The road to Hell is trod by (reduced) Carbon Footprints

The linked article on “The Low-Carbon Economy” is distressing to me, as is anything with the potential to mess up my life.  Not being of the hair-shirted climate change self-flagellate persuasion, I have not bought into the “climate change” dogma prevalent today, and therefore look very closely at anything coming from “experts” (I’m sick of inverted commas already in the first paragraph) that has the potential to affect me.

The Economy is a nebulous phantasm at the best of times, as is anything which deals with abstracts. The abstracts here are trillions of units of fiat currencies, the default reserve currency still (at time of writing) the $US.  Whatever it is, billions and trillions of these notional credit instruments flash electronically around the globe daily, and somehow maintain everyone’s confidence that we know what we’re doing. 

2008 was the most recent time the wheels came off (or the bubble burst, choose your metaphor) but you can expect some sort of serious economic reverse roughly every decade.  I understand in general how this works, but one of the things I understand very definitely is that people supposedly much smarter than me use financial instruments of their own clever devising to manipulate these money flows for their own benefit.

This entire Sci-Am article is a study in rent-seeking, which sums up the entire Carbon Trading and Green Energy industries as far as I can tell.   As I’ve said many times before, a lot of these Greens are really Watermelons (Green on the outside, Red on the inside) and have ridden this bandwagon for all it’s worth as a means of wealth distribution from First to Third World countries.  An example:

Using green bonds and modified insurance portfolios
If the top financial layer includes big institutional investors and banks, then a second tier of untapped finance lies with insurance companies extending policies to the most vulnerable populations in the developing world.

Through the use of mobile phone-based services and micro-credit institutions, a great deal of insurance has already been extended to what Jim Roth of LeapFrog Investments calls the “emerging consumer.” Over the past eight years, the social investment fund has backed a portfolio of companies selling insurance products totaling $40 million, of which $33 million went to low-income consumers in Africa and Asia.

“It’s an optimistic story,” said Roth, noting that the vast majority of those consumers had never owned insurance before.

“A key difference is they have less money. So the kinds of insurance policies they can buy tend to have lower premiums and less benefits.”

Governments in the developing world are also now pooling their resources into sovereign insurance funds that make payouts for climate adaptation programs, said Fatima Kassam of the African Risk Capacity Insurance Co., a specialized agency of the African Union. Niger received a $25 million payout last year, having paid in with a $3 million premium. “Governments are coming together to change the model on disaster management,” said Kassam.

Let’s be clear about one thing to explain why I’m so bent about this sort of foolishness.  The “insurance” is for climate change adaptation/mitigation.  Since “climate change” can mean literally anything at all that weather/climate does, no traditional insurance company (i.e. one which intends to stay in business) would write policies like this. This is very thinly-disguised wealth transfer.

 

The problem is that despite quantitative easing and no physical standard for our notional currencies, “wealth” is a zero-sum game; the wealth has to come from someone.  I am NOT a redistributionist; “law and order Libertarian” is probably closer to the mark, so I object to beggaring ourselves to make African kleptocrats richer.   

Green energy policies in the UK dramatically raised electricity prices as subsidized (to the producers) wind projects were forced into the market. Although this is now easing, it took clawing back the policies that started it, and similar things have happened in other places too.  Coal is the big thing to hate these days (Obama leading the pack) but it has the advantage of being cheap and abundant.  It’s also dirty, but modern scrubbing tech cleans it up quite acceptably, at least as long as you don’t consider CO2 to be pollution. 

This is where activists end up eventually, when all of the low-hanging fruit has been picked.  Back in the 1960s and 70s pollution was a real problem, and people rightly took action to clean it up. With the sulfur dioxide (acid rain) dealt with in the 1980s, North America and Europe ran out of serious, widespread environmental pollution sources.  Coincidentally or not, this is right when Global Warming popped on the radar as the next apocalypse.  Note that we (and both ice caps) are still here, despite all of the doom-laden pronouncements from 1988 onward.  Beware the “green intentions” of any climate lobby, and follow the money to see why people are really doing what they're doing.

Remember the past, look to the future, but keep your powder dry.

Today, May 8^th 2015 marks the 70^th anniversary of the end of WWII in Europe.  The Americans and to a lesser extent the Brits and Australians had a hard slog in the Pacific for a couple more months, but Europe was the main event.  The Canadian news has been full of the commemorations in Holland, our main theatre of operations at war’s end, and arguably our most enduring achievement, clearing first the Scheldt estuary (essential to bring Antwerp on-line as a port) and later The Netherlands of Nazi troops.

The Dutch to this day remember that we did this for them, but this is the last time there will be any significant number of veterans at one of these events.  The youngest of them are in their late 80s, so we’ll see how this is marked in the future. 

I don’t know about “doomed to repeat it”, but a self-willed ignorance of where you come from is in no way useful to ones’ understanding of the world.  There’s a line between chauvinism and identity and it’s a tricky one to walk, but as anyone who reads this knows, I refuse to hate myself for my ancestors or ethnicity.  There are plenty of others who will do that for me, so no need to borrow trouble.

Nevertheless, the past is the past and not to be lived in.  I have seen the definition of a Dark Age given as ‘when we no longer realize that certain things done in the past are possible’.  We often forget that our predecessors were in no way stupider than us; inconformity to current politically correct ethics does not make one unintelligent, regardless of modern cult-Marx university instruction. Could Canada put 1,000,000 people in uniform again (3,500,000 would be the figure proportionate to our current population)?  I know that we did, but I’m sure that would be a shock to most of our Millennials since they aren’t taught anything anymore.   

Canadian society has changed almost beyond recognition to our Great Depression/WWII generation, for good and ill.  People were tribal and racist back then, and we’d like to think that’s changed, but the changes are superficial since this is the natural state of most people.  Race relations in the USA have actually deteriorated in Obama’s Presidency, unavoidable when people take their cues from a race-baiting Administration and media.  This isn’t the way it was “supposed to be” but things are polarizing and stratifying. 

This is a matter of “us” and “them”, the default state of humanity.  Whether or not stripped of automatic racism, i.e. writing someone off due to their skin colour, affinity seems to operate in concentric circles.  The two biggest circles are religion and civilization.  Co-religionists have an automatic affinity, just as infidels, heretics, etc. are natural antagonists.  In the modern world, this isn’t a big deal for most groups, but it is lethally important to the Salafist interpretations of Islam.  Do I care if someone is a Sunni/Shia/Sufi/Ismaili/Alawi/Druze? No, with the exception that the latter four sects don’t cause me/us trouble; I consider Assad and the Baath to be secular, in case you care to quibble about the Alawi. 

I know enough about the differences in these sects to be able to spot civilizational affinities across broader religious enmities, but many Westerners don’t.  This takes some work, mostly reading, which most people can’t be assed to do.  It also takes a willingness to learn and admit you were wrong about things you didn’t understand, something even more people are bad at/incapable of.

