Off the coast of Brazil is a huge oilfield. Ensuring a stable source of Western-Hemisphere oil would be a good thing for us here in the U.S., especially given recent unrest in the Mideast, and uncertainty about the security of the Persian Gulf. So The Obama administration went to Rio last month to make a pitch for rights to the stuff.
Not a successful one, though: it looks like China’s going to drink our milkshake.
Oh well, at least we still have the Keystone Pipeline!
Oh, wait…
Here’s a cheery item: Bankrupt Solyndra is now smashing its inventory and throwing it into dumpsters.
I thought our American readers would find this of particular interest, having paid for the stuff.
Here’s some really terrible news that I just heard about tonight; Tom Ardolino, NRBQ’s longtime drummer and one of my favorite drummers of all time, has died. I don’t know what the cause was, but he’d been sick for a while.
Tom Ardolino just whacked the hell out of the drums, and played the biggest, loudest, fattest grooves you ever heard. What I loved more than anything about his playing was the way he’d find a place somewhere right in between straight four-on-the-floor and a shuffle, and just hammer the crap out of it. Kind of like this.
I always hate it when great musicians die, but this one hurts extra bad. Dammit.
We just posted a couple of NRBQ videos a week or two ago. Go watch ’em again.
My friend Danny Fisher’s website Wish I Didn’t Know has picked up a story about a proposed smart-phone app that will warn users about high-crime districts, presumably so that safety-conscious travelers can avoid blundering into them.
The app has apparently irked various interest groups, who I suppose think that gathering crime-rate statistics and making them available them to the public gives high-crime areas a bad name, or something.
In the article, we read:
Sarah E. Chinn, author of ”˜Technology and the Logic of American Racism,’ told AOL the app is ”˜pretty appalling.’
”˜Of course, an application like this defines crime pretty narrowly, since all crimes happen in all kinds of neighborhoods.’
”˜I can’t imagine that there aren’t perpetrators of domestic violence, petty and insignificant drug possession, fraud, theft, and rape in every area.’
That’s just fantastic, and highly original, too. Just to be clear, because this is such a piercing insight that you might not get it right away: if you were to imagine that a neighborhood with, say, fifty street assaults a week is somehow a more dangerous place for a stroll than a neighborhood with five such crimes per decade, you’re thinking too narrowly. Instead, the right way to understand crime rates, in light of Ms. Chinn’s intellectual breakthrough, is to assign them only two possible values: 0 or 1. And since “all crimes happen in all kinds of neighborhoods” *, we can narrow the range even further: everyplace just gets a 1! Done.
(Somebody should tell Microsoft this, by the way — because as a professional software engineer, I can tell you it will make coding this app one hell of a lot easier. Fewer bugs, too, I’ll wager.)
So there you have it — a breathtaking unification, a Great Leap Forward in what was until now a dauntingly complex field of study: all crime happens equally, everywhere. Move over, James Clerk Maxwell!
Read the rest here.
* I’ll confess that I’m having trouble remembering the last time there was, for example, a gang-related drive-by shooting in Wellfleet, MA (pop. 2750), but just to be sociable I’ll defer to Ms. Chinn as to whether “all crimes happen in all kinds of neighborhoods”. She is, after all, a published author.
Lawrence Auster brings to our attention (with pithy comments of his own, here) an article from the Daily Mail on the SOPA bill that has been getting so much attention. (I’ll confess I haven’t read the dense 78-page bill itself yet, but from all the summaries I’ve seen it does indeed appear to be a real stinker.)
Read it here.
Sorry to harp on politics today, but President Obama has now petulantly squashed the Keystone Pipeline project, which had broad support, would have created many jobs, and would have decreased our reliance on Mideast oil. Even his own base was divided on this one, with unions supporting it and environmental groups in opposition.
Detailed commentary here.
Is it November yet?
In a gratifyingly swift response, those non-recess “recess” appointments the President made a fortnight or so ago are now being challenged in court.
Well, Wikipedia’s down for a day. This should reduce the apparent know-it-all-ness of the blogospheric commentariat by about 98%, I reckon. (Fortunately I downloaded a copy, so I should be OK.)
Feeling a little better today. Should be my old self shortly.
Still under the weather here, and in my depleted state I seem to be losing the battle with the blank page. If brain not in better shape soon I may have to turn things over to my Super PAC for a few days.
