I’m working a long day today, so for tonight here’s another musical item: a clip of the one and only Steve Gadd taking some extended solos.
These aren’t your typical drum solos. What I love about Gadd’s soloing is the depth of the groove that’s always playing in his head, and that he expresses just as clearly with empty space as by actually striking the drums. He isn’t flashing his chops; he’s dancing.
This is real mastery, and musicianship at the highest level. Enjoy.
Can we stop saying “flat-screen TV” yet? You can’t even buy the other kind anymore.
As I was poking around on YouTube this morning I ran across a link to this little number by the great Chaka Khan, only available on a compilation album released in 1998.
Recorded and mixed by yours truly, at the now-defunct O’Henry Studios in Burbank, CA. (What a great studio that was.) Note the guitar solos in the intro and at 2:35 — both of them were knocked off in a single take by the extraordinarily gifted session player Michael Landau.
I’d forgotten about this one. Boy, can that woman sing. Should’ve been a hit.
P.S. While we’re at it, here’s another Chaka tune, from the same sessions.
We’ve been hearing for a couple of days now that Mitt Romney’s drubbing of President Obama in Wednesday’s debate may have been due to his having smuggled in a “cheat sheet”.
Now we have confirmation:  we’ve just learned that the folks at RedState.com have got their hands on a copy.
Last year I wrote a little post about visiting Google’s lavish offices in Manhattan to see my friend Greg, who had recently joined their engineering staff. Here’s a longish excerpt:
It being a mild day, Greg and I dined al fresco on a high terrace with a sweeping view of Midtown. (I had a delightful osso buco, he some freshly made sushi.) We talked about what his new life was like. Yes, he said, the physical perks were nice, but what really made the place so extraordinary was “the culture’.
His use of that word crystallized for me the effect the place had had on me from the moment I walked in. To get there, I had taken the subway from Grand Central down to 14th Street and 8th Avenue (two subways, actually), and the experience was as it is always is: crowded, blaring, gritty, and above all maximally heterogeneous in every way imaginable. It’s “vibrant’, if you like, and after living here in Gotham for more than thirty years I’m certainly well accustomed to it ”” but the effect of such a volatile and discordant public environment is to produce in everyone a subliminal wary tension, so constant and so routine that after a while one hardly notices it until it’s gone.
Well, when you walk into Google, it’s gone. Coming into that place, through the high-tech security checkpoint, from the teeming city outside is like passing through an airlock; it’s like beaming back up to the Enterprise from the steamy planetary surface. You can’t help being aware that you are suddenly in what feels like a different country. It’s culture shock.
Just how, exactly, is it so different? Well, it’s not the the creature comforts: for all its toys and free lunches, the place has nothing on a good hotel. It’s the people. Unlike any government or academic institution, Google is a pure meritocracy. Its employees have jumped a series of very high bars to get in the door, and as a result this building houses one of the most elite concentrations of high IQ in the world. En masse, it’s palpable. You can’t help but notice.
Greg said that he sometimes feels, working at Google, that he’s living in a “bubble’ ”” and sitting on that terrace with all those bright people, looking out over New York City and enjoying my osso buco, I had to agree that he’s right. I realized that what Google has done is to create a one-way membrane, a kind of Maxwell’s Demon: as the world decays and degenerates outside, falling further into chaos, the entropy inside the Google membrane decreases, as self-organizing complexity emerges. That’s what Greg’s “bubble’ is, and that’s what makes the “culture’ possible: an extreme statistical outlier at the end of a long series of centrifuges.
Another friend (and another very smart guy) who now works at Google is my old boss from PubSub, Bob Wyman. I chatted briefly with him, too, while I was visiting. Bob has an interesting paradigm for thinking about the world. The way he sees it, good and evil are basically just a matter of thermodynamics. In a nutshell, good consists of reducing entropy, and evil consists of abetting it.
Google’s motto: Don’t be evil.
It’s an interesting and seductive idea, with a natural, almost instinctive appeal. My lovely wife Nina told me of a little doggerel that her father used to recite to her when she was a wee thing:
Keep order and space, and order in time;
Disorder is chaos, and chaos is crime!
That’s pretty good, I think. If you wanted a pithy way of expressing the idea that ethics is essentially a question of thermodynamics, you could hardly do better.
Well, today my friend Salim Ismail sent me an excerpt from a book called Xenology: An Introduction to the Scientific Study of Extraterrestrial Life, Intelligence, and Civilization, by Robert Frietas. It makes Bob Wyman’s argument: that the reduction of entropy is a suitable foundation for a universal (in every sense of the word) system of ethics.
