We are so fooked here in this country by our willful blindness....

Last year, Kirk Dorius and I travelled to London to participate in the kickoff of the Weinberg Foundation, an advocacy group for thorium energy.  I am pleased to announce with them the formation of an “All-Party Parliamentary Group” or APPG that contains members of both the House of Commons and House of Lords, to consider the potential of thorium as an energy source. 

In a word, "Duh."

Here's the thing folks, when you boil it all down -- thorium is a no-brainer when it comes to a nuclear fuel and fuel cycle, assuming you want power and not bombs.  It also is the enabling pathway to petroleum independence without changing the consuming end of the pipeline.

Many "green" evangelists are all ga-ga over electric cars.  But they forget that while chargers are quite efficient (~80-85%) and electric motors are too (~85% for the best of what we can offer today) the fact remains that batteries have a crap energy density (meaning the amount of energy the contain per unit of both mass and volume is poor), they have a poor energy acceptance rate (how quickly you can charge said battery, requiring hours .vs. minutes to fill a fuel tank) and in addition they simply shift where the energy production takes place (to the coal plant behind the undesirable neighbor's house.)  In other words they simply move the exhaust pipe instead of getting rid of it.

Indeed when you stack the inefficiencies electric cars don't look so good.  A typical gasoline or diesel car is somewhere around 30% efficient end-to-end (that is, the number of BTUs of energy that go into the fuel tank .vs. the amount of energy that actually moves the car.)  The rest is lost as heat in some form or fashion, whether out the tailpipe, rejected by the radiator or as friction somewhere in the middle.

But neither do electric cars.  When we stack efficiencies we see the problem quite quickly:

30% (conventional nuclear or coal) to 50% (combined-cycle such as natural gas) at origin.
90% efficiency in transmission (transformers, loss on the electrical line, etc)
85% efficient (battery charger)
80% efficient (battery itself, assuming 50% charge state -- much less at 85%+ of full charge, perhaps as little as 50%)
85% motor, controller and gearing (in the car)
=====
15.6 - 26% end-to-end

Oops; that's no better and if you start with 30% gross at the generating end it's actually worse!

So the argument for "energy efficiency" doesn't work in favor of electric.

Why does this mean we should use thorium?

Simple -- thorium reactors can be run not on pellets of fuel as conventional reactors using water as both a moderator and coolant, but rather with the fuel dispersed in a molten salt used as the working fluid and a fixed moderator in the reactor chamber.

This is a huge win for a number of reasons:

• The reactor runs at much higher temperatures. Typical operating temperatures are in the 550-650 Celsius range as opposed to water-cooled reactors which are limited by the critical point (374 Celsius); beyond that temperature irrespective of pressure water does not remain liquid.  This means that the heat of vaporization is zero, which in turn limits the useful working temperature of the coolant.  The other problem with water is that to approach the critical temperature requires containment at extraordinary pressures; 217 atmospheres to be exact (over 3,100 psi!)
  
  
• LFTR reactors run at normal atmospheric pressure.  A big part of the danger with conventional reactors comes from the properties of water at high temperature.  In order to keep it liquid you must hold it under extraordinary pressure.  Everything is much more difficult from an engineering perspective and any failure of that pressurized state is catastrophic as the water instantly flash-boils to all steam, resulting in the reactor having no coolant!  This is also why a conventional reactor requires uninterrupted power all the time; you cannot allow the coolant temperature to go over the critical point and since the fuel produces decay heat after shutdown you therefore must provide continual coolant flow until that heat is extracted.  The failure of that continual flow is what led to the Fukushima disaster.  LFTRs do not suffer from this problem as they do not operate under high pressure.  If all power is lost at a LFTR plant the coolant containing the fuel can be allowed to drain by gravity into tanks where, with no moderator present, the reaction stops and it simply cools over time on its own.  This passive safety was tested and proved effective in the United States in the test plant operated at Oak Ridge some 40+ years ago!
  
  
• You can use the higher process heat level, up to 650C, to directly convert any carbon source to liquid hydrocarbons.  Coal happens to be a convenient source of both thorium and carbon, but in point of fact carbon can come from any source -- including atmospheric CO2. The Germans figured out how to turn coal into liquid synfuel during WWII and we have refined that process since then.
  
