BUNgle in the JUNgle

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.

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.

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.

Ann Coulter and the Art of outraging people for fun and profit.

It should be fairly obvious that I have no problem with people making outrageous statements; that is, as long as "outrageous" is used in it's literal sense. Something that causes outrage usually does so due to a subjective reaction on the part of individuals or perhaps groups. Something outrageous does not become untrue simply because it's not popular in some quarters. "Ridiculous" is another type of statement, and that is something that provokes ridicule by being foolish, stupid, etc. and the connotation is that it is also false. 9/11 "truthers" (not even a word!) who foment conspiracy theories involving "nano-thermite" in the Trade Centre towers are a good example of something ridiculous.

So Ann Coulter was supposed to speak last night at Ottawa U. So what? Ann says stuff that even I think goes too far, but much of her delivery may be for rhetorical effect. She is a narrow-minded religious type, and as such I don't want her running things any more than I want the Green Party to run Canada. I'm closer to Coulter's end of the spectrum, but closer isn't collocated. Having said that, even if Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein were headlining something at my alma mater I'd just stay away; people who aren't threatening you (and I don't mean your ideas, I mean your precious skin) don't require violent protests, sit-ins and intimidation.

It makes these leftist Brown Shirts feel big to hector speakers they don't like out of the country, and for all of their ability to grab hold of the media they don't grasp the secondary effects of giving the Ann Coulters, David Irvings and Geert Wilders' of the world that kind of exposure. I must hasten to add that I only include Mr. Wilders in with the other two for his effect on cringing leftists; the West needs more people like him and I can't necessarily say that about Coulter and Irving as there are a fair number of them already.

OTTAWA - Hundreds of screaming students succeeded in what few thought possible Tuesday night - they silenced incendiary right-winger Ann Coulter.

Mm, not quite silenced; she got MASSIVELY more mainstream media coverage due to the screaming mob and the threatening (with legal prosecution) email generated in reaction to her mere presence than she would have had the local intelligencia ignored her. I also note that the CBC used the worst available photos of her; she's a good-looking woman and you don't get goofy shots of her without trying to. That (and the tone of the articles to a less-subtle extent) is subtle manipulation of the media, albeit BY the media. If 100 or so people who haven't been brainwashed by the relentless PC Marxism of our University system want to come and bask in her conservative glow, will that undermine all of our human rights?

The system is good at stamping out little PC clones that possess the illusion of independent thought, so not that many university students would show up for her anyway. Back in the day I probably would have (if I wasn't going out clubbing that night at least) but mostly because it baits these PC twits and I like to spar with them. I remember going to see Gwynne Dyer during Gulf War 1 with some leftish friends who obviously had never actually read what he had to say about war. They just assumed that a critic of the military must be against it. That is a product of the bullshit "Critical Theory" that likes to tear down everything that made the soft squishy society that these people inhabit possible. Western Civilization is the font from whence comes both the technology which makes 6B+ people on this planet possible AND the self-hating philosophy that stifles the free expression of ideas and has the potential to pull the whole thing down.

I confess to some ignorance (no excuse, I know) about the precise laws in Canada about expression, but I do know that we have no equivalent of the First Amendment. I cannot say "Let's kill all of the _" and expect to get away with it, so I won't. I would be interested to see the legal reaction in Canada to someone saying "Muhammad was a pedophile", evidence being him consummating his marriage to Aisha when she was nine (9) years old. I'll make an observation/prediction though: if it were libel it'd go to a real court, not some PC kangaroo version thereof.

Saying "Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims" is not strictly accurate, but not so far off the mark as to be "ridiculous" rather than merely "outrageous". The (Muslim) girl at Western who challenged Coulter on her proposition that Muslims should take "flying carpets" so that they wouldn't blow up our airliners handled it with some class, merely leaving after being offered the option of a camel when she mentioned she didn't have a flying carpet. Coulter scored some cheap points with her base, but did nothing to use her provocative premise as an entrée to a serious discussion of the source of all of these attacks. That marks Coulter to me as a lightweight, and suggests that the dumb-ass things that she says are likely what she actually thinks.

