A Day Late and a Dollar Short for Fort Hood, but...

For all the times that the Americans drop the ball and fail to prevent things, occasionally they get the payback thing right.

Just a few days ago, the pen pal of Major Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter that killed 14 and wounded dozens more, scoffed at the effectiveness of American intelligence and military power.  The US delivered its own message to Anwar al-Awlaki (also spelled Aulaqi by some sources) in its raids on an al-Qaeda leadership meeting that left 30 dead, including the cleric that some believe played an operational role in 9/11:

Gotta love those airstrikes.  From a technical standpoint I'm curious what they hit this meeting with that had the punch to kill 30 of the bastards.  The Hellfire missle is the standard tool of the Predator and is ideal for taking out vehicles and even bunkers, as it was designed to kill tanks.  Given the part of the world the Yanks have lots of airbases and carriers within range, so this was likely an actual bomb.  Not too many problems of this sort that can't be solved with a 2000lb JDAM.

Awlaki claims that Hasan initiated the e-mail correspondence with a message on Dec. 17, 2008. “He was asking about killing U.S. soldiers and officers,” says Awlaki. “His question was is it legitimate [under Islamic law].”
The Al Jazeera questioner asks for confirmation that Hasan forwarded this query nearly a year before the shooting.
“Yes,” responds Awlaki. “I am astonished. Where was American intelligence that claimed once that it can read any car plate number anywhere in the world?”

 You appear to have your answer; not dead, just sleeping a lot.

Britain's no-longer-shocking decline continues apace.

This isn't the first time by a long shot that British courts have done this, but the incredible arrogance never ceases to enrage me.

JERUSALEM — Israel's prime minister on Tuesday called a British arrest warrant against the country's former foreign minister "an absurdity" and warned that attempts to prosecute Israeli officials for war crimes charges over last winter's Gaza offensive could harm relations between the two countries.

Could?  I'd yank my ambassador for something like this, but maybe I'm still cranky about fighting with City Hall over them extorting me on my property taxes.  No "maybe" about that in fact, but it makes this resonate even more:

Netanyahu rejected the notion that leaders and army officers "who defended our civilians bravely and morally against a despicable and brutal enemy could be branded war criminals. We firmly reject this absurdity."

The other side fires rockets from populated areas and YOU are the war criminal for shooting back?  Yes, that's the colour of the sky in a lot of the world these days.  In cases like this, what's important is what works,  and you will notice a lot less rocket attacks from Gaza since the IDF laid the smackdown on Hamas there.  I guess I'm a war criminal too; I'd better stay out of the U.K. in case they arrest me for agreeing with the Israelis.  I wish that sounded as far-fetched to me as it should, but:

Pro-Palestinian lawyers attempted earlier this year to invoke the "universal jurisdiction" law to arrest Gaza war mastermind Ehud Barak, Israel's defence minister, but his status as a Cabinet minister gave him diplomatic immunity.

In 2005, a retired Israeli general, Doron Almog, returned to Israel immediately after landing in London because he was tipped off that British police planned to arrest him. The warrant against Almog -- who oversaw the 2002 bombing of a Gaza home in which 14 people were killed along with a leading Palestinian militant -- was later cancelled.

Other Israeli leaders, including former military chief Moshe Yaalon and ex-internal security chief Avi Dichter, have also cancelled trips to Britain in recent years for the same reason.

   Hell, offer all the displaced persons in the Palestinian refugee camps British citizenship and send what's left of your martime resources to pick them up; that's where things are headed anyway.   I don't think I'll be renewing my Brit passport; I don't want to go down with the ship.  British history for me now ends at the outside in 1982, the last time a British government showed any backbone at all.  Lady Thatcher, I'm afraid that Britain is now a nation in headlong flight.  As a country these qualities are no longer to be seen:

Today we meet in the aftermath of the Falklands Battle. Our country has won a great victory and we are entitled to be proud. This nation had the resolution to do what it knew had to be done—to do what it knew was right.

The U.K. government really should rein these clowns in; an independant judiciary does not mean that you make a hash of international relations on behalf of narrow special-interest groups.  This is another example of democracies getting the governments they deserve.  I don't see any way out short of revolution, and I can't see THAT happening, despite abundant provocation.

It does seem that if you want to see the diametric opposite of what WILL be done by stupid, scared governments in the West, this blog continues to be a good resource.  That's all I can do for those who still care about making things work again.

Circling the drain in the Carbon Sink

The USA is finished, and the countdown to final collapse began Dec 7 2009 with the EPA ruling that CO2 is a pollutant meaning that it will have the power to regulate it.  The link I chose for that sentence is one from what is left of the U.S. industrial belt.  This will beat down their remaining industry with regulations, while jacking up energy costs in a country (like many others) that still gets much of it's power (49% or so in 2006) from coal plants.

So, to take this new announcement to it's logical conclusion, we have to eliminate everything that emits CO2, or regulate it.  How do you regulate forests?  Cut them down?  Crops?  Volcanoes?  In fact, this is bundled with some other gases, one being methane.  This covers all of our personal gaseous byproducts, and the cracks that are currently circulating are along the lines of "tax the air you breathe".

That's not far off, though for the time being they wouldn't try to impose personal exhalation limits.  I'm not sure it matters too much as the cost of EVERYTHING is tied to energy costs.  It will amount to a huge tax, and Obama has stated in the recent past that he intends to bankrupt anyone who wants to use coal.  Even now I'm not certain what all of these people think the end result of their plans to hobble Western industry will be.  It 's not like we can live on the beach all year; we need technology to support our large populations in sub-optimal climatic zones. Wrecking our industrial base will cripple our economy further, and there goes the financial surplus that feeds innovation.

The anarchists et al are crowing about the failure of Capitalism which brought much of the world (and especially the USA) to the current Great Recession.  They'll jump on any bandwagon that will crash the current political and economic systems, and they form the most radical wedge of the "green" movement.  In fact it was not a failure of capitalism that brought things here, but an excess of regulation and individual capitalists behaving badly.

Capitalism needs regulation for sure, but a light hand (safe labour practices, sensible environmental rules, not much else) gets the best results.  Making it more difficult to do business in North America will simply drive what is left of our wealth-producing (e.g. manufacturing) businesses overseas.   We need ideas that can work, and money to be spent to make them work.  Space-based solar power is inching closer to reality, and that is the direction things need to go.  This all takes money, and people need to remember that governments don't make any of it themselves.

While this is happening, the environmental intelligencia are in Copenhagen trying to reach agreements on how to rape the taxpayers of developed countries more with climate legislation.  The only sign of hope on that front is that they seem to be squabbling.  In this case doing nothing is the best possible thing, so the more of that that goes on the better for us.

Climategate and the true colours of the mainstream media.

I won't rehash in excruciating detail the leaked data from the East Anglia University Climate Research Unit, but the short version is that it gives convincing evidence of collusion and manipulation of data there to produce certain kinds of results. WUWT is the best source (though far from the only one) on this sort of thing so I'll direct you there for far more detail than I can process fully, let alone relate.

No, my real axe to grind here is with CTV and CBC. They are not alone, but they are local and the latter is supported by my tax dollars so I'll work them over first. It is only today (1 Dec 2009) that CBC is admitting that this information even exists and at that it is spinning like mad to discredit it. CTV has yet to touch it at all and they've heard from me about that already, much good may it do.

The basics of the whole thing are as follows: a couple of weeks ago persons unknown hacked into the CRU server and liberated a LOT of data. [Update: evidence is convincing that this was a leak, not a hack] Gobs of code from projects that have been run and most devastating, (as it's easier to understand by most people, myself included) hundreds of internal emails between the CRU researchers and affiliates showing them to be manipulating data and suppressing the truth about their sources.

They hid behind “freedom of information” laws (now THAT’s irony!), fabricated data and made models that didn’t fit the historical record, let alone accurately predict the present (then future). This article from the Telegraph says it all quite nicely:

There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre's blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt's blog Watts Up With That ), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.

They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.

This in itself has become a major scandal, not least Dr Jones's refusal to release the basic data from which the CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had simply got "lost". Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence.

