What Buck?

December 20, 2012 – 6:17 pm

I’m working today, with no time for writing — so here are NightWatch‘s comments on the Benghazi report:

Special NightWatch Comment: The most important finding of the Accountability Review Board (ARB) on the Benghazi tragedy is that al Qaida is alive and well and living in Benghazi. The rest is pretty much well known, with a few exceptions.

As harsh as the words of the ARB Report seem about high level failures in the State Department, no one is held accountable. The Board found that mistakes were made. The report is essentially a white wash. Three people at State resigned today, but that is not the same as facing legal proceedings for civil or criminal negligence in wrongful death. The Board gave everyone a pass.

A few things that are confusing in the Benghazi report.

1.The Board found that the ambassador was responsible for mission security and he should have pushed harder for improvements. The implication is the ambassador ultimately was responsible his own death. Hmm”¦.The ambassador made at least three pleas for improved security, including the last on the day of his demise. Other parts of the report make clear that no amount of pushing to improve security would have made a difference with senior State Department leadership.

2.The Board found that mistakes were made. The use of passive voice means the Board refused to find anyone, except the dead ambassador, to blame for the mistakes. The message is that things went wrong; people were murdered, but it was no one’s fault. This is the core of the whitewash. This viewpoint evades questions of causality, incompetence, negligence and blame.

3. Intelligence did not identify a specific threat at the time, the Board found. This finding betrays a shallow understanding of intelligence warning among the Board members. The 65-year history of US national security affairs since passage of the National Security Act of 1947 shows that waiting for last minute unambiguous warning before taking precautions is waiting to die. The report lists 20 security incidents and attacks against the consulate, but found that body of information insufficient for warning, even on the anniversary of 9/11. One clear issue not mentioned in the report, and an obvious blind spot of its authors, is insight about how intelligence warning empowers decision makers to keep them safe by averting harm or increasing readiness to receive damage. Neither happened in Benghazi.

4.The Board made no finding about the importance of Allied cooperation in maintaining diplomatic security in Benghazi, according to the unclassified report. This is strange because the British, Turks and especially the Italians — all NATO allies and intelligence partners — had significantly more resources in Benghazi than the US, they said. They could have been consulted or requested to help rescue the US mission on short notice. British, Turkish and Italian foreign affairs officials said in public they were not consulted and their aid was not requested. They also said they would have responded if asked.

5.The Board found that the US military did all it could in the time available. Secretary Panetta made the point that there was nothing the US armed forces could do which would have made a difference during the time of the attack. The implication of this finding is that there is little point in positioning counter terror and emergency response teams in Italy and elsewhere in the Mediterranean basin within two hours of Libya because they apparently can make no difference in a series of terrorist attacks that lasted for seven hours. This finding looks like a disservice to the US armed forces personnel and units who train for these missions. Plus, the finding of virtual impotence is an intelligence windfall for terrorists in northern Africa.

6.The Board found that the chains of command and responsibility for the protection of the Benghazi mission were not clear and that agencies were stove-piped. This is curious because the central themes of the post 9/11 intelligence and national security reforms are integration, collegiality and collaboration. Apparently those messages, so vital to combat forces, have not reached those responsible for diplomatic security, eleven years after 9/11, and even for diplomatic missions in high risk areas.

The Board found all the things that State did wrong, but the Benghazi attacks expose basic problems in national security crisis management that run far beyond those at State. The entire national security establishment performed no better in failing to save the life of Ambassador Stevens in Libya than it did in failing to save the life of Ambassador Dubbs in 1988 in Afghanistan.

Many things changed between 1988 and 2012, but the system performed no better when it counted most. That should have been the key finding of this report.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (0)

Crikey!

December 19, 2012 – 4:26 pm

Here’s a mighty close call.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (7)

Suzanna Hupp Joins The “Conversation”

December 19, 2012 – 3:09 pm

I almost added this to the previous post, but it deserves a post of its own.

By Malcolm | Posted in Guns | Comments (5)

Do Something!

December 19, 2012 – 1:53 pm

When America’s leftward “progress” encounters friction nowadays, we are told to have a national “conversation”. What is meant by the word “conversation” in this sense is something like: “the conservative opposition will now listen quietly and attentively, whilst enlightened liberals lead them through a long-overdue course of reeducation and rehabilitation. They may then speak, so as to be able to declare their assent.”

(Sometimes the phrase is “national dialogue“. The meaning is the same.)

The “conversation” we are supposed to be having now is, of course, about gun control. (Young Maria Gamez, sadly, won’t be joining us.)

Occasionally, some troublemaker refuses to receive his instruction in respectful silence, and is even so insolent as to raise reasonable objections to the content of the course material.