  
• Reprocessing is continuous and online in form; the reaction products are thus nearly all consumed over time, producing a waste footprint that is a tiny fraction of conventional nuclear plants.  Conventional uranium-fuel-cycle reactors only have ~5% of the fuel material in the reactor that is actually fissile; the rest is bombarded over time.  Some turns into plutonium that can then be reprocessed and burned up, but a large amount of the remainder winds up as highly-radioactive byproducts that are dangerous for enormous lengths of time.  A commercial LFTR would be built with "online" reprocessing to separate out the neutron poisons (specifically Xenon) and introduce more thorium as the fuel is consumed.  The result is that most of the reaction byproducts remain in the reactor until they are reduced to less hazardous (or non-hazardous) elements and compounds; the decay heat released in this process also is harvested to produce useful energy instead of being dispersed in big cooling pools.

This is not necessarily a "cheap" oil replacement, but "cheap" is relative.  Can we produce $20/bbl equivalent oil products with this technology?  No.  Can we match $100/bbl oil?  Probably, and that's the point -- we can both produce electricity and 100% independent liquid hydrocarbons to fuel our buses, trucks and cars.

In addition we would be using a far safer technology than we use today for nuclear power.

I highlighted this alternative in Leverage for a specific reason -- behind every unit of GDP is a unit of energy.  If we are to ever rationalize our federal government spending on all things, including most-particularly our military, we must become energy independent.

We proved that these reactors can work in the 1950s and 60s at Oak Ridge.  This is not "pie in the sky" technology or the subject of science fiction.  It is a matter of science fact that we can, if we're willing, exploit to resolve our domestic energy requirements.

It appears that Britain is going to join China and India in heading down this road, leaving America behind.

We cannot afford to be left behind.

In what portends a tough upcoming summer and perhaps far more violence than we'd like to see, today we got this from the UN Security Council:

Russia and China vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution that backed an Arab League plan to “facilitate” a political transition in Syria.

Thirteen of the council’s 15 members voted in favor today of a proposal by Western and Arab countries to end the bloodshed in Syria. Russia and China, two of the five permanent council members with veto power, blocked its passage.

Notice the language - "a proposal to end the bloodshed."

Uh huh.  And how did they intend to do that given that the resolution....

The draft that was voted on by the council said there should be no “prejudging the outcome” of the political process and that “nothing in this resolution authorizes” military action, responding to Russian concern that last March’s UN authorization of all necessary measures to protect civilians was used to bring down Muammar Qaddafi’s regime.

Yeah.  So we were just going to ask nicely for the Syrian government to stop slaughtering people?

Folks, the armwaving and nonsense has reached a fever pitch.  Those who intend to and do kill understand exactly one form of coercion when it comes to making them stop -- more and bigger guns.

That's it.  You either credibly threaten to shoot them or you actually shoot them.  Nothing else does a thing other than make noise, because once you've decided you're going to use military force then that's all there is left.

As for Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton's expression of "disgust" let me point out that America has a long history of propping up and installing dictators as well.  Mubarak anyone?  Or how about The Shah?  Russia is not the first and won't be the last to veto a resolution against a nation where they have a military presence (cough-US-cough!) and as such we have scant room to complain here.

Yes, this is a civil war.  Yes, it is likely to continue, even escalate and get out of hand.

Yes, it's our (and Russia's, and China's) fault, but more ours than Russia's, as we (the United States) are the ones that turned the fine folks there into gazillionaires by refusing to develop our own energy resources despite having the ability to do so over the space of 30 years, and thus flooded a part of the world that has been unstable for more than 2,000 years with lots of money -- some of which inevitably found its way into arms.

Disgusted, yes. I'm disgusted. 

But when it comes to hypocrisy nobody does it better than America in this part of the world.

Fox News inadvertently blew the cover off the issue, and it's exactly as I maintained in my earlier column.

Here's what I said:

There is nothing preventing the Church from organizing groups and soliciting health insurance quotes for those groups.  Being comprised of "faithful" people, that policy might include the provision that one could obtain these services but with the membership being comprised of faithful individuals who do not believe in such things there would be no use and thus the rating would not include that which is not used!  Contrary to popular belief all health insurance ratings are in fact simply a composite of the risk factors of each participant. (I know this to be factually true as I negotiated and purchased same for my company when I ran it.)