As my dear departed mum used to say, I hae me doots. I’ll lay them out in a later post — I want to think about it a bit more before commenting — but for tonight I’ll just give you the link. Here it is.
One more thing: if evil really does consist, at bottom, of increasing the world’s entropy, then Mayor Bloomberg may want to set his sights on some of the city’s most egregiously entropic culinary offerings. More here.
I’m feeling a little under the weather tonight, so all I have to offer is a handful of interesting links.
Here’s an item about construction of three-dimensional objects by swarms of autonomous drones acting without central guidance.
Here’s one about evolutionary music-composition algorithms.
This item covers a topic that gets far too little attention from the mainstream media, these days at least: vomiting caterpillars.
Here’s a video illustrating the “rolling-shutter effect“. (More images here.)
And here are some thoughts about a clock that could outlast the Universe.
Well, well. If you’ve ever wanted empirical confirmation of the “Taranto Principle”, you got it tonight. When your every public appearance for the past four years has been a tongue-bath from fawning media groupies, this is what happens.
Next up, the vice-presidential debate. Iowahawk: “Compared to that, this one was a nail-biter. Wear a raincoat.”
OK, folks, ready for the big debate?
The good people at RebelPundit.com have given us tonight’s drinking game. Here it is:
Bottoms up!
In the days following the lethal attack on our diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, the Obama administration doggedly clung to its story that the assault, in which a United States Ambassador was killed on U.S. soil, was an unforeseeable and spontaneous eruption of anger, caused by an unflattering video about Mohammed. This story was false, and the State Department knew it was false, yet stuck with it for days, including sending  U.N. ambassador Susan Rice to the Sunday talk shows,  five days after the attack, to reiterate what was by then a transparently deceptive account.  (Many are calling for Ms. Rice’s resignation over this, which I think is wrong; for all we know she was just repeating what she had been told. The State Department and the White House bear the responsibility here.)
Many of us wondered: why would this administration lie so blatantly about this, and continue to do so even as the truth began to be exposed? Obviously Mr. Obama’s  inept Mideast policy is now a political liability, and we shouldn’t be surprised to see as much “spin” as the administration thinks it can get away with  —  but it’s hard to imagine that they really thought they could get away with this.
The purpose of a lie is to hide the truth. What truth was it that the Administration considered so damaging that it was willing to risk lying so publicly for days, even as it became plain to all that its account of events was false?
The House Oversight Committee would like to know, and has sent a letter to the Secretary of State demanding some answers. I’ve excerpted (and highlighted) a key passage below:
Based on information provided to the Committee by individuals with direct knowledge of events in Libya, the attack that claimed the ambassador’s life was the latest in a long line of attacks on Western diplomats and officials in Libya in the months leading up to September 11, 2012. It was clearly never, as Administration officials once insisted, the result of a popular protest. In addition, multiple U.S. federal government officials have confirmed to the Committee that, prior to the September 11 attack, the U.S. mission in Libya made repeated requests for increased security in Benghazi. The mission in Libya, however, was denied these resources by officials in Washington.
Obviously, with the election looming, there are a lot of ulterior motives in play. Democrats will pooh-pooh the whole thing as a political stunt (indeed, long-time readers will not be surprised should that happen in our own comment-thread). Nevertheless, there appears to be serious malfeasance here, at the highest levels of government, and you can be sure this story isn’t going to go away.
You can read the letter here.
Sorry all  —  still too overwhelmed with domestic logistics (and ongoing emergencies at work) to spend any personal time at the computer. The blog is gathering dust, and emails are piling up in the inbox.
Things should be getting back to normal in another day or two, insh’Allah.
Meanwhile, just to get you in the mood for Wednesday’s debate, here are 689 reasons to defeat Barack Obama.
To all who’ve emailed with links, comments, etc. recently: thanks as always. We’re moving house today and tomorrow, however, and will not be able to get to any of it for at least a couple of days.
We’ve been hearing a lot about free speech lately (though not nearly enough). Here’s the NYPD coming to its defense. (And responding to an assault.)
The latest Economic Freedom of the World Annual Report has the U.S. ranked eighteenth, down from second place in 200o.
Well, home of the brave, still, maybe. We’ll see.
Speaking of world-class narcissists, no list would be complete without including  the exquisitely unlovable Madonna. (Sadly, I learned this first-hand; you will find my name on your copy of Like a Virgin, if you have one.)
