in a debate about whether to use a thimble or an eggcup.

A second downgrade is now inevitable. Aw, so what? We had the first back in the summer, and the ceiling didn’t fall in, did it? And everyone knows those ratings agencies are a racket, right? And say what you like about our rotten finances, but Greece’s are worse. And Italy’s. And, er, Zimbabwe’s. Probably.

The advantage the United States enjoys is that, unlike Greece, it can print the currency in which its debt is denominated. But, even so, it still needs someone to buy it. The failure of Germany’s bond auction on Wednesday suggests that the world is running out of buyers for Western sovereign debt at historically low interest rates. And, were interest rates to return to their 1990–2010 average (5.7 percent), debt service alone would consume about 40 percent of federal revenues by mid-decade. That’s not paying down the debt, but just staying current on the interest payments.

And yet, when it comes to spending and stimulus and entitlements and agencies and regulations and bureaucrats, “More more more / How do you like it?” remains the way to bet. Will a Republican president make a difference to this grim trajectory? I would doubt it. Unless the public conversation shifts significantly, neither President Romney nor President Insert-Name-of-This-Week’s-UnRomney-Here will have a mandate for the measures necessary to save the republic.

As for Andrea True, back in 1976 she made a commercial in Jamaica. To protest the then–prime minister’s flirtation with Castro, Uncle Sam had imposed economic sanctions against Her Majesty’s government in Kingston. Miss True was unable to bring her earnings home. So, for want of anything better to do with them, she went into a Jamaican recording studio and made a demo of a song: “More More More.” Sure, 35 years later Fidel’s still around, but at least the world got a disco hit out of it, which is more than you can say for the Iranian sanctions.

We’re approaching a state in which the government spends $4 trillion but only raises $2 trillion. Which is an existential threat to the nation, but at least has the advantage of being one whose arithmetic is simple enough even for politicians: Try to imagine every aspect of government having to make do with half of what it currently has.

That’s the scale of reform necessary to save America from a future as a bankrupt, violent, Third World ruin. More more more, how do you like it? More poverty, more crime, more corruption, more decay: How do you like that?

Flirting with Castroite policies? Maybe Washington could impose economic sanctions against itself.

--- Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2011 Mark Steyn

In Arab Spring, a Young Man's Fancy Turns to...

...sexual assault. At the time of the attack on CBS News reporter Lara Logan, I wrote:

Is this a one-off crime? Or a cultural faultline?

Today in Tahrir Square:

Caroline Sinz told television, her employer, that she and her cameraman were set upon by young men in the square then separated on Thursday. She said she was punched, then "subjected to a sexual aggression in front of everyone in full daylight." Providing more detail in an interview with RMC radio, she said boys 14 to 16 years old "tore off my clothes and undergarments" and assaulted her.

If the authorities intervene, it can be a mixed blessing. Yesterday in Tahrir Square:

The U.S. journalist who was brutally beaten and sexually assaulted by Egyptian riot police as she covered the Tahrir Square protests has posted a photo online which shows both her arms in plaster.

New York-based Mona Eltahawy, 44, tweeted the picture, which shows casts on her broken left arm and right hand, to demonstrate the 'brutality' of Egyptian police.

She claimed they hit her with large sticks, groped her breasts and tried to push their hands down her trousers - before detaining her for 12 hours with 'no real reason'.

The American-Egyptian said: 'I am speaking out to shame them for what they did. As I was being assaulted it was as if I was set on by a bunch of beasts.

'This is not the Egypt we love and not what the revolution is about.'

Except that it is - at least in the sense that post-Mubarak Egypt is already more institutionally misogynist.

My old friend Edward Behr, a distinguished foreign correspondent for Newsweek, wrote a memoir of his life on the front lines with the cynical title (in its London edition) Anyone Here Been Raped And Speaks English? - which, naturally, the halfwit American publisher changed to the somnolently portentous Bearings: A Foreign Correspondent's Life Behind The Lines. These days, the fastest way to get a "yes" would be to ask his fellow western reporters.

Village Green Card

In all the Newt immigration stuff, this seems to have gone overlooked:

“Newt is for a local, community review board where local citizens can decide whether or not their neighbors that have come here illegally should find a path to legality, not citizenship," [Gingrich spokesperson R C Hammond] said. "Two distinctly different things.”