Yep.  The Church could put together a group of faithful that would not want to buy such services, and they thus would not pay for them.  Oh sure, they'd be required to "make them available" but that which you don't use you don't pay for, and if nobody in your group uses them they won't be part of the rating either.  In other words, it would be a nullity.

Well, if there was such a group....... and that's the problem.

A report last year from the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit sexual health research organization, found that 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women have used birth control despite the church's teachings. According to a Reuters report on the study, only 2 percent of Catholic women rely on natural family planning.

Ding ding ding ding ding ding.

There you have it folks.  The truth.  There is no ability to create such a group because if you actually required people to live to the Catholic Church's view on these matters the pews would be empty and so would the donation plate on Sunday.

So the Bishops can whine and scream like petulant children all they want but the facts are something else entirely.  They can't excommunicate everyone who uses birth control as they'd wind up with 2% of their current population of Catholics and the Church (at least in America) would instantly collapse.

They know this as well, despite their screaming from the pulpit.  These Bishops are not stupid people.

What they are, in fact, is dishonest and in this dishonesty they dishonor the faith, they dishonor their office and they dishonor The Church as an institution.

In point of fact were the issue as stated the Bishops would have, as I noted, also been opposed to Obamacare from the start because the very act of requiring someone to pool funds to buy someone else's health care inevitably leads to you funding someone's personal decisions you have a moral problem with, whether it be sloth or gay sex.  But they had no quarrel with and in fact supported Obamacare's forced individual mandate, along with Medicaid and its forced transfer payments and mandated tax structure, even though both did and do support medical treatment for various diseases that are either in the main or even only contracted through behavior that wantonly violates Catholic dogma, along with both birth control and abortion.

Among these treatments, incidentally, are those for essentially all sexually-transmitted illnesses.  Oh sure it's technically possible in some cases to contract them without having sex, but it's difficult and in the most-egregious of cases (e.g. HIV) the remaining non-sexual vectors that are statistically significant are also prohibited behaviors (e.g. IV drug abuse.)

This much is certain -- if both parties to the sexual act adhere to Catholic teachings then it is impossible for them to contract a STD since neither of them would have ever slept with anyone other than the spouse to which they were married, both being virgins at the time of marriage.  If neither party ever sleeps with any other person than their spouse, and both spouses are virgins at marriage, those two people by definition will never contract a STD.  So why should they pay (monetarily) for someone else's sin and why has that never been an objection over the years of Medicaid and in fact when Obamacare was debated?

Well?

Here's what I believe the truth to be and my evidence is here and in the previous article. The Bishops and prelates have been agitated about birth control and (of course) abortion for a very long time.  The latter is a shared position of many people, including Catholics.  The former, however, is definitely not -- virtually all Catholics who are sexually active, married or not, despite the Church's protest and catechism, use artificial birth control, and that's a fact.

So this little brouhaha gave the Bishops the opening on an issue they have not been willing to take on before.  The Church has, of course, been against artificial birth control and abortion forever.  That's not new, but it's also almost-universally ignored among Catholics, whether the Church likes it or not.

What the Church has never been willing to do, however, is raise a conscientious objection under the First Amendment to the provision of these services with employment tax dollars, even though they've been paying into said funds for decades.  Nor have they been willing to agitate for the congregation to also find an objection of conscience predicated on the First Amendment, to paying taxes (at both a State and Federal level) that go into Medicaid, which provides not only artificial birth control but also abortion.

In fact, the Church was for Obamacare for everyone, including the general congregation of Catholics, even though they knew damn well that it would pay for not only birth control but abortion services along with treatment for STDs that can only be contracted by acts that violate Catholic Canon, and none of this was concealed at the outset of the Obamacare debate.

It was only when the Church as an employer was tagged in the same way they were willing to have silently shoved down everyone else's throat, including the faithful that fill the pews on Sunday (myself included) that suddenly they became exercised over the issue of both birth control and abortion services to the degree that they state they "won't" comply.