Ms. Ciccone has now enlivened the campaign season in her own special way. The Huffington Post reports:
Madonna brought her MDNA Tour to Washington, D.C. on Monday night, and added a bizarre dose of politics to the show.
“Y’all better vote for f–king Obama, OK? For better or for worse, all right? We have a black Muslim in the White House. Now that’s some amazing s–t,” she said. “It means there is hope in this country. And Obama is fighting for gay rights, so support the man, goddamnit.”
Perfect. It’s a left-wing trifecta: authoritarianism, race-baiting identity politics, and vulgarity. Made my morning.
We never seem to run out of examples of the pathological narcissism of Barack Obama. Just when I decide to lay off for a few days, I get this in the mail:
 *     *     *
Malcolm —
If you win this, you’re going to have a lot more friends all of a sudden.
Because winning this thing means not one but two of these seats are yours:
Just remember, whoever you bring as your guest is going to owe you for a long, long time.
Donate $5 or whatever you can to be automatically entered to win dinner for you and a guest with the President:
https://donate.barackobama.
That’s one lucky friend,
Julianna
Julianna Smoot
Deputy Campaign Manager
Obama for America
 *     *     *
 My God.
“you’re going to have a lot more friends all of a sudden.”
“whoever you bring as your guest is going to owe you for a long, long time.”
“That’s one lucky friend…”
It makes my flesh crawl with a frisson of horror to know that a person could be so ripened with vanity, so swollen with self-love, and so utterly unencumbered by the slightest shred of humility as to send something like this to a complete stranger  —  and that this person is our President.
It is bizarre, the effect this man has on people. If you happen to be immune to his mesmerizing charms, as about half of us appear to be, and can see through the fragrant, intoxicating gas-cloud to the  remorseless egomaniac beneath, you find yourself looking around with mounting frustration and disbelief at those still under his spell.
Victor Hanson’s had about enough, too, as we see in this latest fulmination.
Ah, well  —  there we are, friends, and our only chance of doing anything about it will be on November 6th.
Comments are welcome, as always (I expect the usual blowback from certain parties still ensorcelled) Â — Â but as noted below, I might not find time to respond. Â Or just might not bother.
There will be reduced activity here this week, as the lovely Nina and I are fully consumed with the immense task of emptying our Brooklyn house so as to permit a major reconfiguration of its interior space.
Given that our kids have now moved out, and that we are spending more and more of our time about 220 miles ENE of here, we thought it fiscally prudent to reduce our living quarters so as to be able to rent out another floor. The construction project thus entailed involves just about every room in the house, and so they must be stripped bare — and we’re finding that the accumulated detritus of our more than thirty years of residency here would make the Augean Stables look like one of Martha Stewart’s guest bedrooms.
The deadline is Friday morning, at which point we flee to the Outer Cape in a rented truck full of those items too dear to part with, and too large to put in the car. Surveying the chaos tonight, which more closely resembles tsunami wreckage than the gracious home of two civilized people in late middle age, it is hard to imagine that we’ll make it. But these things have a way of working out, somehow.
Anyway, the upshot is that there will in the near term be few opportunities for writing posts, or for responding to comments (though I will do so when I can). Back to normal, I hope, sometime next week.
As always, please feel free to browse our archives, which now hold over 2,800 posts — or to click View a Random Post, over there on the upper right.
Here’s an outstanding essay by economist Thomas Sowell on widely held misconceptions regarding the historical effects of varying tax rates on the wealthy. An excerpt:
The very idea that profits “trickle down’ to workers depicts the economic sequence of events in the opposite order from that in the real world. Workers must first be hired, and commitments made to pay them, before there is any output produced to sell for a profit, and independently of whether that output subsequently sells for a profit or at a loss. With many investments, whether they lead to a profit or a loss can often be determined only years later, and workers have to be paid in the meantime, rather than waiting for profits to “trickle down’ to them. The real effect of tax rate reductions is to make the future prospects of profit look more favorable, leading to more current investments that generate more current economic activity and more jobs.
Those who attribute a trickle-down theory to others are attributing their own misconception to others, as well as distorting both the arguments used and the hard facts about what actually happened after the recommended policies were put into effect.
…There is no need to presume that the scholars who wrote these history textbooks were deliberately lying, in order to protect a vision or an agenda. They may simply have relied on a peer consensus so widely held and so often repeated as to be seen as “well-known facts’ requiring no serious re-examination. The results show how unreliable peer consensus can be, even when it is a peer consensus of highly intellectual people, if those people share a very similar vision of the world and treat its conclusions as axioms, rather than as hypotheses that need to be checked against facts. These history textbooks may also reflect the economic illiteracy of many leading scholars outside the field of economics, who nevertheless insist on proclaiming their conclusions on economic issues.
