Oslo-holma City

The shooting/bombing fatalities from the Norwegian rampage stand at 76 right now, and while people can be shocked they shouldn't be too surprised.

The 32-year-old suspect acknowledged carrying out the attacks in Oslo and at a youth camp on Utoya island, but said they were necessary to prevent the "colonization" of the country by Muslims, a judge said Monday.

The Norwegian Labour Party, not Muslims, were the intended target of Breivik's spree on Friday, Lippestad said, adding that he could not explain the suspect's reasoning.

Breivik accused the Labour Party of "treason" for promoting multiculturalism, Judge Kim Heger said after a closed hearing Monday.

Breivik appears to have written a 1,500-page manifesto that rants against Muslims and lays out meticulous plans to prepare for the attacks. In it, the author vilifies Stoltenberg and the Labour Party, accusing it of perpetuating "cultural Marxist/multiculturalist ideals" and indoctrinating youth with those ideals. The author accuses the Labour Party of embracing those ideals and allowing the "Islamification of Europe."

His lawyer says that he doesn't understand Breivik's motives, but they're spelled out in the same article. Alien cultures are being imposed on European countries and a lot of people are unhappy about it; if they wanted to live under Sharia they'd move somewhere that had it. Personally I think that this will not be that last time something like that happens, but I expect more of it in the USA.

Killing people who are no physical threat to you is automatically terrorism, even if I agree with your general grievance. Organizing politically to get a government which represents your views is more difficult, but that way you won't drive away people who might agree with you. Recent events in Holland have shown the lengths the leftist multicultis will go to to suppress ideas they don't like, but the truth will occasionally out as long as you keep things civilized. That is after all what we want in our civilization, not to stoop to the terrorists' level of killing people as your main argument.

Moving on; what next?

Canada's front-line fighting role in Afghanistan officially ended Tuesday when soldiers of the Royal 22e Regiment handed battlefield combat responsibilities over to the Americans.

Almost all Canadian troops are out of Kandahar's dangerous combat zones, except for a few soldiers who are attached to American platoons for a few more weeks.

Canada's war in Afghanistan is now effectively over after five years of fighting throughout farmland and dusty villages in one of the country's most dangerous areas. It cost Canada the lives of 157 soldiers, one diplomat and one journalist, not to mention the many soldiers left with life-altering injuries.

I'll have some more to say about this later, but I'm happy that we're away from this tar baby. I'm apprehensive about the future of the Canadian Army without the fire this lit under it, but I guess we'll see. Hopefully wherever we go next will be more important to our national interests (or at least capable of really helping some people in a permanent fashion) than our other current entanglement in Libya.

On Hiatus

I'm going to be away from my usual haunts for a couple of months, so there will be little to nothing on AotF during most of that time. It's bad timing as the blog has been going pretty well for the last few months, (thank you, my modest readership) but I will be back. As always, having a feed on this place will get you the best results. Later.

More Oil = Less Blood in the Levant, More in the Orient?

Today we'll see if sleeping on the revelations (see June 14's post) of massive reserves of recoverable oil in Israel has produced anything worthwhile. I don't know where I'm going with this yet, so strap in...

I am on record repeatedly here as a defender of Israel; not everything they do, but the right of the place to exist as a Jewish state. It's not a lot of real estate, it's in a (forever) rough neighbourhood, and if the Palestinian Arab recent arrivals can argue a "Right of Return", certainly Jews have priority of claim to everything west of the Jordan.

At the end of the day might makes right, and the Israelis have been a lot more restrained than I would have been facing a group of people who wanted (and repeatedly tried) to wipe my people from the earth. The fact that there are Palestinians still in the West Bank and Gaza is proof of that restraint, with all of the attendant misery on both sides that has come from it. A lot of that restraint, as mentioned in the FP article I referenced, comes from skittish Westerners scared of pissing off the Arabs.

I can't imagine that 2,000 years of anti-Jewish sentiment will disappear from Europe if Israel can suddenly supply them with petroleum, but it is to be hoped that more rationality could result. More interesting to me is the effect of this sort of sustainable windfall on Israel's security policy.

Americans are not entirely enamoured of the amount of money their country sends to Israel every year. I could add that a similar amount of money (c. $2B/y) has been going to Pakistan, a place that can't seriously be considered an ally of the US, but that's just for perspective. The latter is already being throttled back for being unreliable, but in any event the gravy train is over for all concerned as Uncle Sam is skint.

