OK, the battle’s over, if not the war, and as we carry the dead from the blood-soaked field, Obamacare is still the “law of the land”. (“Flaw of the land”, according to some, but never mind.)
So: how’s it going? Megan McArdle’s been wondering. If you are too, here’s a nifty website to help you follow along.
I’ve been preoccupied, so just a pair of related links for tonight. The topic is ‘biobots’ — i.e., remote-controlled cockroaches — and new ways to use them.
I have a question for all of you who say insist that the Democrats have played no causal role in this government shutdown and impending default (there’s no reason why the US must cease paying its debt service if the debt ceiling isn’t raised, by the way).
(Just to be clear: although I agree with the goals they have sought to achieve, I am in this post staking out no position on the wisdom, from a purely tactical perspective, of what the Republicans have done.)
Right, then. Let’s assume, arguendo, that all of the rhetoric we’ve been hearing is spot on: the blackhearted Republicans, in thrall to the stupid and racist Tea Party, are totally insane, and don’t care who gets hurt; they’d rather see the world burn than put down the guns they are holding to the President’s head. They really mean it: they’ll crash the economy, and they’ll keep the government shut down forever, unless they get their way. Let us assume also that, as the Democrats are fond of reminding us, it will be, in human terms, a terrible catastrophe. A great many Americans will see their savings wiped out as the economy tanks again; many will even die for want of government services. All this unless the President and the Senate majority accede to the House’s demands to accept item-by-item funding, or repeal Obamacare waivers, or roll back the medical-device tax, or whatever. There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that these Republicans are evil, criminally insane desperadoes, who have hijacked the benevolent American system for their own foul ends.
So, the question is:
You are a loving father, and a criminally insane desperado holds a knife to your child’s neck, threatening to do her grievous, perhaps fatal, harm unless you hand over something you value greatly: perhaps some precious gift you’ve toiled for years to be able to give to your family. (Your home, for example.) The police are nowhere to be seen. Things are at the breaking point: it is plain that if you don’t act now, the worst will happen.
What should you do? What would you do?
You are President Obama, and you love America and its people (we’ll accept that second, slightly hard-to-swallow premise arguendo, just as we did the first). These Republican mad-dogs are holding a gun to the nation’s head, and they are crazy enough to shoot, unless you make some compromise on your cherished legislation. If you don’t give them at least some of what they want, and they pull the trigger, the nation will suffer terribly, perhaps irreversibly. They will of course be reviled for it, but by then it will be too late.
What should you do?
From an item at SFGate:
People whose 2014 income will be a little too high to get subsidized health insurance from Covered California next year should start thinking now about ways to lower it to increase their odds of getting the valuable tax subsidy.
Slip-slidin’ away…
— Steve Sailer comments on the tendency of women who are interested in science to go into the “life sciences” (medicine, biology) rather than fields like physics and chemistry.
— Mark Steyn on King John and Barack Obama.
— A “must-know” endgame from Susan Polgar.
— Iron Man.
— Walter Williams on guns, and the history of gun violence.
— All those books, and nobody even bothers to loot them.
— I’m telling you: graphene.
— PJB on America going to pieces.
— The courtship dance of the coastal peacock spider.
— Intellipedia.
Forward-looking, tech-savvy investors knew a while back that 3-D printing was going to be a Big Deal. (Those farsighted speculators have already made handsome returns with companies like 3-D Systems and Stratasys.) The technology is still in its infancy, though — about where personal computing was in 1980 or so — and its truly transformative effect (which is coming, believe me) has yet to make itself felt.
So: what’s next? I’m better-connected than most folks when it comes to emerging technologies, and in my opinion, the best candidate is a simple material with astonishing properties. It’s called “graphene”, and it is a one-atom-thick layer of carbon in a hexagonal lattice. It’s been under most people’s radar so far: I’ve mentioned graphene to several big-shot money managers in the past few months, and not one of them had even heard of it.
Graphene is the strongest substance known — hundreds of time stronger than steel — and has fantastic electrical and chemical properties. It seems that the people studying the stuff are turning up new, and potentially revolutionary, applications almost daily. (Here’s today’s, from the latest Graphene World Today newsletter.)
If you’d like to learn more about graphene, have a look here.