He said it would operate like a World War II draft board. But I asked him whether it would be a problem for local communities to determine legality given that this issue would concern federal law.

“None of this matters until you secure the border," he said.

I asked him again, though, about how local communities could determine federal law.

“That’s why it’s called reform," he said.

So the North Podunk Town Meeting could vote to deny you your Green Card but ten miles down the road the burghers of South Podunk could vote to give one to your cousin? That sure sounds like a plan.

It's a tribute to Mitt Romney's soporific caution and Herman Cain's blithe indifference to the bit on the map marked Rest of the World that Newt is now what passes for the GOP's deep thinker.

Happy Sweet Sequester'd Days

Those who can do. Those who can't form a supercommittee. Those who can't produce a majority vote in a supercommittee sequester. Those who can't even sequester are telling the world something profound about American inertia.

As Veronique points out below, the "automatic" sequestration cuts would over the course of ten years reduce US public debt by only $153 billion. Which boils down to about a month's worth of the current federal deficit.

Yet even slashing a pimple's worth of borrowing out of the great oozing mountain of pustules will prove too much for Washington.

Another downgrade is now inevitable. After that, all that's holding the joint up is the dollar's status as global currency. If the world were looking around for a reserve currency today, I doubt it would pick that of a $15 trillion sinkhole. This week's failure will hasten the urge of the Chinese and others to arrange a post-dollar order. I wrote earlier this year about America's inclination to do everything big. And so it goes even with imperial eclipse: We are inviting nothing so genteel as "decline" but rather a sudden convulsive collapse.

Forget the Supercommittee; the timidity of the GOP frontrunners is far more disturbing. In a sane polity, they would be competing over the abolition of departments, the rollback of regulatory tyranny, the shrinking of entitlements - not to mention flying commercial and making do with a mere 20-car motorcade. This close to the abyss, public discourse is nowhere near where it ought to be.

(Headline courtesy of Otto Harbach, whose "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" also seems oddly relevant to this week's alleged "drama".)

Wolf Whistling

Rich, re that "Man Arrested And Charged In Bomb Plot," don't worry about Señor Pimentel also being "known as Muhammad Yusuf." Mayor Bloomberg has already pronounced him a "lone wolf":

Mayor: 'Lone Wolf' Terror Suspect Arrested

Alleged 'Lone Wolf' Arrested In New York On Terror Charges

'Lone Wolf' Terror Suspect Arraigned In New York

So relax. He's just another working stiff from Local 473 of the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves. Any connection between Muhammad and any other Mohammeds, Mohameds, Muhammeds or Muhamads is purely coincidental. For one thing, Mr Yusuf was thinking of adopting the name "," after Messrs bin Laden and Saddam, but worried that it might draw unwanted attention to himself. Which shows how little he knows about us.

So nothing to worry about. There'll be another lone wolf along any moment. All jihad is local.

No Man's Land

There is a famous if apocryphal tale of a Fleet Street theater critic covering the first night of a new play in the West End of London. At the end of the evening, he went to a public telephone and dictated his review. The following morning, a furious editor called him and demanded to know why he had neglected to mention that, midway through the third act, the theater had caught fire and burned to the ground. The critic sniffily replied that it was not his business to report fires, but that, if the editor had read more carefully, he would have observed that the review included a passage noting discreetly that the critic had been unable to remain for the final scenes.

#ad#That, more or less, is the position of those Americans defending the behavior of the Penn State establishment: It would be unreasonable to expect the college-football elite to show facility with an entirely separate discipline such as pedophilia-reporting procedures, and, besides, many of those officials who were aware of Jerry Sandusky’s child-sex activities did mention it to other officials who promised to look into mentioning it to someone else.



From the grand-jury indictment:

On March 1, 2002, a Penn State graduate assistant (“graduate assistant”) who was then 28 years old, entered the locker room at the Lasch Football Building on the University Park Campus on a Friday night.#...#He saw a naked boy, Victim 2, whose age he estimated to be ten years old, with his hands up against the wall, being subjected to anal intercourse by a naked Sandusky. The graduate assistant was shocked but noticed that both Victim 2 and Sandusky saw him. The graduate assistant left immediately, distraught.