Thanks to reader Dom for the link.
Want more Sowell? Here’s a five-part interview with Peter Robinson.
Again, I’ve had no free time for writing today — I’ve been very busy with work, and meanwhile the lovely Nina and I are busy preparing our modest brownstone for a major construction project that begins in just a few days. So for tonight, a repost of some old items:
A reminiscence of my salad days on the CNJ.
Some thoughts about public discourse.
Too busy today for any writing — so for tonight, the Irish perspective on Olympic sailing, courtesy of a longtime reader.
Mitt Romney’s campaign, in the, um, collective opinion of the “mainstream media”, suffered a major setback the other day. As you may perhaps have heard by now, Mr. Romney’s opponents unearthed a video clip in which the GOP candidate, speaking to a private audience (or so he thought), commented on the difficulty of winning the support of the large segment of voters who draw more revenue out of the federal government than they put in.
It was, of course, only those folks whose vote he does in fact have little chance of winning who saw Mr. Romney’s remarks as damaging. For the rest of us he was only making, though perhaps carelessly and inelegantly, rather an obvious point — and indeed his doing so, and the dedication of endless news cycles to it by the press, has had the effect of energizing his base.
Pat Buchanan has just written a tart essay about this. An excerpt:
[W]hat was right about what Romney said was discerned two centuries ago by that governmental genius John C. Calhoun.
“The necessary result … of the unequal fiscal action of the government is to divide the community into two great classes; one consisting of those who … pay the taxes … and bear exclusively the burden of supporting the government; and the other, of those who are the recipients of their proceeds, through disbursements, and who are, in fact, supported by the government; or, in fewer words, to divide it into taxpayers and tax consumers.”
A nation sundered between taxpayers and tax consumers, said Calhoun, “must give rise to two parties and to violent conflicts and struggles between them, to obtain the control of the government.”
Is that not a fair description of where we are today?
Of course it is, with the acknowledgement that the adherents of the two parties aren’t riven with arithmetical precision along maker/taker lines.
You can read the rest of Mr. Buchanan’s essay here.
A reader brings to our attention a fantastic Google-Maps-based application. Here.
That was quite a storm we had here in the Northeast last night, coming most abruptly on the heels of a delightful run of gorgeous late-summer days. It brought to mind Mark Twain’s remarks about New England weather:
Yes, one of the brightest gems in the New England weather is the dazzling uncertainty of it. There is only one thing certain about it: you are certain there is going to be plenty of it — a perfect grand review; but you never can tell which end of the procession is going to move first. You fix up for the drought; you leave your umbrella in the house and sally out, and two to one you get drowned. You make up your mind that the earthquake is due; you stand from under, and take hold of something to steady yourself, and the first thing you know you get struck by lightning. These are great disappointments; but they can’t be helped. The lightning there is peculiar; it is so convincing, that when it strikes a thing it doesn’t leave enough of that thing behind for you to tell whether — well, you’d think it was something valuable, and a Congressman had been there. And the thunder. When the thunder begins to merely tune up and scrape and saw, and key up the instruments for the performance, strangers say, “Why, what awful thunder you have here!” But when the baton is raised and the real concert begins, you’ll find that stranger down in the cellar with his head in the ash-barrel.
Mohammed as Brigitte Bardot. See here.
Anyone out there old enough to remember the Candid Camera theme?
♪ ♫ “It’s fun to laugh at yourself,
It’s a tonic tried and true;
It’s fun to look at yourself,
As other people do!”
Maybe instead of another Charles Martel, what we need these days is another Allen Funt.
Here’s another edgy little item: warp drives might be feasible after all.
Sharpens up the Fermi paradox even more, if so.
Recent events remind us, once again (with a hat tip to James Taranto), of the enduring mystery of the number 47.
More here.
Here’s a sampling of today’s headlines from Drudge:
Chinese General: Prepare for Combat with Japan
IRAN DEPLOYS RUSSIAN-MADE SUBMARINE IN GULF
Ships from 30 nations sweep mines in Persian Gulf in warning to Tehran
Pentagon suspends joint patrols with Afghans after more troops killed
Marine Squadron Commander Died in Taliban Attack
Libya: We gave USA three-day warning of Benghazi attack
Pressure mounts for Congress to conduct independent investigation...
