With the Battlegroup in Kandahar set to turn into a pumpkin next year, the military and government are looking ahead to what comes next. Congo has figured prominently in the early running, so I thought it worthwhile to look into what we might hope to achieve there.
What's wrong with the place? That's easy: pretty much everything. No functional government, rampant banditry, staggering levels of rape and mutilation, child abduction for use as sex slaves and drugged up mini soldiers, and all of this in a country which is huge with poor communications. The poor communications (roads, railways, airstrips, etc.) are due to previous corrupt governments letting things slide and recent ones being both too corrupt and too busy fighting various factions to work on infrastructure.
The biggest problem with the place though is not the hardware but the software, e.g. people. The population is large (c. 68M) which causes governance issues even if they are relatively homogeneous, which the population of Congo most definitely is not. The key problem within the
"people" category is the various bandit groups. I'm using the Russian term (bandits) for any of the armed groups that aren't part of a disciplined national army because it fits. I'd also applythe Russian solution.
As often stated here (and elsewhere) the job of the Army is to break things and kill people; if that's what you need done, or you need the potential on the ground to be able to do that, you send in the Army. Will we be sending Canada's troops there (or anywhere else) on that understanding? Not likely, especially considering the dirty bush war of extermination that we'd have to fight in the Congo in order to do the place any long-term good. The article I linked to for this shows the problem with the UN for this sort of work:
'When we talk about 1,400 civilians killed, these are not people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time or civilians caught in the crossfire. These were people deliberately killed, hacked to death by machetes, shot in the head at point blank range, beaten to death by clubs. And, in 2009, the United Nations human rights section didn't publish a single report about the events in Eastern Congo. It was seen as too controversial.'
The whole article is about the UN either standing aside while these things happen, or supporting certain groups to do various bits of dirty work. I have no problem with the need for "wet" work, but if you're there to improve the situation you need to keep close tabs on who's doing what and to whom. My rules of engagement would be simple: anyone belonging to one of those bandit groups is killed with extreme prejudice, full-stop. Don't concern yourself with "collaborators" and such; hunt and exterminate the two-legged monsters that go around hacking of limbs and raping women into incontinence and suicide (if they survive to do that).
"Search and Destroy" is the name of the game, and to avoid the civilian slaughter you need highly trained and motivated troops who are given a job to do and backed up with everything they need. Helicopters, supply and first-rate medical support will keep the troops in the bush, and strict observance of the Laws of Armed Conflict will allow them to do their job without nit-picking micromanagement from above. Freedom of action is NOT the same thing as carte blanche, so professional troops with effective leaders are a must to avoid (non-belligerent) massacres.
Of course, that won't happen. There will be interference all the way from Ottawa for the lowest level mission, and everyone will be thrown for a loop every time somebody makes any sort of allegation of wrongdoing by our troops. The solution to the problem of bad people with weapons is dead bad people, and the fact that the punk pointing an AK at me is 10 years old and high on coke doesn't change that equation.
Try selling THAT to the political and media class. When you can, then we should go to Congo.
Monday 19 April 2010
Wednesday 14 April 2010
The War of Ideas
The link is to a rather long post about the evolution of the modern assault on Western Civilization by the forces of Islam, and is a good primer on how we got here. Where exactly "here" is is a bit ambiguous; Walid Phares places us in the "Fourth War of Ideas" since 2009, and I don't really know what the chances are of us surviving as secular technological societies, but I do know that it has to happen.
Ideas are obviously the key to an ideological struggle of any description, so the trick in our progressive societies is to identify those which are incompatible with those societies. As we are a very big tent, there are a lot of things that we can digest, but there are various rumblings of indigestion in societies both progressive and would-be progressive. What is causing these problems? Well I'll have to identify symptoms before I can get to more specifics. Since I am
talking about Islam (quel surprise) I will use a couple of recent and controversial developments.