Update: OK, here’s something, in case you missed it over at Kevin’s place: Just who or what was Tom Bombadil, anyway?
I’m not at all well tonight — I seem to have caught a nasty sinus cold, a rarity for me — and it’s all I can manage to keep the conversation going in our “What Is A Nation Anyway?” thread.
Back to normal soon, I hope.
Pat Buchanan has now lost his TV gig for crimespeak, but he’s still got his website and newsletter. In his latest offering, he examines Ron Paul’s candidacy, and what Mr. Paul’s investment strategy says about his view of the near future.
Here.
With a hat tip to Dennis Mangan, here’s a provocative item:
Israel Upholds Citizenship Bar for Palestinian Spouses
Israel’s Supreme Court has upheld a law banning Palestinians who marry Israelis from gaining Israeli citizenship.
Civil rights groups had petitioned the court to overturn the law, saying it was unconstitutional.
“Human rights do not prescribe national suicide,” Judge Asher Grunis wrote in the judgement.
How about that! “National suicide”. Amazing that somebody can get away with calling a spade a spade like that in this day and age. As Dennis remarked (my emphasis):
Judge Grunis appears to be sound on what exactly constitutes a nation, that is, it consists of a people, not anyone who can manage to get to a physical location.
Very unfashionable notion these days, that.
What say you, readers? Should Israel be allowed to define itself as home to “a people”?
If you say ‘no’, then why not? If you say ‘yes’, then you probably know what I’m going to ask next.
In Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, the magnum opus of the extraordinary Greek/Armenian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff, the central character, Beelzebub refers to the unfortunate inhabitants of Earth — us — as “three-brained beings”. This is in alignment with Gurdjieff’s division of the human organism into three parts: the intellectual center, emotional center, and ‘moving’ or ‘instinctive’ center.
The emotional ‘brain’, on this view, is distributed throughout our middles, with a particular concentration in what we call the ‘solar plexus’.
I was reminded of all this when I saw this article the other day.
For our other mentions of Mr. Gurdjieff in these pages, have a look here, and for related posts try our ‘Inner Work‘ category.
This post is something a little out of the ordinary, one that most of our readers will want to skip: it’s a Javascript hack for Microsoft Visual Studio that solves a problem I had at work today. I couldn’t find anything about this online, and once I’d got it sorted out I thought I’d make it available here, so that the next poor wretch who wants to know how to do this won’t have to puzzle it out for himself.
One thing we Windows programmers sometimes need to do is to generate C++ files representing the classes exported by a type library. Visual Studio 2010 has a tool for doing this, called the MFC Class Wizard. (You launch it from the menu bar: Project -> Class Wizard…)
When you use the Class Wizard to create these files, it does two things. First, it renames the exported classes according to the MFC naming convention, by dropping any ‘I’ or ‘_’ prefix and replacing it with a ‘C’. (E.g., an exported class called IBaseClass will be called CBaseClass in the output file.)
The other thing it does is to generate a separate header file for each exported class — so that two exported classes IBaseClass and IUtilityClass will end up in two files, CBaseClass.h and CUtilityClass.h.
But what if you want to keep the class names the same, and merge all the declarations and definitions into a single header file? You have to go through the classes one at a time, in each case explicitly changing the auto-generated class name back to the original class name, and replacing the auto-generated file name with name of the single file you want as the output. (The Wizard is smart enough to merge the code, Dieu merci, but you still have to tell it specifically what to do every time, one class at a time.)
Yesterday I needed to generate a wrapper file for the Outlook Redemption type library, which exposes zillions of classes and methods. I was retrofitting the wrapper classes into some legacy code, created long ago, so I wanted all the class names to match the names in the type library — and I wanted it all in a single header file. To munch through these classes one at a time would have taken me many, many hours, and would have been inexpressibly tedious. I knew that if I could somehow get the Wizard to skip the automatic renaming of the classes, and to generate the same output-file name each time, it would do the whole conversion in just a minute or two. But where was this configured? I looked online for a while, but couldn’t find what I needed. So I dug into the Visual Studio installation directory, and finally found what I was looking for: an HTML file that defines both the Wizard’s UI and the Javascript that does the actual work. A few quick hacks, and the problem was solved.
The file is here:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\VCWizards\CodeWiz\MFC\Typelib\HTML\1033\default.htm.
All of this auto-generation work is done in the function AddClass, which starts at line 527.