The “conversation” then goes like this, or this.

Here are a few points that might be worth making, if we can get a word in edgewise.

Finally, once we have got everyone in line, here are some procedures that every good Eloi should follow in the unlikely event of any further unpleasantness.

Just in: leading the charge on tougher gun laws will be Joe Biden.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Guns | Comments (8)

Congress

December 18, 2012 – 11:51 pm

This is amazing. From XKCD cartoonist Randall Munroe.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (0)

Web Of Deceit

December 18, 2012 – 10:06 pm

Here’s a new one: a spider that builds decoy spiders.

By Malcolm | Posted in Darwin and Biology | Comments (2)

West Meets East

December 18, 2012 – 12:09 am

I just realized I had neglected to note the passing of the great Ravi Shankar, who died last week at the ripe old age of 92.

He was for me, of course, as for everyone else who was young in those days, the one who opened the door to the treasure-house of Indian music. I first heard his music by way of his association with, and influence upon, the Beatles, but once I had acquired the taste I wanted more.

In 1968 I bought a mind-boggling album (twelve-year-old aspiring musicians have easily bogglable minds, and in those heady days there was much to be boggled by) called West Meets East, a collaboration between Mr. Shankar and the violinist Yehudi Menuhin. It was aptly named, because it was really this record that brought me fully into contact with the richness of Indian music — which up till then had just been some droning guitar-like sounds on a few Beatle records (though the opening cut of side two of Sergeant Pepper’s had given me my first real inkling that there was more to it than that).

Here you go, then: Swara Kakali, from West Meets East.

Whew! I still get goosebumps when those tabla start to play.

By Malcolm | Posted in Music and Recording | Comments (2)

Coda

December 16, 2012 – 9:56 pm

With a hat tip to our friend Jeffery Hodges, here’s an excellent survey of the moribund and incoherent state of American conservatism. It is not a cheery picture.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (8)

Constructor Theory

December 16, 2012 – 2:04 pm

From a fascinating interview with physicist David Deutsch:

There’s a notorious problem with defining information within physics, namely that on the one hand information is purely abstract, and the original theory of computation as developed by Alan Turing and others regarded computers and the information they manipulate purely abstractly as mathematical objects. Many mathematicians to this day don’t realize that information is physical and that there is no such thing as an abstract computer. Only a physical object can compute things.

On the other hand, physicists have always known that in order to do the work that the theory of information does within physics, such as informing the theory of statistical mechanics, and thereby, thermodynamics (the second law of thermodynamics), information has to be a physical quantity. And yet, information is independent of the physical object that it resides in.

I’m speaking to you now: Information starts as some kind of electrochemical signals in my brain, and then it gets converted into other signals in my nerves and then into sound waves and then into the vibrations of a microphone, mechanical vibrations, then into electricity and so on, and presumably will eventually go on the Internet. This something has been instantiated in radically different physical objects that obey different laws of physics. Yet in order to describe this process you have to refer to the thing that has remained unchanged throughout the process, which is only the information rather than any obviously physical thing like energy or momentum.

The way to get this substrate independence of information is to refer it to a level of physics that is below and more fundamental than things like laws of motion, that we have been used thinking of as near the lowest, most fundamental level of physics. Constructor theory is that deeper level of physics, physical laws and physical systems, more fundamental than the existing prevailing conception of what physics is (namely particles and waves and space and time and an initial state and laws of motion that describe the evolution of that initial state).What led to this hope for this new kind of foundation for the laws of physics was really the quantum theory of computation. I had thought for a while that the quantum theory of computation is the whole of physics. The reason why it seemed reasonable to think that was that a universal quantum computer can simulate any other finite physical object with arbitrary accuracy, and that means that the set of all possible motions, which is computations, of a universal computer, corresponds to the set of all possible motions of anything. There is a certain sense in which studying the universal quantum computer is the same thing as studying every other physical object. It contains all possible motions of all possible physical objects within its own possible diversity.

Read the rest (with video) here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Science | Comments (1)

Hell On Earth

December 15, 2012 – 5:56 pm

In the wake of the Newtown shootings, the usual voices on the Left have resumed their call for the nation to “do something” about guns. In a longish post, here are some contrarian opinions from around the blogosphere, and a few observations of my own.

Read More »

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (72)

From The Abyss

December 14, 2012 – 1:47 pm

There was an eruption of unspeakable horror, of pure Evil, today in Newtown, Connecticut. From what I understand many small children — 18, according to the latest report — have been shot to death.