This brings me by my typically torturous path to my second point.  As of today, Omar Khadr has been released on bail from an Alberta prison, despite the best efforts of the Canadian Government (ah, rule of law) and at least one of the American veterans he injured when he threw that grenade in Afghanistan.  I will not recant my opinion that a fourth bullet (Khadr survived being shot three times) would have saved a lot of trouble, but that was then and this is now.  Omar says that he is “a good person” and wants people to get to know him for that.  It may come as a surprise to some, but I’m willing to give him a chance to do just that.   He was brainwashed into jihad by his family (why the hell are they still allowed to live here?) and I am sceptical that he has left that all behind, but he’s been in prison (including Guantanamo) since he was 15 so it’s possible that he would like to do his time and fade into a quiet life. 

Only time will tell, but unless we were going to lock him up forever (which was not the case) he was getting out eventually, and now is as good a time as any.  I offer no predictions of his future behaviour; if I had that sort of prescience I’d use it on the lottery or the horses and not waste it on this sort of thing.  All I will say is that it’s possible (depending entirely on Khadr’s character) that cutting him a bit of slack is a good thing and will put him on the right track.  If so, great and I hope he makes something positive of his life.  If he regresses to his family’s mean, well, there’s still that fourth bullet.

Bash some heads together or be chopped separately

This past weekend has seen an unprecedented series of public demonstrations in France as an outpouring of solidarity and “don’t-tread-on-me” in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre.  World leaders (though notably no-one from the USA) lead the crowd, and the one in Paris was estimated at 2 million people, bigger than Liberation Day in WW2.  At the same time, the anti-Islamization marches in Germany continue, and may be gaining traction.  The latter is hard to be certain of, as the media is determined to tar all of these people as Nazis and supresses and distorts reports.  In these two events you see that Europe is approaching critical mass in terms of the threat of Islam to Western Civilization. 

The West has spent much time, blood and treasure of fighting amongst itself, but in the post WW2 period one could be excused (on casual reflection) of thinking that this internecine fighting is behind us.  I think that in the post-nationalism period the struggle has changed from being international to being a “civil war” in every Western country at the ideological level.  In other words, the West is wilfully destroying itself. 

Not all of it of course, but the self-loathing strain of “white guilt” progressivism is firmly entrenched in our university and media making it the default position of the latter.  The idea that anything done by white men is the worst thing ever seems to be the basis of it, and as such it encompasses everything from Marxists (the cultural variety) to radical feminists and many other sub-groups besides.  I run into this on a regular basis online, and have greatly curtailed my activities there (mostly to here) as these people are so thoroughly indoctrinated that they don’t even try to debate, just insult and belittle. 

How many of them are having second thoughts in the wake of the Paris attacks, and the ones before them in Ottawa and Sydney is anyone’s guess, but the hard core (who I estimate at c. 10% of the population) will cling to their “Écrasez l’infâme” attitude toward their own society no matter what.  They are, no matter what their actual proportion of the population, a minority and at some point, hopefully now or very soon, the majority who don’t feel like bowing down to these jihadis will accept that some heads need to be cracked to maintain what we have. 

Canada is overhauling its’ laws to deal more proactively with terrorist wannabes (we’re already arresting them) but France I’m sure already has what it needs to deal with them, including now the public and political will.  The EU overall needs to tighten up to track these guys (and girls) when they travel to Syria, etc. and either nab them before they go, or (better to my mind) let them go and revoke their passports as soon as they clear the EU.  Couple that with contributing military force to battle them wherever they went and we have most of a plan to manage this threat. 

People need to be (and are) arrested for supporting Salafist causes, and the net has to expand to Facebook etc. posts.  Post a message supporting Islamic State,  10 years in jail.  Conspire to support them, life.  Make it painful and you will weed out the lightweights, or at least muzzle them.  The intelligence services can track them (hopefully) when they go underground, and I’m sure (as much as I can be with no inside knowledge) that many a plot has been foiled already.   

Whatever laws are passed and whatever action is taken, it has to be balanced with not making life difficult for law-abiding citizens.  For routine investigation and enforcement this is very do-able, and the (let’s face it, pinprick) attacks those guys can make do not justify martial law.  That’s here; in France they have a much larger problem with extensive “no-go” areas in the banlieues of Paris and elsewhere, and  military reinforcements have been sent.  This is the tactical response required to the situation, and as long as the usual whiners shut up when the necessary “profiling” takes place and supporters are rolled up the problem is, as mentioned previously, manageable. 

Soluble?  No measures which would leave our societies recognizable as “free” could reduce the threat to zero, and even the alternatives (police/military state) aren’t 100% solutions.  “We” must decide that our way of life is worth defending and do so at all levels.  That will necessitate hating a bit less the society that allows you to publicly call for its’ downfall and (sometimes) replacement, if for no other reason than you’d rather not be lumped in with the jihadis who do the same.   You can and will be judged by the company you keep, even the virtual kind.   

Beyond-the-Pale Horsemen

Events like yesterday’s massacre at Charlie Hebdo in Paris are a tactical surprise, but not a strategic one.  CH has (they say they’ll be back) a history of nettling Islam and doing so in an inflammatory fashion.  While this is offensive to some people, under no circumstances in a civilized society should that lead to bloodshed. An appropriate (civilized) response is to ignore, rebut inaccuracies, or failing that, to skewer their stuff as well as they did yours.  

I saw this compared (due to the death toll) to the Brevik massacre in Norway in 2011 which leads me off on a related tangent.  Brevik was the odd exception these days, someone without a religious motivation who killed a lot of people for a cause, but he did it to attack what he saw as the out-of-touch “elite” who were enabling Islamization in his country.  Not the civilized way to do things, but if those “elites” don’t figure out that most people are unhappy with being flooded by immigrants who don’t share their values, we may see more things like this. 

There is some concern that the fallout of the Charlie Hebdo attack will be a strengthening of the “radical right”.  If that’s the threat you take away from this you’re totally missing the point, but there’s plenty of that going around.  Hitler used the analogy of the culture as a biological system, with (in his view) the Jews representing an infection in the “body”.  Breaking that concept into its’ component parts and generalizing, it is obvious to anyone with a functioning brain that not all cultures are the same, and some are too alien for others.  The indoctrination provided by Cultural Marxist universities these days does much to suppress actual critical thought so this realization is rare within the intelligencia, but it’s obvious to the man on the street.  

A “reaction” is inevitable when you mix incompatible cultures, and Europe is hip-deep in that right now.  “Right wing” parties can’t rise if people aren’t drawn to them, and people won’t be drawn to the fringes if the centre looks after their concerns.  Pragmatic/realistic politicians will note the way the wind is blowing and tack that way to keep the “extremists” from gaining traction.  Currently in Germany there is a growing anti-Islamization movement which has been denounced by Angela Merkel, but she is no dummy so I suspect we’ll see some re-positioning by the ruling party.  People all over Europe are concerned that they are being overwhelmed and edged out by immigrants and mainstream politicians had better take note. 