The graduate assistant went to his office and called his father, reporting to him what he had seen. His father told the graduate assistant to leave the building and come to his home. The graduate assistant and his father decided that the graduate assistant had to promptly report what he had seen to Coach Joe Paterno (“Paterno”), head football coach of Penn State. The next morning, a Saturday, the graduate assistant telephoned Paterno#...#

Hold it right there. “The next morning”?



Here surely is an almost too perfect snapshot of a culture that simultaneously destroys childhood and infantilizes adulthood. The “child” in this vignette ought to be the ten-year-old boy, “hands up against the wall,” but instead the “man” appropriates the child role for himself: Why, the graduate assistant is so “distraught” that he has to leave and telephone his father. He is pushing 30, an age when previous generations would have had little boys of their own. But today, confronted by a grade-schooler being sodomized before his eyes, the poor distraught child-man approaching early middle-age seeks out some fatherly advice, like one of Fred MacMurray’s “My Three Sons” might have done had he seen the boy next door swiping a can of soda pop from the lunch counter.



The graduate assistant, Mike McQueary, is now pushing 40, and is sufficiently grown up to realize that the portrait of him that emerges from the indictment is not to his credit and to attempt, privately, to modify it. “No one can imagine my thoughts or wants to be in my shoes for those 30--45 seconds,” he e-mailed a friend a few days ago. “Trust me.”



“Trust me”? Maybe the ten-year-old boy did. And then watched Mr. McQueary leave the building. Perhaps the child-man should try “imagining” the ten-year-old’s thoughts or being in his shoes. Oh, wait. He wasn’t wearing any.



#page#Defenders of McQueary and the broader Penn State protection racket argue that “nobody knows” what he would do in similar circumstances. In a New York Times piece headlined “Let’s All Feel Superior,” David Brooks turned in an eerily perfect parody of a David Brooks column and pointed out, with much reference to Kitty Genovese et al., how “studies show” that in extreme circumstances the human brain is prone to lapse into “normalcy bias.” To be sure, many of the Internet toughs bragging that they’d have punched Sandusky’s lights out would have done no such thing. As my e-mail correspondents always put it whenever such questions arise: “Yeah, right, Steyn. Like you’d be taking a bullet. We all know you’d be wetting your little girly panties,” etc.



#ad#For the sake of argument, let us so stipulate. Nevertheless, as the Canadian blogger Kathy Shaidle wrote some years ago: “When we say ‘we don’t know what we’d do under the same circumstances,’ we make cowardice the default position.”



I quote that line in my current book, in a section on the “no man’s land” of contemporary culture. It contrasts the behavior of the men on the Titanic who (notwithstanding James Cameron’s wretched movie) went down with the ship and those of the École Polytechnique in Montreal decades later who, ordered to leave the classroom by a lone gunman, meekly did as they were told and stood passively in the corridor as he shot all the women. Even if I’m wetting my panties, it’s better to have the social norm of the Titanic and fail to live up to it than to have the social norm of the Polytechnique and sink with it.



That’s the issue at the heart of Penn State’s institutional wickedness and its many deluded defenders. In my book, I also quote the writer George Jonas back when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were revealed to be burning down the barns of Quebec separatists: With his characteristic insouciance, the prime minister Pierre Trudeau responded that, if people were so bothered by illegal barn burning by the Mounties, perhaps he would make it legal. Jonas pointed out that burning barns isn’t wrong because it’s illegal, it’s illegal because it’s wrong. A society that no longer understands that distinction is in deep trouble. To argue that a man witnessing child sex in progress has no responsibility other than to comply with procedures and report it to a colleague further up the chain of command represents a near-suicidal loss of that distinction.



A land of hyper-legalisms is not the same as a land of law. I’ve written recently about the insane proliferation of signage on America’s highways -- the “Stop” sign, the “Stop Sign Ahead” sign, the red light, the sign before the red light instructing you that when the light is red you should stop here, accompanied by a smaller sign underneath with an arrow pointing to the precise point where “here” is#...#One assumes this expensive clutter is there to protect against potential liability issues. It certainly doesn’t do anything for American road safety, which is the worst in the developed world. We have three times the automobile fatality rate of the Netherlands, and at 62 in the global rankings we’re just ahead of Tajikistan and Papua New Guinea.



But that’s the least of it: When people get used to complying with micro-regulation, it’s but a small step to confusing regulatory compliance with the right thing to do -- and then arguing that, in the absence of regulatory guidelines, there is no “right thing to do.”