REPORT: Median Income Worse Now Than During ‘Great Recession’
The President’s schedule today? Why, a visit to the David Letterman Show, followed by a campaign fundraiser with Jay-Z and Beyoncé.
Here’s an attention-grabbing item: an ancient Coptic papyrus fragment referring to Jesus’s wife.
Still mired in false consciousness? When you look in the mirror, do you still see that same old bourgeois running-dog imperialist lackey looking back at you?
If you’re like many Amerikans who still cling bitterly to the misguided policies of the past — you know, the ones that got us into this mess — the answer’s probably “yes”. You know it’s wrong, and deep down inside you’re beginning to hate yourself for it — but what to do? After all, as someone once said, it is not easy to become sane. The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness, and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better. Where to begin?
Perhaps this brief instructional video will help to get you moving Forward.
We can only hope that this sort of thing diminishes reproductive fitness. It may not.
OK, a moment of relief from all the dismal news of the day — a tweet by @FunnyFacts.
The sentence “I never said she stole my money” has 7 different meanings depending on the stressed word.
Foggy Bottom: no more questions about Benghazi, please.
CNN: State Department was warned three days in advance of Benghazi attacks that the security situation was deteriorating fast; did nothing.
WH press secretary Jay “Baghdad Bob” Carney: worldwide protests “not a case of protests directed at the United States writ large or at U.S. policy…”
CT expert Colonel David Hunt weighs in on State Department’s toothless Benghazi ROE.
Sudan refuses request by U.S. to allow Marines to enter in wake of bloody anti-American uprisings. (Time was, Mr. Obama, that the U.S. Marines went wherever we decided to send them…)
At least 4 casualties in al-Qaeda attack on US-led Sinai peacekeeping mission.
WH distances itself from cringing embassy statement, issues semantically identical statement of its own.
I realize, dear readers, that these pages, which once upon a time covered an eclectic salmagundi of topics, have had a relentless focus lately on politics and foreign affairs. Our interest in other things is undiminished, but with the world catching fire, and the most important presidential election of our lifetime right around the corner, it’s been hard to focus on anything but current events.
Once the election’s over, or the world ends (whichever comes first), we’ll be more inclined to get back to blathering about free will, inner work, religion, science, music, chess, technology, martial arts, lowbrow humor, oddities of language, and all the rest of the world’s fascinating clutter.
The question of the identity of the man behind this week’s most talked-about movie deepens. First there was this link from our reader Dom, then this, which came in the mail just now.
Dom commented earlier that “Yahoo news is now reporting that the movie was not made by an evangelical Christian, but by a Coptic Christian. Coming up next ”¦ an Egyptian Imam made it, to stir up trouble.”
A clever move: false-flag blasphemy to rile the base. Look at the results!
That raises an interesting theological question: could a devout Muslim do that, for the sake of jihad? Might taqiyya, for example, be stretched to permit such a thing?
This is just terrific. Obama in 2007:
“I truly believe that the day I’m inaugurated, not only does the country look at itself differently, but the world looks at America differently. If I’m reaching out to the Muslim world, uh, they understand that I’ve lived in a Muslim country — and I may be a Christian, but I also understand their point of view.”
Let’s get this straight: Mr. Obama expected that anti-American Muslims would see a boastful Christian — of Muslim stock, with a Muslim name, who rejected his Muslim heritage in favor of Christianity — as such a sympathetic figure that it would make them completely re-think their hatred of the Great Satan? This is his “understanding” of their “point of view”?
Is there absolutely no limit to this man’s incandescent vanity? He, of all people, should know better than this — but he is so bedazzled by his own awesomeness that he simply cannot see the world before his eyes.
Listen to the whole thing. If the Romney campaign has any sense, they’ll see to it that this clip gets plenty of airplay between now and November.
There is something downright surreal about President Nero, who according to reports skipped his daily intelligence briefing on September 12th so he could sashay off to Vegas, tweeting about the Paralympics right now.
Oh, and sweatshirts, too!
“Winter is coming”. You got that right, pal.
Six years ago I scribed a breezy little item about the tardigrade, one of our planet’s commonest, yet most exotic, microfauna.
I haven’t thought much about them since, I’ll confess, but I just ran across a charming short video about the tim’rous wee beasties, featuring an affable philotard by the name of Mike Shaw.
Here.
In keeping with our time-honored tradition of spreading unsubstantiated rumors, I’ll mention that a little bird just whispered in my ear that we have killed Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban. I have no way of confirming this yet.