There will be bitter political debate in the days to come — such as we have never seen before, I think — but for the sake of human decency, please, not today. Hold your children close, if you have them, and reflect on what it means to be human, and what it means to be alive.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (7)

Take Good Heed Not To Judge Me Ill

December 14, 2012 – 12:50 pm

Laura Wood, the Thinking Housewife, brings to our attention France’s newest public institution: the National Observatory of Secularism. Its function is to train the State’s benevolent and watchful Eye upon “religious pathology”.

Whether secular pathology will be detected as well is left to the reader’s intuition.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Foreign Affairs | Comments (0)

Great And Small

December 14, 2012 – 12:44 pm

Courtesy of Reuters:

 

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (3)

Reminder

December 13, 2012 – 11:27 pm

“Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter. A democratic state may profess to venerate the name, and even pass laws making it officially sacred, but it simply cannot tolerate the thing.”

– H.L. Mencken, the Baltimore Evening Sun (13 April 1925)

 

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (2)

In The Beginning…

December 13, 2012 – 10:37 pm

If you’re like me, you’ve been asking yourself lately: when did people first make cheese?

Here’s your answer.

By Malcolm | Posted in Science | Comments (5)

Weissrein!

December 13, 2012 – 11:43 am

Today Dennis Mangan comments on the actor Jamie Foxx’s recent opening monologue on Saturday Night Live, which I hadn’t seen until just now. It is startlingly frank (I realize I shouldn’t be startled by this sort of thing any more, but I’ll admit I was) in its triumphalist antipathy toward white people. At one point Mr. Foxx, describing his role in some movie he’s just made, says that he gets to “kill all the white people”. Beaming, he asks the audience: “How great is that?”

It hardly needs mentioning, but if any white person had made such a comment in reverse (on the immensely implausible assumption that a movie might even be in theaters today in which a white protagonist slaughters black people), he would be dragged into the public square to kneel and grovel for forgiveness, and his career would be over. (See, for example, Michael Richards). Yet a grinning Mr. Foxx can do this on one of America’s premier network television programs and elicit nothing but howls of approval from the audience.

To put this as delicately as I can: if history and human nature are any guide, at some point this may lead to unpleasantness. Of course, history and human nature may in this case not be a reliable guide, because the blithe acquiescence of Western, Anglo-European culture in its own obliteration has, as far as I am aware, no historical precedent.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (8)

Family Matters

December 12, 2012 – 11:09 am

Townhall.com has published a fascinating article about household income inequality in America, based on a novel analysis of historical income data. Applying the mathematics of log-normal distributions to census data for the incomes of working and non-working individuals of both sexes, the authors found a way of simulating various household combinations that allows them to parse out the median incomes for each. By combining these results with the Gini index of income inequality, they conclude that rising household income inequality in America is due to the steady increase of single-person households.

The core of our civilization has always been the traditional family. As that crumbles, so does everything else.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (0)

Our Minds Are Dark, Our Wills Weak, Our Hearts Foul

December 11, 2012 – 11:39 pm

Get thee post-haste to the Maverick Philosopher‘s website, where our friend Bill Vallicella has inked a splendid meditation on how very much we have to be humble about.

The best turn of phrase: “…an early weaponization of the space between chucker and effer.”

Too much the gentleman, he, to make it rhyme.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (2)

Food For Thought

December 11, 2012 – 3:30 pm

Here’s something I didn’t know until just now: squids have doughnut-shaped brains, with the esophagus going right through the hole.

See for yourself.

By Malcolm | Posted in Curiosities | Comments (3)

Born That Way

December 11, 2012 – 2:13 pm

Writing at The Thinking Housewife, Laura Wood examines an article, by one Alice Dreger, about the sexuality of two African tribes, the Aka and the Ngandu, in which both masturbation and homosexuality are absent. Mrs. Wood writes:

Dreger says that the absence of homosexuality does not conflict with the prevailing belief in the West that homosexuality is genetic. (That homosexuality can be genetic given that homosexuals do not reproduce is a mystery we never find adequately answered by most who make the claim that it is.)

I have often wondered about this myself. Living in New York and working in the record business (and having a wife who is a senior VP at a major NYC real-estate firm) I’ve known lots of gay people — almost all of whom have said, when I’ve asked, that they couldn’t remember a time that they weren’t certain about their sexual identification. I’ve also known children who were clearly homosexual from very early childhood, and never wavered. All of this has inclined me to think that these folks really are, mostly, “born that way” — but I could never make much sense of it as a hereditary factor, for the obvious reason that one would expect a gene that causes homosexuality to disappear from the population. (Of course, the idea of ‘a’ gene that causes homosexuality is itself rather simplistic, I’m sure.) Also, studies with rats have shown that homosexuality increases in succeeding generations when population density gets too high, which seems incompatible with a purely hereditary explanation.