As for the "flying carpet" comment itself, it has potential. Make an opening by pissing people off with that, then riposte their frothing outrage with something along the lines of: Muslims wouldn't even have planes if it wasn't for Christians, or at very least Western Civilization. It therefore follows that camels certainly are an appropriate transport alternative for a group who SHOULD be preferentially profiled on the basis of their religion due to their demonstrated inclination to try to blow up things that they couldn't come up with themselves. There are enough bad apples in that particular barrel to taint the bunch; Islam DICTATES that non-believers should be subjugated (when not forcibly converted or killed), so ipso facto all Muslims are a potential threat to all non-Muslims (insert relevant verse etc. of Koran here for full effect).

That, Ann, is how it's done, and I'm not even all that clever so it can be and has been done even better. It's easy to outmanoeuvre the dogmatic of any stripe, especially the ideologues, and all that it requires is a) you get them riled up first, and b) that you can back up your wacky pronouncements with FACTS, not cheap jokes to the mouth breathers in your peanut gallery. You're good at a) and it's not too late to work on b) as long as you're flexible enough to separate the "mostly-true" from the factually unassailable and recombine them for maximum rhetorical impact. You've got a pretty good gig already though , so what could I know?

Acts of War on Terror

One of the shibboleths of the now re-branded "War on Terror" was the phrase "cowardly suicide attack". A roadside bomb can be termed "cowardly" since it's objective is to avoid direct engagement with the enemy, but by the same token so can an artillery fire mission. Anything where you intend to put your ass on the line involves at the very least determination or delusion if not actual courage. Your garden-variety AQ shaheed falls into the "deluded" category here, and given what AQ stands for I can only hope that they all get the death that they love so much, though not they way they're hoping to.

A contributing factor to this post was a show ("Silent Warriors") that I saw part of yesterday. It involved an AK-47 attack which killed two CIA agents in traffic in Langley in 1993. The perp was a Pakistani who shot the agents, but spared the wife of one of them who was in the car. The guy was eventually run to ground in Pakistan in '97, and executed in 2002. The agents got their stars on the wall at Langley, and the widow got payback on the man who spared her life. Hmm, doesn't sound very good like that, but still technically correct.

So what, you ask? Standard disgruntled-Muslim attack, albeit before it was really fashionable, but I found that I could identify with the attacker's method, if not his motive. First, he used a gun, not a bomb, and he did it in public in daylight. He shot the men he was after, and no one else. No car bomb in the market, suicide vest on the train, he had a military target and he hit that and only that. Say whatever you want about who's side they're on (and who really knows with the CIA anyway?), but a CIA agent is as legitimate a target for upset foreigners as you can get. Ditto the suicide attack a couple of months ago in Afghanistan that killed the CIA drone crew. The bomber hit a military target, and got it because of his determination and slack security on the post.

I am not of course advocating open season on the CIA. I am merely pointing out that enemy action against military/intelligence targets is exactly that, enemy action, NOT a terror attack. 9/11, 7/7 and Madrid were terror attacks; the attack on the USS Cole and the truck bomb that hit the US Marines' barracks in Beirut in 1982 were not. Do you hunt the planners down and kill them with extreme prejudice? Most certainly, as you can't make them think that their human cruise missiles are the only ones who will pay for hurting us. In this case at least I would make sure to execute them quickly and cleanly; that's MY "due process" for our mortal enemies.

Tarring everything that's done to attack us as a "terror" attack is stupid and plays into the opposition's hands by paralyzing us. Most terror attacks are headed off by Int and law enforcement agencies, and most of the rest are so incompetently executed (I'm looking at you, Abdulmutallab) that they are almost funny. In fact they are funny, to me, when the only ones they hurt are the shitheads who think it's a good idea to kill Westerners just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Burning to death or losing your 'nads (you again, Umar) sounds about right to me, as I lack confidence in a Hereafter that will give these clowns their proper reward.