The per-class filename generation is done at line 590:
Files_Array[oGeneratedClasses.options.length-1] = strClass + “.h”;
To force the Wizard to merge all the classes into the single file ‘YourFileName.h’, just change this to:
Files_Array[oGeneratedClasses.options.length-1] = “YourFileName.h”;
To prevent the renaming of the generated classes, look at these lines, starting at 559:
var strInterfaceName = oInterfaces.options[i].value;
var strClass;
if( strInterfaceName.charAt(0) == ‘_’ || strInterfaceName.charAt(0) == ‘I’ || strInterfaceName.charAt(0) ==’i’)
strClass = “C” + strInterfaceName.substr(1);
else
strClass = “C” + strInterfaceName;if (IsInGeneratedList(strInterfaceName))
…
Change this to:
var strInterfaceName = oInterfaces.options[i].value;
var strClass = strInterfaceName;if (IsInGeneratedList(strInterfaceName))
…
And that’s it! Don’t forget to put it all back, or at least to change the hard-coded filename next time you want to use it. (What would be even better would be to add some new code to expose all of these as options accessible directly from the UI, but I haven’t bothered.)
I hope this saves somebody out there a little time someday.
BE IT KNOWN BY ALL that Hizzonner Michael Bloomberg, Lord Mayor of Manhattan, Imperator of The Five Boroughs, Slayer of Term Limits, and Guardian In Loco Parentis of the Well-Being and Moral Probity of the Gothamite Flock, has of Late turned His Attention to the licentious Consumption of Alcoholic Liquors, and other stimulating Potations, by His intemperate Wards.
BE IT KNOWN ALSO that, Hizzonner having Determined, by the Light of His beneficent Wisdom, said Consumption to have become in recent Years EXCESSIVE, appropriate Arrangements therefore Soon shall be Made, throughout the Imperium, sharply to Limit the Vendition of intoxicating Beverages, so as to improve the Character, Comportment, and Eupepsia of His Flock.
Here’s a dispatch from our senior White House correspondent, Milton Polchek:
WASHINGTON, Jan. 11 –
Michelle Obama, the first black woman to serve as First Lady, took to the airwaves recently to express her irritation at being characterized as an “angry black woman”.
Mrs. Obama could not be reached for comment, but a close friend and confidante spoke to this reporter, on condition of anonymity.
“As a black woman in America, Lord knows Michelle has plenty to be angry about, and of course with decades of academic and professional experience in this area, she is widely regarded as an expert in the field. But this “angry black woman” thing just really, really pisses her off. She’s trying to keep cool about it, but frankly I can’t remember the last time I saw her get so mad.”
Her friend paused.
“…well, not lately, anyway. But I’ve been out of town for a few weeks.”
Here’s a curious item for you: the only recorded capture, in the Tripiscum Plateau of the Circum-Caribbean region of Northern South America, of the exotic Piercing Devil.
With thanks to our reader Pete K., here’s a heartening item from the frontiers of science. What’s more, the story introduces a new and important fundamental unit of measurement, which I think should be called the ‘marley’.
And here’s a related video.
With a hat tip to VFR, here’s the Jerusalem Post’s latest report on the Islamist renaissance that is coalescing in the wake of the ‘Arab Spring’.
Meanwhile, DEBKA reports that in Egypt, General Tantawi and the SCAF grow weary of their burden, and are negotiating an early handover of the reins of power to the Muslim Brotherhood (who reiterate that they are not bound by Egypt’s agreements with Israel). DEBKA also reports on a growing deployment of U.S. military resources to Israel:
Thousands of US troops began descending on Israel this week. Senior US military sources told DEBKAfile Friday, Jan. 6 that many would be staying up to the end of the year as part of the US-IDF deployment in readiness for a military engagement with Iran and its possible escalation into a regional conflict. They will be joined by a US aircraft carrier. The warplanes on its decks will fly missions with Israeli Air Force jets.
As a result of the political upheavals in the region, Israel’s security situation has deteriorated sharply in the past year, and the buildup of U.S. forces there is unlikely, in my opinion, to be reversed any time soon. This tightening encirclement of Israel by its mortal enemies, who are in political ascendancy on all sides, will lead to an increased Israeli dependency on the United States to guarantee its survival. This in turn will give the United States — whose current administration shows no particular fondness for Israel to begin with — increasing leverage with which to pressure Israel as regards its accommodation of Palestinian demands, which are themselves merely a proxy for the eliminationist sentiments of the regional Islamic community.