The other way that a trait can exist in the phenotype without being transmitted genetically is if the modification is epigenetic — that is to say, the appearance of the trait in the phenotype is not caused by a gene, but rather by causes, external to the genome itself, that affect how certain genes are expressed. For the reasons given above, I’ve long suspected that innate homosexuality is due to some sort of epigenetic factor.

It seems that researchers might now be zeroing in on the particular epigenetic mechanism involved. Learn more here, and here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Darwin and Biology, Science | Comments (2)

Fat Cat

December 11, 2012 – 12:18 pm

In an item that’s been making the rounds since its publication a few days ago, Mark Steyn examines the modest lifestyle of America’s populist champion.

Here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (0)

Darker

December 10, 2012 – 11:45 pm

Not long ago we posted links to an important series of essays by Nick Land on what is now being called the “Dark Enlightenment”.

The essays were published at the website www.thatsmags.com/shanghai.

They are now gone.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (6)

Tech Talk

December 10, 2012 – 10:12 pm

Forgive me, readers, but I have to make a brief technical digression: for some time now I’ve been grappling with a common but perplexing computer problem, one that appears to have vexed and confounded an awful lot of people. I’ve just found the solution, and I must share it here so that others Googling the same problem might find it.

The problem: I’m using an HP Pavilion laptop running Windows 7 on a quad-core Intel processor. It’s a robust machine, with 6 GB of RAM and a capacious hard drive. Nevertheless, for some time now the machine has been running more and more sluggishly, and often it’s been so bad that video playback stutters and freezes, and there’s a significant lag between typing characters and seeing them appear on the screen.

The proximate cause was clear enough: my CPU was running at or near 100% most of the time. What I couldn’t figure out was why.

Windows provides a variety of tools for looking into this sort of thing. One of them is called the “Task Manager”, and it tells you what processes and services are running, and how much CPU they’re using. I was never able to find anything out of the ordinary, though.

I tried shutting down various Windows services that people had identified online as resource hogs, such as the “Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service”. At first I thought this one had helped, but after a minute or two my CPU was pegged again.

This machine has a little touch-strip above the keyboard with controls for volume, video playback, and a few other things. These hadn’t been working for a while, so I even went so far as to dismantle the machine and clean and re-seat all the little ribbon connectors attached to this component. I got the touch panel working again, but it still didn’t help the problem (not that I really expected it to).

I did a full system scan with my antivirus software. I deleted 40 gigabytes of junk from the hard drive, and defragmented it. I even re-flashed my BIOS with a later version. Nothing.

Then I ran across a little video on YouTube, by a fellow named Danish Amjad Alvi. In the posting he promised:

It can fix the 100 % CPU Usage I swear it will 100 % work.

The problem turned out to be the System Cooling Policy, under my Processor Power Management settings (Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Power Options\Edit Plan Settings, then click “Change advanced power settings”).

Here’s the story: when a CPU is running at full speed (that means, for example, that if it’s a 2GHz processor the clock rate is actually running at 2 billion instruction cycles per second), it’s drawing maximum power, and gets hot. You don’t always need to go so fast, though, and so the system can drop the clock frequency to conserve power if needed. This means that for any given number of instructions per second, the CPU usage-percentage runs higher.

It seems that my system was doing a really crappy job of modulating the CPU frequency. It turned out that my System Cooling Policy was set to “Passive”, which will apparently slow the processor before increasing the fan speed. Setting it to “Active” does the opposite. It was slowing the processor too much, and so the CPU was running at close to 100% all the time.

I made the change, and bingo! CPU usage immediately dropped to 1%, and now the machine runs like a Lamborghini.

So: I hope you’ll forgive me, readers, but for tonight’s post I’m just sharing this with the world. If it saves anyone the irritation I’ve just gone through, I’ll be very happy indeed. And to Danish Amjad Alvi: thank you, thank you.

By Malcolm | Posted in Technology | Tagged , | Comments (2)

Tea In The Sahara

December 9, 2012 – 1:05 am

Just got back from the VFR dinner on Manhattan’s West Side. The mood was a tad somber, given our discouraging circumstances, but it was encouraging to break bread with so many clear-eyed and highly intelligent people, and to meet in person many whose comments and essays I’ve been reading for years.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (1)

A Cool Reception

December 7, 2012 – 11:42 am

I meant to post this yesterday (and I see Kevin Kim’s on it today): the impertinent global-warmism gadfly Lord Monckton (featured previously in these pages here and here) is taking heavy fire for having pointed out, at a United Nations climate summit, the stupendously inconvenient finding that there has apparently been no global warming for the past 16 years.

