Bogged down in Stanleygrad.

I'll start with the good:

Islamabad, Pakistan (CNN) -- Another senior Afghan Taliban leader has been arrested in Pakistan, two Pakistani intelligence officials told CNN on Monday.

Security forces arrested Mullah Abdul Kabir last week from a religious school in the district of Nowshera, 54 miles (88 km) northwest of Islamabad, the officials said.

"This arrest underscores a change in Pakistan's policy," Gul said. "This suggests their level of cooperation with the U.S. is much better than in the past."

Gul said the new level of cooperation could be in response to Washington's recent decision to tone down its criticism of the Pakistani military.

"The Pakistani military has finally convinced the U.S. military establishment not to publicly condemn it," said Gul. "When you criticize the Pakistani military publicly, it reduces room for maneuvering for Pakistan's institutions. It becomes difficult for the military to motivate the lower and middle rank officers. Finally, there is a much better equation between both military establishments."

This is a key flaw in American in particular and Western foreign policy in general. When you talk smack about people that you would like to do your dirty work, it's hardly likely to make them willing to put themselves out on your behalf. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" is a cornerstone of Realpolitik (even if not worded quite that bluntly) and there are times to shut up. More times in my opinion than there are to gob off about how other countries are handling their internal problems.

Now, the Bad:

The Afghan cabinet has revised the death toll from a NATO airstrike in the centre of the country down to 27 civilians killed, from 33 previously.

On Saturday, Afghan President Hamid Karzai admonished NATO troops for not doing enough to protect civilian lives. During a speech at the opening session of the Afghan parliament, Karzai called for extra caution on the part of NATO, which is currently conducting a massive offensive on the southern Taliban stronghold of Marjah in neighbouring Helmand province.

"We need to reach the point where there are no civilian casualties," Karzai said. "Our effort and our criticism will continue until we reach that goal."

Bullshit; when the opposition is using human shields this will simply not happen.

And last but far from least, the Ugly (from the main link):

MARJAH, Afghanistan — Outnumbered and outgunned, Taliban fighters are mounting a tougher fight than expected in Marjah, Afghan officials said Sunday, as U.S.-led forces converged on a pocket of militants in a western section of the town.

U.S. officials signalled their intention to attack Marjah, a major Taliban supply and opium-smuggling centre, months ago, apparently in hopes the insurgents would flee and allow the U.S.-led force to take over quickly and restore an Afghan government presence.

Instead, the insurgents rigged Marjah with bombs and booby traps to slow the allied attack, which began Feb. 13. Teams of Taliban gunmen stayed in the town, delivering sometimes intense volleys of gunfire on Marine and Afghan units slogging through the rutted streets and poppy fields.

Afghan Defence Ministry spokesman Gen. Mohammad Zahir Azimi said the U.S. and its allies had expected the Taliban to leave behind thousands of hidden explosives, which they did. But they were surprised to find that so many militants stayed to fight.

"Surprised", eh? Me, not so much. What the fuck did you THINK they would do if you gave them months (unmolested) to prepare? I know what I'd do in their place; each of my most zealous jihadis would be built multiple fortresses within the town with enough bombs, grenades, RPGs and small arms ammo to stage hit and run attacks every time the infidels turned a corner. Oh wait, that's they did too...

I will say it here as unequivocally as I can: Gen. Stanley McCrystal's strategy for Afghanistan is stupid. Yes, stupid, rather like Hitler's decision to leave 6th Army in Stalingrad when the Soviets enveloped it, although the scale of the impending (military) disaster is of course smaller. If you wanted to do this, (it has been done in Fallujah) give the townies 24 hours notice to leave. That's enough time to sauve qui peut and let the Taliban small fry take off (the intent here) and NOT allow them months to mine and fortify the whole town.