In a hyper-legalistic culture, Penn State’s collaborators may have the law on their side. But there is no moral-liability waiver. You could hardly ask for a more poignant emblem of the hollow braggadocio of the West at twilight than the big, beefy, bulked-up shoulder pads and helmets of Penn State football, and the small stunted figures inside.



— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2011 Mark Steyn

Deficit-Reduction Fever

Have you been following this so-called Supercommittee? They’re the new superhero group of Superfriends from the Supercongress who are going to save America from plummeting over the cliff and into the multi-trillion-dollar abyss. There’s Spender Woman (Patty Murray), Incumbent Boy (Max Baucus), Kept Man (John Kerry), and many other warriors for truth, justice, and the American way of debt. The Supercommittee is supposed to report back by the day before Thanksgiving on how to carve out $1.2 trillion dollars of deficit reduction and thereby save the republic.

I had cynically assumed that the Superfriends would address America’s imminent debt catastrophe with some radical reform -- such as, say, slowing the increase in spending by raising the age for lowering the age of Medicare eligibility from 47 to 49 by the year 2137, after which triumph we could all go back to sleep until total societal collapse.

#ad#But I underestimated the genius of the Superfriends’ Supercommittee. It turns out that a committee created to reduce the deficit is instead going to increase it. As The Hill reported:

Democrats on the supercommittee have proposed that the savings from the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan be used to pay for a new stimulus package, according to a summary of the $2.3 trillion plan obtained by The Hill.

Do you follow that? Let the Congressional Budget Office explain it to you:

The budget savings from ending the wars are estimated to total around $1 trillion over a decade, according to an estimate in July from the Congressional Budget Office.

Let us note in passing that, according to the official CBO estimates, a whole decade’s worth of war in both Iraq and Afghanistan adds up to little more than Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill. But, aside from that, in what sense are these “savings”? The Iraq War is ended -- or, at any rate, “ended,” at least as far as U.S. participation in it is concerned. How then can congressional accountants claim to be able to measure “savings” in 2021 from a war that ended a decade earlier? And why stop there? Why not estimate around $2 trillion in savings by 2031? After all, that would free up even more money for a bigger stimulus package, wouldn’t it? And it wouldn’t cost us anything because it would all be “savings.”

Come to think of it, didn’t the Second World War end in 1945? Could we have the CBO score the estimated two-thirds of a century of “budget savings” we’ve saved since ending that war? We could use the money to fund free master’s degrees in Complacency and Self-Esteem Studies for everyone, and that would totally stimulate the economy. The Spanish–American War ended 103 years ago, so imagine how much cash has already piled up! Like they say at Publishers Clearing House, you may already have won!

#page#Meanwhile, back at the Oval Office, the president is asking for your votes for the 2011 SAVE Award. To demonstrate his commitment to fiscal discipline, he set up a competition whereby federal employees can propose ways to cut government waste. A panel of experts (John Kerry, Paula Abdul, etc.) then weigh the merits, and the four finalists go up on the White House website to be voted on by members of the public: It’s like Dancing with the Czars. Last year, Marjorie Cook of Michigan, a food inspector with the Department of Agriculture, noted that every year USDA inspectors ship 125,000 food samples to its analysis labs by “next day” express delivery, and that a day or two later the labs ship the empty containers back to the inspectors using the very same “next day” service. Marjorie suggested that, as the containers are empty, they can’t be all that urgent, and should be mailed back at regular old ground delivery rates.

#ad#But this reform was way too radical, so it didn’t win. And happily, even as we speak, mail couriers are rushing empty containers back and forth across the USDA-inspected fruited plain at your expense. This year’s SAVE Award nominees include Faith Stanfield of Toledo, a “General Technical Expert” with the Social Security Administration. As someone who’s technically expert in a very general sense, she sees the big picture. It’s on the front of the SSA’s glossy magazine. Did you know Social Security has its own glossy magazine? It’s called Oasis and it’s sent out to 88,000 SSA employees plus about a thousand government retirees. It’s like Vogue or Vanity Fair, but without the perfume and fashion ads, because who needs Givenchy and Yves St. Laurent to fund your mag when you’ve got the U.S. taxpayer? It’s the magazine that says you’re cool, you’re now, you’re living the SSA-bureaucrat lifestyle. But Faith thinks they should scrap the glossy pages and only publish it online.