What’s waka waka waka‘s editorial position on this highly charged topic? See a brief summary here, and our collection of related posts here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Global Warming | Comments (23)

Whizky

December 7, 2012 – 11:23 am

Blogger Ellison calls our attention to a potable that might be better left in the pot.

Here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Curiosities | Comments (2)

Two Steps Forward, …

December 6, 2012 – 4:53 pm

Here’s a website that will appeal, I think, to at least a few of our readers, for various reasons: Retraction Watch.

By Malcolm | Posted in Science | Comments (1)

Party Animals

December 6, 2012 – 12:29 pm

It’s been known for a while that extraversion — one of the “Big Five” personality traits — is positively correlated with longevity in humans. (Pessimism, on the other hand, is negatively correlated, so I’ll take this opportunity to say that it’s been nice knowing you, readers.) It now appears, perhaps unsurprisingly, that this extraversion-longevity relation holds true in gorillas as well.

I wonder what mechanism causes this correlation. I suppose there is, in social animals, some basic need for social contact as a kind of “food”; I recall reading somewhere that ants, for example, will quickly die if kept alone (though I’m too lazy right now to go find a citation for that, or to find an ant I can throw in the bing). One could easily imagine why genes that favored extraversion might be selected for, but becoming more prevalent in the population is not the same thing as increasing longevity.

I suppose that we’ll soon be subjected to “extraversion guidelines” from HHS, recommending that we all start telling more jokes at parties, participating in the three-legged race at the company picnic, and so on.

No, scratch that: on further reflection I suppose the very last thing any government healthcare system needs is for us all to be living longer. We’ll probably all be encouraged to stay home on Friday nights reading Poe.

Meanwhile, a contrarian data-point (small, I admit):

Joe Strummer of the Clash was once asked:

If you had to put into 25 words or less what it is you’re trying to say when you get up on stage, what would it be?

His answer:

LOOK AT ME!!!

That’s weapons-grade extraversion, friends. Joe Strummer died at fifty.

By Malcolm | Posted in Science | Comments (0)

Working Late

December 5, 2012 – 11:44 pm

No time for writing tonight. So here are two video clips:

First, here’s the late Christopher Hitchens letting that cad Bill Clinton have it with both barrels. (Why Clinton remains so popular eludes me; the man is a knave and a blackguard.)

Second, here’s the one and only Stevie Wonder working his magic, and stealing the show. Enjoy.

By Malcolm | Posted in Shameless Filler | Comments (9)

The Loyal Opposition

December 3, 2012 – 10:55 pm

If I asked you to name the holiest of America’s founding documents, there’s a good chance you’d pick the Declaration of Independence. (The only other one even remotely in the running would be the Constitution.)

How well do you know the Declaration? We all remember those reverberant passages about self-evident truths (despite their being, if we reflect on our experience of the world, neither self-evident, nor, for that matter, true.)

Those famous signatures down at the bottom are also familiar to us all, with John Hancock’s extravagant autograph rising almost to the level of a national logo. (It stops just short, serving instead as the emblem of a large insurance agency.)

How about what lies between? A little fuzzier, perhaps, but most of you likely recall that there is in the middle of the page an enumeration of the Crown’s outrages against the Colonies: an encyclopedia of malfeasance so comprehensive as to leave no doubt in the reader’s mind that the Revolution was not only justified, but downright overdetermined.

Our opinions, however, are affected as much by what we don’t read as by what we do, and I have something here, courtesy of Mencius Moldbug, that I’ll wager you’ve never read, or even heard of. It is the Strictures upon the Declaration of the Congress at Philadelphia in a Letter to a Noble Lord, &c., written in 1776 by Thomas Hutchinson, the former Governor of Massachusetts.

You’ll find it here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Curiosities | Comments (3)

Jews, Genes And Intelligence

December 3, 2012 – 12:46 pm

I haven’t much time for writing today, so for now, here’s Steven Pinker on the genetic basis of the high IQ of Ashkenazi Jews.

Pinker is one academic who, despite being a fairly high-echelon member of the Cathedral staff, apparently has an office with a window, and flirts openly with apostasy. Among the apostatic asseverations in this presentation: that intelligence is real; that intelligence is highly heritable; that intelligence makes an important difference in life outcomes; that the statistical distribution of intelligence varies among human populations.

This video is in four parts: 1, 2, 3, and 4.

By Malcolm | Posted in Mind and Brain, Darwin and Biology, Science | Comments (4)

The Dark Enlightenment, cont’d

December 2, 2012 – 12:24 pm

We’ve added some new links to our Dark Enlightenment post. See also this essay on the tension between democracy and liberty.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (0)

The Cheetah

December 1, 2012 – 9:40 pm

This is magnificent.