Months of warning and they're still killing heaps (not really, but the media...) of civilians because they're being used as shields, and just because of standard war type stuff. Errant MLRS missiles wouldn't kill civvies who aren't there, and our side wouldn't be bogged down (in what I'll call Stanleygrad) if the good General's strategy had any firm basis in ground truth.

There are some signs of hope (see top) over there, but this is NOT one of them, and a public relations minefield to boot. Hopefully this debacle gets a new commander over there, but I'm not holding my breath waiting on that.

Decline and Slide of the West

The linked article ties in nicely with the latest series of posts here. Much better researched and thought through, but you'll notice a lot of ads on his page that you don't see at AotF.

The big thing to take away from this is the concept of Material Productivity. There may be other terms, but it's exactly what I've been on about and it fits perfectly.

Yet Rome did not fall for four centuries after its moralists wrote of its decadence and decline. Why the resilience?

Entitlements and official corruption were for centuries subsidized by the profits accruing from global standardization and Romanization — brought about by the implementation and imposition of Roman law, order, and commerce throughout the Mediterranean. As long as the empire was cohesive, it brought in thousands yearly into its sphere of influence.

And:

So such global uniformity created real wealth in newfound places faster than such bounty could corrupt the citizens in the old Italian core to the degree to bring down what was now a world system. In other words, the creation of entirely new cities like Leptis or the growth of Asian centers such as Ephesus, brought previously unproductive tribal folk into the Roman system at precisely the time old Romans were no longer doing the things that had once created their own vibrant culture that swept the Mediterranean — the ancient version of the Chinese youth working 10 hours in an Adidas factory while an American counterpart is still “finding himself.”

The point? We see something like this today. What made American culture boom through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were traditional American values like the Protestant work ethic, family thrift, limited and stable government, equality of opportunity rather than result, lower taxes, personal freedom, opportunity for advancement and profit, and faith in American exceptionalism.

But the cloning and spreading of this system after WWII (“globalization”) did two things: literally billions of non-Westerners adopted the Western mode of production and began, in economic terms, becoming far more productive in creating valuable manufacturing goods, food, and exporting previously unknown or untapped natural resources; in addition, the vast rise in population added billions to the world’s productive work force.

Yes, lazily blockquoting someone else could be taken as another sign of said decline, but I do have a day job too. I am more than passingly familiar with the Roman Empire, though certainly no expert; this sounds like what happened to them, and the analogies with today are ignored at our peril.

Something I know even less about is Economics, however the same could be said for most people who specialize in it; the Dismal Science indeed. Free Trade was seen by many as the thin edge of the predicament we find ourselves in, and can't claim mastery of the intricacies of those arguments. However, if there is one thing I have learned by surviving this long is that if you need a complicated explanation of or complex scheme for anything you're doing something wrong.

Brushing aside the obvious exceptions to that statement I am reminded of that one house that remained standing in Chicoutimi during the 1996 Saguenay flood while all else around it was washed away. The reason it stood is that it was built on bedrock. The more we undermine the foundations of our economy, the closer our collapse as a society comes. I think that NAFTA could have worked, as long as we protected it against wider competition. Even that is cold comfort to people who used to do jobs that moved to Mexico. Now those jobs have moved to China, and our wealth is moving in an ever widening loop, less of it making back to us.

Again, this is a more acute problem for the U.S. than for Canada, but I am not optimistic that all the recently lost manufacturing jobs will return to Ontario when this slump is over. Watch and shoot.

Engineering Twilight, Part Two

Today I come to the subject I had in mind when I concocted this title, and ironically the tangent it spawned was more coherent and supportable than what will follow here, mais c'est la guerre.

No, the plan was something that I've been thinking about for a while, and it has to do with our decreasing vision if not our absolute decline in ability to do certain things. I was watching something on the Military Channel about the SR-71 which had video of the production process. They had to make the plane out of titanium, so Lockheed developed techniques to cast and forge the stuff. The connection here is that while watching this I said "That represents the peak of American engineering".