So back to my point. The UK media can't avoid it completely as it happened in their back yard, but the North American media are doing their damnedest to ignore or suppress it. One has to wonder why. I can see these researchers and hangers-on who are stakeholders in the AGW machine, but the media has what exactly to gain by sitting on this? With the Copenhagen meetings on how to fleece Western societies and de-industrialize us completely about to take place there is room for a BIG media storm. That's the kind of climate change I'd like to see.

Political Leadership 101

There are a couple of things that have popped up in Canadian politics recently that probably require some comment. Maybe not require, but since I use this to vent, that’s what is going to happen regardless.

First and far lower profile is the minor flap over the “no-good bastards” remark made by Conservative MP Gerald Keddy recently. He was saying what a lot of people think about the chronically unemployed in the context of migrant labour, in other words it was a defensible opinion, albeit rather crudely presented.

He should certainly not have said exactly that in a public forum, but what’s done is done. What bothers me, and lowers his credibility with people who otherwise agree with him, is the cringing end to his apology in the House of Commons the other day:
Later Tuesday, Keddy stood in the House of Commons and once again expressed his regret. "I apologize to anyone who was offended by my remarks," he said.
Keddy said what he was thinking, and although it badly needed to be qualified somewhat, some people NEED to be offended sometimes. A blanket apology (to me) shows a lack of backbone unless it is used for something you said impulsively but don’t actually mean. We all do that, and there is no value in backing up random stupidity that pops out of your head. Admit it was stupid and move on, but do it with some class.

You’ll piss certain people off no matter what you say if you’re saying anything of substance; that’s the price of doing business. If you flip-flop and react to that by apologizing all the time you’ll lose the respect (and support) of the people who DID agree with you.

Next, the main event in the Commons right now: the prisoner hand-off/torture fiasco.

The government has done a terrible job with this, full-stop. Today’s headlines include a poll done that shows that more people believe Diplomat Richard Colvin’s assertions that he warned the government about the fact that prisoners handed over to Afghan authorities by our troops were routinely abused by those authorities.

We have been hearing these allegations in the news for several years now, and I’m quite certain that this is the case. The Defence Minister’s attempts to discredit Colvin have backfired badly, as they should have, because they were dishonest smear tactics. Transfers have been put on hold several times in-theatre because the Afghans were abusing prisoners a bit too obviously.

This is a dirty war in a crappy but deadly serious part of the world. Ask the Russians; if you were captured, you were lucky if they only ass-raped you within an inch of your life. Hell, go even farther back if need be:

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.

I read something yesterday about someone interviewing a “former” Taliban Imam in Kabul about these torture claims being propaganda. His response was apparently a shrug followed by “We would do the same to them”.

Where does this connect to the Leadership theme I claimed in the title? The first of the Canadian Forces Principles of Leadership is: “Achieve professional competence.” Do your homework so that you come out of the gate with the right information. This of course may have been the case; Mr MacKay likely knew a great deal about what goes on over there. In that case this has just been poorly handled.

Credibility was the basis of the government’s attack on Colvin, and it was a poor choice. The way to handle this was to say “Yes, we have heard about this. At any time when we had grounds for concern about the treatment of prisoners we handed over to the Afghans, we suspended transfers until they straightened out again.”

Give the opposition no traction, but DO IT WITH THE TRUTH. This reinforces your credibility, and from there you can brush off the gnat-like buzzing of disgruntled diplomats and take the wind out of the sails of your political opponents. I notice that the government is starting to move in this direction now, but the damage has been done.

Calling politicians “leaders” is a stretch the vast majority of the time. The strength of personality required to stand by your principles (heck, to have some principles as a politician in the first place) is rare, and even more rare is that coupled with enough charisma to pull it off. Preston Manning, for example is very principled, but lacked the charisma to break out into the mainstream. His opposite is sitting in the White House right now; all charisma, no leadership or firm principles, and people are starting to notice.

That I suppose is the point of diminishing returns that you hit if you have firm opinions on things. Far more damaging than merely disagreeing with someone is having no respect for them, and trade-offs must be carefully calculated if you’re to have a successful run as a politician that people feel that they can trust. A rare breed, but the only true Leaders in politics, or anywhere else for that matter.

“You can’t handle the truth!” is a famous admonition (albeit from a work of fiction) about what the public can digest. The public will understand what needs to be done as long as you explain it succinctly and consistently. It works with kids, and we all were kids once so it still works. Note that “succinctly” doesn’t mean “dumb it down”; many people are simple, but the majority of them are not actually stupid and that is an important distinction. And yes, I know I’m repeating myself on this topic, but hey, I’m fairly consistent!

The pesky History that refuses to end.

This month marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the loudest and most terminal death-knell of the Communist empire. Virtually nobody much under the age of 40 today (especially in North America and outside of Europe in general) recognized the significance of the event at the time, and correspondingly don't care too much today.

Indeed, today the Cold War is scarcely even on the radar as a historical period for most people. Since we avoided WW3 I suppose that's unavoidable, but the USSR didn't collapse because we ignored them and hoped they'd go away. Gen. Patton didn't get his wish in 1945 to re-arm the Germans and head east, but they were pretty aggressively contained from that time forward.

Stalin to this day still doesn't have the bad rep of Hitler even though he killed a lot more of his own people than Adolf could ever have dreamed of doing. That said, the generation that had just beaten the (arguably) best military machine in history into the ground knew a threat when they saw one. The political will to fight another major war in Eurasia after six (or 3.5) years of war was simply not there, but the sacrifices made to rid Europe of a blighted ideology would not be completely squandered. If there is anything positive to remember about American foreign policy, it is from that period immediately after WW2.

The USA is broken, and I'm not sure it will ever reach the heights it had the potential to. It did keep the Commies from taking everything over, and that was a great service to the world even if no-one appreciates it now. All of the future tech, space travel, flying cars, etc. should have come from the US, but they are strangling themselves in bureaucracy, political correctness and entitlements.

In the meantime, history marches on. Sorry Francis Fukuyama, you were incredibly wrong, and anyone who actually paid attention to history and current events, 20 years ago as much as today would have known it. I sure did. I read something a long time ago about it being possible to kill pessimists, but optimists would take care of themselves for you. Neoconservatives are a special kind of optimist, the kind that gets a lot of other people killed for their good intentions. They are not alone in this, but I'm not big on labels and categories and these guys are just a big, obvious target.

There was a certain atmosphere that night in November 1989 when the TV images of people smashing the Berlin Wall with sledge hammers started showing up. I was just old enough (and historically aware enough) at the time to be amazed at it, as I knew I was seeing a turning point in history. I was a young soldier back then, and it was until that moment theoretically possible (however unlikely by the late 1980s) that I could get dragged into WW3 in Europe. Knowing that something as big as that had moved from a possibility to an impossibility, just like that... well, I guess you had to be there.

I have good days and bad days like anyone else, but my crystal ball is on the blink and I have no idea where things will go from here. The one thing I do know is that they will go somewhere, but my ability to predict things is pretty much limited to the tactical level, "Gods of the Copybook Headings" kind of things.

I observe (with apprehension, quite frequently) the world that I can see, and history is the keel ballast that keeps me from tipping over completely. As dark as things have ever been, (and things are no worse in that regard today than most times in the past) it never stays like that for good or ill. Will Islam conquer the world (my biggest personal concern)? On balance, not likely. It is the new "Other", and with good cause, as it is as soul-suckingly backwards as Communism in it's worst incarnations, but it has only ever conquered in a relative vacuum. As long as we have the will to fight it, it will not be able to take over.

Are there other things that threaten us? The climate worries some people, but I'm not one of them. It's going to do what it's going to do, and all we can do is make things worse for ourselves if we try to fight it. Nature is BIG, and we are not, so adapt. That, after all is what humanity is best at, and for the record adapting to warmer is easier than adapting to colder.

I saw the Taliban described somewhere today as deranged "fanboys", and it is the most spot-on description of the sort of guy who is attracted to Salafist, etc. Islam I can remember. It's a gang, and it attracts the disaffected and damaged, the simple and the brutal. Communism at least aimed for the intellectuals.