Look at the flow, the coordination: right rear, left rear, left front, right front. Look at the power. Most amazing of all: see how steady the cat’s head remains throughout, and the unblinking gaze.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (2)

Better Late Than Never

December 1, 2012 – 12:17 am

The irrepressible Pat Condell wishes us all a happy Islamophobia Awareness Month. Here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Jihad | Comments (1)

Who Knew?

November 30, 2012 – 12:48 pm

Another thunderbolt from the frontiers of science: men like sports more than women.

This will require an intervention, I think.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Sport | Comments (2)

Just Another Day In Paradise

November 30, 2012 – 11:08 am

For those of you with any lingering interest in the pestilential viper’s-nest we like to call the “Mideast” — that blasted, slippery-edged sinkhole of human misery that manages always to be going straight to Hell without ever actually getting there and leaving the rest of us in peace — I reprint below two items from John McCreary’s latest NightWatch:

Syria: On 29 November, the administration of Damascus’ airport cancelled all incoming and outgoing flights because rebel groups had cut the road from the airport to Damascus, for the first time.

Syrian rebels also used shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile systems (MANPADs) that were captured from Syrian forces to shoot down a government helicopter and a fixed wing combat aircraft in a 24-hour period.

Comment: The Syrian uprising crossed an important strategic threshold with the first demonstrated capability to shoot down government aircraft. This is a major escalation of the threat to the Damascus government.

One news report stated an opposition group had captured 40 MANPADS in recent overruns of government air force bases. That number is enough to neutralize the government’s air advantage, provided they are distributed adequately to trained shooters. A key question is who is providing the training. That is almost certainly US special forces.

The gradual loss of air superiority means the regime cannot survive, though its demise is not yet imminent.

Several other recent tactical successes by opposition fighting groups also almost certainly are the result of US and possibly other Western training, guidance and possibly leadership. Within four months of American announcements that US Special Operations Forces were providing training to opposition groups in camps in Jordan, the opposition groups suddenly have become tactically more effective. The targets of some of their attacks are more harmful to the Damascus regime and some groups have greater ability to coordinate their attacks.

These are the effects of superior outside military involvement. These same opposition groups fumbled around for 18 months with no significant impact on the stability of the regime. The US is involved in the fight, probably with special forces inside advising selected rebel groups.

The regime is falling back, trying to find a line it can hold. That presumably is the corridor from Damascus to Latakia, the Alawite homeland.

As noted above, policy choices have consequences. Should the Alawite government fall, Syrian Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians and other minorities will be killed and shrines destroyed. That is why the Syrian Kurds are opposing the Syrian opposition fighters and jihadists.

State of Palestine: The United Nations General Assembly on Thursday voted to upgrade the status of the Palestinian Authority. Henceforth, the UN will treat the Authority as a non-member observer state, instead of as an entity. The vote was 138 delegates in favor of the measure, nine against and 41 abstentions.

Comment: US State Department and the US Permanent Representative to the UN have been humiliated in one of the worst defeats of US diplomacy in the modern era. The US diplomats failed to persuade US allies to vote with the US. It is a setback for Israel’s negotiating position.

Some news pundits have called it a symbolic victory. Actually that is quite wide of the mark. The Palestinian State will now be an equal – in the UN – negotiating partner with Israel, rather than an inferior.

The positions of the negotiators are forever changed. As a state, Palestine is entitled to a much wider range of international support than as an entity. It is freed from dependence on the largesse of Arab states, the US, the West and non-governmental organizations. It has the authority to negotiate on its own, without Israel permission.

It also may be recognized as a belligerent by other states, entitling it to provision of arms. It also means that Israel’s sea blockade of Gaza may be judged an act of war, rather than an act to contain a renegade entity. Airspace controls also may be affected. As for ground borders, Egypt can negotiate with the Palestinian state about how to control the border in Sinai, rather than with Israel.

Palestine also can negotiate directly with Iran and Sudan to ensure the supply of arms through Egypt. No UN member needs, ex officio, to work with or through Israel, henceforth, in dealing with or helping the Palestinians.

This is a diplomatic and strategic calamity for the US Department of State and its UN mission and for Israel. Its full consequences will become clearer over time, but US national security interests have taken a major hit.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (15)

The Dark Enlightenment

November 29, 2012 – 7:08 pm

The title of this post is a term that is taking root in a certain corner of the intellectual blogosphere. Dennis Mangan has written about it just today; I first saw it in a post by John Derbyshire about a month ago. That post led me to a four-part series by Nick Land, in which Mr. Land discusses the singular oeuvre of blogger Mencius Moldbug.