With a hat tip to our friend Mangan: sitting will kill you.
Here’s the academic Left descending ever deeper into self-parody. Racism collides with sexism in a self-pitying pissing-contest of the microscopically oppressed.
One would have to have a heart of stone to read this without laughing.
On the dance floor itself, a great seething mass of people move like maggots in a tin.
— Theodore Dalrymple, visiting a club.
From Life at the Bottom, Kindle location 1408.
I don’t know what’s worse here: the brownshirt tactics of NPS rangers assigned to strong-arm old folks so as to make House Republicans look mean, or the awful fact that someone educated in America could accuse a person of “recreating”.
God help us.
Over at The New Republic, in an article called Quit Blaming Gerrymandering for the Shutdown, Nate Cohn addresses some fashionable ideas about the effects of Congressional districting.
In a new worldwide evaluation of various cognitive skills, Americans have made a poor showing.
Americans performed below the international average on math, reading and problem-solving on the exam, known as the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies. U.S. math skills lagged far behind top performers, including Japan and Finland. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, based in Paris, released the results early Tuesday.
A key sentence from the linked item:
The oldest U.S. adults were close to the international average, but American adults in every other age group performed far worse than the world average.
Do not believe for a moment, readers, that this age-related distribution in any way suggests that the education of our youth is in decline.
Remember, always: our republic enjoys consistent gains in all social metrics!
Is it not true that today No Child is Left Behind, and every pupil in need gets a Head Start?
Furthermore, it is known by all that high-school graduation rates are up!
If only we had the cognitive skills to understand what the actual problem could be…
Here’s another, from DARPA: WildCat.
See also: RoboSimian.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
— C. S. Lewis.
Limpid clarity on the 17th shutdown, from Thomas Sowell. Here.
While the nation keens and writhes over the theatrical Obamacare showdown/shutdown, Kevin D. Williamson, in an essay published earlier today, offers a sobering look at the larger problem: reaching a point where debt service plus “mandatory” entitlement spending exceeds total revenue — which rising interest rates could bring about sooner than you might think.
When that happens, it’s the Zombie Apocalypse, friends.
We read:
If you think that our politics looks polarized this week, imagine what it’s going to look like when the choices are a more or less identical partial shutdown of the government plus suspending most or all Social Security payments indefinitely, eliminating federal health-care benefits, and/or defaulting on our bonds and enduring the subsequent economic chaos. There are people in Congress, Senator Rand Paul among them, with serious if necessarily imperfect plans to help get us from where we are to a safer and more sustainable place, and the main obstacle to such reforms is not gridlock or special-interest lobbying or any of the usual suspects in Washington: It is the willful ignorance of the American people, who refuse to demand that their elected representatives act like responsible adults who can count.
It’s the people who elected and reelected Barack Obama and his team ”” and it’s the people saying “Don’t touch my Social Security! I paid into it!,’ along with the so-called conservatives in farm states who make like Pharisees every time they catch sight of an EBT card on the way to deposit their farm-subsidy checks. Everybody is talking this week about dysfunction inside the Beltway, but the problem, America, is you. None of that spending is free. And if you want a quantitative measure of the real long-term impact of that national immaturity, see those accumulating interest payments.
Read the rest here. Keep your powder dry.
Speaking of Washington Monument Syndrome, some memorable political theater is underway at the WWII Veterans Memorial: the completely open-air plaza has now been blocked off by our Executive Branch, in a gesture of sheer petulance, just as a planeload of elderly veterans are arriving for a ceremonial visit. (“Non-essential” workers were actually exempted from their temporary furlough in order to close off the area.)
Great optics, you geniuses.
A term you might be hearing more of soon: ‘Barackades’.
Update: the guards have given way. The veterans are in.
This excellent metaphor comes to us (by way of Jim Geraghty) from blogger Bruce Webster, who coined it to describe a phenomenon that he observed, originally, while analyzing the ways in which large-scale software projects can fail. In this post, he notes that it applies also to the slow-motion catastrophe we call “Obamacare”. The post is dense with links, which are worth following.