Hypocrisy is a terrible thing, especially when it comes from the leaders of a powerful and influential group.  What the Bishops owe their congregations is both an apology for being willing to foist off on the congregation "acceptance" of these taxes for the last couple of decades along with an explanation for exactly why the faithful should comply with something they themselves claim is a rank Constitutional violation, and why they've advocated that Obamacare specifically, and Medicaid and other government-provided health care generally that happens to include both abortion and birth control services, is a social good and thus worthy of not only vocal but monetary support.

I may be beating on a dead horse here, but this topic keeps coming up on the forum and I think it needs substantive expansion and more pounding of nails.

Look folks, this is mathematics at a "macro" (that is, "everyone's involved") level.  The Federal Government went from spending $53 billion on health care (all forms) in 1980 to over $800 billion last year.  Private insurance costs have risen by some 9% annually for the last 30 years.  The Federal Government's spending has tracked this rate of expansion as well, which means that the commonly-held claim that this is all about "more elderly people on the government tit" is false; the working population is roughly constant in age.

The Republican Party (and the "Tea Party" contingent within it) have repeatedly stated that "nobody over 50" is going to have their Federal Government medical benefits tampered with.  Roughly, your life expectancy in the US is 85.  This means that if you're 50 today you have some 30 years of life left.

At a 9% escalation per year your medical costs -- whether insurance or government spending -- will multiply by a factor of 13.3 over the next 30 years.

That is, if you spend $600 a month now, assuming you did not get older or sicker, you would spend $7,980 a month in 30 years on your health insurance, or some $95,760 per year.

The Federal Government will spend not $800 billion but $10.64 trillion on health care at this rate in 30 years.

Neither of those things is going to happen; the money does not exist.

But this is the path we are on when you can demand a bypass, a hip replacement and $200 tests.  When the cost of Juanita the illegal Mexican, giving birth is forced upon you as an American Citizen.  When you may make lifestyle choices that severely impact your health and yet force someone else to pay for them.

If you keep believing in this, America, you are going to die sooner than you should, because what you believe in will not happen.

You therefore have two choices: You can either go "baaaaaaahhhh!" like a Sheep right up until the medical system collapses, at which point if you are dependent on it for a drug, procedure or device you will die or you can do what you can to change the course of your life and with a reasonable probability avoid that outcome.

That's all there is folks.  This is not about what someone wants and it is not about what you think you can demand.  It is about mathematics.

Let's talk about the cost picture for a minute.  I'm going to pick on one common test -- HbA1c, used to measure long-term glucose control.  It is commonly used among diabetics to monitor not their instant blood sugar but how well they control it over time.  The test measures the amount of damage in the blood caused by excessive swings in blood sugar over the last four months or so (the normal lifespan of a red blood cell); once a cell is damaged in this fashion it remains damaged.  A "normal" range for a non-diabetic person is between 4 and 6%; diabetics with excellent control can approach normal but few achieve it.  Elevated values are very bad; levels over 7% are strongly associated with serious complications.

For an apparently-healthy person who is not attempting any sort of intervention for diabetes this test is far better in diagnosing trouble than a single fasting glucose test, since it checks damage over time as opposed to "at the present instant."

Ok, so there's the background.  Now why do I bring this specific (and common) medical test up as an example?

That's easy: I can easily find prices for this as a lab test and outside the lab.

The lab price of this test is about $65 from my survey around the web of various medical labs.  But at WalMart I can buy two tests for $30 and perform the test myself at home in three minutes.

In other words the "doctor" price -- where cost-shifting, monopoly behavior and other games are present is four times that of the competitive price in an open market.

Never mind the privacy issues -- if I go to a lab the lab gets to choose who obtains the information.  If I have "insurance" then that data becomes part of my indelible record for anyone who has "a financial interest" in my medical care to look at forever.  If I buy the test and take it at home, I control who gets the information and on what terms since I paid for it with my own money and only one pair of eyeballs sees the result.

But on a cost-control basis, even leaving the privacy issues aside, why doesn't the local doctor's office simply buy these boxed products from WalMart and use them?  They're approved by the FDA and as such they have to be "lab-style accurate" or they wouldn't be.  Both use blood samples so the testing methodology is the same.