If you want to get an idea of what all this is about, read Nick Land’s extended essay: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4. There are many links to follow from there, to Moldbug’s place and elsewhere; for example this item from the well-known biology blog Gene Expression.

This is all rather a large and exotic reading assignment, and caveat lector: for some of you, it may turn out to be a “red pill” you can’t unswallow. Others may find their throats constricting at the first taste of it, and won’t be able to get it down at all.

Update: there’s more. Read the rest of Nick Land’s extended essay here: parts 4a, 4b, 4c, 4d, 4e, 4f(inal).

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (7)

The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

November 29, 2012 – 5:34 pm

Here’s an item that’s making the rounds today: it’s the abstract of a paper published in the Psychology of Women Quarterly. The topic is something called “benevolent sexism”, which refers to all those “chivalrous” things gentlemen do for ladies: holding the door for them, seating them at table, offering them your arm during a stroll, serving them first, etc.

Shockingly, it turns out that these gestures actually make everyone happier.

Here’s the abstract (my emphasis):

Previous research suggests that benevolent sexism is an ideology that perpetuates gender inequality. But despite its negative consequences, benevolent sexism is a prevalent ideology that some even find attractive. To better understand why women and men alike might be motivated to adopt benevolent sexism, the current study tested system justification theory’s prediction that benevolent sexism might have a positive linkage to life satisfaction through increased diffuse system justification, or the sense that the status quo is fair. A structural equation model revealed that benevolent sexism was positively associated with diffuse system justification within a sample of 274 college women and 111 college men. Additionally, benevolent sexism was indirectly associated with life satisfaction for both women and men through diffuse system justification. In contrast, hostile sexism was not related to diffuse system justification or life satisfaction. The results imply that although benevolent sexism perpetuates inequality at the structural level, it might offer some benefits at the personal level.

All good so far, right? Well, here’s the authors’ conclusion:

Thus, our findings reinforce the dangerous nature of benevolent sexism and emphasize the need for interventions to reduce its prevalence.

Love that “thus”. In other words:

“Here’s an ancient, natural feature of human social life that, as our own study has just shown, makes people happy. It conflicts, however, with our wholly artificial conception, for which there is absolutely no basis whatsoever in any successful culture ancient or modern, of what the “correct” relation between the sexes ought to be.

If, therefore, as appears to be the case, establishing the “correct” relation between the sexes actually decreases human happiness, then society (under the benevolent guidance of the Psychology of Women Quarterly and its contributors) shall perform whatever “interventions” are necessary for the re-education of the people, and the reprogramming of human nature.”

We see here once again, as we see everywhere, the psychotic, suicidal effect of the unitary principle that all of modern liberalism is reducible to: that the suppression and eradication of any and all discriminations, whether by Man or by Nature, is the highest possible good.

This, friends, is a world gone absolutely barking mad.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (9)

No Fishes?

November 29, 2012 – 1:24 pm

This is either some top-notch street magic, or some clever video jiggery-pokery. Worth a look, in any event.

By Malcolm | Posted in Shameless Filler | Comments (1)

Padawan Wars

November 28, 2012 – 7:22 pm

Here.

It’s all fun and games, until someone loses a leg.

By Malcolm | Posted in Tomfoolery | Comments (0)

Approaching The Bench

November 28, 2012 – 7:01 pm

Here’s Stanford’s Peter Robinson, interviewing Antonin Scalia for the Federalist Society (in five parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Well worth your time, I think, and you might be surprised by some of what Justice Scalia has to say.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Reason and Philosophy, Language | Comments (0)

Pain, No Gain

November 28, 2012 – 4:55 pm

I used to run. I never liked it much, but I did it anyway. I was never fleet of foot, and I never ran very far — two or three miles, usually, with the longest effort ever being only about six miles or so.

I did it mainly because I found running to be good training for the will. I disliked it so much that the mental effort it took for me to get out there and do it cultivated a useful kind of inner discipline. But as the years went by the various injuries I’ve accumulated — a teenage hatchet-wound to my left ankle, a torn left ACL with serious meniscus damage, and a shredded right Achilles tendon — made running more and more unpleasant, and so a few years ago I stopped altogether.

I’m happy to see that this turns out to have been exactly the right move.

By Malcolm | Posted in Sport | Comments (2)

Forward!

November 28, 2012 – 11:24 am

From an article entitled When Work Is Punished: The Tragedy Of America’s Welfare State:

We realize that this is a painful topic in a country in which the issue of welfare benefits, and cutting (or not) the spending side of the fiscal cliff, have become the two most sensitive social topics. Alas, none of that changes the matrix of incentives for most Americans who find themselves in a comparable situation: either being on the left side of minimum US wage, and relying on benefits, or move to the right side at far greater personal investment of work, and energy, and… have the same disposable income at the end of the day.