Ooh, I dunno. Sounds a bit extreme to me. Could result in hundreds of Social Security lifestyle editors being laid off and reduced to living on Social Security.

Anyway, the winner of the SAVE Award gets to meet with the president to discuss his or her proposal. The proposal then gets submitted to a committee for further discussion on whether to set up a committee to discuss discussing it further. But, unlike the Superfriends’ Supercommittee, the lunch expenses are cheaper.

What with the proposal to use the nearly two centuries of budget savings from the end of the War of 1812 to fund the construction of high-speed monorails and the plan to turn the Social Security Administration’s in-house glossy into an in-house virtual-glossy, it’s no surprise that the president himself has got the deficit-reduction fever. On Wednesday, he signed an executive order “Promoting Efficient Spending” -- and ending government waste. Just like that! According to Section Seven:

Agencies should limit the purchase of promotional items (e.g., plaques, clothing, and commemorative items), in particular where they are not cost-effective.

Sounds like someone’s seen one amusing Janet Napolitano bobblehead too many at the DHS holiday party. About to stick in one of those giant commemorative plaques on the side of the road saying “These next three miles of single-lane scarified pavement brought to you by the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act”? Don’t even think about it.

Fresh from launching the war on tchotchkes, the administration then proposed a 15-cent tax on Christmas trees in order to fund a federal promotional campaign to promote the sale of Christmas trees. Possibly Commerce Department research showed that there’s a dramatic fall-off in the sale of “holiday trees” round about December 26 every year, and Obama figured a little stimulus surely couldn’t hurt. He was forced to rescind the proposal, presumably after an ACLU chum pointed out that settling the Bureau of Christmas Tree Promotion lawsuit would wipe out all the budget savings from the French and Indian Wars.

Meanwhile, as these ruthless austerity measures start to bite, the government of the United States continues to spend one-fifth of a billion dollars it doesn’t have every hour, every day, every week, including Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Ramadan.

And remember, folks, Rick Perry is the dummy because he wants to abolish so many government departments, he can’t keep track of them all. Keep it simple, Rick. Just stick to a campaign pledge to set up a supercommittee to report back on the possibility of using savings from mailing back empty specimen beakers by three-day ground service to fund Medicare. Then people will take you seriously.



--- Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2011 Mark Steyn

O.W.S. D.O.A. (cont)

So we now have dead bodies at Occupy Vancouver, Occupy Oakland, Occupy Salt Lake City, and even Occupy Burlington, Vermont. The good news is that for the moment Occupy Wall Street types seem more at risk from scrofula:

“I’m amazed that in a park full of revolutionaries, there are large contingents that can’t throw away their own trash,” said Jordan McCarthy, 22, a member of the protesters’ sanitation team.

Jordan and her fellow "revolutionaries" like to assure us that they're the future. And in the sense that, in a post-prosperity America pox-ridden encampments of the homicidal, suicidal and narcotically inept will not seem that unusual, she may have a point. But I do hope at least a few of the celebrities who've endorsed the movement - Susan Sarandon, Cornel West, Naomi Klein, Michael Moore, Margaret Atwood, Noam Chomsky - get to spend the night.

The Winter of our Discontent

When they're drawing assignments at Occupy HQ, the short straw is Occupy Whitehorse:

The sole member of Occupy Whitehorse camped out outside the Yukon Legislature says he will be leaving by the end of the week because winter is setting in.

Since Oct. 19, Mark Bowers has lived in his camper at the tent city that cropped up in June to protest the Yukon's housing crisis.

Bowers said the Occupy Whitehorse group held a general assembly this weekend, where it was decided he should leave.

“It’s the winter time in the Yukon and we have to face facts,” he said. “It's expensive. Is it possible to sleep there all winter? Sure it is, but propane is expensive.

“There's safety issues that come into play and the one thing we don't want to do is essentially put anyone's health or life in danger."

Very true. It's not a good idea to urinate on a cop cruiser in the Yukon on a January morn with high wind chill. So henceforth Napoleon will be Tweeting his triumphant "virtual occupation" of Russia:

Occupy Whitehorse will now be a "virtual occupation" with the campaign switching to Facebook and Twitter, he said. But just because he's leaving doesn't mean he won't be back.

“Will I come back in the winter time and maybe set up camp for a weekend or whatever? You know I might just, because awareness needs to be raised."

But not as much as body temperature.