It was a plane, and although it was really fast, it was no Three Gorges Dam or (more contemporaneous to it) Apollo Project, so I don't mean the most sophisticated or biggest thing built by man. What it meant to me, and I could be completely wrong, was that we have lost the sort of industrial "muscle" that would allow a single company to build something as outrageous as a plane that is 90% titanium and goes Mach 3.2+ at 85,000ft (or 3.5 at over 100,000ft, depending on your source).

Of course this would never have happened at any other time or place in history than in a still-prosperous U.S.A. in the throes of an ideological struggle for the political and economic soul of the world. The Cold War isn't seen like that any more, but that was what it was and Reagan finally won it by bankrupting the U.S.S.R. Since then the West has lacked that sort of far-horizon existential threat. The war against Islam is much older, but the threat is a lot less definable than that of the 1st Guards Tank Red Banner Army facing you over the IGB (Inner German Border).

The America that built the SR-71 is gone, and not looking likely to come back. I don't disagree with the decision to can the F-22, for example, but its' demise (or scaling back) is an early symptom of the U.S.A.'s own "Recessional":

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget!

There are a lot of things we can do today that couldn't be done 40-50 years ago, so we're not looking at a Dark Age just yet. A lot of the "fire" has gone out though, as current achievements are at a much smaller scale than in the 1950s and 60s. When you're working on
nanotech that's a good thing, but North America has dropped out of the race for a lot of things that we used to lead. Canada peaked in the 50s with the Avro Arrow, but our loss was the Yanks' gain as our people went to the Apollo program and elsewhere.

Science fiction has worked a great deal with the idea of a future when few people are needed to keep things running, and it is one possibility that the global population will peak and recede as everyone goes "post-industrial". The chickens of the cradle-to-grave Social Security state are beginning to roost as it becomes obvious to people other than Actuaries that we can't maintain the society we have designed for ourselves. That means different things to different people, but to me we need an economy which actually produces things as a foundation for its wealth, and we need it basically now.

Back to industry and engineering. As much as I don't hold with the (increasingly discredited and shrill) AGW models, we do need to wean ourselves off of oil. With good scrubbing technology we can keep using coal and certainly natural gas, but the key to all of these electric cars is, well electricity. "Clean" coal, hydro, natural gas and nuclear power plants will give us that, but to generate the added energy that recharging all of those batteries will require a lot more juice than we have available presently. Engineering advances remain to be made in all of these areas; simple, efficient nuke plants, efficient solar cells, and the holy grail of clean low-impact power generation, orbital solar power.

I'm a well-known cynic, but I know what we have done, so I know we could do that sort of thing again. The sort of drive and sense of purpose that built SR-71s could be turned loose on the engineering requirements of launching the solar platforms and building the receiving stations.

We are victims of our own success and the resultant lowered expectations. I have no idea where our tech will top out, but it shouldn't happen in my lifetime, and I want that cheap clean energy as much as the most ardent Green. You might be able to live as a "naked savage" on tropical beaches, but in this climate it takes energy just to survive 2/3 of the year. That's my pet hypothesis why Europe was first to develop advanced tech, though the Chinese had a head start and certainly could have come out ahead.

It starts in the homes and the schools of the nation. Kids should feel that they have a contribution to make, and the schools should identify strengths and guide those children to what they are proficient in. It wouldn't work for everyone, but there would be more plumbers, electricians, technicians, engineers, chemists, etc., and a lot fewer Art History majors. This is drifting into "Credentialism", another sign of our decline, but one which can be reined under control and even directed to the good of individuals and society.

Sustainable progress is the key to survival. Cheap clean energy is the key to wealth within that model, and keeping our R&D where it needs to be to get that requires us to put our industry back in business. Canada's not as far down the road of de-industrializing as the Americans are, but they have still far more industry than we've ever had, so we've not far to fall to hit our bottom.

Engineering Twilight, Part One.