As I wrote just after the election:

America has now crossed the event horizon, and the singularity lies ahead. Before we reach it ”” and although “there is a lot of ruin in a nation’, the acceleration will now be brisk ”” the tidal forces it will exert will soon begin to tear the nation to pieces.

Meanwhile, in England, there’s this — as described by Thomas Sowell, here.

The social engineers and professional uplifters responsible for this dog’s breakfast of a civilization in decline would have done well to reflect on two important concepts in evolutionary theory: “fitness landscapes” and “local maxima”.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (2)

Dumb Ways To Die

November 28, 2012 – 10:54 am

Here’s a light-heartedly macabre Australian train-safety video.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Your Lips Say “Moo”, But Your Eyes Say Yes

November 27, 2012 – 4:32 pm

Here’s something: Germany is planning to ban sex with animals.

This is not, mind you, because humans having sex with animals is something that a goodthinkful liberal society might wish to prohibit on any moral grounds. That would be discriminatory — and now that the universal acid of secular nihilism has dissolved away any foundation for moral judgment in polite society, the only sin that remains, the worst thing a person can be guilty of, is judgment itself.

No, the ban is being considered for the sake of the animals, presumably on the assumption that they are unable to give informed consent. Clearly, a failure to extend the prohibition against non-consensual sex to the animal kingdom introduces an impermissible discrimination between humans and animals, so it has to go.

I wonder if cucumbers are next.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (3)

To Your Health

November 26, 2012 – 5:03 pm

A great sage once hoisted a glass and made the following toast:

“Here’s to Alcohol: the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.”

With thanks to the indefatigable JK, here are some further details.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (2)

A Fire Shall Be Woken

November 25, 2012 – 11:57 pm

Like a great many people my age, I was bowled over in my adolescence by the books of J.R.R. Tolkien. I was smitten, transformed. Not only was I transported by the great story itself, but as the immigrant son of British expats, I was also awakened for the first time to the great depth of my heritage: my connection to an ancient culture and people, to their folkways and song and poetry and myth, and to the lives they lived, and the stories they told, in the fertile valleys and craggy hills of my ancestral homeland.

The depth and beauty of Tolkien’s language — both his plain English prose and the several tongues he created for the books — aroused in me what would become a lifelong fascination with words and their history. Perhaps above all, the books gave this unchurched boy an unforgettable and richly embroidered parable, my first lesson in the persistence of evil in the world, and gave me also an inexpressibly poignant (adolescents do “inexpressibly poignant” better than anybody) awareness of the transience, and inevitable passing, of even the greatest works of men.

I realize I’m not the only one to have been affected in this way, at the dawn of adult understanding, by Tolkien’s books. Another, as it turns out, is Bruce Charlton, who writes about it all here — although he speaks also of one effect that I was immune to.

By Malcolm | Posted in Books | Comments (3)

You Asked For It, You Got It

November 25, 2012 – 5:38 pm

With a hat tip to Kevin Kim, here’s one physician’s comments on Obamacare (which of course we have now lost any hope of repealing).

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (3)

Dignity

November 24, 2012 – 11:06 pm

Forgive me, readers, for the paucity of output here lately. A concatenation of upheavals and disruptions in my personal life, combined with a deepening gloom as regards our position on the great arc of history, have together knocked some of the stuffing out of me, and I find myself slow to recover.

Much on my mind has been the brevity of our lives, and how little we can truly lay claim to as our own. All we really possess, in the last analysis, is that which cannot be taken away — and let me remind you, friends, that in this life anything that can be taken away most likely will be, before the last curtain falls.

Dignity? Fuhgeddaboutit, as they say in these parts. (It’s a stupid concept anyway, says Steven Pinker.)

That’s all I have right now, I’m afraid. I’m going to spend the rest of the evening with Aurelius and something strong to drink.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (4)

Happy Thanksgiving

November 22, 2012 – 1:17 pm

To you all. Yes, we’ve just taken an awful beating, and must now come to terms with the grim fact that the great Republic born with such promise in 1789 is now a tottering corpse, beyond hope of resurrection, and that its future now holds only decomposition and decay.

But if you have family and friends to hold close, if you have a roof over your head and clothes on your back and food to eat, if you still have a healthy body and sense enough to perceive all the beauty in the world, then you have a very great deal indeed to be thankful for.

At the very least, as Al Swearengen reminds us, we aren’t dead. And that’s plenty.

My thanks to you, readers, for joining me here all these years. Let’s raise a glass and be genuinely thankful for all our many blessings.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (4)