I have no idea what will happen, but despite recent attacks on mosques in Sweden I don’t predict an anti-Muslim pogrom in Europe.  This does not preclude more violence, but as much as I want to keep the baleful influence of political Islam away from my culture, people walking around in headscarves and skullcaps is not by itself a threat to Western civilization.  By this I mean that the last thing I want to see in response to the very real Salafist threat to our institutions and free speech is your everyday Mohammed or Fatima hassled (or worse) just for their general affiliation.  What I would in fact like to see is those Dick and Jane Muslims putting the boot (literally or figuratively) to the Salafi assholes in their midst.  

For that to happen governments must be prepared to call Islamist terror what it is, while giving the larger Muslim community the (moral and enforcement) support it needs to purge itself of Salafis/jihadis. They can flush them out then we’ll sort them out, at home or in whatever wanna-be Caliphate they jihad off to. 

 

I believe I’ve talked about my conception of  a “tribe” on here before, but the essence of it is that a tribe should encompass anyone who is willing to live by its’ rules.  The Western Civilization tribe can absorb anyone who wants to be absorbed (apolitical Muslims included), but must fight anyone who tries to subvert it. We can’t all get along, but most of us can and we have to expand that circle as wide as possible.  With that done, open season, no bag limit on anyone outside of it.  

RIP to the fallen staff and police at Charlie Hebdo.  I have confidence that the French will get those two assassins; I won’t put any money on them ever standing trial, but I don’t hear the Barons of Runnymede rolling in their graves about that.   

Draw the correct lessons from Ottawa

Last week in Canada generated world-wide headlines for the dramatic attack on an honour guard soldier at our national war memorial and subsequent armed attack on our House of Parliament (seat of the Federal government in Canada).  Twenty-four-year-old Corporal Nathan Cirillo of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders (Hamilton ON) was shot from behind and killed as he stood with an unloaded rifle at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and a security guard (again unarmed) at the doors of the Centre Block was wounded trying to deflect the gunman as he charged into the building.

This was pretty crazy for Ottawa, but it was in fact the second attack on a member of Canada’s Armed Forces by a Canadian Muslim convert in that one week; see my previous post. This was another act of terrorism, and we have Sgt-at-Arms Kevin Vickers (head of Parliamentary security) to thank for putting the Ottawa shooter out of our misery.  We also still have PM Stephen Harper to thank for calling it the Islamist terrorism that it is.  There seems to be some opportunistic bill jamming-through, but I’ll leave that out of this.

Can we expect more of this sort of thing?  I would say “yes”, and it’s good that a lone-wolf (who could easily have done much more damage) was the first attack, to shake up security arrangements.  The vehicular attack on Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent earlier that week is the sort of thing you can’t really prepare for, except by paying more attention to your surroundings. I stayed away from this until the dust settled a bit, and now I have some observations.

Firstly, more preventative detention of people who express an interest in “jihad” is in order.  It’s all very nice to make lists of potential bad apples, but when they start killing people that practice is obviously deficient.  You “like” Islamic State on Facebook?  Go to jail for 10+ years for terrorism/sedition.  Yes, sure it might “drive them underground” (too many quotes in this paragraph already) but if you’re not going to stop them when they are operating out in the open that hardly makes a difference. 

Secondly, our security needs some tweaking but mostly on the enforcement side.  Canada is not completely clueless (at the pointy end at least) about the threats we face, but there must be political will to do something about it, and I must say from a domestic political standpoint, the current party/leader combination is the only one which looks like it might have the stones for that.   The Guards at Buckingham Palace carry loaded weapons and there has been talk of arming our sentries, but that won’t happen here due to jurisdictional issues. I have thought about this a bit over that last several days, and on balance it’s better it stays that way provided that the local police will guard them, as is happening now. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Now we know.  If I were running things I would give the sentries a loaded mag so that they are not helpless, but still leave the cops as the first line of response.

Thirdly, media and public reactions.  This implies no conspiracy, but I am going to very cynically say that these attacks are timed very well for the Canadian Armed Forces.  The years in Afghanistan are behind us and the military was largely losing relevance to the public, dissipating the high regard in which they were held.  Defence funding was slashed back to levels not seen since the “peace dividend” Decade of Darkness of the 1990s and it was obvious that even the supposedly CAF-friendly Conservative government had lost sight of the necessity to maintain what you have.  The Canadian public has rallied around Cpl Cirillo in particular, (WO Vincents’s murder was far less telegenic) and two attacks in short order have brought the home-grown jihadi problem into focus a bit more.  I have no illusions that forceful direct action will result from this, but it’s better than nothing.

Media response was well handled overall, but I feel that the hand-wringing about 22 October being “the day that changed everything in Ottawa” was overdone.  That day was in fact September 11^th 2001, and it changed everywhere else in the Western world that day too; a sense of perspective is in order here.  It’s now the week after and things are going back to modified normal just as they should be.  It’s time to stop reacting and start acting against the threats within our borders.  If these fucks want to go to Syria to get killed, let them go and cancel their passports as soon as they clear a European airport.  Pressure on them will push some in that direction, and if they don’t leave they go to jail.  I don’t give a shit if you were born here or not; if Canada isn’t good enough for you get out and don’t come back.

It's not paranoia if they ARE out to get you

t has not escaped my notice that I am a minority viewpoint in today's society. This doesn't make me doubt myself or my views, as they are based on observation of the world as it is, not as I think it should be.

This it could be said is the difference between a conservative and other people, and indeed, this article makes that point:

Traditional conservatism, or what’s better called Toryism, is not about hiding from the scary outside world. It’s a worldview that, as A. J. P. Taylor described it, “rests on doubt in human nature; it distrusts improvement, clings to traditional institutions, prefers the past to the future.” Conservatism isn’t defined by gun-nuttery or rabid fundamentalism. It’s about prudence in the face of progressive utopianism and revolutionary fervor. When the conservative looks into the mirror, he sees a broken, fallible man capable of good, but never perfect, things. Liberals and government apparatchiks in the media don’t see him that way. Progressivism seeks to crush human nature and the idea that man isn’t meant for greatness. A progressive’s reflection never shows humility, only a hubristic belief in fixing all the world’s wrongs. For the left, right-wingers, including social conservatives, are ignorant troglodytes in need of forced enlightenment.

It continues to draw disturbing parallels between past purges of "undesirable" elements of society by various "progressive" regimes of the past and the thought-crime policing which is going on today, but you can read it there.

I'd like to say that I think the author is off his rocker/meds but I really can't. We're not at Reign of Terror level yet, but having unfashionable (but harmless) ideas can cost you your job, no small thing in today's economy. Of course this is a small price to pay for a better world, right?

The word utopia means literally "no place" since perfection cannot exist in human affairs. Make things better? Certainly better, but perfect? No. That is my troglodyteist conservativeness speaking of course, because after a certain point the quest for "equality" becomes a zero-sum game. More women in the workplace equals less men in it; not a misogynist rant, simple math. Should we hobble the potential of 50% of the population to maintain someone's advantage? I'd say no, take all the best and brightest. Well, then that disadvantages the dim and useless.