Another historical lesson for those who care to learn it: moderates always get their asses kicked by those willing to go all out for what they believe. The rare case where relatively moderate ideals beat fanatics was (partially) met by WW2. The "partially" is due to the fact that most of the damage was done on the Eastern Front, and we forget that at our peril. The lesson to learn from that is to have some "true believer" allies to do the dirty stuff. Back them with everything you can, but if they'll fight harder than your nationals, let them do it since they're motivated. Think of Ethiopia vs. Somalia.

Europe 20 years after the Wall came down is the canary for Western civilization. There was a time when it was the West, but now it's merely the front line. The Muslims have started to make themselves really unpopular in most European countries. This is still a problem, as 300 years ago they would have been fought on the frontiers, and 200 years ago they were getting booted out of their footholds. The shame is that the Greeks screwed up in 1919-22 and didn't take back Constantinople, then at least the front line would be on the other side of the Dardanelles.

Knocking over strongmen to try to implant democracy is not the future, as it isn't the past; if it didn't work before in some recognizable form, it won't work in your version of it either.

'When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

Sound anything like "Change you can believe in"? I like the fact that the Yanks have a lot of nukes; I'd like it even more if I thought they were willing to use them if need be. That sounds frightening, but if you're willing to go to the wall, the other people who have nukes will make sure they don't end up in the hands of people who'll piss you off. THAT is what I believe in; si vis pacem, para bellum . If you follow that, you're covered no matter what.

I like solutions to things, but many solutions are rather more "final" than our society would find acceptable so we half-ass a lot of things. The gap between the intellectual elite and the disappearing middle and working class is wide, and I think my opinions are more in sync with the latter group. That says something (assuming that I'm not out to lunch), but I'll let you tell me because I'm not even sure what I really think about a lot of things anymore! It's not like we'll ever try to SOLVE the big problems; we'll just hope that the elephants in the room don't sit on us.

Remember, remember, the 5th of November...

Between being busy and being out of action with the current pandemic disease (unpleasant for sure, but not up to the hype of earlier this year), I've put off saying anything about the Ft Hood shootings. In a way this is a useful tactical pause, as it allows the dust to settle a bit and gives an opportunity to temper my knee-jerk reaction to it.

That time having passed, I'll start with the positive; Sgt Kimberly Munley of the Killeen Tx PD (I hope that's correct) stepped up and shot the murderous Islamic zealot down at risk of her own life. She is as of this writing recovering from being wounded in that encounter, and I can't imagine she'll have a problem finding childcare help while she's getting back on her feet. Her actions (e.g. doing her job) have apparently re-opened the debate about allowing women into combat roles in the US military. That's a moot point on this side of the border as we do it already, and women like her are the justification (if not the impetus) for that.

She shot the fucker 4 times, and you would hope that was enough, but it seems not. One way or another (albeit far more expensively now) Nidal Hasan will go to his jihadi reward, but sooner is better than later.

Yes I said it; Nidal Hasan (I refuse to use his rank) is another religious wacko who thinks that you and I should die because we don't do things his way. He's a radicalized Muslim, and that is what this attack was all about. I don't want to hear any more bullshit about PTSD that he supposedly absorbed by osmosis from his psychiatric patients (Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder maybe?). He's a Muslim, and since that's his primary identifier, he had no place in any Western military.

There are an estimated 3500 Muslims in the US armed forces. That is a pool of 3500 people who feel that Islamic law is above any oath they can take to a secular organization. I'm sure not all of them are all that hard-core about it, but it's a risk factor that shouldn't be ignored.

Fifty years ago another ideology posed an existential risk to Western society, and it's adherents were ruthlessly expunged from anywhere sensitive, hell, from Hollywood even. Yes I'm talking about Communists. They too took their orders from a higher authority, in that case and time Moscow, and they would not have been tolerated within the armed forces.

Political correctness has a lot to do with this happening in the first place (there were previous complaints about his ideas) and will have a lot more to do with sanitizing and covering it up. He'll be another generic "lone gunman", and all of those soldiers will have died and been maimed without the benefit of any (re)awakening to the treachery that lurks within our societies.

Here's what Barack Hussein Obama had to say about the motivations of Nidal Hasan:

"This is a time of war. And yet these Americans did not die on a foreign field of battle," Obama said to a crowd estimated at about 15,000. "They were killed here, on American soil, in the heart of this great American community. It is this fact that makes the tragedy even more painful and even more incomprehensible."

Emphasis in the above is mine. I would be curious to know how many of those in attendance at the memorial service at Ft Hood find it so "incomprehensible". Diversity can bite my ass if this is what it leads to.

Know your enemy, October 2009 edition.

This is absolutely breathtaking, reading as this guy circles back to make the point that Muslims want to conquer the entire world. What’s amazing is that he does this in the context of telling an interviewer that the UK’s policies aimed at curbing radicalism in and fostering better integration of the “Muslim” population there are so appalling. I quote:

‘We should be clear, "Prevent" is not a policy that will detect and deter future bombers. It is an ideological agenda built on the false premise that the more Islamic a person is, and the more politicized, the more chance they have of becoming a security threat. This may sound utterly ridiculous, but that is actually the strategy.

Earlier this year, a leak to the Guardian newspaper exposed that the government's definition of "extremism" which should raise suspicions includes belief in the implementation of sharia or Khilafah/Caliphate - anywhere in the world; belief that it is legitimate for the Muslims of Palestine, Iraq or Afghanistan to resist occupation; and belief that homosexuality is a sin. So you can see its real aim is to start a coercive assimilation of Muslims - "converting" them to Western values, and subduing them to the will of the state.’


Well yes, I rather think that IS the aim of the policy! Read the first highlighted section and consider the “falseness” of that premise. I’d say he’s pretty much defined the prime candidates for jihad, but I’m profiling, aren’t I? Interesting how it looks from the other side, and if anyone thinks that there aren’t people who think like this (Islam will cover the world, universal Caliphate, etc.) I hold Dr. Abdul Wahid up as an example.

There’s another bit further on:

MA: Even mainstream British politicians have declared "multiculturalism" to be as good as dead; how will this impact British Muslims at local and national levels?

AW: I think the demise of the policy of "multiculturalism" has made it easier to vilify Islam. Things can be written and said about Islam and Muslims that could never be said of other races or religions. The net result is that more of the wider society, who are fed this diet of lies and misinformation, view Muslims as a suspect community or with hostility.

I would have to ask why anyone would go out of their way to be concerned about Muslims, as opposed to any other particular religious group; that is, if I didn’t already know. The Hindus don’t have plans to take over the world, ditto the Buddhists, Sikhs, Taoists, Zoroastrians, etc. The Christians are largely past that, at least as a group, and the last I checked none of these groups riot and run amok en masse every time someone says something they don’t like.

Multiculturalism as official policy is an absolute disaster, as it says that everything is as good as everything else. The moral-relativists out there might not see the problem with this but I do. There has to be a hard centre that people can look to for continuity, a base for civil society. The constitution of that centre can vary by time and place (culture, etc.), but people have to know there are standards, and what they are.

Assimilation is best for domestic stability, but integration works quite adequately too. I like the food options, etc. that a diverse population brings, and I don’t care if there’s a temple or a mosque down the road any more than a church, as long as it’s there for the same purposes. I will not stand for our Common Law being changed by people from vastly different legal traditions, and Rule of Law (another cornerstone of civil society) can have only one set of rules for EVERYONE. Sure sharia has that too, but I don’t want to live under it, so it can stay where it is; anyone who wants so badly to live under it can live in those places.

The death of Multiculturalism is the only chance that the UK has to survive in any recognizable form, and at some point a decision will have to be made in a lot of other places too. There are rumblings in much of Europe that people are fed up with being forced to kowtow to the Islamists, but I’m not sure they’ll manage to stabilize things.

Time will tell, as always, but the above interview gives the informed a good idea of what the stakes are. For reference, consider living under witch-burning Puritan fundamentalists in the 16th Century. That would be a progressive regime by comparison with the Abdul Wahids of the world taking over.

It's inconvenient when the enemy makes a good point...