A commenter recently remarked, in response to my unvarying pessimism about how the ‘Arab Spring’ was likely to affect Western interests in the region:
In the end the “Arab Spring’ might turn out to be an unmitigated disaster but at the very least it allows for possibilities not imagined in many decades.
That’s certainly true. Likewise, if I were to put on a blindfold while driving, it would allow for possibilities not imagined by nearby motorists.
Gotta love this: the upstart Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow, who has attracted nationwide attention for his ostentatious Christianity, is fond of associating himself with the New Testament verse John 3:16. For you damned heathens out there who may not be familiar with this oft-quoted passage, it says:
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
Here’s the sort of thing I’m talking about:
Well, in tonight’s unlikely Broncos win over the Pittsburgh Steelers, Mr. Tebow completed ten passes — for a total of 316 yards. Better yet: that’s an average of 31.6 yards per completion.
I don’t know if any of them qualified as a “Hail Mary”, but that’s pretty nifty work nevertheless.
So, conservatives: who’s our guy going to be? Heading into the New Hampshire primary, Mitt Romney has a commanding lead — and the other candidates spent most of Saturday’s debate snarling at one another, while hardly even taking a swing at Mitt.
There are two questions.
First: who out of this lot would, by our lights, be the best president?
Second, and far more important for the future of the nation: who has the best chance of ousting Barack Obama?
To answer the most important question first: I think the answer is Mitt Romney. Newt Gingrich is simply much too off-putting to too many people. The reasons? There are several: his personal peccadilloes, his ostentatious vanity and haughty condescension (though of course you’re stuck with those that either way in a Gingrich/Obama contest), his petulance, his sequential fascination with a kaleidoscopic assortment of Big New Ideas, and more. (Even his portly middle, suggestive of hedonistic indiscipline, would no doubt be a liability in contrast to the imperially slim Mr. Obama.) I simply don’t think he would win, and if there’s one thing that all conservatives agree on, from the evangelicals to the Tea Party to the most socially liberal, godless “metrocons”, it’s that for Mr. Obama to get another four years in office would be a catastrophe for America. Mitt Romney, though brilliant by nobody’s assessment, looks radiantly presidential, holds his own well enough in debates, and clearly understands what all conservatives agree our next president must understand: the importance of a smaller, leaner, and less intrusive government to the preservation of America’s liberty and prosperity. It would be delightful to see Newt Gingrich shred Mr. Obama on the debating floor, but you can’t have everything, and it’s hard for me to imagine that Mitt won’t have a far broader appeal at the polls. I’ll invoke the Buckley Rule: you pull for the most conservative candidate who can actually get elected — and that’s Mitt Romney, I think.
As for the first question, about who would make the better President: for all of Newt’s brainy command of history, and his vast governmental experience, I’m still not sure that he’d be a better president. He has a tendency, rather like Toad of Toad Hall, to hop from one glittering attraction to another, and he has many enemies in Washington. I’m sure Mitt would be less of an activist than Newt — but Washington doing less looks pretty good right now, and I imagine most of his activism would be directed toward slimming the Federal behemoth, rather than dreaming up new and visionary initiatives. There’s no doubt that Mitt is far less imaginative than Newt, but that’s just as well, under the circumstances.
So: Mitt Romney it is, I guess. It’s hard to get excited about the guy, but if he can unseat Mr. Obama, that’s good enough for me.
Not everyone on the Right agrees, of course. In his latest essay, for example, Thomas Sowell makes the case for Newt Gingrich. I agree with much of what he says, as usual, but I think he overestimates Newt’s chance of victory in November, which completely undermines his argument. You can read it for yourself, here.
I’ve never been a fan of Rick Santorum, and I hope he doesn’t win the GOP nomination, because then I’d have to vote to elect him President. But any criticism I might make of him begins and ends with his public life: his opinions and intentions regarding government policy.
Not so for liberal water-carriers Alan Colmes and Eugene Robinson, who disgraced themselves recently by jeering at Mr. Santorum and his wife for the way they handled what is surely the most sorrowful calamity that can ever befall any of us in this vale of tears: the death of a child.
Mark Steyn lets them have it, with both barrels, here.
P.S. I realize that, as Ross Douthat says here, privacy is to some extent “a luxury of moral consensus”, and that Mr. Santorum has made a career of pushing politics into the privacy of the bedroom — which is a big part of the reason I don’t support him. But mocking a family over their grief for a dead son is simply beyond the pale, I think, and in another age would have been considered evidence of ill breeding.