It's easy to see how equality of outcome is completely separate from equality of opportunity, as with true equality of opportunity the cream will rise to the top of whatever you're looking at. If you game the opportunity, making it "more equal" for some, it descends into farce with manifold unintended consequences. Quotas and "affirmative action" undermine any confidence in the products of a system, as you can never be sure of the quality of any member of the preferred groups. Were I a black neurosurgeon I would really resent this. Meritocracy is problematic for those who don't make the cut, but I bloody well want my doctors and engineers selected by that process.

Freedom of speech is if not dead at least gravely wounded, mainly because if you don't toe the line you'll be shouted down. Nobody debates any more as they are either too certain that they know everything or afraid to state their real views in public. None of this is new under the sun, and Voltaire would likely recognize the constraints of the current regime, having had his run-ins with l'ancien. That's progress for you.

Red is Red and Blue is Blue, and Never the Twain Shall Meet

News of the day-or-so is the Malaysian Airlines plane being shot down over Ukraine, but I'll wait for that to settle out a bit before I comment on it. For now, something completely different, certainly off my beaten path here.

The general scenario is Sarah Palin getting a job on "The View" television show. I despise The View as a coven (no offence to actual witches) of shrieking harpies; although that is a personal opinion, it is relevant to the situation.

To say that Sarah would be a minority viewpoint on that program is to understate things significantly, but the "minority report" is important to the credibility of any undertaking. The writer for The Daily Beast to whose article I have linked doesn't see it that way however.

1. Co-hosts Rosie O’Donnell and Whoopi Goldberg would crush her.

The View isn’t Fox News, where hosts fawn over Palin like she is dropping pearls of wisdom instead of inane comments.

It’s not going to work out that way on The View, because in past years, Rosie and Whoopi would frequently slam the conservative co-host Elizabeth Hasselbeck’s right-wing politics. For example, there was the time Whoopi schooled Hasselbeck on the reason why women need to be the ultimate decision makers when it comes to their reproductive rights. The audience clearly sided with Whoopi, breaking out into thunderous applause as she finished her comment. Expect more of the same with Palin on the panel.

2. Palin’s daily dose of idiotic comments. Currently, we are stuck waiting for periodic appearances by Palin to make unintentionally hilarious remarks, like when she said Paul Revere “warned the British,” not the colonists. Or when she insisted that “We’ve got to stand with our North Korean allies.”

Listening to Sarah Palin talk about history is like watching an episode of the new Comedy Central show Drunk History. That show, based on a hit web series, features horribly inebriated people telling their versions of history. With Palin on The View, it will be like Drunk Historyfive days a week.

3. Sarah Palin’s views will be tempered or she’ll be fired. Here’s the most serious issue for Palin: She can’t play to both mainstream and probably not very political American housewives (The View audience) and the Tea Party wingnuts.

ABC’s parent company, Disney, is not going to let Palin be the Palin that most of us hate (or love.) Sure, Disney wants ratings because they equal profits. But I very much doubt that Disney will allow Palin—or any one person—to cause damage to its corporate image.

If her views are to be "tempered" (read: supressed, mocked, censored) why the hell would they bring her on? The answer is of course to use her as a punching bag for cheap points and laughs with the show's base just like Liz Hasselbeck before her, the token Christian conservative. The real mystery is why would Palin want to put herself in that position? Sarah is, bless her, not the sharpest knife in the block, but should have drawn to her some smart people as advisors by now. Her coming out with this idea calls that assumption into question, but whatever.

My point here is more on the ideological divide in public discourse shown very starkly by choice of language and personal vilification/mockery of those who don't conform. The linked article is relatively mild as these things go, but is still about as clever and subtle as a sledge hammer, 'though I'm certain the author would differ. Most likely he'd call me a bunch of names and tell me how ignorant I am while feeling smugly superior. I don't know this for a fact, but past experience with the broad "type" (determined by his treatment of his subject here) places a high level of confidence on that prediction.

Too much exposure to this sort of zealotry has soured me on online discussions, as it is impossible to keep things to the facts of a situation. Recently I called someone on a flippant remark completely at odds with reality, and the response was a constant barrage of assumptions about where I get my info from, words put in my mouth and complete dismissal of the possibility that I had any idea whatsoever what I was talking about. I consider myself sharper than Mrs. Palin. (she does have other redeeming qualities however) and the way I really displayed it there was that I walked away from a fight I could never win.

Here in my obscure corner of the internet I can say what I want, and I like it that way. I am happy to debate things with people who see things differently than I do, but the old concept of "agree to disagree" seems to be lost, so it's not worth it.  I know that I don’t know everything; it’d be nice for a whole lot of other people to realize the same thing but I’m not holding my breath.  Or ever watching “The View”, Sarah Palin or no Sarah Palin.

A new Thirty-Years War?

I stole this from Jerry Pournelle's mail bag at Chaos Manor. Put aside some time and read it, I found it enlightning, albeit it asks some more questions.