I am of course passingly familiar with the form and function of propaganda, and this Taliban press release is certainly a bit of it. That said, I have to say that it is quite free of the usual jihadi crap, and whoever is doing this for them is doing a good job. This part in particular I cannot disagree with:

“At the beginning, they were promising they would withdraw within three months, in their words, after eliminating the so-called terrorism. Contrarily, today eight years from that time have passed, but they have built up hundreds of military bases in Afghanistan and Iraq. They say that they will raise the level of their troops to almost 110,000 troops. It is clear from this, that they have occupied Afghanistan for the execution of their expansionist plans in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Southeast Asia.”

CENTCOM and the US State Department can say what they want, but this is the truth. The US is WAY out of their sphere of influence in Central Asia, and one has to ask why they would plunge these sorts of resources into that part of the world. Containment of Russia and China could be reasons, but if so it's a stupid idea. Pipelines? It would be a hell of a lot easier to run one through once the dust settles and Afghanistan is running it's own show (for good or ill) and that will happen a lot faster if they pull out than if they fight an endless guerrilla war.

Please note that this doesn't represent a change in my position on Afghanistan. I have said from the get-go that we should have smashed the real problem children, established some bases in the Northern Alliance territory to guarantee no recurrence and to keep the Taliban away from the people who really didn't want them there.

I have to say that I believe them when they say that they have no designs on terrorizing the West. They figure that they can run Afghanistan better (read: less rampantly corruptly) than anyone else, and as long as you don't account for the enforced backwardness and misery, they probably can. The reason is that they keep things VERY simple, and punish transgressions mercilessly.

An earlier post of mine mused about just taking over the government. I'll showcase my incredible arrogance by saying that if you put me in charge I would do a better job than Karzai and his cronies. This assumes a mere Division of first-rate troops (10-15,000 depending on organization) with attendant air power and tactical transport. I'd be making deals left right and centre, and cracking heads in a big way when the deals were not held up. Walk softly and carry the biggest stick around. In other words, to run Afghanistan you have to be the biggest, baddest Warlord of the bunch.

I rather like not living in constant fear for my life, so this is completely academic, not a job application. One thing remains salient to this whole debacle: you can't make Afgthanistan into a stable democracy by any means that I see available to us. Exterminating the entire population and colonizing the place with less intransigent groups might be a start but isn't an option. People talk about an "exit strategy", but this is only important in terms of logistics. We have to bring our stuff home when we leave (tanks, guns, planes, etc.) but I guarantee if we told the Taliban tomorrow that we were leaving, there would be no attacks or bombs on our route.

The recent election showed the population what they can expect from Democracy, and they don't see a lot of difference from the old way of doing things. Karzai has the biggest stick (NATO) so he wins. That stick is not fully his to control so he can't hold the country. It would be interesting to see what Karzai would do if he had full tactical control of the NATO forces, but for now he plays us against the populace, reaming us every time we inevitably kill some "civilians".

A lot of people think Gen McChrystal is out-to-lunch with his COIN strategy, and a lot of others think this is the way forward. I think that if you need to double the number of troops in-country to even try this you should be thinking very clearly about the stakes involved. Again this is a time to "man up" and admit that we bit off more than we could swallow. We've lost the south, and we're losing parts that were initially friendly to us. We can recover the non-Pashtun parts, support them militarily to keep the Taliban from taking them over, maintain a presence to keep the pulse of the region, and it's but a matter of drawing some lines.

Pakistan you say? I don't have any answers there, but I will postulate that if they can't manage their internal security, nothing we do is going to help them. Get involved directly and we make more "Taliban", but a solid and dynamic military force to the north of "Talibanistan" would be a sword of Damocles over the Talibs in government to keep them (mostly) out of it. We can knock over their government any time we want to, the one lesson both sides should have learned from the "three month raid" we started out with eight years ago.

Logic and realism

If everybody subscribed to this philosophy the Dalai Lama would be right, but shit ain’t like that:

"Peace is not just the mere absence of violence. . . . Genuine peace is genuine restraint," he said.
The Dalai Lama pointed to former United States president George W. Bush, a man he called a "straightforward" and "nice" person.
But he said the "violent methods" used in Iraq and Afghanistan only give way to "violent consequences."
Only compassion and dialogue can solve differences, the Tibetan leader urged.
"Peace through compassion is logical," he said. "External, long-lasting general peace must come through inner peace."

In the absence of jerkwads wielding sticks, the carrot is indeed all you need. For the longest time I always wondered why the “good guys” are so frequently getting their butts kicked. We don’t always lose, but if good intentions are enough we should be doing better.

We’ll start with Israel. Which side of the good guy/bad guy fence they’re on is a matter of opinion, but on balance I’d say they’re “us” as opposed to “them”. When they show “compassion” (weakness) by pulling out of some contested area (South Lebanon, Gaza) this is not responded to with dialogue and understanding, but with rockets, mortars and attacks on outposts.

“Peace through compassion” is internally logical, but it is patently obvious to any rational person that if Israel ever totally drops its guard, it’s boned. The actual as opposed to theoretical logic of the situation is closer to “kill or be killed”. Restraint just encourages the terrorists and gives them time and opportunity to re-arm and reorganize. In fact, the restraint that they do show (not bulldozing Gaza and everyone in it into the Mediterranean) very palpably imperils Israel’s security.

“They make a desert and call it peace”. That, my dear exiled holy man, is as logical as it gets. If there are no people, there will be no conflict. Even if there are relatively homogenous groups there is relatively little conflict. People are NOT logical; logic is an overlay on our thought processes, and is a cultural artefact. If the Dalai Lama was correct, he wouldn’t be exiled, for example…

Bad guys will always have the advantage of having no interest in restraint. This can burn them in a couple of ways; people will turn against them and/or the other side will drop the gloves. The logic of these situations is also simple, and based on self-interest. Ideology starts wars and keeps them going, but people end them when they’ve had more than they can take. Most people like stability, which is a close analogue of peace, and will back whatever gives them the best prospect to achieve that. If the Taliban for example provide services where the government doesn’t, people will tend to back them even if they don’t like them.

As long as there are guys that are willing to commit atrocities to get what they want there is a completely different logic that applies. The Dalai Lama’s version is utopian, and the word “utopia” is Greek, from ou “no” and topos “place”. As long as we’re here and not there, war most certainly can be logical. Some people just need to die; it’s the only way to stop them since they don’t care about compassion or restraint.

How much restraint we should show in doing that is debatable, but I’ll put it out there that the last war our side won unequivocally was WW2, and then we used literally all the force that we could bring to bear. In modern conflicts you certainly have to at least be prepared to use more than the other side; if you kill them all, they can’t stop your development programs, again logical. Somehow I don’t think this is the logic the DL had in mind, but it’s simpler and makes no assumptions. Simple can be ugly, but it’s generally effective.

Put our money where our brain is, not our mouth.

A former head of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security calls it "regrettable" that Canada plans to withdraw from the conflict in Afghanistan.

He is certainly entitled to his opinion, and the following is undoubtedly true:

Chertoff believes the challenge of this century is "ungoverned space," where there is no government that can maintain order. Those areas of the world can give terrorists room to thrive, he said.

This is the part that I take issue with, not the concept, but the scale and the execution:

"It would be very short-sighted to stint on the investment now and face the consequences in five years," he said. "So I think President Obama is dead-right in what he is doing."

I read something a few days ago about U.S. Special Forces troops sweeping into Mogadishu with helicopters, hitting a specific target, killing him, and extracting with no losses; it's like "Blackhawk Down" except that it worked. The key phrase in the article was "specific intelligence" and THAT is where the investment that Mr Chertoff talks about should be made.

If the place is ungovernable, who are we to think that we can make it so? Even empires had a hell of a time subjugating barbarians; beating them in the field, sure, conquering the place, sure, but holding it? Iraq might have worked if the Yanks had just decapitated the leadership, but I've made that argument before. Superimposing government can work, but building one in a vacuum? Ask another question, what is the Aim?

Yes, "Selection and Maintenance of the Aim" is the foremost of most Principals of Warfare that you will find, although the exact terms will vary. End state is what? Terrorists have no safe havens to attack us from with impunity? I can think of a lot cheaper (in blood and treasure) ways to achieve that than bogging ourselves down and making us the fixed target as we wallow about trying to rebuild a failed state.