Here's the answer: The entire medical system is built upon the premise of intentionally distorting price and cost-shifting on a massive scale, along with controlling you by denying you the right to control information about your own medical status and how it's used.  Since "profit" is typically a percentage of price this inures to the benefit of providers in the space.  And since there is no free market for these services -- Juanita can "pop in" and pop out a kid, billing you indirectly for her care (along with Dear old Granddad who can do the same thing!) there's zero incentive to solve the problem.  If it becomes common knowledge that the test in the store is just as good as the one in the lab and you have to pay for one or the other what do you need the doctor's office for in performing that test?  You might need his advice on how to interpret the results but he loses the mark-up on the lab work and so does the lab, and now you control the data instead of him.

Never mind the other issues that arise in our massively-fraudulent medical system, such as with drugs.  Some people claim that other nations have a "better controlled" cost structure.  That may be true but a big part of how they achieve it is by forcing you, the American citizen, to cover the cost of development of new drug and device therapies!  In Canada, for example, Viagra is a couple of bucks a pill.  In the US it's $25 or so.  The drug is the same, the manufacturer is the same, and the price disparity is maintained by the drug companies getting laws passed making it illegal for you to import those Canadian pills into the US, forcing a price collapse in the United States. 

I've written about all this before in depth, and it figures prominently in Leverage as well.  But today I want to draw your attention to something very important -- that avoiding the consequence of the collapse of the system is at least partially within your control.

We're not going to stop the stupidity folks.  There's been zero attention paid to this by any politician from the left or right, and in fact they're intentionally lying to the people on a literal daily basis in this regard.  This is not going to change and the system is going to collapse upon itself.  We are merely trying to figure out when, but if you're under 60 today it's a good bet you will live to see it.

When I pointed out the mathematical impossibility of what Steve Southerland and Jeff Miller were claiming (that nobody over 50 would see their Medicare changed) in a town hall meeting last year I was shouted down and told that I was out-of-order to state that they were lying in their claims.  The problem is that they were lying and they both knew it; it is never out of order to state the plain truth.  Mathematics is an exact thing and the record in this regard on Federal Spending is a fact, not supposition.  That this cannot continue is also a mathematical fact and since the lion's share of federal medical spending is in fact on Medicare it is mathematically inevitable that major reductions in that spending and the program itself will occur before those who are currently 50 die, if the program doesn't collapse entirely!

Every one of the people involved in this scheme and scam -- some 20% of our GDP -- are financial rapists and terrorists.  The entire corrupt system and its enabling politicians all deserve to have an asteroid fall on them when they go to the mailbox this afternoon.   Escaping from this corruption and outrage in its entirety is not possible.  Ultimately, you will have to either face your own mortality or become subject to the medical system's perversities. 

However, this doesn't mean you can't change the outcome between here and there in a positive fashion for you as an individual, because you can.

Let's start with the simple.  If you smoke, stop.  Right now.  Throw the cigs in the trash can and never buy or smoke another cigarette.  Ever.  It is the single-most productive thing you can do to change your health prognosis over time.  If you wish to keep smoking that's fine, but understand that you are likely to take years, and perhaps decades, off your life and you will not be able to force society to pay for whatever medical care you need as a consequence of this choice in the near future and beyond.

Second, look at this picture:

Which of these two men would you like to be?  One has a far greater chance of needing "intervention" by the medical industry some time in the next 30 years or so.  There's a roughly-50lb difference between those two pictures, and the change from #1 to #2 - 205 to 157, several pant sizes, a 42 suit jacket to a 39, along with two full shirt sizes (from XL to M in a T-shirt) and an inch of neck size in a dress shirt - took about nine months.  #1 was what I had been for more than a decade.  #2 is what I was when I was roughly 17, and am now again today.  The bad news was that several grand worth of business suits went to Goodwill as there was no reasonable way to alter them to fit.  The good news is that I haven't been in this good of condition since I was a teenager, and it's not just "being fat" (or not) -- it's also how I feel.