By: David P. Goldman
A one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is upon us. It won’t arrive by Naftali Bennett’s proposal <http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/181501#.U6dRlvmwJcQ> to annex the West Bank’s Area C, or through the efforts of BDS campaigners and Jewish Voice for Peace <http://jewishvoiceforpeace.org/> to alter the Jewish state. But it will happen, sooner rather than later, as the states on Israel’s borders disintegrate and other regional players annex whatever they can. As that happens, Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria is becoming inevitable.
Last week’s rocket attacks from Gaza failed to inflict many casualties in Israel—but they administered a mortal wound to Palestinian self-governance. Hamas launched its deepest strikes ever into Israel after the IDF cracked down on its West Bank operations following the murder last month of three Israeli boys, arresting nearly 900 members of Hamas <https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/news/middle-east/12643-israel-has-arrested-896-palestinians-since-12-june> and other terrorist groups. Humiliated in the territories, and unable to pay its 44,000 Gaza employees <http://www.timesofisrael.com/hamas-decides-to-go-for-broke/> , Hamas acted from weakness, gambling that missile attacks would elicit a new Intifada on the West Bank. Although Fatah militias joined in the rocket attacks from Gaza, for now the Palestinian organizations are in their worst disarray in 20 years.
The settlers of Judea and Samaria have stood in the cross-hairs of Western diplomacy for two decades, during which the word “settler” has become a term of the highest international opprobrium. Yet the past decade of spiraling conflicts in the Middle East have revealed that what is settled in the region is far less significant than what is unsettled. Iran’s intervention into the Syrian civil conflict has drawn the Sunni powers into a war of attrition that already has displaced more than 10 million people, mostly Sunnis, and put many more at risk. The settled, traditional, tribal life of the Levant has been shattered. Never before in the history of the region have so many young men had so little hope, so few communal ties, and so many reasons to take up arms.
<http://cdn1.tabletmag.com/wp-content/files_mf/population1524.png>
Source: U.N. World Population Prospects <http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/unpp/panel_indicators.htm>
As a result, the central premise of Western diplomacy in the region has been pulled inside-out, namely that a resolution of the Palestinian refugee issue was the key to long-term stability in the Middle East. Now the whole of the surrounding region has become one big refugee crisis. Yet the seemingly spontaneous emergence of irregular armies like the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) now rampaging through northern Mesopotamia should be no surprise. The misnamed Arab Spring of 2011 began with an incipient food crisis in Egypt <http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MB02Ak01.html> and a water crisis in Syria <http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MC29Ak02.html> . Subsidies from the Gulf States keep Egypt on life support. In Syria and Iraq, though, displaced populations become foraging armies that loot available resources, particularly oil, and divert the proceeds into armaments that allow the irregulars to keep foraging. ISIS is selling $800 million a year of Syrian oil to Turkey, according to one estimate <http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/business/2014/06/turkey-syria-isis-selling-smuggled-oil.html> , as well as selling electricity from captured power plants back to the Assad government. On June 11 it seized the Bajii power plant oil refinery <http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/12/world/middleeast/the-militants-moving-in-on-syria-and-iraq.html?hp&_r=1> in northern Iraq, the country’s largest.
The region has seen nothing like it since the Mongol invasion of the 13th century. Perpetual war has turned into a snowball that accumulates people and resources as it rolls downhill and strips the ground bare of sustenance. Those who are left shiver in tents in refugee camps, and their young men go off to the war. There is nothing new about this way of waging war; it was invented in the West during the Thirty Years War by the imperial general Albrecht von Wallenstein, and it caused the death of nearly half the population of Central Europe between 1618 and 1648.
As a result of this spiraling warfare, four Arab states—Libya, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq—have effectively ceased to exist. Lebanon, once a Christian majority country, became a Shia country during the past two decades under the increased domination of Hezbollah. Nearly 2 million Syrian Sunnis have taken refuge in Lebanon, as Israeli analyst Pinhas Inbari <http://jcpa.org/article/syrian-war-is-reshaping-the-region/> observes, and comprise almost half of Lebanon’s total population of 4 million, shifting the demographic balance to the Sunnis—while the mass Sunni exodus tilts the balance of power in Syria toward the Alawites and other religious minorities, who are largely allied with Iran. Jordan, meanwhile, has taken in a million Syrian Sunnis, making Palestinians a minority inside Jordan for the first time in a generation. A region that struggled to find sustenance for its people before 2011 has now been flooded with millions of refugees without resources or means of support. They are living for the most part on largesse from the Gulf States, and their young men are prospective cannon fodder.
The remaining states in the region—Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran—will alternately support and suppress the new irregular armies as their interests require. Where does ISIS get its support, apart from oil hijacking in Syria and bank robberies in Mosul <http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/06/12/isis-just-stole-425-million-and-became-the-worlds-richest-terrorist-group/> ? There are allegations that ISIS receives support from Turkey <http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jun/17/pipes-turkeys-support-for-isis/> , the Sunni Gulf States <http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/14/america-s-allies-are-funding-isis.html> , and Iran <http://jcpa.org/article/isis-irans-instrument-regional-hegemony/> . Pinhas Inbari <http://jcpa.org/article/isis-irans-instrument-regional-hegemony/> claims that Shiite Iran is funding Sunni extremists “to be certain that a strong Iraqi state does not emerge again along its western border.” There are equally credible reports that each of these powers wants to stop ISIS. Saudi Arabia fears <http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/05/isis-saudi-arabia-qaeda-terrorism-syria.html> that Sunni extremists might overthrow the monarchy. Turkey fears that the depredations of ISIS on its border will trigger the formation of an independent Kurdish state, which it has opposed vehemently for decades. Iran views ISIS as a Sunni competitor for influence in the region.
To some extent, I believe, all these reports are true. The mess in the Middle East brings to mind the machinations around Swedish intervention in the Thirty Years War between 1627 and 1635, when France’s Cardinal Richelieu paid Sweden’s King Gustavus Adolphus to intervene on the Protestant side in order to weaken France’s Catholic rival Austria. At different times, Protestant Saxony and Catholic Bavaria allied with France, Austria, and each other, respectively. France and Sweden began as allies, briefly became enemies, and then were allies again. Looming over this snake-pit of religious, dynastic, and national rivalries was the figure of Albrecht von Wallenstein, the Austrian generalissimo who twice saved the Empire from defeat at the hands of the Protestants. Wallenstein, commanding a polyglot mercenary army with no national or religious loyalty, played both sides, and Austria had him murdered in 1634.
There is more than coincidence to the parallels between the Middle East today and 17th-century Europe. Iran’s intervention into Syria’s civil conflict inaugurated a new kind of war in the region, the sort that Richelieu practiced in the 1620s. Iran’s war objectives are not national or territorial in the usual sense; rather, the objective is the war itself, that is, the uprooting and destruction of potentially hostile populations. With a third of Syria’s population displaced and several million expelled, the Assad regime has sought to change Syria’s demographics to make the country more congenial to Shiite rule. That in turn elicits a new kind of existential desperation from the Saudis, who are fighting for not only the survival of their sclerotic and corrupt monarchy, but also for the continuation of Sunni life around them. Today Iraq’s Sunnis, including elements of Saddam Hussein’s mainly Sunni army and the 100,000 strong “Sons of Iraq” force hired by then-U.S. commander Gen. David Petraeus during the 2007-2008 surge, are making common cause with ISIS. Tomorrow they might be shooting at each other. The expectation that the waves of sectarian and tribal violence that have caused national borders to crumble across the Middle East will die down in 30 years may be both incredibly grim and wildly optimistic.
***
In the background of the region’s disrupted demographics, a great demographic change overshadows the actions of all the contenders. That is decline of Muslim fertility, and the unexpected rise in Jewish fertility. The fall in Muslim birth rate is most extreme in Iran and Turkey, with different but related consequences. When Ayatollah Khomeini took power in 1979, the average Iranian woman had seven children; today the total fertility rate has fallen to just 1.6 children, the sharpest drop in demographic history. Iran still has a young population, but it has no children to succeed them. By mid-century Iran will have a higher proportion of elderly dependents than Europe, an impossible and unprecedented burden for a poor country. Iran’s sudden aging will be followed by Turkey, Algeria, and Tunisia.
<http://cdn1.tabletmag.com/wp-content/files_mf/popover65.png>
Source: U.N. World Population Prospects <http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/unpp/panel_indicators.htm>
Iran’s disappearing fertility is in a sense the Shah’s revenge. Iran is the most literate Muslim country, thanks in large part to an ambitious literacy campaign introduced by the Shah in the early 1970s. As I showed in my book How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam Is Dying, Too), literacy is the best predictor of fertility in the Muslim world: Muslim women who attend high school and university marry late or not at all and have fewer children. This has grave strategic implications, as Iran’s leaders unabashedly discuss.
Between 2005 and 2020, Iran’s population aged 15 to 24, that is, its pool of potential army recruits, will have fallen by nearly half. To put this in perspective, Pakistan’s military-age population will have risen by about half. In 2000, Iran had half the military-age men of its eastern Sunni neighbor; by 2020 it will have one-fourth as many. Iran’s bulge generation of youth born in the 1980s is likely to be its last, and its window for asserting Shiite power in the region will close within a decade.
The Obama Administration wants to contain Iranian aggression by accommodating Iran’s ambitions to become a regional power. As the president told <http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-03-02/obama-to-israel-time-is-running-out> Bloomberg’s Jeffrey Goldberg in March, “What I’ll say is that if you look at Iranian behavior, they are strategic, and they’re not impulsive. They have a worldview, and they see their interests, and they respond to costs and benefits. And that isn’t to say that they aren’t a theocracy that embraces all kinds of ideas that I find abhorrent, but they’re not North Korea. They are a large, powerful country that sees itself as an important player on the world stage, and I do not think has a suicide wish, and can respond to incentives.” Any deal with Iran is therefore a good deal from Obama’s point of view. But that is precisely wrong: Iran does not have a suicide wish, but it knows that it is dying, and has nothing to lose by rolling the dice today.