First, close to home Quebec is cracking down on the niqab. The niqab, as you may know (or not) is the full-face covering worn by particularly repressed Muslim women, only a small step away from a burqa in that you can see her eyes. I'm not a fan of the headscarf, but it's pretty recent even in our (western) history that women don't routinely cover their hair, so I can't be too
upset about those. More importantly than my opinions/feelings is the fact that a headscarf doesn't obscure your identity, and is therefore not an outright offence to civil society. Both the niqab and the burqa SHOULD be banned in Canada and any other civilized place too.
What Quebec has been doing with this (and with several other reactions to recent immigrants trying to make us conform to them) is to drag these issues out into the light, force the public and politicians to confront them. Part of the War of Ideas is to suppress criticism of your side of the fight. If every criticism of anything "Islamic" becomes "Islamophobia" it harnesses the forces of Political Correctness to protect the jihadi agenda. Unlike the Illuminati and other notional world-spanning conspiracies, this one is real and has millions of adherents living and expounding in plain sight. Quebec's actions here are tilting the balance back toward us and away from the jihadis, although it is but a battle in a war that has so far lasted 1400+ years.
The fundamentalist Muslim base in Canada is relatively weak, especially politically, so opposition to Quebec saying "no" to the niqab has been limited and not gaining any traction that I can see, despite the CBC's best efforts. Europe however is on the front line as always (except 9/11) and the next example shows what can happen when you run into the full force of jihadi money and resulting political influence.
Libya, in case you didn't notice, has declared war on Switzerland of all places. Not of course in the standard Westphalian model of a declaration thereof, or even a Pearl Harbour-style attack, but in a call for jihad against and the dissolution of Switzerland. As this was coming from the head of state of Libya you would be inclined in most cases to call up the reserve and put the air force on high alert. That is, if the head of state in question wasn't Gaddafi (pick your spelling).
The trigger was ostensibly the Swiss plebiscite of November 2009 which banned the construction of any new minarets in their country. Of course Gaddafi had a bone to pick with the Swiss after they had the temerity to arrest his swinish son Hannibal for beating some of his retinue in the lobby of a posh hotel in Geneva in 2008. There were some tit-for-tat travel restrictions, the end result of which was the EU throwing Switzerland under the bus and sucking up to Gaddafi. Much of this after Gaddafi declared jihad on Switzerland. Shows you how much backbone the EU has, but that shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
Two of the most powerful weapons in any kind of war are money and fear. Oil gives Gaddafi a lot of money and a certain amount of fear-mongering capability associated with both what he can do with the money and (much less of a threat) the effect of turning off the tap to Europe. It has been shown that fear works against him; Iraq (2003) scared the shit out of him and prompted him to come clean on Lockerbie and his abortive WMD program. Now however he has recovered from that and has found a lever to use against the EU and anyone who displeases him.
Appeasement has been tried before, and we know how that came out in 1939, but it's a lot older than that:
IT IS always a temptation to an armed and agile nation,
To call upon a neighbour and to say:-
"We invaded you last night-we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away."
And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you've only to pay 'em the Dane-geld
And then you'll get rid of the Dane!
It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say:-
"Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away."
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray,
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say:-
"We never pay any one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost,
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!"
A long insert, but this way you couldn't just ignore the link and besides, excerpts just didn't work for full effect. A common theme here, but you have to stand your ground in the War of Ideas as much as in any other. The difference in any other kind of fight is that there are times and places for a tactical withdrawal, whereas with Ideas you can't give an inch. That leads into another problem in warfare, and that is weak or otherwise unreliable allies.
Switzerland stood firm here, but were undercut by pusillanimous Europe. The parallel here being with Czechoslovakia in 1938, the final act of appeasement to Hitler which weakened the forces against him when a firm stand would have told him where to get off. Hopefully we can't stretch this analogy too far, but we all know what came next.
Ideas are obviously the key to an ideological struggle of any description, so the trick in our progressive societies is to identify those which are incompatible with those societies. As we are a very big tent, there are a lot of things that we can digest, but there are various rumblings of indigestion in societies both progressive and would-be progressive. What is causing these problems? Well I'll have to identify symptoms before I can get to more specifics. Since I am
talking about Islam (quel surprise) I will use a couple of recent and controversial developments.
