Next: Purges and the Midwest Gulag?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All is not lost. Yet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The other end of the arc.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sounds like a case for Unconditional Surrender Man!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meltdown Shakedown

The following seems pretty straightforward:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you NEED something to worry about...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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