I will make the argument here that a more secure Israel will be a more stable bulwark in the Mid-East. They could of course go nuts and ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip or some such, but on past practice I consider that unlikely, as justifiable as Gaza's current government would seem to make it. This is good news for the local Arab countries too, particularly their soldiers. A strong Israel with the best and most modern armed forces in the area will dissuade a future Nasser from trying again; a weakened Israel with no US support might be a tempting target and result in a bloodbath on both sides. Even worse, if Israel was facing disaster, what would stop them from nuking their tormentors?

Of course this gives energy-and-everything-else starved Egypt a motive to invade, but as noted above it ensures Israel's means to resist all comers. In short, I can't see any way in which an energy and financially secure Israel will make things worse in that part of the world. Iran could go even farther off the rails and do something crazy once they have nukes but if Pakistan hasn't let one slip yet I don't see that happening either, and payback would be the end of Iran as we know it.

Much as a certain amount of restraint was necessary during the Cold War and later during the (very) recently lapsed Pax Americana due to the ability of superpowers to do a lot of damage, weakness or perceived weakness is the trigger for invasions and other adventurism. The Americans are overstretched, so the Chinese are playing war games with their weaker neighbours over the Spratly Islands. In that case a combination of oil reserves and no strong counter to the ravenous (of resources) Chinese could plausibly lead to war with at least Vietnam and Taiwan.

This suggests to me that it's time to switch my focal point to the Far East, as that is where some real movement could take place. Pakistan or North Korea could completely collapse and China could skirmish or worse with many of it's neighbours; yes the centre of gravity has definitely shifted. There will continue to be stuff happening in the Mid East, but I don't see much actually changing (globally) because of it. China throwing it's weight around will be QUITE different. I'm waiting to see American carrier groups defending communist Vietnam against free-market (ish) China. "The End of History" my ass.

Israel vs. OPEC?

I'll take a bit to digest this, but it's certainly a game-changer:

Financial Post June 10 2011

In the first 25 years after Israel’s founding in 1948, it was repeatedly attacked by the large armies of its Arab neighbours. Each time, Israel prevailed on the battlefield, only to have its victories rolled back by Western powers who feared losing access to Arab oilfields.
The fear was and is legitimate – Arab nations have often threatened to use their “oil weapon” against countries that support Israel and twice made good their threat through crippling OPEC oil embargoes.

But that fear, which shackles Israel to this day, may soon end. The old energy order in the Middle East is crumbling with Iran and Syria having left the Western fold and others, including Saudi Arabia, the largest of them all, in danger of doing so. Simultaneously, a new energy order is emerging to give the West some spine. In this new order, Israel is a major player.

The new energy order is founded on rock – the shale that traps vast stores of energy in deposits around the world. One of the largest deposits – 250 billion barrels of oil in Israel’s Shfela basin, comparable to Saudi Arabia’s entire reserves of 260 billion barrels of oil – has until now been unexploited, partly because the technology required has been expensive, mostly because the multinational oil companies that have the technology fear offending Muslims. “None of the major oil companies are willing to do business in Israel because they don’t want to be cut off from the Mideast supply of oil,” explains Howard Jonas, CEO of IDT, the U.S. company that owns the Shfela concession through its subsidiary, Israel Energy Initiatives. Jonas, an ardent Zionist, considers the Shfela deposit merely a beginning: “We believe that under Israel is more oil than under Saudi Arabia. There may be as much as half a trillion barrels.”

What if Western foreign policy was freed from fear of another OPEC embargo? Admittedly that scenario is fantastically unlikely as things stand presently, but if it's happened once it (or something very similar) can happen again. More importantly, what happens if Israel no longer needs the USA?

Anyway, this requires some thought so I'll come back to it when I have more time; in the meantime I leave it as a mental exercise for the reader

Snow more to say about "Climate Change"?

"The science [of man-caused Global Warming] is settled" my ass:

BBC 16 Jan 2007

Scientist's fear for Snowdon snow

Scientists have been studying the changing snowline on the mountain for 14 years.
Snowdon could lose all its snow in less than 15 years as climate change continues to take hold, it is claimed.
Wales' highest mountain has seen its snow covering fall by about a third in 10 years, Bangor University scientists and environmentalists have found.
Measurements show significant warming on Snowdon since the 1960s. Average spring temperatures are up about 2.5C.