We’ll see…
Update: Looking doubtful. That’s just as well: they’d be spiking that football all the way to Election Day. We’ve waited this long; let’s get him on November 7th.
All right, a break from Armageddon for a moment: have a look at a newly discovered species of blue-bottomed monkeys.
Now this: a Lebanese report (I have no way as yet of confirming it) claims that Ambassador Stevens was raped before he was murdered.
In our previous post we noted that Egyptian ambassador Anne Patterson forbade the embassy’s Marine guards to carry live ammunition. What is it in the modern Western mind that makes us such obstinate fools?
In its most recent posting, NightWatch has issued extensive and pertinent comments on the attacks in Egypt and Libya. I reproduce them here:
Egypt-US: The day after the storming of the US Embassy, all day and night on 12 and 13 September, mainstream media aired footage of obviously unemployed Egyptian young men gathering and milling near the US Embassy in Cairo. A single security vehicle was imaged making an occasional and completely feckless foray through the gathering area, during the early morning of 13 September in Cairo. No Egyptian police or military or other security personnel were present.
Comment: The normal time for organized, violent Muslim protests is Friday afternoon, after prayers. Muslim Brotherhood leaders already have called for “non-violent”, anti-US protests on Friday after prayers. Readers should expect more anti-US protests and no Egyptian security forces.
The unemployed and the underemployed in Cairo are amusing themselves by protesting in the name of Islam over just about anything they think is offensive. Much larger and dangerous protests are likely after the miscreants are infused with Islamic fervor after Friday prayers.
Had the Mursi government begun to deliver on its promises of more jobs, theoretically, the unemployed and under-employed youth would have been asleep in anticipation of going to work. The unemployment rate for men under 35 is about 50%.
It is a negative commentary about the job creation accomplishments of the Mursi government to date that so many men have nothing to do in Cairo but vent their frustrations. In Egypt there is no penalty for destroying a foreign embassy, but criticism of President Mursi is a criminal offence. That explains why Egyptian men would judge they could attack the US embassy, when their real target should have been the Mursi government.
The protestors said, in paraphrase, that they understand the US has freedom of speech; the US needs to understand that they have freedom of action. Theirs is a claim to justify lawlessness granted by the Mursi government as long as the violence is not turned against Mursi.
What is important is that the Mursi government has not denounced the violence. [MP adds: Not exactly true. Mursi, who no doubt would like to keep the U.S. foreign-aid spigot open as long as possible, did issue a feeble, pro-forma statement yesterday, one that fell far short of an apology.] The US and the US president are vowing to bring justice to the killers in Libya, but the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood government has made no comment or apology. Instead, Mursi’s reaction is to urge the US to punish the US filmmaker.
Comment: There is only a trailer of the film, no film yet, Mursi has not seen it nor have most of the protestors in Egypt and Libya. The riots are flash mobs, arranged and manipulated by others.
NightWatch Special Comment: Ambassador Anne Patterson’s April Glaspie moment.
Ambassador Anne Patterson, the US Ambassador to Egypt, experienced her ‘April Glaspie’ moment yesterday when she blamed Americans instead of Egyptians for attacking, storming and desecrating the US Embassy in Cairo and the US Flag.
Old hands will remember, April Glaspie, who was a rising star in the State Department’s constellation of diplomats. Her notorious conversation with Saddam Hussein in early 1990 led Saddam to believe that the US encouraged and condoned an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
Having worked closely with US officials for a decade in the struggle and war against Iran, Saddam understood that everything after the Glaspie talk was plausible deniability by US President Bush, 41.
Glaspie misunderstood and misjudged the Iraqi leadership and the situation in Iraq. Patterson’s operations at the US Embassy in Cairo bespeak a comparable misjudgment of the Egyptian Arab situation, its volatility and the depth of anti-American sentiment.
She did not permit US Marine guards to carry live ammunition, according to USMC blogs. [emphasis: MP] Thus she neutralized any US military capability that was dedicated to preserve her life and protect the US Embassy.
In this respect, she did not defend US sovereign territory and betrayed her oath of office. She neutered the Marines posted to defend the embassy, trusting the Egyptians over the Marines.
She apparently judges that Egyptian President Mursi spearheads a democracy and a new civil order, despite the mounting evidence that Mursi disregards US interests, cavorts with US enemies, is a budding authoritarian ruler who disdains parliament and does not honor the basic obligations of diplomatic agreements and the Geneva conventions.
Readers, by definition, whenever an embassy of any country is overrun by locals in any country, everyone knows that the ambassador and senior staff must be replaced.