The people who live in these places have more pressing motivation than we do for their countries to function, and if THEY can't make it work that doesn't augur well for us to do so. Cynical for damned sure, but I'm still waiting for someone to prove me wrong.

If you want something done right...

In the aftermath (sort of) of the latest Afghan election, there is a lot of comment from various sources about the corruption of the incumbents. If anything, this is probably understated, as the most lucrative parts of the economy is the drug trade, and the Karzai family is deep into it.

I have talked to Afghans in the heart of Taliban territory and they aren't happy when we wreck their stuff and kill them by accident, but they don't want us to leave. Part of that is economic; we break something or tear up their fields, we pay for it and that's a better source of hard currency than they'll get pretty much anywhere else. Bigger than that though, the Taliban are as miserably austere a group as have ever walked the earth and even conservative Pashtuns don't want to live under their rules.

Leaving the problem of how best separate the wolves from the sheep for the moment, back to running the country. The question I have (and I don't have an answer!) is; should we just kick out the government and run the place?

Afghans are famous for uniting to drive out foreign invaders, so on the face of it it sounds like a fantastically bad idea. In the current situation, where their government is seen as a corrupt Western puppet anyway, I don't see what we have to lose.

The people kowtow to the Taliban partly in desperation for any kind of stability, partly in fear, and partly because they know that we (and consequently the Karzai government) won't be sticking around forever. In the meantime we pour in blood and treasure in an ultimately fruitless attempt to get the country on it's feet.

My proposal: decapitate the government and replace it with competent Westerners. Use the British Raj as a model as far as possible and keep locals where you can, replace them where you can't. You have to keep the Bremers out but I really don't see it as being either more expensive or more dangerous than what we're doing right now.

The ANA is already stood up, although it has a long way to go and honestly it may never get all the way there. The police are a disaster that is being somewhat managed, and the biggest challenge is to damp down the corruption to something reasonable (for that part of the world). Right now the public distrusts the government despite its' "nativeness". My gut tells me that they would not rise up against a foreign administration as long as it got the job done.

This does not suggest that things will be all rainbows and frisky puppies if we kick Karzai et al to the curb, spray the opium fields and cut out the middlemen from our aid to the country. I just don't think it would be worse, and people might do what they did in Iraq and start talking to us if they think we can get the job done.

Michael Yon described the US military in Iraq as a "tribe", specifically a powerful one which could be trusted to be neutral and just. Afghanistan is NOT Iraq, and that isn't a good thing in this case. The educated middle class of Iraq doesn't exist in Afghanistan, so we'd have to work with warlords, but if you have the biggest stick on the block you can keep them in line. Be "professional" about running that place and you might gain that (probably grudging) respect from the public.

Incredibly difficult, complex and most certainly bloody, but a sliver of long-term hope. We can extrapolate from what we're doing now, and everybody says it'll take a generation at least. I say throw the dice; go big or go home, and soon at that.

Third one’s a charm…

Holy fuck, this AGAIN!

Omar Khadr's lawyer says his client is being unfairly punished by the Conservative government, which has steadfastly refused to request his repatriation from Guantanamo Bay despite court rulings ordering it to do so.

I have addressed this schiesskopf (and to a lesser extent his whole family) here, but it just won’t die. As for me I’ve not a lot new to say, but opinions/observations follow.

1. Khadr was shot twice by American soldiers. This suggests (and there is a lot of other evidence as well) that the 5.56x45mm NATO assault rifle round has insufficient killing power and should be replaced. Obviously you have to shoot people three times at least to make sure they don’t come back to bite you.

2. His lawyer says that the “Harper Government” picks and chooses which Canadians it’s going to help. Of bloody course they do. The “Canadian” in question was an enemy combatant fighting an allied army in a country replete with terrorist training camps, one or more of which Khadr and his dad were attending. This is no mere passport problem, and it CERTAINLY has nothing to do with him being “a person of colour”.

3. The comments section of the CTV article I linked to is revealing. Roughly 2/3 of posters are quite happy to keep Khadr out of the country, probably permanently, but for sure long enough for the Americans to try him. These same people (and I’m one of them, go figure) forecast Khadr suing the government (hence you and me) for some massive amount whenever he arrives back.

I don’t want him back, but I’ll look at it as impassively as possible: as long as it costs us less to keep him out than to bring him back, we should. He’ll get to Canada eventually, and let’s face it, he’s a lot less dangerous than any number of other people who are already here. No reason to hurry that along though; Guantanamo is as much jail time as this bad apple will see and a bit more will be good for him.

We will remember them, but who are "we"?

LONDON -- Harry Patch, Britain's last survivor of the trenches of World War I, was a reluctant soldier who became a powerful eyewitness to the horror of war, and a symbol of a lost generation.

Patch, who died Saturday at 111, was wounded in 1917 in the Battle of Passchendaele, which he remembered as "mud, mud and more mud mixed together with blood."

Mr Patch was the last fighting soldier of any nation in that conflict, and with his passing the Great War (WW1) will soon pass almost into myth.

I was asked last Remembrance Day to give a speech as a veteran to a local high school. I accepted rather reluctantly, not because it's not worth doing (quite the opposite) but because I can't put my experiences in the same league as the men who fought in the World Wars. This being said, I was all they had so I stepped up.

A key point I tried to make to the kids was that the veterans of the mass-army wars of the 20th Century are nearly gone. That is pretty parochial I suppose, as there are lots of survivors of the Iran-Iraq war, loads of American soldiers who saw a lot of shit in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the wars for the soul of Western Civilization are the ones that really got our attention.

Time will tell if those of us who served in the GWoT in it's various guises will be accorded any sort of equivalence for what we were trying to do but I'm guessing not. There are several reasons for that.

First is that it's not the epic struggle that were the World Wars. Korea was on that scale, at least locally, and even that first successful example of the Cold War strategy of "containment" (remember Communism?) never caught the public the same way.

Second, and not really separate from the first, is the sense of sacrifice. Right now, Canada's Army is at war, but the country (and even the other branches of the CF) is not. There is no rationing, no conscription, no "We Want YOU" posters everywhere, and bluntly, not enough soldiers are dying. This is war reduced to personal, not national, tragedy and it directly effects hardly anyone.

Third, it's the lack of a sense in the public of an existential threat to our way of life. Part of that problem is that few people give much thought to what exactly is "our" way of life, and our Diversity agenda has a lot to do with that. Beer companies are about the only thing I can think of offhand that present a "Canadian" identity, but the "I am Canadian" spots etc. aren't the sort of thing that will draw the youth of the country to the colours to defend it. Osama Bin Laden is no Kaiser Bill (except that they're in all likelihood just as dead), and not a lot of people are concerned about the jackbooted tread of Islamic zealots stomping over our precious institutions.

What we have now is "The Long War", which will never be one to end all others. I don't know that Remembrance Day will mean much to most people in 20 years when the last of the WW2 vets has passed away. I guess that it'll be left to people like me, but I can't imagine the King, PM, etc. will make much of an address when the last of us passes away.

That's for the best, as it would mean that there was never again the mass slaughter of the WWs, but I hope that people won't completely forget those generations when they're no longer around to speak for themselves. They did a lot for us and suffered terribly for it.

The last straw?

Time to leave:

Unsure of whether civilians were inside the compound, the Marines had an interpreter talk to the insurgents, said an official who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak publicly. After some time, a number of women and children left the compound, the military official said.

The insurgents denied that any more civilians were inside, the official said, but the Marines held their fire anyway. About 4 p.m. (7:30 a.m. ET), in the midst of the standoff, another group of women and children emerged from the compound, the official said. As of 4:30 p.m., the Marines were holding all fire and waiting out the insurgents, the official said.

Finally, a screaming woman emerged from the compound with a bullet wound to her hand, Pelletier said. Then, another group of women came out, covered from head to toe, according to custom, he said. The Marines attended to the wounded woman while the others walked away.

When the Marines went into the compound, they discovered that it empty, Pelletier said. That's when they realized the fighters had dressed up as women to escape, he said.

This is an absolute farce. Despite the rather abysmal level of writing demonstrated by this CNN piece, it is obvious that the RoE (Rules of Engagement) in Afghanistan have tightened to the point that they have throttled any hope we may have had of getting the upper hand on these fanatics.