Now this:

BBC 10 June 2011

Summer snow falls on summit of Snowdon

This was the scene on top of Snowdon at lunchtime on Friday
The summit of Snowdon under a white blanket of snow: it's a picture postcard cliche.
But if you thought this photograph was taken in the dark days of winter then think again.
The wintry scene, at the Snowdon Mountain Railway's terminus near Hafod Eryri, was photographed at 1300 BST on Friday - in the middle of June, days before the start of Wimbledon and just over a week before the summer solstice.
Around the UK this week counties have been declaring drought conditions after one of warmest and driest springs in memory. Parts of Wales, too, have been experiencing very dry weather.

Even when Nature shows them that they have no idea what is happening or what's going to happen, the Changeistas have to shill their agenda. The "warmest and driest springs in memory" follow abnormally (for recent times) cold snowy winters in the UK.

I don't claim to have the last word on this, but the hypocrisy of some groups and individuals is staggering. There is absolutely NO PROOF that the earth is still warming, as opposed to local fluctuations in climate. The satellite temperature measurements are the closest we have to a global average, and as best I can tell they show no warming since 1998. Particularly since 2007 we've not been all that warm and the Arctic ice is recovering in area and thickness.

You can look this all up (I've seen it all but can't be bothered to look it up for links presently) and make up your own mind, though I advise a lot of cross-checking of facts and sources. That's standard research, but this of course only applies to people who want to KNOW what's going on; those who've already made up their minds don't need anything as crude as observations.

Models are the basis for all of the alarmist predictions, and not a single one of them has been right so far. They keep pushing the timelines farther out to make them unverifiable, which is the antithesis of Science. It's political and idealistic and accordingly dangerous. For reference, Hitler and Osama bin Laden were also idealists.

Profiles in Petty Tyranny

There are lots of (logical) arguments in favour of "profiling" in law enforcement and security, but this one is as good as they get:

... when a group of 2,000 elderly British cruise ship passengers docked at Los Angeles for a short stop-off during a five-star cruise around America it was, in the words of one of them, more like arriving at Guantanamo Bay.
Although they had already been given advance clearance for multiple entries to the country during their trip, all 2,000 passengers were made to go through full security checks in a process which took seven hours to complete.
The fingerprints of both hands were taken as well as retina scans and a detailed check of the passport as well as questioning as to their background.
Passengers claim that the extra checks were carried out in “revenge” for what had been a minor spat over allegedly overzealous security.

I totally believe this. I have a friend who was banned from entry to the USA for five years for getting in an argument with one of their border guards, and that was before 9/11 and the Patriot Act. I've said it before and I'll say it again; as long as visiting the USA is an ordeal, I won't subject myself to it.

A group of elderly Brits on a high-end cruise ship is about as unlikely a group of terrorists or illegal immigrants as you could ask for, and nothing about the situation justified what was done. So some old guy compared you to North Korean border guards (maybe not literally, but you know what I mean), does that mean you have to act like them? This is the result of too much power being given over completely banal situations, and petty functionaries the world over are prone to get drunk with such power.

Stories like this abound about "the land of the Free and the home of the Brave". Efforts to control everything to this degree are born of Fear, and they make people distinctly not Free. I know that the US is having problems, but is the place really so fragile that anything that a six-year-old or a group of elderly tourists could possibly do (saying nothing about what's probable or even likely) bring the whole rotten edifice down?

Fear drives most of security thinking, but fear should be used as a tool and not take over or be a means to further a plan which loses sight of the basic rights of the citizens and even of visitors who shouldn't be assumed (at least not all of them) to be terrorists. This requires intelligence and flexibility, not something you'll get from the sort of people who want to be TSA screeners.

"At the end of the day, the United States is down, for sure, but it is not out," ; this is from a statement about oil prices and investment from Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, but I'm not so sure. The US can certainly come back from this, but it's increasingly difficult to see how. What hope I do see is in this general direction and comes from the grassroots; the government and the malignant bureaucracies it has spawned needs to be torn down and rebuilt. That I don't see happening, so I'll just stay away until they prove me wrong.