First, close to home Quebec is cracking down on the niqab. The niqab, as you may know (or not) is the full-face covering worn by particularly repressed Muslim women, only a small step away from a burqa in that you can see her eyes. I'm not a fan of the headscarf, but it's pretty recent even in our (western) history that women don't routinely cover their hair, so I can't be too
upset about those. More importantly than my opinions/feelings is the fact that a headscarf doesn't obscure your identity, and is therefore not an outright offence to civil society. Both the niqab and the burqa SHOULD be banned in Canada and any other civilized place too.
What Quebec has been doing with this (and with several other reactions to recent immigrants trying to make us conform to them) is to drag these issues out into the light, force the public and politicians to confront them. Part of the War of Ideas is to suppress criticism of your side of the fight. If every criticism of anything "Islamic" becomes "Islamophobia" it harnesses the forces of Political Correctness to protect the jihadi agenda. Unlike the Illuminati and other notional world-spanning conspiracies, this one is real and has millions of adherents living and expounding in plain sight. Quebec's actions here are tilting the balance back toward us and away from the jihadis, although it is but a battle in a war that has so far lasted 1400+ years.
The fundamentalist Muslim base in Canada is relatively weak, especially politically, so opposition to Quebec saying "no" to the niqab has been limited and not gaining any traction that I can see, despite the CBC's best efforts. Europe however is on the front line as always (except 9/11) and the next example shows what can happen when you run into the full force of jihadi money and resulting political influence.
Libya, in case you didn't notice, has declared war on Switzerland of all places. Not of course in the standard Westphalian model of a declaration thereof, or even a Pearl Harbour-style attack, but in a call for jihad against and the dissolution of Switzerland. As this was coming from the head of state of Libya you would be inclined in most cases to call up the reserve and put the air force on high alert. That is, if the head of state in question wasn't Gaddafi (pick your spelling).
The trigger was ostensibly the Swiss plebiscite of November 2009 which banned the construction of any new minarets in their country. Of course Gaddafi had a bone to pick with the Swiss after they had the temerity to arrest his swinish son Hannibal for beating some of his retinue in the lobby of a posh hotel in Geneva in 2008. There were some tit-for-tat travel restrictions, the end result of which was the EU throwing Switzerland under the bus and sucking up to Gaddafi. Much of this after Gaddafi declared jihad on Switzerland. Shows you how much backbone the EU has, but that shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
Two of the most powerful weapons in any kind of war are money and fear. Oil gives Gaddafi a lot of money and a certain amount of fear-mongering capability associated with both what he can do with the money and (much less of a threat) the effect of turning off the tap to Europe. It has been shown that fear works against him; Iraq (2003) scared the shit out of him and prompted him to come clean on Lockerbie and his abortive WMD program. Now however he has recovered from that and has found a lever to use against the EU and anyone who displeases him.
Appeasement has been tried before, and we know how that came out in 1939, but it's a lot older than that:
IT IS always a temptation to an armed and agile nation,
To call upon a neighbour and to say:-
"We invaded you last night-we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away."
And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you've only to pay 'em the Dane-geld
And then you'll get rid of the Dane!
It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say:-
"Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away."
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray,
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say:-
"We never pay any one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost,
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!"
A long insert, but this way you couldn't just ignore the link and besides, excerpts just didn't work for full effect. A common theme here, but you have to stand your ground in the War of Ideas as much as in any other. The difference in any other kind of fight is that there are times and places for a tactical withdrawal, whereas with Ideas you can't give an inch. That leads into another problem in warfare, and that is weak or otherwise unreliable allies.
Switzerland stood firm here, but were undercut by pusillanimous Europe. The parallel here being with Czechoslovakia in 1938, the final act of appeasement to Hitler which weakened the forces against him when a firm stand would have told him where to get off. Hopefully we can't stretch this analogy too far, but we all know what came next.