Plus le Climate Change, plus c'est la meme chose

I haven't been much into the Global Warming/Climate Change wars of late, but it's always on my radar.  I have some very real concerns about the climate changing, but they all involve things getting colder.  Even on the equator you can grow food, not so much in the polar and sub-polar zones.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s most accurate, up-to-date temperature data confirm the United States has been cooling for at least the past decade. The NOAA temperature data are driving a stake through the heart of alarmists claiming accelerating global warming.

Responding to widespread criticism that its temperature station readings were corrupted by poor siting issues and suspect adjustments, NOAA established a network of 114 pristinely sited temperature stations spread out fairly uniformly throughout the United States. Because the network, known as the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN), is so uniformly and pristinely situated, the temperature data require no adjustments to provide an accurate nationwide temperature record. USCRN began compiling temperature data in January 2005. Now, nearly a decade later, NOAA has finally made the USCRN temperature readings available.

According to the USCRN temperature readings, U.S. temperatures are not rising at all – at least not since the network became operational 10 years ago. Instead, the United States has cooled by approximately 0.4 degrees Celsius, which is more than half of the claimed global warming of the twentieth century.

 Of course this isn't news to anyone who isn't blinded by Luddite anti-Western dogma, as it has most certainly not been getting warmer for most of us on the ground for quite a while.  I recall (subjective of course) a time in the mid to late '90s when I did feel it was getting warmer in the summer, particularly the intensity of the sun.  I have felt rather the opposite of that for most of the time since then, certainly this century, and this involves travel to other parts of the world.

This wasn't lost of the powers that be in the Warmist camp, hence the "Climate Change" re-branding.  I would argue that was the beginning of the end for them, as "climate change" is meaninglessly vague and attempts to equate literally any climate event with the increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.

The one thing everyone agrees with is that CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing, largely due to human activity.  From there things go off the rails and it gets pretty-much ideological.  Appeals to "science" are common from the Climate Change intelligentsia, but let's look at empirical (testable) effects of CO2.

First, it is half-assed (in scientific parlance) as a Greenhouse Gas (GHG), far outpaced by water vapour and methane.  Specifically, its' IR (heat) absorption window (wavelengths) is overlapped by that of water vapour.  What that means is as Freeman Dyson (a man much smarter than me and likely you) said, CO2 will have most if not all of its' GH effect in cold, dry areas.

"Aha!  That means the ice caps will melt and the sea level will rise!"  Except that that hasn't happened.  

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

[I found this as a draft after I said I was ending the blog but I hate leaving things unfinished, so THIS is the last post for AotF]

The "social media" which is supposed to connect us is also a catalyst for distilling previously hidden differences which will push us apart.  I know people who insist on spewing their pet causes and political ideals all over the news feed, and I have "unfriended" several over things they insist on inflicting on everyone they know. 

Once upon a time there were rules for polite company, and not discussing politics or religion played a large part in them.  Now everybody knows what (almost) everybody thinks about pretty-much EVERYTHING, all the time, and familiarity does indeed breed contempt.  "Social Media" encourages a great deal of what I consider to be anti-social behaviour, specifically ad hominem attacks.  I will go after peoples' IDEAS, but not them personally; if I feel that negatively about the person I won't waste my time or effort on them.

Of course what happens when people know who you are pales in comparison to what happens when people can be anonymous.  Yes, I know that sounds hypocritical on my anonymous blog, but I have work-related reasons to keep things the way they are. More importantly, I never say anything here that I would not say in person to whoever I'm talking about, violent idiots excepted; I'd rather deal with them through a rifle scope or the business end of a cosh.

My point?  I couldn't deal with 600 real friends, I see no point in aspiring to have that many cyber acquaintances.  How many of your Facebook "friends" would help you move?  Show up to a BBQ? It's now like people have anywhere up to thousands of pen-pals, except that you are sharing your life in 140 characters or so at a time.  What do we really know about the personalities of these people?  Knowing their taste in cat videos is not the same as knowing their hopes and dreams or having those "you-had-to-be-there" in-joke memories from the stupid things you've done together.

Facebook is a tool, and like all tools it can be misused and hurt people.  The anti-bullying efforts that are being made today are being stymied if not outright thwarted by the fact that if people are hassling you, it doesn't end at school.  Even if you try to avoid them online, once those parasites have their sights on you they will spread horrible shit about you via whatever social media is trendy at the time.  My personal solution for bullying is to meet it with superior force or at the very least surprise and violence to make them think twice about messing with you, but the sort of kids who get bullied are picked on because they are incapable of standing up for or organizing amoungst themselves.

The title refers to a Kipling poem about cutting through bullshit and identifying basic truths:

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race, I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

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."

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

One look around the world indicates that our part of it at the very least is trying entirely too hard to ignore objective reality in favour of what we'd LIKE to see. This blog started modelled on "Arithmetic on the Frontier" (hence the name, go figure) but as it has moved along over the years I think the message is more in line with the above.  New and shiny is not necessarily better, and that applies to ideas as well as gadgets.  Certainly things have improved immeasurably since the Bad Old Days, but hard times taught some hard lessons which we would do well to remember lest we need to constantly re-learn them the hard way.

World's not gonna end just yet, Chicxulub willing...

I loved P.J. O'Rourke's book All the Trouble in the World , and this Wired article is more in that same vein:

Religious zealots hardly have a monopoly on apocalyptic thinking. Consider
some of the environmental cataclysms that so many experts promised were
inevitable. Best-selling economist Robert Heilbroner in 1974: “The outlook for
man, I believe, is painful, difficult, perhaps desperate, and the hope that can
be held out for his future prospects seem to be very slim indeed.” Or
best-selling ecologist Paul Ehrlich in 1968: “The battle to feed all of humanity
is over. In the 1970s ["and 1980s" was added in a later edition] the world will
undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in
spite of any crash programs embarked on now … nothing can prevent a substantial
increase in the world death rate.” Or Jimmy Carter in a televised speech in
1977: “We could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by
the end of the next decade.”