Timing
Readers also should remember that by definition the time for an official government protest for an attack on a US embassy is always when rioters attack or deface the embassy compound itself, long before they violate or penetrate the US sovereign territory or deface the US Flag. Not nine hours later and not when the details become clear. Then it is too late to take action to keep an embassy from burning or to protect American diplomats. The objective is safety, more than knowledge.
When foreign TV videos showed rioters on the walls of the US Embassy and tearing apart the US Flag on the early evening of 11 September, the time for a strong US official protest and angry telephone calls to Mursi had already passed.
Every student of international affairs and international diplomacy knows this. Every experienced foreign policy staff and every competent journalist knows this. But not this State Department and not this US administration and not mainstream US news services. The US simply failed to defend itself.
It bears repeating: apologies never mollify criminals. Only law abiding citizens believe such baloney. Criminals consider apologies to be acts of submission, especially in foreign cultures.
O’Reilly at Fox needs to wise up!
The NightWatch Chronology
When NightWatch wrote last night, every news channel carried video footage of the violation of the US Embassy; the destruction of the Embassy’s US flag; the raising of the Islamic flag – not the al Qaida flag, mind you – and the burning of the US flag.
AFTER those events, the news services carried Ambassador Patterson’s denunciation of Americans at fault. Ambassador Patterson at no time denounced in public the Islamists who violated her Embassy.
When the NightWatch ended, details about the Benghazi atrocity had not yet been reported by any major news services.
Subsequently, Twitter and Facebook postings by the Cairo embassy, after the Libyan catastrophe was reported in the press, insisted that the Americans were wrong for hurting the feelings of the Muslims, despite the loss of life in Benghazi. Patterson’s embassy astonishingly continued to try to minimize the loss of American life and to justify the acts of the Egyptian and Libyan crazies by blaming Americans.
In an earlier era, less politically correct, old time professionals would have called this clientisis – falling in love with one’s client. It is similar to Stockholm syndrome and is an occupational hazard of US diplomats. The US Embassy staff in Cairo has it, based on public, twitter and facebook postings.
The bottom line is that some deferential, weak US diplomats have done more to encourage anti-American outbursts and to promote the perception of US weakness and subservience to Muslims than US citizens exercising free speech. They need to be vetted and replaced because they do not speak for us.
Final note, in most less-developed countries of the world, from Morocco to Indonesia, no one believes the press is free of government control. There is no free press in any of those countries. Thus their leaders, analysts and others disbelieve the US press is free of government control. They mirror-image their own conditions and project them onto the US.
NightWatch has talked with senior foreign officials who simply refuse to believe the American press is free of US government control and manipulation. US official apologies for the actions of private citizens reinforce this astonishing misperception, around the world.
Libya: Multiple sources have reported more details on the events that led to the death of Ambassador Stevens. The details suggest this was another case of well-intentioned but misguided hubris by Americans, as to their own safety, and well-aimed and well- targeted attacks by the Muslim attackers. This appears, in fact, to have been a deliberate assassination of an effective diplomat, within the cover of an anti-US demonstration in Benghazi.
The reporting indicates that the number of fundamental US security and intelligence lapses, blunders and examples of ineptitude make the efforts of Libyan security and of a local, loyal militia force to protect the US Consulate look heroic by comparison.
Comment: The State Department admitted that the Ambassador and an information management officer – an ex-US Air Force veteran – were killed. Foreign media reported two US Marines also were killed.
The website for Gateway Pundit carries video images of US Ambassador Stevens’ body being dragged through the streets of Benghazi by his Muslims miscreant murderers. All mainstream US media failed to report that the Muslim miscreants not only killed the US ambassador, they defiled his body.
Note to analysts: It is important for intelligence analysts to never forget that the fundamental purpose of US intelligence, as stated in the legislative history of the US National Security Act of 1947, is to keep the US, its persons, property and its interests safe. Yesterday, US intelligence apparently did none of them.
Reuters live stream: police vs. demonstrators in Cairo. Here.
Today Barack Obama, commenting on the murder of our ambassador to Libya by a Muslim mob, said this:
Since our founding, the United States has been a nation that respects all faiths. We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others, but there is absolutely no justification for this type of senseless violence, none.
Does the President realize what he is saying here? This was hardly an act of “senseless” or “unjustified” violence: in the context of Islam’s core doctrine that calls all of its faithful to wage ceaseless jihad until all the world is brought into submission to Allah, this attack finds abundant justification, and makes very good sense indeed.