If it's as simple as waiting until you find some women (rarely seen, but not scarce in Afghanistan) and hiding amongst them long enough to get changed, we'll never kill any Taliban again.

I had hoped to stay away from this subject, but even if Despair is a sin, I'm feeling a bit of it about the prognosis for any of these fights. Some of that was triggered by an article on Algeria that I read yesterday, suggesting that the government is beating them militarily, but the pressure the Salafists are putting on the average Mohammed on the street is getting the job done.

Balance of force, balance of terror, whatever you want to call it. People can be intimidated by those who show themselves capable of killing and torturing them. Rare is the person who will prefer to be killed (unpleasantly, at that) than to knuckle under.

One of the key problems in Algeria that tipped the balance against the non-islamists was the government's decision to disarm all of the civilian "Patriot" units in the towns and villages. These were standard Local Defence groups (from what little I've been able to find about them), apparently quite effective at keeping the bad-asses out, and were disbanded by the government when the islamists had been "defeated".

Those fuckers are defeated when they're all dead, which takes a lot of work and a relentless bloody-mindedness. There is the eternal argument that if you give arms to these local groups there's no saying who will end up with them. This is a valid point if there is a scarcity of weapons, but in this early 21ieme siecle those are about as hard to get as the clap. Assault weapons are readily available to anyone that c an afford them, and they're not too expensive. What does make them scarce is government control.

The best way to contain the bad guys is to allow people to defend themselves in a locally-organized fashion, to fill in the gaps that the army and police can't manage. That may not work in Afghanistan, so a different plan is necessary.

As a refinement of my previous position on splitting the country and backing the non-Pashtun parts of it, go back to backing warlords. Support the ones who oppose the Taliban, and obliterate their compounds from orbit if they turn on you. Your aid should be lots of tanks, artillery, low-tech stuff that needs to be centralized to be effective. That gives them firepower, and gives you fixed targets to hit if they step out of line. Divide and contain, if not conquer, has worked forever.

In any event, get the hell out of Afghanistan because our current capacity is rapidly being shown to be incapacity. Some Surge; more troops just gives more chances to not do the job.

Panic-demic

I was hoping this whole "swine flu" thing would fade away when it was obvious that hardly anyone was dying from it, but no such luck as yet.

The WHO is claiming 90K cases reported so far, but I'm sure there are a lot more. There have been at least one and possibly two cases in my immediate family, and we didn't panic or report it. There are the vague reports of "flu parties" where parents try to generate some herd immunity amongst their offspring. Were this another Spanish Flu this would be grounds for criminal child endangerment charges, but with the almost negligible death rate I personally think it could be useful, or at least not harmful.

If one remembers the hoof-and-mouth livestock epidemic in the UK a few years back you can see one way of treating an epidemic. Burning everyone who contracts H1N1 would cause an armed revolution in most places, and should in the rest, so the comparisons are not meant to be direct. I have heard that a certain level of herd immunity can be generated if things are allowed to run their course. I don't know if that is in fact the case, but it sounds plausible; that said, economic factors in the agricultural business would never permit that to happen.

So what is driving the WHO and various agencies in keeping this "pandemic" bandwagon rolling? The media "helps" this along of course, but the whole thing smacks of bureaucratic momentum to me. Whole staffs have been expanded at the UN and elsewhere as new empires are carved out of any current crisis.

That could lead to various screeds about ever-expanding bureaucracies and governments, but not right now. No, I was just noting the persistence of this swine flu thing despite the fact that the regular garden-variety flu is still killing at least ten times as many people with (almost) no one remarking upon it. Good old media and special-interest scare mongering.

It's a bit like like passing a crippling carbon tax bill in the US with absolutely no actual evidence that it needs to be done, let alone that the 1500 pages of the Waxman-Markey bill will do anything other than hasten the decent of the USA into de-industrialization and thence to bankruptcy and irrelevancy. Happy July 4th, by the way...

There will always be an English.

I wrote an essay in university about the “Cultural Legacy of the British Empire”, and this article in Foreign Policy comes to the same (largest) conclusion that I did, albeit from a different angle.

The English language (in various forms) is overtaking the other largest cultural artefact of the B.E., football (soccer). There are already far more Indians speaking English than there are Brits, full-stop, and the numbers continue to rise worldwide. I won’t rehash the linked article, but I wanted to make a point about it’s conclusions as to the cause of this.

The article mentions a linga franca, and English is certainly that for the foreseeable future. I contend, however, that the reason this is so is because of the historical accident that the two succeeding world-spanning empires both spoke English (or near enough in the case of the Americans).

The 350 million or so Indians who speak English don’t do so because of America; neither do any of the Anglophone African countries, the former Dominions (Australia, Canada & New Zealand), or even the USA itself. The USA is itself a legacy of The British Empire 1.0, one which absorbed most of the potential of the U.K. and created a continental power that stepped into the colonial power vacuum after WW2.

If anyone can find a contrary example I’ll stand corrected, but I do not believe that there has ever before been two successive empires that spoke the same language, certainly not any big enough to have more than regional influence.

One million words (the number of them now supposedly in the the English language) is a hell of a lot, and that number goes a long way to explain the appeal of English. It’s a mongrel language which takes the best from other languages to cover new concepts. Just like biological mongrels, this hybridization keeps it strong and healthy. I don’t think any of my “words” have made it in yet, but there’s obviously room…

Oh, treasure the use of the weaseling phrase that never quite says what you mean...

I didn't think I had much to say about the ongoing Sotomayor foolishness in the US, but never say never...

In fact, today's post has more to do with the spinelessness of politicians than the judicial activism that runs unchecked in the US (see the post by Steve Setzer about 2/3 down the page here), although that too is something that is of concern to anyone who claims to believe in representative democracy.

In a letter to supporters, the Georgia Republican said that his words had been "perhaps too strong and direct" last week when he called Sotomayor a reverse "racist," based on a 2001 speech in which she said one would hope the rulings of a "wise Latina" with a breadth of life experience would be better than those of a white male without similar experiences. Gingrich's remarks created a furor among Sotomayor's backers and caused problems for GOP figures who have been pushing to bring more diversity to the party.

Gingrich conceded that Sotomayor's rulings have "shown more caution and moderation" than her speeches and writings, but he said the 2001 comments "reveal a betrayal of a fundamental principle of the American system — that everyone is equal before the law."

 

"Too strong and direct" eh? If that's what you really think and you want to make any claim to being a leader, or at least someone with actual principles, bloody well say it. I've seen left-ish defenders of Sotomayor talking about "context", but it's a red herring. She said what she said, and he said what he said. I have no respect for anyone who won't back up what they say, or if necessary, admit it was stupid/uninformed, etc. Qualified retractions are embarrassing and disingenuous, because it means that you're not willing to take the heat for what you really think.

Next: Purges and the Midwest Gulag?

It never occurred to me that I'd be agreeing with pieces on the state of capitalism that come from Pravda, but this one hits on all cylinders. Example:

'The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America's short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.

These past two weeks have been the most breath taking of all. First came the announcement of a planned redesign of the American Byzantine tax system, by the very thieves who used it to bankroll their thefts, loses and swindles of hundreds of billions of dollars. These make our Russian oligarchs look little more then ordinary street thugs, in comparison. Yes, the Americans have beat our own thieves in the shear volumes. Should we congratulate them?'

Of course Putin warned about this very trend a few months back, and I noted that (somewhere) here. The tone of this one is a bit hectoring, but I can't disagree even with that. The Russians know all about centrally planned EVERYTHING, and the Americans ignore 70 years of that at their peril. Here, peril, peril; come here boy!

There is a lot of talk about the new US Supreme Court appointee, Sotomayor. She's as politically correct as anyone could want, and apparently believes (as many judges do) that it's the courts' job to change or even make laws. Needless to say I don't agree with that; we elect people to do that, but a lot of "progressives" want things to move faster than legislatures generally do.

There's a certain amount of that in Canada, but our political and social structure is (shockingly) far healthier, at least so far. The USA is certainly in trouble, and seems to be digging a deeper hole for itself on all fronts. I've read a lot about the dismal state of the American education system, mentioned in the linked article (but see Jerry Pournelle's blog for a lot more) and the political pork-barrelling going on with the auto bailouts rivals anything Mugabe could come up with.