Meanwhile, into the shutdown we go, it seems. There is much infighting on the Right over this (though there is no disagreement that this bill is a monstrosity that should be resisted tooth and nail for the sake of the nation). Many say that because fiscal conservatives in Congress will be blamed, fairly or not, for a shutdown, the better strategy is just to let Obamacare run its disastrous course, and make the Left own it. The problem, though, is that entitlement programs generate constituencies — and in a democracy, if those constituencies are large enough, programs become immortal, even if they increase the overall morbidity of the nation. Like Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, we can see the baby cobras curled up inside the eggs, and know that once hatched, they can kill a mongoose, or a man.
The shutdown, however, will cause a great deal of pain, and likely accomplish nothing.
The lovely Nina and I met a very interesting gentleman today: Paul Sheehan, a columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald. (He has also served as that newspaper’s Washington correspondent, and its day editor.) Mr. Sheehan is an old friend of our friend Allen Kurzweil, and is in Wellfleet for a visit. This afternoon Allen, who lives nearby, brought him over to introduce us, and we spent a couple of hours in conversation.
In addition to being witty and charming, Mr. Sheehan is quite the reactionary gadfly, and a stout-hearted infantryman in the culture war now ravaging the West. He is also noted for his collection of crack vials, which I understand to be the finest in the world.
If you should happen to see this, Paul: it was a pleasure getting to know you. Come again, and next time I’ll make sure to have some oysters put by.
Here is the opening of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, pp 25-26, 1986. (My emphasis.) For “openness”, you may substitute “non-discrimination”.
There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students’ reaction: they will be uncomprehending. That anyone should regard the proposition as not self-evident astonishes them, as though he were calling into question 2 + 2 = 4. These are things you don’t think about. The students’ backgrounds are as various as America can provide. Some are religious, some atheists; some are to the Left, some to the Right; some intend to be scientists, some humanists or professionals or businessmen; some are poor, some rich. They are unified only in their relativism and in their allegiance to equality. And the two are related in a moral intention. The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so they see it. They have all been equipped with this framework early on, and it is the modern replacement for the inalienable natural rights that used to be the traditional American grounds for a free society. That it is a moral issue for students is revealed by the character of their response when challenged — a combination of disbelief and indignation: “Are you an absolutist?,’ the only alternative they know, uttered in the same tone as “Are you a monarchist?’ or “Do you really believe in witches?’ This latter leads into indignation, for someone who believes in witches might well be a witch-hunter or a Salem judge. The danger they have been taught to fear from absolutism is not error but intolerance. Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating. Openness ”“ and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance in the face of various claims to truth and various ways of life and kinds of human beings ”“ is the great insight of our times. The true believer is the real danger. The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all.
The students, of course, cannot defend their opinion.
This book, given to me as a gift a year or two after it came out, was my ‘red pill’. Further, painful rounds of memetic chemotherapy lay ahead, but for me, this is where it began.
One of my oldest and closest friends is a fellow by the name of Carl Sturken. We’ve been pals since the fifth grade.
Carl is a fantastically (and eclectically) talented musician. We were bandmates in high school, and he went on (to no-one’s surprise) to a very successful career as a songwriter and record producer. (Have a look here, or here.)
Since Carl was a boy, he’s spent a week every summer at a retreat on Star Island, one of the Isles of Shoals off the New Hampshire coast. There are a lot of musicians who go there, and every year they have a little talent show. This year, Carl, together with his longtime musical pal Kemp Harris, decided to try something ambitious — an ad-hoc orchestra playing the complete arrangement of the Jimmy Webb/Richard Harris 1968 mega-hit MacArthur Park.
To make this happen, first Carl needed to figure out the arrangement. To do this, he loaded a copy of the song into his digital audio workstation (I think he uses Logic Pro.)
The original song had a lot of tempo changes, all played live. Carl set up a tempo map in Logic, with tempo changes just a bar or two apart in some spots, so as to be able to add sequenced parts that would track closely enough with the varying tempo of the record.
Next, he began listening for every instrument he could hear in the mix — strings, horns, bass, winds, guitars, keys, you name it — adding a MIDI track, for each one, that effectively matched the part it was playing on the original. (No small feat!)
Once he had finished this painstaking work, he was able to solo each track, and use the built-in notation software to generate a printed score for each instrument.