It does us no credit to spew panicky "terror" crap every time someone gets the drop on us. There must be a tit for their tat, but (the disproportionate "tat" I'd prefer aside) some professionalism is called for from the talking heads. I'd like to see stuff along the lines of "Yes, we lost some good people, but rest assured that the planners won't get away with it." Of course Dubya said that about Bin Laden nine years ago and we don't have his head in a box on the steps of the US Embassy in Pakistan yet. Oh well; the reward is still up, $US 27M I think, so if he's alive (which I personally doubt on the balance of evidence) it could still happen. Hell, the head-in-a-box scenario still works if he's dead...

Whack-a-Muj in Afghanistan

Harking back to my initial post on the battle for Marjah, Helmand province, I will gratefully concede to being partially wrong. The Taliban, although brutal and ignorant are no Al Qaida, and have failed to accomplish their leaders' intent in Marjah.

The plan was to suck ISAF in and cause massive (by current standards) allied casualties in a nest of IEDs and ambush positions that the opposition had several months' warning to construct and refine. Reports I read had it that Taliban leadership was annoyed with their guys failing to die for Allah and Mullah Omar, and I can easily believe that.

That's the good news. I used the whack-a-mole analogy in the post title, but hitting an insurgent force this way (e.g. not cordoning off the area and killing anyone with or near a weapon) is more like hitting water with a hammer. If it's not destroyed (ok, it's hard to destroy water in any permanent way, but you know what I mean) it simply flows elsewhere. In any event, these two quotes tell you everything you need to know about Afghanistan:

Helmand Gov. Gulab Mangal acknowledges that the Taliban have outright control of three of the province's 13 districts. In most other districts, the only areas where the government has control are the district capitals, according to residents and some government officials.

Mangal's appointee as chief of Baghran district, Abdul Razik, hasn't been able to take up the job because the Taliban won't let him enter the area. Instead, he works out of an office in Lashkar Gah, telephoning elders in Baghran to try to persuade them to switch sides.

"How can I go there by myself if they are in control?" Razik asked. "We don't have enough soldiers or police to go with me. I can't go alone."

and:

Michael Scheuer, the former CIA point man in the hunt for al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, cautioned against overstating Marjah's success, which he called "transitory."

"As long as we have 10,000 folks on the ground and open the spigot of greenbacks the success will continue," he said. "The U.S.-NATO-Karzai team will also get a boost from the large part of the media ... who will take a transitory local success and extrapolate it into a nationwide, permanent turning of the tide. How many times did we see that in Vietnam and in Iraq? How many times did the Soviets trumpet the same kind of victory in Afghanistan?"

Those who will not learn from history will keep attempting to splash around in the nation-building morass of Afghanistan. My equally dire prognosis for the democracy transplant in Iraq have not (yet) come to pass, but Iraq is a VERY different country than Afghanistan. That was merely a bad idea and unlikely to work, Afghanistan is quite possibly permanently broken.

Gen. McChrystal has not proven me wrong here in the big picture. The low quality of the human material he was up against is the only thing that has kept this from being another Fallujah, but the Taliban don't have to be brave and willing to martyr themselves to control the place in the long run. As they said, NATO has the watches, but the Taliban have the time.

Marching with Morons

The old expression goes: "The rich get richer, the poor get children". This is the basic premise of the story of similar name, and something which has been considered as a potential problem off and on for years. The premise is that the collective IQ of the population is lowered by only the least gifted having children. It is important to note that anything I have to say about that is anecdotal at best, as I have not made any actual study of demographic IQ trends.

What triggered me writing about this was an article in the Times Higher Education online about attempts to open up "elite" universities to the average Nigel:

'The issue at stake is a familiar one: the make-up of the student
population does not reflect that of the UK as a whole. People from some
groups - most notably poorer backgrounds - are significantly
under-represented in the university system.

According to a 2008 National Audit Office (NAO) report, Widening
Participation in Higher Education, half the population of England is
made up of people from lower socio-economic groups, yet among the young
full-time student population the proportion is less than a third (29 per
cent). Those from better-off backgrounds are more than twice as likely
to go to university as those from the less privileged sections of
society.