Just tweeted by “Karma’s janitor”, @Iowahawk:
New York New York, it’s a helluva town / 3 foot rats, but the transfats are down
Peter Kirsanow comments, here, on President Obama’s scorched-earth “recess” appointments. I look forward to an adjudication in the courts.
This year’s presidential campaign is going to make Iwo Jima look like a pillow-fight. And if you thought U.S. politics were already polarized to the point of total dysfunction, Pat Buchanan argues here, just wait until it’s over — especially if Mr. Obama wins.
New tests of the extract of Japanese raisin-tree seeds (hovenia dulcis) appear to have confirmed that their “active ingredient” is highly effective at blocking the effects of alcohol. Big Think reports:
Scientists at UCLA gave a group of rats the “human equivalent” of 15 to 20 beers during a two-hour binge. We’ll call this group the Rat Blackout Brigade. These rats not only passed out cold, but also lost the reflex mechanism that allows them to flip over when placed on their backs.
Another group of rats got tanked up with the same amount of alcohol, except this group was also given a shot of DHM. While the DHM rats eventually passed out as well, it took them longer to become intoxicated and their stupor lasted only 15 minutes. These rats also regained their reflexes quickly. In other words, the study concluded that DHM counteracts intoxication and alcohol withdrawal symptoms. And most significantly, DHM was found to reduce voluntary alcohol consumption. (After a two-week bender, the rats did not become dependent).
Hovenia dulcis has been used as a folk remedy for centuries to treat a wide range of alcohol-induced ailments, including liver injuries. In fact, the Raisin Tree was recorded in the world’s first pharmacopoeia, Tang Ben Cao. It is said that during the Song Dynasty the poet Su Dongpo, who had a propensity for excessive alcohol consumption, used zhi ju zi, or Raisin Tree extract, to help him hold his liquor.
I don’t know. As far as I can tell, this h. dulcis stuff interferes with all the effects of alcohol, both the ones you don’t want and the ones you do. I know a simpler way of accomplishing that, and it’s cheap, too: don’t drink. (I give that a whirl every once in a great while, and as it happens it’s how I’m spending this January — mainly because I enjoy being able, now and then, to flip myself over when placed on my back.) I suppose this raisin-seed elixir would be good for someone who just wants a nice glass of wine with dinner, say, for purely aesthetic reasons, but I think it’s safe to say that most people consuming alcohol have a motivation that goes beyond finding the perfect pairing for their aumÁ´niÁ¨re d’oeuf poché Périgueux.
On the other hand, if someone were to come up with a medicament that reliably eliminates the existential crisis commonly known as “the morning after”, without interfering with one’s customary enjoyment of the evening before — well now, that would be something worth investing in.
So I’ve decided to follow @kanyewest on Twitter. Should be great, I think.
From the frontiers of science, here’s some breaking news —
Men, Women Really Do Have Big Personality Differences
— that any human being, plucked from anywhere on Earth at any time between the invention of language and the 1960s or so, and not in a persistent vegetative state, could have told you.
I’m “on the wagon” this month; after an outstandingly well-lubricated holiday season I thought a dry January would have a salubrious and restorative effect. Items like this make it very much more difficult.
Here’s something I meant to post a few weeks ago, when President Obama was delivering that Osawatomie speech. It’s an essay by Walter Russell Mead, in which he examines the persistent Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian threads in American political history, and argues that after a long period of Hamiltonian ascendancy, the time is right for the tide to turn.
Here.
In the discussion thread of our recent post about Yusuf al-Qaradawi and the Muslim Brotherhood, the issue soon became: what should the attitude of the West have been toward the democratic uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere? On the one hand, as Americans it seems we ought to support democracy wherever we can; on the other, democracy will produce different results when practiced by different peoples. My own concern, which has so far been borne out by events, was that these revolts would lead directly to Islamist regimes in the region: hardly a gratifying outcome in terms of Western interests.
The ‘crux of the biscuit’ is this question: Do Western normative principles appeal to universal longings, and are therefore universally applicable across all peoples and cultures? Both liberal muticulturalists and neoconservative nation-builders seem to agree that they are.
Our commenter ‘The One-Eyed Man’ summed up with this:
…I do think that the principles in the Declaration of Independence are universal, applying to Muslims equally to Christians and everyone else.