There is a plain contradiction in Mr. Obama’s words (and, lest this be seen as partisan sniping, both “conservative” and liberal politicians in America and the West suffer from the same, suicidal, cognitive dissonance): if you truly “respect” Islam, then at the very least, you should “respect” it enough to believe that it means what it says.
Today is the eleventh anniversary of September 11th, 2001, when a team of Muslims, seeking martyrdom in jihad against infidels, slaughtered thousands of innocent American civilians and tore a gaping hole in the heart of the world’s greatest city. On this anniversary, a violent mob of similarly minded Islamists, enraged by a perceived insult to their Prophet, today stormed our embassy in Cairo, scaled the walls, and tore down our flag.
Our response:
U.S. Embassy Condemns Religious Incitement
September 11, 2012
The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims ”“ as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions. Today, the 11th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, Americans are honoring our patriots and those who serve our nation as the fitting response to the enemies of democracy. Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy. We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.
Writing at Via Meadia, Walter Russell Meade comments on Europe’s accelerating slide into toothless decrepitude. As an example, he gives us France, who would like very much to intervene in Syria, but lacks the military oomph to do so. This is of course due to Europe’s having had, under the postwar U.S. security umbrella, the enfeebling luxury to ignore the cost of its own national defense in favor of extravagant social programs. (There’s some irony there: while it was fostering the degenerative and etiolating effects of dependence on its own people, Europe’s general dependency as a security client of the U.S. has in turn weakened that once-great array of nations to the point of global impotence. We could call it “trickle-down debilitation”.)
You can read Meade’s piece here. One quibble — he writes:
Project some trends out a bit and interesting changes appear. Not since the 1600s has Turkey been able to claim a place as the leading military power in Europe. On the present course, the Turks could become the most populous country with the most powerful military on the continent well before the end of the current century.
I’m not sure what trends Meade is referring to here (other than the general decline of Europe); Turkey, at least as an ethnonation, is itself facing a general demographic collapse. As David “Spengler” Goldman writes in How Civilizations Die:
Turkey is locked in a demographic trap: to compete in the world economy, it must educate and employ its women. The more years of education a Turkish woman receives, however, the fewer children she is likely to bear. According to demographer Sutay Yavuz, improvements in female education have suppressed fertility. “The proportion of women aged 15 to 49 that have completed at least the second level of primary school increased from 15 percent in 1993 to 24 percent in 2003,’ he wrote in a recent study. As in Iran and the rest of the Muslim world, the consequence is a sharp decline in the birth rate: “Fertility differentials among women with different educational backgrounds are striking; the mean number of children ever born (a measure of completed fertility) among women aged 40 to 49 without formal education is 5, while the same figure is only 2 for women at the same ages who have completed high school or higher level education.’5
That’s half the problem. During the period 1995”“1998, overall Turkish fertility was 2.29 children per woman, while Kurdish fertility was 4.27 children per woman.6 The Kurds comprise 18 percent of the Turkish population by the narrowest definition (Kurdish rather than Turkish as a mother tongue), which means that the Turkish fertility rate excluding the Kurds during the late 1990s was only 1.5, as low as Europe’s. For native Turkish-speakers in Turkey, fertility has been in a death-spiral for the past fifteen years. Erdogan is right: if the trend continues until 2038, the Turkish economy will collapse under the strain of caring for its dependent elderly, while the country’s young people will be concentrated among minorities demanding independence from the hard hand of the Turkish state. According to a recent study in Population Policy Review: “Fertility levels of Turks and Kurds are significantly different. At current fertility rates, Turkish-speaking women will give birth to an average of 1.88 children during their reproductive years. The corresponding figure is 4.07 children for Kurdish women. Kurdish women will have almost 2 children more than Turkish women.’7 The study adds, “Results show that despite intensive internal migration movements in the last 50 years, strong demographic differentials exist between Turkish and Kurdish-speaking populations, and that the convergence of the two groups does not appear to be a process under way. Turks and Kurds do indeed appear to be actors of different demographic regimes, at different stages of demographic and health transition processes.’
The Kurds of Turkey’s undeveloped east, in short, continue to bear four children while Turkish citizens whose cradle tongue is Turkish have one or two.
Europe’s decline is farther along, of course. Perhaps Meade just sees Turkey as becoming the “last man standing” for a while, before its own troubles get the better of it.
Important thing to keep in mind in the fight against global warming: keep those damn sea urchins in their crevices, living on scraps.
Ghettoization, you say? Sure. But this is the moral equivalent of war, folks.