To get from #1 to #2 I did two things: I cut the crap from going down the piehole -- specifically, refined carbohydrates.  I also removed all manufactured fats from my diet (e.g. anything with the word "hydrogenated" on the label); if I want a "butter taste" on something (e.g. microwaved brussel sprouts, which I really like) I use butter, not Frankenfood. I also downloaded the program "Myfitnesspal" for my Android phone and started using it to log my weight, what I stuffed down the pie hole and how much exercise I was actually doing.   It works as it keeps what you're doing in your face.  It also has calorie and nutritional information for a lot of restaurant chain menu items which makes it easy to consult before you order when eating out -- and that makes a big difference.  For those of you who just can't get rid of the crazy carb stuff, I understand from my research that you can do either low fat and high carbohydrate or low carbohydrate and high fat -- both moderate protein (NOT high protein!) but you cannot stuff both high-glycemic carbs and fats in your body without becoming fat.  Since I just cannot deal with the idea of not eating steak or ribs, two of my personal favorite foods, the choice that I could actually live within was easy.

Second, I "moved more."  Google up "Couch to 5k" and do it.  If you can't do jogging for physical reasons (e.g. bad knees, hips or ankles) double or triple the distances and get a bicycle.  If you still can't do it for physical reasons then choose swimming (an essentially-zero-impact physical exercise) instead.  There are damn few people who cannot manage the physical requirements of swimming no matter how bad your joints and similar are and it is an excellent form of whole-body exercise.  I also found and bought a weight machine from a guy over in Destin who looked like he never used it. It needed a couple of cables replaced but was otherwise in pristine condition at a tiny fraction of the cost of buying one new.  I don't use it as much as I should, but it does get used and it matters.  I also found that it's easier on the joints of this old fart if I use the Vibram "Five Fingers" shoe-like things -- it's basically running barefoot with a pad to keep rocks from embedding themselves in your toes, and with them you're forced into good form which stops the injuries (fancy that -- the human body was designed better than all those crazy ideas from shoe companies?)  Beware that when you start using those, if you choose to, your calf muscles will complain loudly as they probably haven't been used extensively in years.

I'm not going to tell you that the "move more" part was easy.  It wasn't.  In fact, it was really hard when I started.  If you don't know if you have cardiac problems go see a doc and take a stress test first where he can watch your heart rhythm while you crank up the METS so you have a reasonable expectation you won't fall over and die when you begin.  That would be bad.  Starting out I couldn't run a mile without feeling like someone had hit me with a truck, but what I found is that the only way to keep from plateauing is to hit that wall and push through it -- just a bit further, a bit harder pace, and then keep at that level of exertion on further workouts until it becomes not-so-tough.  Then push again.

Having gotten here I've found it's not hard at all maintaining what I've achieved.  I jog a couple of times a week and ride a bicycle for grins, giggles and fitness, usually putting in at least half an hour of "working out" in some form three to five times a week.  I live near the MidBay bridge and when the weather is nice I sometimes choose to ride over it to the Crab Trap in Destin for lunch -- a roughly 15 mile round-trip, and an hour and a half including the time eat (on the beach, natch, so that's the reward.)  I can now crank off three miles at a 9 minute pace, a modest jog, without my heart rate going materially over 150 -- I can talk with you while jogging in a reasonably-normal tone of voice.  Nine months ago all of that was impossible.

It's a choice folks and one you need to make now, because at the present pace we're a couple of years -- maybe four or five at the outside -- before the medical system collapses under its own weight.  You can't make these changes in a day -- if you wait until it all comes apart it's too late. 

The politicians are all liars and they're going to sit back and watch you die as a consequence of your reliance on their lies.

If I, as a fat bastard pushing 50 years of age can accomplish this with nothing more than a decision to do so then anyone can in one form or another.  And yet when I look around at the Mall, at WalMart or just walking about the perception changes.  That first picture was what I thought of as "average" and I was about that in terms of American men.  Now I know differently -- I was on my way to an earlier death and whether I wanted to admit it or not I was fat.  I might have been "average" for America, but on an absolute scale I was overweight and pushing toward obese -- and that's a fact.

I know there are a million excuses as to why you can't do it, but just take a look at the picture above and then tell me again, with a straight face, that you want to be "Guy #1".  You're lying to yourself if you do -- you can do it, but don't want to, and thus far you've been able to get away with it because the government has always been there to "pick up the pieces."

That day is coming to an end folks, and this aspect of being prepared is, for many Americans, far more important than any other.  If you're rich and dead you're still dead, so if you look like the left-side photo (or worse) take care of that issue first.