Predictions of global famine and the end of oil in the 1970s proved
just as wrong as end-of-the-world forecasts from millennialist priests. Yet
there is no sign that experts are becoming more cautious about apocalyptic
promises. If anything, the rhetoric has ramped up in recent years. Echoing the
Mayan calendar folk, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday
Clock one minute closer to midnight at the start of 2012, commenting: “The
global community may be near a point of no return in efforts to prevent
catastrophe from changes in Earth’s atmosphere.”

I particularly like Ridley's description of humanity as a "moving target" and strongly encourage you to read the whole article.

A lack of historical (even recent) perspective bedevils efforts to compete with the hectoring Luddites who would hold us back. The "climate change" crowd for example will ignore all "inconvenient" information which would detract from their agenda of dismantling our technological society. Points of No Return are routinely passed without undue incident, increasingly destructive weather events are taken out of context of the development which has occur ed in that area since the last "worst" hurricane, flood, tornado, etc.

I'm picking on the Warmists again, but in this case it's because they encompass all of the goals of Greenpeace, The Club of Rome and all the rest of them, e.g. there are too many people, and bundle that with the dogma of CO2 as the worst thing since dioxin. The problem with all of these people is that they only have influence in First World countries, places where the birth rate has already plummeted, in most cases below replacement rate and what industry that remains has cleaned up far past where it was even during the Acid Rain era of the 1980s.

The hope of this planet to absorb the ongoing population growth of the Third world and the pollution of the Second is the technological base of the First. Technological advances require prosperity, prosperity requires not being straightjacketed by red tape and excessive taxation. If the world does end due to something less catastrophic than the sun exploding, it will probably be something that sufficiently advanced tech and production capacity could have at least mitigated.

There are PLENTY of "world-ending" bolide (asteroid) impact examples to choose from, so let's take the Cretaceous dinosaur killer as a case study. As things stand, one of these comes our way we're fucked; what could change the odds? Enter Planetary Resources, or other private sector asteroid mining outfit. Yay! Capitalism will save us all out of the goodness of its' altruism, right?

Of course not. What they would however do in their self interest is develop the means to get to asteroids whipping around our system and then take them apart. The tech to do that will also include a highly motivated system to find and track NEOs, the essential first step in averting a bolide catastrophe. In warfare it's "Find, fix, strike" and the principles apply here too.

It is an inescapable fact that motivated people accomplish much more than plodding clock punchers, and the best way to motivate most people is money. Making money off of asteroid mining will require the same tech that one would need to have a chance of averting a major asteroid strike. It may also require large thermonuclear devices, currently held as a monopoly by governments, so there is certainly room for Public and Private to work together here.

None of this matters to the malcontent misanthropes who would have us all living in huts, and then complain about all of the trees we cut down to build and heat them. Well fuck them; the rest of us would like to avoid the "nasty brutish and short" lives of our ancestors and we need to fight those idiots to keep things moving forward. After all, if Mankind is to survive

For all but a brief moment near the dawn of history, the word 'ship'
will mean simply - 'spaceship.' (Arthur C. Clarke)

It's good to have a King

I opened this up yesterday realizing that I'd written nothing here in the better part of a month, but was at a complete loss for topics. This has happened before of course, but is happening more often the last year or so as I realize i don't have much to say which is new. Well, who does anyway; it's a post-scarcity world for ideas too. With that in mind, here's what I think about what David Brooks thinks about our modern elites.

Everybody thinks they are countercultural rebels, insurgents against the true establishment, which is always somewhere else. This attitude prevails in the Ivy League, in the corporate boardrooms and even at television studios where hosts from Harvard, Stanford and Brown rail against the establishment.

As a result, today’s elite lacks the self-conscious leadership ethos that the racist, sexist and anti-Semitic old boys’ network did possess. If you went to Groton a century ago, you knew you were privileged. You were taught how morally precarious privilege was and how much responsibility it entailed. You were housed in a spartan 6-foot-by-9-foot cubicle to prepare you for the rigors of leadership.

The best of the WASP elites had a stewardship mentality, that they were temporary caretakers of institutions that would span generations. They cruelly ostracized people who did not live up to their codes of gentlemanly conduct and scrupulosity. They were insular and struggled with intimacy, but they did believe in restraint, reticence and service.

This is very much my argument in favour of continuing with our (Commonwealth) constitutional monarchy. The Royal Family is raised like this (and it even takes, sometimes), providing some institutional continuity much pooh-poohed by "progressive" republican elements in our society. To wit:

Today’s elite is more talented and open but lacks a self-conscious leadership code. The language of meritocracy (how to succeed) has eclipsed the language of morality (how to be virtuous). Wall Street firms, for example, now hire on the basis of youth and brains, not experience and character. Most of their problems can be traced to this.

When things are ALL about results it can be efficient, however ruthless efficiency is no way to live. It's also no way to run a business, i.e. for "shareholder value", but this is the trap that publicly owned companies run into. It is almost universally true that short-term solutions are not good in the long run. The corollary is that long-term things have no solutions, just management.

"Nothing ever ends", Watchmen fans. If I could, I'd be setting things up for my kids and great-grand kids, and it once was that the rich (elites) had estates, Duchies, Earldoms, etc. that were handed down. You can look at this as outmoded feudalism, or you can look at it as a multi-generational company providing some certainty for the tenants.

Yes, it's de riguer to be against "the Establishment", but please somebody explain to me what that is these days? The banks? Publicly-traded companies; if you want stop the ridiculous bonuses that executives get, buy up enough stock to vote them down. Unless you'd rather just smash things because life is insufficiently handed to you. Political elites? Don't make me laugh; they are merely opportunistic and know they have a limited shelf life.

Of course there is some shadowy world-wide oligarchical elite and with enough money there is a whole lot you can influence and get done. After that though we're in Yertle the Turtle territory and if the plebes have a real problem things can go seriously sideways in the planning cycle. That's Entropy, and a multi-generational elite will account for it. They would not, for example invade Iraq and have nothing to show for it but a lot of dead and injured troops and worn-out equipment.

We have something to the best of my immediate knowledge fairly unique in history: the USA as incipient Empire which is controlled by the new meritocratic elite. Accordingly it is REALLY bad at the Empire stuff, since that requires a long-term goal and the personal investment of the planners. The latter you will most certainly not get with a "democracy", so expect more schizo foreign policy behaviour from whatever passes for "America" these days.