Next, he started calling all the people that he knew would be there for this year’s get-together on Star Island. (It’s a tight-knit community, and many of the families who go each year have been coming for generations, so everybody knows everybody.) He asked anyone who could play a musical instrument to make sure they brought it. All were welcome to join in, and the players ranged from 8-year-old violinists to grizzled professionals. Carl omitted no detail: for example, the high note at the very end of the original record was sung, not by Richard Harris, but by a female vocalist. Carl found someone to do that, too.
When the week at the island rolled around, Carl set up rehearsals for all the different sections — string players in one room, rhythm section in another, etc., and they all went off to learn their parts. After a day or two, they all got together for a full rehearsal. A day after that: showtime!
As it happens, the whole thing ended up on YouTube. (There is a rather extended series of introductions by the maestro himself, and then the song begins. Hang in there.)
A final “inside” note, and another mark of the attention to detail on view here: that’s Kemp Harris conducting, in an homage to the conductor-in-a-kimono featured in this classic appearance on Soul Train by the late, great Barry White. (Said conductor really gets going around 2:15 in the linked Soul Train clip.)
OK, without further preamble: here it is!
Interesting item here: the human population may have undergone significant expansion far longer ago than we’ve thought up till now — not ten millennia ago, but sixty to eighty.
How, I wonder, does this fit in with the “Toba bottleneck” theory, in which the entire breeding population of humans is thought to have crashed to a few thousand individuals, about seventy thousand years ago?
Here’s a Cold War scheme I’d never heard about, until our own JK sent me this link: a Saturn-like ring around the Earth, made of little copper wires.
For you chessplayers: a pretty puzzle, from Susan Polgar. Here.
Here’s the comedian Louis C.K., with some remarkably insightful remarks on the popularity of smart-phones and the human condition.
Blaise Pascal said: “All of man’s misfortune comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room’. We would rather see, or do, almost anything rather than be forced to look inside ourselves.
We have more ways to distract ourselves today than any generation of humans has ever had, and we seize them eagerly, and with increasing desperation. As a result, entire civilizations are drifting into oncoming traffic.
— Steve Sailer on amnesty and fertility.
— New book on the way about the Matthew Shepard story.
— A great Burgess Shale website. Drill down for the animations.
— Speaking of exotic fauna, longtime readers may remember our mentioning the tardigrade, here and here. Now, an amazing photo, here.
— And if that weren’t enough: dinosaur feathers!
— Upscale vending machine.
— From the one and only Lileks: Starfish Hitler.
— Feeling the need to “give something back”? Go crowdsource some plankton.
— Yikes!
— Hail to thee, blithe spirit.
— Theoi.
Cleverly displayed, using animated maps. Here.
In his daily newsletter, Morning Jolt, political commentator Jim Geraghty posts a response to a question from NPR on “what kind of debates the country should have after a mass-shooting tragedy”. *
I’m reproducing Mr. Geraghty’s answer in full, below, because I think it is forthright and sensible.
Sam Harris has issued a $20,000 challenge to anyone who can refute his claim to have placed morality on a thoroughly scientific, Utilitarianist footing. (Not a merely descriptive footing, that is: a normative one: a beneficent blend of biology and Bentham.)
I might have to take a go at this myself.
See also Harris’s initial responses to his critics, here.
Meanwhile, Ross Douthat adds some penetrating comments of his own, here. His concluding remarks are on the money, I think:
I have no problem, and nor should anyone, with Harris declaring that he favors a particular moral system, defining its terms to the best of his ability, and then explaining why he thinks scientific inquiry can help us maximize the end that system privileges. If you know what moral ends you’re driving at, then clearly science can be of assistance in your quest; the idea that the two spheres of inquiry never overlap is obscurantist and silly. But he would be much more persuasive on that narrower point if gave up on the broader one, and reconciled himself to the fact that his style of utilitarianism is not the self-evident and scientific foundation for all sensible moral inquiry that he believes it to be.
Though in that case he would also be out $20,000.
Jonah Goldberg has posted a tart essay on the Left’s conceit that it is they, not conservatives, who stand on the side of personal liberty.
We read:
Alleged proof for this amusing myth (or pernicious lie; take your pick) comes in the form of liberal support for gay marriage and abortion rights, and opposition to a few things that smack of what some people call “traditional values.’