In the occasional serendipitous neuron firing/misfiring that passes for cleverness with me, I had one idea in mind for this post when I came out with the title. Thinking that it might be confusing (and in what way) led me to that which will comprise today's post.

The idea of a "global sunblock" is certainly new enough when talked about as something we'd want to try:

Proponents suggest so-called "geoengineering" would probably take effect much more quickly than cutting emissions and at a fraction of the price. They also point out that years of international debate on emissions has produced almost no results and opening a high-altitude chemical parasol may soon be the only way to keep global warming at manageable levels.
"Solar-radiation management may be the only human response that can fend off rapid and high-consequence climate impacts," wrote Keith, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Energy and the Environment at the University of Calgary.

First off, I've no idea what planet these people are on that still think things are too hot here; probably the same one where the inhabitants explain "global warming" as being responsible for it getting colder. From here I was going to list the ways in which this was a bad idea numerically, but screw it, I'll just free-style it as usual.

The key to all of this is blocking our sun, e.g. Sol, source of all life on this planet. Partially they say, and I'm sure that's true, but how much is enough and how much is too much? I have those questions for starters, but it is conceivable that someone could answer that, at least with something that gave them the result they were looking for in a model.

Where this is not so new is that it has happened innumerable times already in Earth's history. The average reader of this blog is old enough to remember Mt Pinatubo going up in 1991. The upshot of that "high-altitude chemical parasol" was a cold miserable summer and a drop of 0.5°C in the world's temperature. Bloody cold winter too, as I recall. It is to be noted that these "average" numbers translate into something significantly less academic on the pointy end, e.g. in reality, in our lives. I strongly suggest reading the above link to get a solid idea of the forces involved, the persistence of effects and the world-wide impact of ONE VOLCANO. The effects on the ozone layer by themselves are eye-opening even though I was generally aware of it before now.

The Earth bounced back from that with the warmest decade since the 1930s, and I note that mankind's numbers increased significantly despite the horrible pleasantly-warm weather that we had for those years. Whatever chemical weirdness they have in mind, they have no way to test it. Think about that, and put any thought of computer models out of your head. The systems involved (the sun, the factors affecting atmospheric circulation and our climate) are vastly too complex to be reliably modeled, full-stop. Effects are transient (though how transient, exactly?) but if you're looking for something longer lasting, do I have a program for you!

It's called "Nuclear Winter" and you may have heard of it. You don't need nukes for it of course; a massive regional volcanic event will do it, or failing that a big enough rock hitting us. Note that both of these are leading contenders for killing off the dinosaurs, or at least most things bigger than a housecat living on land at the time.

Cold is bad. The Inuit concept of Hell is a cold place, and they know more about cold than anyone. When it's warm, things can grow; the worst droughts or hurricanes (not guaranteed results just because it gets hotter) pale in effect on the landscape and living things compared to a continental ice sheet. Compare South America to Antarctica for example.

The AGW brigade is feverishly trying to keep their agenda in the public eye, and this represents the latest angle. Note the dangling bait of "less expensive". It is obvious to the great unwashed (that's us, btw) that the implications of all of these "green" policies would be disastrous to our standard of living. This latest brainwave has the potential to flat-line agriculture if they block out a teensy bit too much sun (Oops! That's not what the model predicted...) leading to the mother-of-all unintended consequences as we all starve to death. Actually, considering the attitudes of some of these people that might not be so unintended after all as long as all of the rich white people are wiped out too...

It's treated quite glibly by these geoengineering advocates, but personally I would view a unilateral dispersal of some chemical into the atmosphere by some country as an act of war against the entire world. What this also does, although it is never mentioned in the articles, is recognize that our heat all comes from the sun. It's not a big step from there to realizing that the sun is NOT a constant and that just maybe we're trying to mess with things that aren't idly trifled with. I just hope it's not as cheap and simple as they claim so we don't find out the hard way, sort of like the dinosaurs did.