This is a commonly held view, but with particular regard to Islam, it’s a fundamental error, of critical importance. I’ll try to explain.
As much as it may be fashionable (especially among unbelievers like me) to downplay the significance of religion in America’s founding, the Declaration of Independence explicitly expresses a Judeo-Christian understanding of the nature of God, and of God’s relationship with human beings. It clearly declares this understanding in its most famous passage:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…
The central argument of the Declaration of Independence is that the Crown, having repeatedly infringed on the rights of its American colonists, has voided its claim to sovereignty over them. So: what does it mean for men to possess inalienable rights granted to them by God, and how is this belief distinctly Judeo-Christian?
First, this assertion reflects the belief that a loving God grants these rights as part of His covenant with mankind — a covenant made first with the Jews, and then extended to the rest of humanity by Jesus Christ. Central to both is the idea of a loving God who, loving all men as individuals, directly grants each of them the assurance of His protection. The Declaration explicitly places this direct, individual assurance from God above any earthly institution’s power to abrogate.
But the idea of a loving Creator with whom mere humans may enter into this sort of personal covenant is directly at odds with the Islamic concept of God. The Islamic God Allah is perfect, transcendent, and aloof; the idea of Allah deigning to “love” a mere human is absurd, and indeed the thought is offensive to God’s majesty. The great Islamic theologian and philosopher Abu HÄmed Mohammad ibn Mohammad al-GhazzÄlÄ«, who died in 1111 but remains probably the most influential Islamic theorist of all time, argued against this by pointing out that love implies a need, an incompleteness, on the part of the lover that can only be fulfilled by the beloved. But God is perfect, continued Ghazzali, and complete unto Himself — so the idea that He might have a longing that can only be fulfilled by reciprocal love with mortal men is an abomination, as is the notion that He would enter into an equal partnership with anyone or anything at all.
This brings us to a second point: the very idea of an irrevocable covenant, as implicit in the concept of inalienable rights, necessarily implies a limitation of God’s sovereignty: for God to make an unbreakable promise necessarily limits God’s freedom of action. But the divine Will and infinite potency of God obviously can permit no such limitation — again, the very idea is an offense and an abomination.
Furthermore, the Declaration of Independence is a product of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, which in turn has at its foundation the idea of a lawful natural world. This concept also reflects the Judeo-Christian assumption of a loving God: one who, having endowed Man with the gift of reason, provided a world that operated without caprice, and that was subject to reliable regularities that human reason could comprehend. But again, this idea of a lawful Cosmos necessarily limits the freedom and sovereignty of God. Indeed al-Ghazali went so far as to say that because God’s power is infinite, His moment-by-moment attention to the world’s every minutest detail is what maintains the world’s seeming regularities, and the appearance of lawful connections between observed causes and effects is merely an illusion. If drinking water seems to alleviate thirst, it is only because God, on each occasion, has chosen to follow our drinking of water with the relief of thirst. But to imply that God’s choice in the workings of His creation is constrained by natural laws is again to suggest that God’s sovereignty is limited, and is again an abomination.
Finally, there is the Islamic concept of tawhid, or the unity of God. This idea was developed extensively by Taqi al-Din Ibn Taymiyya, a medieval Salafist whose teachings still exert great influence. In his widely read paper A Genealogy of Radical Islam, Quintan Wiktorowicz explained (emphasis mine):
One of Ibn Taymiyya’s most important contributions to Salafi thought is his elaboration of the concept of tawhid ”” the unity of God. He divided the unity of God into two categories: the unity of lordship and the unity of worship. The former refers to belief in God as the sole sovereign and creator of the universe. All Muslims readily accept this. The second is affirmation of God as the only object of worship and obedience. Ibn Taymiyya reasoned that this latter component of divine unity necessitates following God’s laws. The use of human-made laws is tantamount to obeying or worshipping other than God and thus apostasy. [20th-century Muslim theologian Mawlana Abul A’la] Mawdudi adopted this position and drew a sharp bifurcation between the “party of God’ and the “party of Satan,’ which included Muslims who adhered to human-made law.
This idea, which is very much a part of mainstream Islamic thought throughout the world, raises an impassable barrier between Islam and the Judeo-Christian tradition of a distinction between divine and worldly law — the root of America’s founding principle of a separation of Church and state.