The evidence disproving this adorable story of live-and-let-live liberalism comes in the form of pretty much everything else liberals say, do, and believe.
Social liberalism is the foremost, predominant, and in many instances sole impulse for zealous regulation in this country, particularly in big cities. I love it when liberals complain about a ridiculous bit of PC nanny-statism coming out of New York, L.A., Chicago, D.C., Seattle, etc. ”” “What will they do next?’
Uh, sorry to tell you, but you are “they.’ Outside of a Law and Order script ”” or an equally implausible MSNBC diatribe about who ruined Detroit ”” conservatives have as much influence on big-city liberalism as the Knights of Malta do.
Seriously, who else do people think are behind efforts to ban big sodas or sue hairdressers for charging women more than men? Who harasses little kids for making toy guns out of sticks, Pop Tarts, or their own fingers? Who wants to regulate the air you breathe, the food you eat, and the beverages you drink? Who wants to control your thermostat? Take your guns? Your cigarettes? Heck, your candy cigarettes? Who’s in favor of speech codes on campuses and “hate crime’ laws everywhere? Who’s in favor of free speech when it comes to taxpayer-subsidized “art’ and pornography (so long as you use a condom, if liberals get their way) but then bang their spoons on their high chairs for strict regulations when it comes to political speech? Who loves meddling, finger-wagging billionaires like Michael Bloomberg when they use state power and taxpayer money to herd, bully, and nudge people but thinks billionaires like the Koch brothers who want to shrink government are the root of all tyranny?
Right. And when it comes to taking control, let’s not forget toilets, light bulbs, and a whole lot more. Pretty much everything, in fact, except sex, drugs and the border.
Read the whole thing here.
A sine qua non for the modern liberal ideologue is a flair for living comfortably in a state of cognitive dissonance. This is made necessary by the internal contradictions of his worldview, and by its frequent, and calamitous, collisions with the social, political, economic, cultural, mathematical, and biological realities of the actual world. The California legislature has now given us an excellent example of this, in which two features of a recently passed bill stand in direct and obvious contravention to one another.
The new law, Assembly Bill 60, stipulates that illegal aliens may now acquire driver’s licenses. It requires journeyman cognitive dissonance merely to think this a good idea in the first place (as opposed to an unfolding of the consequences of prior bad ideas), but what takes real virtuosity is to reconcile the two provisions stipulating, on the one hand, that the new licenses will carry distinguishing markings indicating the bearer’s “undocumented” status, and on the other, that prospective employers must not use these markings as a basis for discrimination when hiring.
Consider:
A) Illegal aliens do not have Social Security numbers, which an employer needs for tax compliance.
B) If a job applicant presents one of these new licenses to a prospective employer, it establishes, then, with legal certainty, that any Social Security number the applicant may give will be fraudulent.
The law thus requires that the employer keep these propositions well apart from one another at all times — an easy thing, perhaps, for a left-wing Assemblyman to manage, but a formidable challenge for a normally functioning mind.
For employers in California, there is no avoiding one or the other prongs of this fork. When presented, by a job applicant, with one of these new illegal-alien licenses, they must either hire the fellow knowing that they become complicit in a Social Security fraud, or discriminate — which is, as we know, the Omega point of evil in the modern world. Both are illegal.
We hear often lately of “anarcho-tyranny“, in which those who comply with the law are brought under stricter and stricter control, gradually squeezed dry, and finally ground to dust, while those who simply ignore it are at greater and greater liberty. Just today I heard a splendid example on the radio.
“Have you been foreclosed on recently?” the announcer asked. “If so, then your mortgage may have been satisfied in full! Just call this number…”
The idea appears to be that, some people having been foreclosed on too aggressively, a class-action suit had been brought forward, with the result that the mortgages in question have been dismissed. Meanwhile, however, those chumps who just ground along at their dreary job, or jobs, dutifully making their payments every month, are in just as deep as ever.
On the other hand the applicant, who violates our national sovereignty by his mere presence, enjoys the blithe protection of the very state whose laws he disregards. One party, the job-creating citizen, is coerced into criminality, as he tries in good faith to comply with the suffocating web of obligations the State ensnares him with; the other, the alien infiltrator, violates the law of his own free choice, and is rewarded for it.
