I will miss the first part of the debate but please leave comments if you are watching. I will update when I get to a TV.

P.S. OK, I’m in front of the TV. Bernie is making fun of Eisenhower, good for him. But where is the foreign policy debate? I swallowed my lettuce-wrapped burger whole to get to the debate, and what I get is a discussion of prescription plans? I feel grumpier than Bernie.

Conclusion: Bernie was clearly winning until the last 20 minutes when Hillary turned things around and won the end of the debate.

This Jihadi John fellow, the Daesh terrorist killed the other day by a drone, was taken off a plane a few years ago, drunk as a skunk.

These creeps are less Muslim than I am because I don’t even drink these days. Everything they claim to do for Allah is what they want to do for themselves. And whenever Allah becomes inconvenient, they push him to the side.

The Prophet told them to kill French concert goers, yeah, right. And St Teresa of Avila told me to stuff my face with half a cow at the local steak joint the other day. 

Ukraine shows solidarity with France:

On the negative side, Russia has already started pushing hard for the creation of an anti-ISIS coalition. The price of the coalition will, of course, be the removal of Western sanctions against Russia.

France has always been the weakest member of the international community that imposed sanctions on Russia, and now Putin has a great opening to push France towards giving up the sanctions.

Putin has been very lucky with the airplane crash and yesterday’s terror attacks in Paris happening in such close succession.

Reader el asks an important question:

“How can offering security from terror go together with porous borders and letting the whole world’s criminals into one’s country? If every criminal may enter, why not every terrorist?” . . . Unaccompanied refugee children are the next billion-dollar industry in Sweden. With an average cost of 2000 kronor ($233) per child per day, the 7000 refugee “children” who came last year cost 5.1 billion kronor ($595 million).

We are now in a transitional stage. The current state form is trying to be both something new and something old. And that is not going to work. In a world of porous borders, handing out benefits to every “child” – and let’s remember that for a nation-state everybody within its borders is its child – won’t work. You can’t be both things at one.

So for now the choice is:

1. Be a traditional nation-state that looks out for its “children” through welfare benefits, etc. This state form has very strictly defined borders that are controlled at all times. The question, of course, is whether it is even possible to have such a state any longer given that preventing both capital and human flows from going where they wish is a losing proposition. A state can still somewhat control the entrance. But it can do nothing to control the exit. 

2. Accept porous borders as a fact of today’s reality and ditch benefits. A constantly fluctuating population consisting of people who see every place of residence as transitory cannot be bound to each other with obligations of old-age pensions, childhood and unemployment benefits. It’s impossible to generate enough feeling of commonality of fate among them to make this viable. 

So what we are seeing now is the collapsing nation-state trying to stretch a fraying social safety net over people whose allegiances to this state are increasingly fragile. The welfare resources are becoming scarce, and citizens who don’t see any shared values or purpose lash out against each other in a fight over them. There is a huge likelihood that yesterday’s terrorists in Paris are not foreign terrorists who came from afar but local youths who fail to see themselves as citizens and whose lives are untouched by the disappearing safety net.

When the new state form really comes into existence and stops pretending to be what it isn’t, it will ditch welfare and shift all the resources to concentrate strongly on security from global threats. An enormous military / surveillance apparatus will stand in place of welfare provisions.

Sorry for the long post but this is not an issue that can be addressed with a few snappy slogans.

In 1941, within months of each other but completely independently of each other two groups of nationalists addressed formal requests to Hitler to liberate their land from oppressors and help them form their own nation-states.

What were these new nation-states going to be called?

The answer is under the fold.

Continue reading “Holocaust Studies, 3” →

I know Peter Salovey, and I’m not a huge fan. But today I actually feel sorry for the fellow because listening to this pathetic bull crap and managing not to laugh is no common feat:

“Because the administration has been unwilling to properly address institutional racism and interpersonal racism at Yale, Next Yale has spent hours organizing, at great expense to our health and grades, to fight for a University where we feel safe,” one of the student leaders read from a prepared statement to Salovey.

This is from a letter that student protesters read out to Yale ‘ s president Salovey.

A serious question, though. How is it possible for people not to understand that they undermine their entire message with “great expense to health and grades”? That they lose all credibility as serious organizers with this idiotic phrase? These are Yale students, they can’t be completely dumb. They have Internet, television, I’m sure they can’t be oblivious to the attention directed to them and to how this “great expense” sounds when delivered by a bunch of very rich kids who have known no hardship in their lives.

What’s really frustrating is that, underneath Halloween costumes, safe places, and great health expenses, there is an important cause here, begging to be addressed. But these rich people can’t be trusted not to mess up even something this obvious.

And please don’t tell me this is all because they are young. I was 18 once, and I was not a complete idiot. One can be 18 and still manage to stand upright and not topple over.