Friday 2 April 2010
Zero Risk, Zero Return.
With nuclear power coming partially back into vogue due to the climate change hysteria, a lot of the old bugbears have resurfaced. Radiation is like fire; too much of it is decidedly bad for you, but some, in the right measure, time and place, is a very useful tool. In fact, a bit of it is everywhere, all the time.
The whole planet is radioactive, and if radiation really scares you, just think about the fact that our sun is one big fusion reactor. Yes, too much sun is a bad thing too, and too much of anything will kill you; a simple fact of life. It takes a mere 2L of water to kill you for example, albeit that's 1L per lung. Drinking it would take several L more in a short period, but it can still dilute you to death. Much more water than that in the shower (or the ocean) will not harm you, so "how" as much as "how much" is a factor.
So what about radiation? The consensus view (oh, how I'm beginning to dread that term) is the Linear Non-Threshold model. In plain English, that means that ANY amount of substance X is bad for you, and just gets worse the more of it that you get. This sounds rational (using fire as an example) but it's not so simple as that and the alternatives are not some way-out fringe theory.
The leader of alternates is called Hormesis, and it postulates (with a LOT of evidence) that small amounts of potentially deleterious substances, effects, etc. actually are GOOD for you. Perhaps that radon in your basement isn't as scary as "they" would have you believe?
This is where things get sticky; testing and validating. How much is good for you and how much is too much is not easily determined, and a lot of that has to do with how the experiments are designed. The standard toxic dose is generally the LD50, the amount which will kill 50% of a population. This is fairly easy to determine (though a raw deal for the test subjects) and is a good dose to stay below for safety.
The problem is at amounts significantly lower than the LD50. They don't determine the LD1, for example, but that would be a very useful number. With that number you could fairly confidently extrapolate what is in fact a dangerous amount of something. My understanding of what is actually done is that a number like the LD50 is the basis for all exposure regulations, and acceptable levels are extrapolated from that.
Yes, extrapolated; not tested, verified or otherwise proved. Better safe than sorry though, right? If that's your only option I suppose so, but what you don't know can in fact wreck your whole day. It depends on your worldview too I guess; would you rather be safe, or would you rather have as much information about things that affect you as possible?
So, how much ionizing radiation is too much? Studies from Hiroshima show that the LD50 for radiation there was 450,000 millirems, and the dose that killed everyone was 600,000 millirems. That however was an attack with a nuclear bomb, and those sort of levels are not found even under the worst possible nuclear accident, that of Chernobyl in 1986. Even the World Health Organization's 2005 report enumerates only 50 deaths to that time from the release of fission materials in that incident, with a projection of 4000 total deaths attributed to it.
The WHO is a UN entity and I am a bit sceptical in light of the IPCC garbage we've had on climate recently, but I can see no "angle" to be played here that would cause them to under-report. Their projection of 4000 more deaths may be alarmist or it may not, but in absolute terms it's less than catastrophic considering what happened and what you'd expect given the "any radiation is unhealthy" model. Note that the 50 dead is 20 years after the explosion, and those people were acutely exposed during the explosion itself or the cleanup/containment immediately afterward.
Lots of interesting stuff on this, and proponents are definitely bucking the hive mind, particularly in the U.S. My point here (I usually get to one eventually) is that this is yet another manifestation of the "Nanny State", or at least Nanny Agencies. There is money to be made on scaring people, and policy can be slanted in certain directions based on those same fears. There are a lot of people who are heavily invested in the status quo.
You can of course say the same thing for the oil business. To break free of that we need electricity (and better batteries, but they're coming), and nuclear power is a tested and SAFE stopgap to bridge until our space-based solar and mythical fusion plants arrive. Three Mile Island is still supposed to scare us, but NO ONE died there or was even made ill.