Plus ca change; the Russians are trying to warn the Americans away from the Marxist edge, and plus c'est le meme chose; the Americans are ignoring them. Sheeple indeed, but they aren't exclusive to the USA...

All is not lost. Yet.

OTTAWA -- The Supreme Court of Canada refused Thursday to hear arguments that Canadian troops in Afghanistan should apply the Charter of Rights in their dealings with prisoners.

That leaves it to the Military Police Complaints Commission to investigate whether foreign captives delivered to Afghan custody by Canadian troops are routinely tortured.

I really hope this comes as no surprise to anyone; it is, after all the CANADIAN Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the last time I checked we hadn't taken Afghanistan over. I had my reservations about the Turks and Caicos joining Canada, but if I must make a choice...

Afghans, particularly ones that are trying to kill Canadian soldiers are, well, Afghans. They have their own government (and they're welcome to it!) to appeal to (ha!) if the ANA or ANP are mistreating them. It is not our troops doing anything untoward with them, it's their own people.

This of course opens questions about what kind of system are we propping up. I personally don't care what they do to each other, because you can see from what NATO (you know who I mean when I say that) is going through to try to hold the place together, that it's a hell of a lot of blood and treasure for little return.

I won't go back to that "well" right now, but I'll keep this short and just say that I'm happy that the idiots who'd like to flood our country and courts with all sorts of fellow (but different) idiots can't do it with these clowns. I might not mind so much letting a few in, as long as I could make them live with these Amnesty types. I'd be curious to see how many of these secular humanist idealists would still be pushing this idea if they had to be responsible for an illiterate Pashtun, etc. jihadi under their own roof. An interesting experiment to separate the real idealists at least...

The other end of the arc.

I thought this was interesting, not because I agree with his entire postulate, but because it represents in some ways the opposite swing of the pendulum from the Gaea "nature is everything" school.

That said, I think that this guy REALLY underestimates the power of natural processes in comparison to what we can do. That statement however opens up some questions about what is considered nature. The biggest change in the biosphere (once Earth had one) was largely driven by plants "vegeforming" (my word) the planet by creating Oxygen in large enough amounts to change the makeup of the atmosphere.

One major natural event (hurricane, volcano, earthquake, solar flare) puts out more energy, etc. than the entire human race does in an equivalent period of time. The idea that we can modify anything more than our immediate environment is pretty arrogant, the more so because it's demonstrably false. Thera and Krakatoa are just two volcanic events in (sort-of) recorded history that put any nuclear bomb we've come up with in the shade.

Society needs to learn from recent scientific efforts to explain changes in greenhouse gases and the biosphere during the Anthropocene. Three lines of evidence demonstrate that we live on a planet reshaped by humans for thousands of years.

The first evidence dates back to the beginnings of science itself, when amateur scientists stumbled across the bones of massive, long-extinct mammals like the mastodon, giant ground sloth and saber-toothed tiger. The last glaciation can’t explain their disappearance 10,000 years ago, because they survived many preceding glaciations.

So what do I think? That is after all what this spot is about, so I'll tell you. Of course we can modify our environment, and history (and prehistory) shows it, from those first photosynthetic respiring plants to draining the Aral Sea for cotton production. We can pollute and wipe out species left and right, and to date we've done a fine job of it. Hopefully we can cut back on that, because there are a hell of a lot more of us around, and we all want consumer goods which don't grow on trees, but may come from them in some form.

What we can't do, is totally derail the planet, at least not without a gob load of H-bombs going off, like, say, all that we've ever made. Even that the planet would eventually recover from, and some sort of life would reseed from whatever survived. It just wouldn't be us.

That, we can concern ourselves with. Keep things as clean as we can, but be realistic about what we're doing and why we're doing it. Heavy metals in the water: bad. CO2 in the water: fizzy, and we drink it all the time. How is that a pollutant? Is sugar? I guess the EPA should ban pop; I say that glibly, but if they join up with the FDA (using American examples here as they're bigger than ours) that's exactly what the nanny-crats might yet do to protect us from ourselves.

Sounds like a case for Unconditional Surrender Man!

Tamils in this country have been camping out on Parliament Hill for the last few weeks, and the political angles on this just get more and more acute. There is nearly zero chance that our current government will change its’ policy toward the LTTE, but India and the UN are making noises now. Canada has no pull in that part of the world, so I leave it to your imagination the reaction of any Sri Lankan government officials to us telling them how to run things.

I get annoyed when we try to tell other countries (that aren’t attacking us or our allies) how to run their affairs. I may be some Westphalian dinosaur, but I wouldn’t stand for China (for example) telling us how to treat Quebec. If things are so bad that you think you need to intervene, e.g. massacres, ethnic cleansing, etc., send in the army. If you won’t put your money where your mouth is, shut up.

As already mentioned, the Canadian Government is staying out of it, which is the only appropriate action. What I’d like to do here is simply put the political manoeuvring in context with the military situation.

War is messy; things get broken and people get killed. The (many, anyway) Tamils were happy as clams when their side was sticking it to the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, and they’d carved out an autonomous zone in the north. Now the underdogs are getting their asses handed to them and Tamilland (or whatever) is being rolled up and pulled back by the government.

Napoleon said something to the effect that in war the Moral is to the Physical as is 3 to 1. This is the same man who used the levee en masse to create the “Grande Armée” so I hold more with the old saw “Quantity has a Quality all its’ own” for him. In modern conflicts, Information Operations (IOs) are designed to work the morale angle, and the UN is helping the Tamils as much as it can in this regard.

The UN is claiming 6500 dead and 13000+ civilians killed by the Sri Lankan armed forces, but then refuses to say from whence came these figures. It’s not quite “Highway of Death” in scope, but this has no proof and is quite possibly arbitrary. The great thing about making up numbers is that you can make up whatever ones you want to.

What does have the ring of authenticity to it however, is what the ubiquitous “rights groups” are claiming:

International rights groups have accused the government of shelling densely populated civilian areas in the war zone and accused the rebels of holding the civilians as human shields. Both sides deny the accusations.

Asymmetric warfare pretty much guarantees that both of these things will happen. The weaker side will use any advantage it can get, and the stronger side will try to kill the opposition wherever they hide. Again, the Laws of Armed Conflict (LoAC) have no problem with attacking a military target, wherever it may be as long as reasonable force is used. There is a lot of grey in the idea of what’s “proportional”, and the media really doesn’t like any sort of area weapon like artillery or bombing in a civilian area.

Here is the disjoint between the military and political imperatives. Politically the omelette has to be made, but rare is the (democratic) government that can take the media/political heat that will result from all the eggs that need to be broken by the military to that end.

I have no doubt that the Sri Lankan field commanders are not trying to kill civilians, and will avoid it where possible. I am equally certain that the LTTE are willing to incur some friendly deaths to make the security forces look bad. This is used to get the media, certain organizations, etc. on your side and/or applying pressure to the other side. The LTTE are on the ropes, and after all the fighting, bombing and bloodshed in Sri Lanka since this started, the government has a chance to knock the military threat on the head.

The time for political considerations to take the forefront is after your military objectives have been met. There is no ethnic cleansing, genocide, massacres (at least not big or official ones; these fights can be nasty), it’s just a fight to the finish. The fighting will stop the day that the LTTE surrender, not when they need a breather to recover. At least that’s the direction things are going, and it’s the way I’d do it.

Yo ho, it's a Pirate's death for you.

There have been a lot of electrons forcibly arranged over this topic, but I've noticed a discrepancy between the media's hand-wringing and the comments of the (apparently) general public commenting on it.

I don't think I go out on too long a limb when I say that most people don't care what happens to pirates. I saw some analogies to attempted home invasion, and armed persons bent on committing illegal acts are subject to potentially violent interdiction under the laws of any country.

It is therefore a bit disquieting ('tho not surprising) to see all these clowns worrying about what the pirates will do in retaliation for three of them being killed while holding a sailor hostage at gunpoint. Do we not punish criminals because we're afraid of what their compatriots will do? Sure there's a bit of that on a local basis in a lot of places. In a lot of northern Canadian towns I've heard anecdotally that the minimal RCMP detachments have a live-and-let-live arrangement with the local organized crime figures within certain recognized behavioral boundaries, but this is certainly NOT policy.