I note with real sorrow the passing of Ray Dolby, who gave my generation of recording engineers a priceless gift: quiet recordings on analog tape. That may not sound like much, but let me tell you, friends — it was.
From Charles Cooke (@charlescwcooke):
The Russian president just trolled an embarrassed United States in its paper of record on September 11th. Everything I love is dead.
From Iowahawk:
Putin now just basically doing donuts in Obama’s front yard.
They’re talking, of course, about this.
OK, enough about Syria.
Here’s the video we’ve all been watching, a frame a day, in the mirror. Fantastic.
Good point from Stanley Kurtz just now at the Corner:
This speech was a close reflection of [U.N. ambassador Samantha] Power’s views. The overwhelming emphasis was on humanitarian goals, with a brief, secondary, and noticeably weak effort to buttress that case with talk about threats to our interests.
Power’s core argument is that American foreign policy has historically “refused to take risks’ for humanitarian ends. Power chastises American leaders for declining to “invest the military, financial, diplomatic, or domestic political capital’ necessary to prevent massacres. U.S. officials, she complains, consistently “play up the futility, perversity, and jeopardy of any proposed intervention.’
Well, drawing a humanitarian red line in conformity with Power’s goals has brought us face-to-face with the prospect of a genuinely futile and counterproductive intervention. The president’s speech tonight failed to persuade that the risks mooted in our debates over Syria are not in fact grave. Obama’s line about taking humanitarian steps when it’s merely a matter of “modest effort and risk’ comes straight out of Power’s work. Unfortunately, the risks in Syria are far from modest…
A foreign policy that intentionally subordinates traditional calculations of strategic interest to humanitarian ends will inevitably sacrifice our strategic interests. And having lost strategic position, our ability to sustain humanitarian ends, insofar as we can do so consistently with out interests, will be correspondingly reduced. This is what happened in Libya and Syria when we put Power’s policies into practice. So not only are we now facing a substantial reduction of our influence in the Middle East and the rise of Russia in our place, but the Syrians are unlikely to give up their chemical weapons in the end.
All of this follows logically from Power’s theories. Move humanitarianism to the center of our foreign policy at the expense of traditional strategic concerns, and strategic disaster follows. In the end, that means more humanitarian problems, not less.
Humanitarian interventionism has been tested in the Middle East and found wanting.
Some takeaways from the President’s speech just now:
1) Assad has achieved moral equivalence with Hitler, but we will leave him in power.
2) It is morally imperative that we use our incomparable military power to set an example here, so that despots the world over will never again dare to use gas to do their slaughtering. Therefore we must strike hard; no “pinpricks” for us. The world must fear our wrath!
2a) No “boots on the ground”, though. Jeez, somebody could get hurt.
3) If we degrade the Assad regime’s assets with some serious, non-pinpricky bombing, it will weaken al-Qaeda too! That’s because it actually strengthens al-Qaeda when Assad slaughters them en masse with poison gas and then doesn’t get bombed afterwards by us. Betcha didn’t know that.
4) Anyway, I’ve decided that we’ll do nothing for now, because maybe confiscating poison gas a few weeks after it’s been deployed against a dictator’s own people is a pretty good way to go, too. We’re just going to check that out for a while, and we’ll get back to you. But don’t forget: wrath!
5) People on the left are totally into freedom and dignity, and really hate to see children (did I mention children?) writhing and dying on the floor. (From gas, anyway. Kind of “meh” otherwise.)
6) My “friends” on the right, on the other hand, mostly just like blowing shit up. (That’s the difference between good folks like us and people “on the right”, by the way — in case, like me, you had never actually met or spoken to any of them until very recently.) This means they can get on board, too! Something for everyone here, folks.
Hey, whaddya know. Looks like:
a) Our “credibility”, and incontrovertible moral imperatives, don’t require us to bomb Syria after all;
b) Our “incredibly small” strike — described as being equal, in its fearsomeness, to making Assad eat Cheerios with a fork instead of a spoon — might not be about to send its blunt and puissant “message” to blackguards and evildoers the world over;
c) U.N. “hocus-pocus“, however annoying, is nevertheless preferable to Congressional “joke’s-on-POTUS”;
d) The Houyhnhnms of our foreign-policy Justice League — whose hippo*-cratic oath seems to begin with “First, do some harm” — have, in the event, been well and truly pwned by that nasty little Yahoo, Mr. Putin.