So, I'll close with a call to remember the Scientific Method in things that affect our daily lives. Extrapolation is a bullshit way to determine anything important, and a lot of that is going on with global temperature measurement, by way of current example. If we're going to make official pronouncements about things that affect people and industry (and consequently peoples' livelihoods and entire economies) it should be proven, not a dogmatic answer based on some "consensus" guess.
The whole planet is radioactive, and if radiation really scares you, just think about the fact that our sun is one big fusion reactor. Yes, too much sun is a bad thing too, and too much of anything will kill you; a simple fact of life. It takes a mere 2L of water to kill you for example, albeit that's 1L per lung. Drinking it would take several L more in a short period, but it can still dilute you to death. Much more water than that in the shower (or the ocean) will not harm you, so "how" as much as "how much" is a factor.
So what about radiation? The consensus view (oh, how I'm beginning to dread that term) is the Linear Non-Threshold model. In plain English, that means that ANY amount of substance X is bad for you, and just gets worse the more of it that you get. This sounds rational (using fire as an example) but it's not so simple as that and the alternatives are not some way-out fringe theory.
The leader of alternates is called Hormesis, and it postulates (with a LOT of evidence) that small amounts of potentially deleterious substances, effects, etc. actually are GOOD for you. Perhaps that radon in your basement isn't as scary as "they" would have you believe?
This is where things get sticky; testing and validating. How much is good for you and how much is too much is not easily determined, and a lot of that has to do with how the experiments are designed. The standard toxic dose is generally the LD50, the amount which will kill 50% of a population. This is fairly easy to determine (though a raw deal for the test subjects) and is a good dose to stay below for safety.
The problem is at amounts significantly lower than the LD50. They don't determine the LD1, for example, but that would be a very useful number. With that number you could fairly confidently extrapolate what is in fact a dangerous amount of something. My understanding of what is actually done is that a number like the LD50 is the basis for all exposure regulations, and acceptable levels are extrapolated from that.
Yes, extrapolated; not tested, verified or otherwise proved. Better safe than sorry though, right? If that's your only option I suppose so, but what you don't know can in fact wreck your whole day. It depends on your worldview too I guess; would you rather be safe, or would you rather have as much information about things that affect you as possible?
So, how much ionizing radiation is too much? Studies from Hiroshima show that the LD50 for radiation there was 450,000 millirems, and the dose that killed everyone was 600,000 millirems. That however was an attack with a nuclear bomb, and those sort of levels are not found even under the worst possible nuclear accident, that of Chernobyl in 1986. Even the World Health Organization's 2005 report enumerates only 50 deaths to that time from the release of fission materials in that incident, with a projection of 4000 total deaths attributed to it.
The WHO is a UN entity and I am a bit sceptical in light of the IPCC garbage we've had on climate recently, but I can see no "angle" to be played here that would cause them to under-report. Their projection of 4000 more deaths may be alarmist or it may not, but in absolute terms it's less than catastrophic considering what happened and what you'd expect given the "any radiation is unhealthy" model. Note that the 50 dead is 20 years after the explosion, and those people were acutely exposed during the explosion itself or the cleanup/containment immediately afterward.
Lots of interesting stuff on this, and proponents are definitely bucking the hive mind, particularly in the U.S. My point here (I usually get to one eventually) is that this is yet another manifestation of the "Nanny State", or at least Nanny Agencies. There is money to be made on scaring people, and policy can be slanted in certain directions based on those same fears. There are a lot of people who are heavily invested in the status quo.
You can of course say the same thing for the oil business. To break free of that we need electricity (and better batteries, but they're coming), and nuclear power is a tested and SAFE stopgap to bridge until our space-based solar and mythical fusion plants arrive. Three Mile Island is still supposed to scare us, but NO ONE died there or was even made ill.
So, I'll close with a call to remember the Scientific Method in things that affect our daily lives. Extrapolation is a bullshit way to determine anything important, and a lot of that is going on with global temperature measurement, by way of current example. If we're going to make official pronouncements about things that affect people and industry (and consequently peoples' livelihoods and entire economies) it should be proven, not a dogmatic answer based on some "consensus" guess.
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