It's a new year.  Turn the new year into a new you and avoid, to the extent possible, what's coming.

There's only one problem with being pissed off about it -- they are, for the most part, right.

Hear Dr. Paul on the subject of the 9/11 terror attacks—an event, he assures his audiences, that took place only because of U.S. aggression and military actions. True, we've heard the assertions before. But rarely have we heard in any American political figure such exclusive concern for, and appreciation of, the motives of those who attacked us—and so resounding a silence about the suffering of those thousands that the perpetrators of 9/11 set out so deliberately to kill.

There is among some supporters now drawn to Dr. Paul a tendency to look away from the candidate's reflexive way of assigning the blame for evil—the evil, in particular, of terrorism—to the United States.

There is nothing wrong with a belief that our military "reach" is too wide, too broad, and broadly unsupportable.  But you have to be either intentionally obtuse or outright dishonest to believe that the United States' enemies are only our enemies because we're a bunch of jackbooted jackasses who step on the necks of people worldwide and "generate" our own terrorists.

That's revisionist bullshit, to be blunt.

Before running such crap anyone with a hint of intellectual honesty would have to note the several hundred year long Jihadi nightmare unleashed upon people worldwide by those seeking to establish their Caliphate -- long before there was a United States, and continuing on since.  One would have to note that Muslim piracy and terrorism was commonplace on the high seas in the time of the Revolutionary War, and had exactly nothing to do with the United States "projection of power" (since we had just formed this nation!)  One would have to note the examples of nations (and there's lots of them) that have had as their only offense being majority Christian and thus "praying the wrong way."  And finally, one would have to look at the record of appeasement and its results in the mirror of history, including the millions killed as a consequence in WWII.

When it comes to Iran there's a curious problem with Ron Paul's narrative that his supporters simply ignore.  Paul says that Iran is just "misunderstood" and doesn't really want to wipe Israel off the map.  Ok, let's assume I accept that "bad translations" are responsible for that "misunderstanding."  What am I supposed to make of their repeated, vehement, and "in English" denial of the Holocaust?  That's much harder to argue over, isn't it?

Curiously, where the Journal misses the point in their attack on Ron Paul is where I drive my stake home through those who support him along with the rest of the Republican field: His utter lack of understanding of the essential link between our economic reality today and our current military posture.

That's energy, of course.

I happen to support a widespread retrenchment of our military projection.  The reason is simple: We've never managed to have that work out the way we intend.  How many times have we installed some guy here or there and had it go sideways on us?  Mubarak anyone?  The Shah?  How about the mess in Central America -- pick one there, they all sucked.  The problem with supporting jackasses as "our jackass" is that it doesn't work -- they're just all jackasses and eventually they turn on their own people, and then they turn on us.

But denial over the reason we've put the current system together is foolish, and here Ron Paul does the same thing that all the other "mainstream" candidates do: He intentionally looks the other way while participating in the government systems that make our current posture mandatory.

America can be isolationist.  We have the ability.  Most nations do not, but we do.  We can afford it.  We have the resources.  We have the people.  We have the smarts and we have the industry.  In short, we don't have to run a trade deficit and we shouldn't; we have the luxury of indulging only in fair trade and that which generates trade surplus.

But it is the cover of our federal budget deficit that gives life to trade deficits, to offshoring our jobs and ultimately our energy dependency and military power exercises.  Absolutely none of that is workable without government overspending.  It's a deadly embrace and Ron Paul is not only in the institution that's responsible for it, he fails to make the essential link and then speak against the actual cause, identifying not just the "what" but the "why".

So The Journal gets their criticism mostly right, but they do it for the wrong reasons.  It's not hard to understand their blindness -- if they actually looked at the picture from 30,000 feet The Journal would have to go after all of the Republican field and Obama, and that would leave them with the uncomfortable position of having to look beyond the "establishment" candidates.

I'd say that half a loaf is better than none at all, but in this case half a loaf is none, because without addressing the true issues we'll never make progress and when, not if, our excessive spending becomes unsustainable the harm that will come to this nation will be dramatically worse than it needs to be.

In that failure The Journal, in the fullness of history, will be judged complicit.