The Road to Hell is paved by the good intentions of the new intellectual elites in academia (who make their way into politics; hello, Obamas) and the media. The problem of course is the Marxist/socialist cant that people are prefectable, they just need to be shown the way. The old-school view is that most people are fucked and it was your Duty to lead them by example. You will rarely if ever hear a social progressive talking about Duty, as it's viewed as archaic and patriarchal or something. Not surprising, because serving as an example severely circumscribes your freedom to do what you want. The mechanical difference between the approaches is that Example leadership pulls, the Nanny State pushes.

Different elite paradigms, different problems. There is theoretical upward mobility today, but in the old days there was in the Feudal system too (William the Conqueror, anyone?). All systems bloat and ossify over time, and the newer meritocratic version has merely done so more quickly and by different mechanisms. The much railed-against credentialism of today is the prime means of keeping the riff-raff in their place. As each generation gets positions, they increase the qualifications required beyond what they needed to get there. Forty years ago you could get in pretty much anywhere with High School (admittedly they actually taught something useful back then), but that generation turned that into a BA, and in many cases they now want post-grad and experience.

That's enough from me on that (for now) but the more I think about it the more real opportunity there was under the ancien regime vs. the current system. I'll close with an axiom to keep in mind when people talk about "equality": free men are not equal, and equal men are not free.

Some actual "science" in the Climate Wars

"Global Warming" has been losing steam (ahem) for some time now as people realize that the dire predictions of environmental Armageddon have not been manifesting as prophesied. Here is one of the biggest Green prophets recanting in the face of facts. I wish this wasn't noteworthy, but here we are.

Two months ago, James Lovelock, the godfather of global warming, gave a startling interview to msnbc.com in which he acknowledged he had been unduly “alarmist” about climate change. The implications were extraordinary.

Lovelock is a world-renowned scientist and environmentalist whose Gaia theory — that the Earth operates as a single, living organism — has had a profound impact on the development of global warming theory.

Unlike many “environmentalists,” who have degrees in political science, Lovelock, until his recent retirement at age 92, was a much-honoured working scientist and academic.

Here's the money part:

Lovelock still believes anthropogenic global warming is occurring and that mankind must lower its greenhouse gas emissions, but says it’s now clear the doomsday predictions, including his own (and Al Gore’s) were incorrect.

He responds to attacks on his revised views by noting that, unlike many climate scientists who fear a loss of government funding if they admit error, as a freelance scientist, he’s never been afraid to revise his theories in the face of new evidence. Indeed, that’s how science advances.

Emphasis mine. If you don't revise your theories in the face of new facts, that's dogma, not science. Therefore the "consensus" on "Climate Change" is... Here's a part I particularly like:

As he puts it, “so-called ‘sustainable development’ … is meaningless drivel … We rushed into renewable energy without any thought. The schemes are largely hopelessly inefficient and unpleasant. I personally can’t stand windmills at any price.”

I wonder how many of the people who advocate wind power live anywhere near a wind turbine; anecdotally, everyone who lives near them that I've heard of HATES them. The mere sight of them makes me angry, I guess as a symbol of oppressive "Green" religion and a lack of critical thinking.

In any event, Loveleock has been very influential and the hope is that this will undermine the Gores etc. and make some erstwhile environmentalists actually think. I don't hold out a lot of hope for that as the facts were available before, but every little bit helps. More nuclear power and natural gas, and no more wind turbines and solar farms; abundant clean energy is what will allow us to survive. The universe is about what works, not what appeals to your sense of "social justice".

Better than all other forms of government, except...

In view of the mob violence which is the increasingly prevalent hallmark of modern "democracy", I saw this and thought it'd make a good counterpoint to the default "Democracy at any cost" school.

Books have been written about it, films have been made about it: Rwanda is best known for a genocide that claimed more than half a million lives in 1994.

But in the ensuing years, quiet changes have taken place there. So much so that "The Economist" magazine now asks: is Rwanda "Africa's Singapore?" The World Bank ranks it 45th in the world for ease of doing business, higher than any African country barring South Africa and Mauritius. And Transparency International says it is less corrupt than Greece or Italy.

A (post-Apartheid) Sub-Saharan society with less corruption than two EU members? I wish it was hard to believe, especially considering that Greece and Italy are "democracies", but something else is at work here. In fact, in Paul Kagame we see a pretty good example of that rarest of good governments, the Benevolent Despot.

"Benevolent" does not mean he's a saint, by any stretch. Considering how he came to power there were and remain a lot of heads to be cracked in a notoriously volatile part of the world, so I'm sure Amnesty International won't be giving him a gold star. The scale to measure a Benevolent Despot against the garden variety ones is much like the scale of judgment in the Egyptian underworld; all the bad you do should weigh no more than a feather (although I hear they used a pretty big feather).

There are a lot of places that could use a BD, and historical precedents are any good king, etc. Tito in Yugoslavia is a reasonably contemporary example. All of these occurrences, rare as they are, must be viewed through the lens of their environment, not some armchair human-rights mouthpiece. The world is what it is, most frequently not what you'd like it to be, especially if you get all of your learning from a narrow range of Utopian politically correct sources. The "Arithmetic" of the Frontier that I model this blog on (and as much of my life as I can) is "whatever works is right".

Let's take a situation which is not currently entirely out of control, Tunisia. This is the epicentre of the "Arab Spring" and as Arab countries go, particularly considering the overall state of the world economy, it was in pretty good shape under Zine El Abedine Ben Ali. There was a fairly reasonable level of corruption (real-world assessment), but no freedom of the press. This is a case of "what have you done for me lately", as for the first 20 or so years of his rule he was voted in with massive majorities, and his policies made Tunisia on of the most vibrant economies in the region.

The problem with Tunisia, like all Muslim(ish) countries is that they have too many kids, leading to "youth" unemployment. This is a deliberate plan as it was for the Catholics until recently to out-produce the infidels, but that's an aside. I will lay a significant sum of money against whatever replaces Ben Ali being better overall than what his system managed.

A surprising number of people with nice comfy lives in soft Western countries consider a free press more important than stability, at least in other countries. If the recent foolishness in Montreal was to persist or even better, escalate, being able to blog about it without the secret police (CSIS, I guess?) kicking in your door will likely be a lesser priority than having enough food in the house and/or getting to work to make a living.

Ideally you have stability and freedom of the press, etc. but if you're in a rough neighbourhood which is more important? I personally think that an inability to tolerate criticism is the mark of an insecure leader, and showing weakness in any regard is dangerous when you're on top. If I were despoting somewhere I would let the press say what they want (as long as it's true and they spell my name right) and not waste my scarce secret police resources on hassling journalists. There are plenty of other people who need visits from them, the ones who advocate violence, and secret police are just what is needed for that bunch.

Keep the gears engaged, the lights on and the food rolling in to the distribution centres; that's what keeps people alive and reasonably comfortable, and that's my measure of success. I would indeed make a few bad actors disappear for that, and I have at least some respect for anyone who can hit those benchmarks. Even (especially, to be honest) if some (deserving) heads get cracked for it. Democracy is indeed only one range of options out of many.