People have police and military so that they can be protected from various threats. The idea that we are afraid to deal with a problem to prevent it from getting worse does not appeal to taxpayers, or, in this case, sailors and the companies that own the ships. Bending over and taking it doesn't make thugs go away, they just send their friends to get some too.

.50 cal HMGs (Browning M2 or DShK) are neither rare nor particularly expensive (ranging from big plasma TV to used motorcycle in real-world money terms) and one of those fore and aft on any ship and you can sort out any pirates you're going to encounter in the Gulf of Aden. I'm sure there are legal implications to the possession of these weapons, but if you shoot up a bunch of armed pirates on the high seas you are better tried by 12 than carried by 6. I'm not sure, but I think it being the high seas and all you can defend yourself as you see fit. If anyone knows for sure one way or the other, fill me in.

"Shoot on Sight" would do the job nicely, but in absence of arming the merchant ships, what are the options? Convoying is apparently out, as time is money and the devil-take-the-hindmost attitude of peacetime Just-in-Time delivery seems to spike it right out of the gate. I've read some stuff that advocates taking out the pirates' shore bases, but those too lilly-livered to shoot them in flagrante delicto will scarcely countenance preemptive strikes on fishermen.

That's not an irrelevant problem, but it's not mine to solve even if people actually listened to me. There may well be some escalation, and a good test of how "overstretched" the US military is will come if another US-flagged ship gets taken, especially if people are killed. A precedent has been (haltingly and painfully slowly) set, so things will be interesting to watch from a distance.

One last thing occurs to me on this; there is definitely a market here for military contractors (old term: mercenaries). If carrying your own weapons on a merchant ship is too problematic, hiring reputable professionals is likely cheaper and more certain than the insurance you'll need as this gets worse. Enterprising types could set up in some country along the route, and hook up in international waters bringing aboard any required weapons (heavy or otherwise), debarking at the other end, or switching to other ships headed back the same way.

Free enterprise isn't dead; the response to the pirates' version could be market-driven too. A few more swashes may have to be buckled before this scurvy crew decides to desist, it's just a question of who will be willing to do what's necessary.

Meltdown Shakedown

The following seems pretty straightforward:

Arctic sea ice is melting so fast most of it could be gone in 30 years.

So far so good, I guess, but notice the fudging "most" and "could". Already not bearing up well to even casual examination. It gets worse.

"Due to the recent loss of sea ice, the 2005-2008 autumn central Arctic surface air temperatures were greater than 5 C above" what would be expected, the new study reports.

That amount of temperature increase had been expected by the year 2070.

A jump of 5C is a MASSIVE increase in average temperature, and would have been noted before now. That's the sort of temperatures from the Holocene that had trees well above our current tree line although there is now reason to doubt that this high-latitude warming was uniform across the globe. Anyway, I digress.

They expect the area covered by summer sea ice to decline from about 7.2 million square kilometres normally to 1.6 million square kilometres within 30 years.

Last year's summer minimum was 4.6 million square kilometres in September, second lowest only to 2007 which had a minimum of 4.2 million square kilometres, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

The Center said Arctic sea ice reached its winter maximum for this year at 15 million square kilometres on Feb. 28. That was 720,000 square kilometres below the 1979-2000 average making it the fifth lowest on record. The six lowest maximums since 1979 have all occurred in the last six years.

"They expect"; who cares what these guys "expect", can you give me evidence for it? The bit below that was the attempt, but what does this actually tell us? Last summer suggests things are getting colder again, but a curve doesn't plot from one point. Also, if the six lowest maximums have come in the last six years, but last year's was the fifth lowest, what does that suggest to you?

I'd have to see the numbers, but this sounds to me like things are chilling again, and that is borne out by what has actually happened world-wide in the last year or so. The lack of raw data in a news post are hardly surprising, but red herrings like "The finding adds to concern about climate change caused by human activities such as burning fossil fuels" show that people have an agenda and that mere facts are not going to stand in the way.

If you NEED something to worry about...

The Gore-ian panic about "Climate Change" (as it's being called now, since it's obviously NOT warming) is ebbing a bit. Not enough at this point, but it's remarkable what a collapsing world economy and a growing mass of contrary evidence will do to an idea that was never based on a proper understanding of natural processes in the first place.

As we wait to see if the leftists and the UN can successfully destroy the First World production base and economies, here's a (real) potential catastrophe we could actually be starting to do something to prevent.

Over the last few decades, western civilisations have busily sown the seeds of their own destruction. Our modern way of life, with its reliance on technology, has unwittingly exposed us to an extraordinary danger: plasma balls spewed from the surface of the sun could wipe out our power grids, with catastrophic consequences.

The incursion of the plasma into our atmosphere causes rapid changes in the configuration of Earth's magnetic field which, in turn, induce currents in the long wires of the power grids. The grids were not built to handle this sort of direct current electricity. The greatest danger is at the step-up and step-down transformers used to convert power from its transport voltage to domestically useful voltage. The increased DC current creates strong magnetic fields that saturate a transformer's magnetic core. The result is runaway current in the transformer's copper wiring, which rapidly heats up and melts. This is exactly what happened in the Canadian province of Quebec in March 1989, and six million people spent 9 hours without electricity. But things could get much, much worse than that.

Coronal Mass Ejections are not the product of some politically motivated agitator's agenda, but they are (at least on our time scale) rare. The benchmark is the Carrington event of 1859 and anything that can cause auroras at the equator has to be bad news for our electronics.

Technology trap anyone? We're certainly in one; 6.7B people can't be supported by a pre-industrial base, something that the Luddites at the UN and places like the Suzuki Foundation may or may not be thinking about as they work toward dismantling the cultures and economies that have gotten us this far.

My point is that we are wasting a lot of time, effort and money to prevent something that likely is beyond our influence, let alone whether it is actually a bad thing. A lot of people who actually know what they're talking about think we need more CO2 in the atmosphere, but I'll leave that for the moment. There are things we need to worry about, that have concrete solutions to them. I will go on record as saying that it is far more likely that our civilization could be brought to collapse by a big-ass solar flare than by the effects of respiration.

The state of the alienation.

The old blog is getting zero traffic these days, but I suppose I can't be surprised as I haven't had a lot to say of late.

A perusal of the news shows that the world continues on it's perennial voyage to heck in some hand-borne conveyance, but really no faster or slower than it has recently. The economy of the west is in varying states of distress which has it's trickle-down effect on everyone else. The more I read about how things are done in the USA and the piling-on of stifling government regulation, the more I doubt the US will ever get back to the status it's had for the 60+ years since the end of WWII.

News that should make me feel better is that it's more and more clear to the public that Global Warming is a scam. There are two main reasons that doesn't cheer me as it should; one, Obama's crew are moving ahead to classify CO2 as a pollutant (fine the trees then!) and two, if anything, it's going to get colder.

The latter is more likely to have an impact on me than the former, living in a northern clime (tho not in fact above the 49th //) but if the Americans succeed in completely destroying their industrial base it bodes not well for the rest of the hemisphere. I've read a good deal about how the present state of the US economy came about from off-shoring all manufacturing (mostly to China) and then having some sort of credit shell game to generate the money that would then be sent to the Chinese as well as the industrial base.

Quite the house of cards, and there are some arguments against unrestricted Free Trade that can be made (and have been), but not my forte so I won't wade right in. I will however go on record as saying that in a phone poll some years ago I was willing to pay a bit more for milk if it ensured we had a domestic supply. This doesn't work for everything, but it is obvious that the lifestyles most of us expect are unsupportable in the long term. The bubble has certainly burst in the States, so we should take some lessons from that.

Anyway, not the sort of vitriol my fans are looking for, and to that I just say that it's too bad I didn't have this kind of forum when I was 20. That being said, I've stayed out of jail, so maybe that's all to the good...

If anyone is still looking here, I like a challenge, so challenge me. Work, etc. is pretty hectic so I don't have the time I once did, but I work a lot better if motivated, so YOU can take that as a challenge. Find something that pisses me off enough to rant about it, and I will.