But getting to university is only the first part of the equation: the
second is the type of university these students attend. Poorer students
are more likely to study at "lower status", less selective institutions,
and this affects their life chances. The divide is widest in "elite"
universities, particularly Oxbridge - a high-profile issue regularly in
the public eye. It is here that widening participation collides with
"fair access".'

Granted, this doesn't have a lot to do with the book I mentioned above, but there is a bit of stupidity involved. This cannot be any sort of surprise; the definition of the word "elite" would do for starters. The article then goes on to burnish its' brilliance with something about how it actually matters which University you graduate from. To take a couple of domestic examples, the degree from Queens' carries a bit more weight in the marketplace than one from, say, Lakehead, all things being equal. This is not to slag Lakehead or to say that Queens' is the bees'-knees, but some are more prestigious than others. "Better" is a more complex idea requiring quantifiable direct comparisons, but prestige although nebulous is easier to get a feel for.

Where this comes back on track is with the effect of successfully integrating Joe and Jane six-pack (or the Brit equivalent; football hooligans, mayhap?) into Oxford and Cambridge. There could be some short-term boost to the "outcomes" for those plebes in the labour market ("Ooh! Oxford!"), but in the medium to long-term it turns those former "elite" universities into just another community access college. This is a typical political decision, looking only as far as the next election and how to get votes from certain segments of the hoi-polloi. Demographics are Destiny, but a pig with lipstick is still a pig.

If you're poor and want to go to a fancy school, there are mechanisms for that known as "scholarships". This keeps the elite character of the school, in fact enhances it, as it brings in the best and brightest, not just the kids whose parents are wealthy and well-connected enough to get them in. Of course this is (gasp!) an argument for a meritocracy. The politically correct will not accept that as the basis for society, as it is too "exclusionary".

I want people smarter than me running certain things, certainly anything that involves a lot of math. Most people don't resent people more intelligent than themselves, (as long as their noses aren't rubbed in it) and can appreciate that not everybody can do everything equally well, or on some cases, at all. It's rather like arguments to keep the Olympics more open to less-than-elite athletes; I don't care to watch anyone competing in something that they aren't not in the very top rank of; consider women's hockey from the recent games. Most people can play hockey (for example) worse than pros, so they watch pros to see it at the highest (available) level.

"Equality" and "access" when combined should not (and literally don't) mean that everyone can do whatever they feel like whether or not they have the means (personal or material) to do so. The government is an institution designed to keep the lights on and the worst excesses of human nature under control. It has everywhere grown far beyond that, and although I like our medical system, I'm not fool enough to think that it comes for "free". The laws of Thermodynamics dictate that you don't get something for nothing, and it applies in the practical "real world" as well. Of course governments exist to control the population; as an exception, the U.S. Constitution took a stab at keeping government small and out of most of peoples' lives 200+ years ago, but now they have "No Child Left Behind", which (thank you, Law of Unintended
Consequences) is more like "No Child Gets Ahead". Cue Harrison Bergeron.


This is the real risk to our societies, not poor people having more kids than rich people. Poor kids can still be smart, and with WELL CONSIDERED incentives they can and should get ahead. Anything that doesn't involve taking an opportunity from someone else who would otherwise have it is fair game in my books.

Entitlement is a cancer eating away at Western civilization, but we'll see more attempts to impose it on the taxpayers until our system collapses. That is, assuming it hasn't already in some places; Greece is pretty much paralyzed with strikes and protests, and the Euro zone is in real trouble. One thing I can tell you with certainty is that Brussels won't be able to do more than paper over this, if it can do even that. More regulation will be their answer to this, not "live within your means".

As soon as people think that others will bail them out, they are no longer interested in being prudent. At a personal level that's welfare, or being handed a university placement that you didn't earn by brains or bank account. Back on the education angle, 50% of the population is BY DEFINITION below Average. No government initiative will change that; in fact no power on Earth can, and any ideas to the contrary are at best delusional. The US Army's ads from a few years back had it right: Be All That You Can Be. I don't live in "happy-self-esteem world" and out here everyone has limited potential, like it or not. You can push that potential to see how far you can go, but you can't be pulled there.