* From the Greek ‘hippos (ίππος)’ = ‘horse’, of course, of course.
It’s sad, it must be said, to see such a farce play out on the world stage — but then again, as Oscar Wilde remarked: “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”
Let the spin begin! (It will all turn out to have been a master-stroke by the Lightworker, I expect.)
Sorry — no time for a post today. Some links:
— Natural selection in action.
— A Chinese guide to the West, c. 250 A.D.
— Steve Sailer on American exceptionalism.
— BHO vs. BHO, from VDH.
Our friend Kevin Kim has just worked his way through all of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes adventures, and has a comprehensive review. Go read it here.
Here’s retired general Robert H. Scales on a war the military doesn’t want:
By no means do I profess to speak on behalf of all of our men and women in uniform. But I can justifiably share the sentiments of those inside the Pentagon and elsewhere who write the plans and develop strategies for fighting our wars. After personal exchanges with dozens of active and retired soldiers in recent days, I feel confident that what follows represents the overwhelming opinion of serving professionals who have been intimate witnesses to the unfolding events that will lead the United States into its next war.
They are embarrassed to be associated with the amateurism of the Obama administration’s attempts to craft a plan that makes strategic sense. None of the White House staff has any experience in war or understands it. So far, at least, this path to war violates every principle of war, including the element of surprise, achieving mass and having a clearly defined and obtainable objective.
Meanwhile: John Kerry has announced that the House of Saud and other Arab oligarchs will pay us to take out Assad. Is this what we’ve come to? Mercenary hit-men in the ancient Sunni-Shi’ite blood feud? They take out their checkbooks and we do the dirty work?
Pat Buchanan asks the same question, here.
I was all set to put up a link to today’s NightWatch analysis, but noticed that the indefatigable JK beat me to it in a comment on our previous post. Here it is again, nevertheless.
I haven’t selected any excerpts to reproduce here — I urge all of you to follow the link and read the whole thing. In brief: there is a great deal more uncertainty about all of this than you might have been led to believe. Open-source reports (see here, for example) cast significant doubt on the story we’ve been hearing from Mr. Kerry et al.
The dog that I don’t hear barking in all of this is Samantha Power, who — unless water now flows uphill, the planets have reversed their courses, the Mets are headed for the World Series, and the Republican Party is a doughty garrison of rock-ribbed conservatives — is working the President’s ear like Grima Wormtongue on this one. There has hardly been any mention of her in the press, but let there be no doubt that she sees this chance to hit Syria the way Michael Moore might look at a lasagna.
With a tip of the hat to a tweet by hbd* chick, here’s an idea from Israel: banning “remittances” by illegal aliens (or, as they call them in Zion, “infiltrators”):
Interior Minister Gid’on Saar signed regulations, Monday, that make it illegal for someone who illegally infiltrated the country to send money out of the country. The goal of the measures are to make the infiltrators leave with what they accumulated instead of regularly sending it out to their countries of origin.
Under the regulations, an illegal infiltrator can only take money or property out upon leaving the country. The regulations were approved by the Knesset Interior Affairs and Environmental Protection Committee last week, and are scheduled to go into effect on Friday.
To get to this point, however, one has first to embrace a curious notion: that for people to enter your country illegally, underbid natives for jobs that would otherwise pay higher wages, and then to siphon off to a foreign economy most of whatever they earn, is something that a nation might have a legitimate interest in discouraging.
Industrial-grade unwisdom from the National Review:
Any strike shouldn’t be a pinprick or necessarily a one-off but part of a broader, longer-term plan to topple Assad and defeats [sic] his allies. This means strengthening elements of the Syrian opposition we can trust, with arms and training; it means crafting and leading an international coalition committed to a post-Assad Syria; it means staying engaged beyond the next few weeks.
“Elements of the Syrian opposition we can trust.”
“Crafting and leading an international coalition.”
Hoo-boy.
The rest here.