There is much more I could say about all of this, but it’s late, and this post is already long enough. I hope, however, that I have shown that it is a mistake, and betrays a dangerously superficial acquaintance with core Islamic doctrine, to imagine that bedrock American principles — in particular those Enlightenment principles expressed by Jefferson in our Declaration of Independence — apply as aptly to serious Muslims as they do to those of us raised in the Western religious and cultural tradition.
This in the mailbag from our old friend David Pauley: Freeman Dyson on catastrophes, real and imaginary.
Nearly a year ago, as the uprising in Egypt was gaining traction, I wrote:
The Muslim Brotherhood (or “Ikhwan’) differs from militant Islamist factions like al-Qaeda not in its goals, which are more or less the same, but only in its strategy: it has no moral or philosophical aversion to violent jihad, but considers it unnecessarily provocative, and therefore counterproductive. As such, it can make an ostentatious public display of distancing itself from terrorism, and so it is embraced by gullible Westerners ”” for whom the only imaginable threat from Islam is terrorist violence ”” as a “moderate’ Muslim organization to be supported and embraced. This suits the Ikwhan, whose avowed strategy is to sabotage secular democratic societies from within, just fine.
The Obama administration, however, which has made “outreach’ to the Muslim world a priority (even going so far as to make NASA’s “foremost’ mission helping Muslims “feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering’) clearly feels the the Muslim Brotherhood is an outfit it can do business with. We should not be surprised to see ”” in fact we should be astonished not to see ”” the Ikwhan seizing the opportunity now taking shape in Cairo, for which it has worked and waited so long. We should also not be surprised to learn that they will do so with the overt or covert support of the United States: so broad is the Brotherhood’s influence in Egypt that it is almost unimaginable that they will not take the reins, and you can be sure that Foggy Bottom and the Oval Office have already made the appropriate calculations.
For my trouble, I was berated in the comment thread for having made, under the bewitchment of “confirmation bias”, an assertion that was “unsupported by fact” and unable to “withstand even the slightest amount of scrutiny”.
A lively eleven months have passed since then, and we have yet to see any flowering of secular Jeffersonian democracy in the region, despite the lavish and effervescent optimism with which the initial disturbances were greeted by most observers here in the West. As was suggested at the time by those of us who have rather less faith in the universal appeal of Western ways, and a more sober understanding of the history of the area and its people, the likeliest outcome of these populist upheavals would be a transition to Islamic governance, with a concomitant erosion of Western interests in the region, and deepening existential peril for Israel.
Now, as Andrew McCarthy notes here, The Hindu reports that the Obama administration has turned to none other than Yusuf al-Qaradawi — the Muslim Brotherhood’s principal ideological theorist and dawa-jihad strategist — to negotiate the terms of our accommodation with the Taliban.
More confirmation bias, no doubt (after all, it’s just the Hindu, not the New York Times). We’ll just have to see.
Last January we noted in these pages a mysterious event at Beebe, Arkansas: thousands of red-winged blackbirds had fallen out of the sky on New Year’s Eve. An excerpt:
It seems that thousands of red-winged blackbirds (and as far as I can tell, only red-winged blackbirds) fell dead from the sky on New Year’s Eve in the area around the town of Beebe: victims, apparently, of some “massive trauma’. The cause is as yet unspecified; those who abhor such explanatory vacua, and must fill them, have suggested that “a loud noise’ might have been to blame.
A loud noise? It’s a dandy explanation, of course, and ought to settle the question ”” but as I head for the door I find myself turning back again, troubled, Columbo-style, by a nagging little detail. You see, the thing is that I have been around a lot of very loud noises in my day, and have even caused quite a few myself ”” and it strikes me that on no occasion did any of them, not even the very loudest, cause thousands of birds, of a single species, to drop lifeless from the firmament. So I wonder.
This seemed awfully strange then, but it seems even stranger now — because exactly the same thing has happened again, and on New Year’s Eve again, too.
I have not even the slightest inkling as to what might be going here, but it is very odd.
With grim 2011 winding down, I thought about making a New Year’s resolution to take a more positive outlook toward the future, to express more optimism in these pages, and generally to stop being so pessimistic about everything.
I figured it probably wouldn’t work out, though, so I gave up on the idea.
But just because the world (or at least Western civilization, which as far as I’m concerned amounts to pretty much the same thing) really is going down the drain doesn’t mean we can’t set aside our well-justified gloom for a moment, and raise a glass with family and friends. So here’s to you, readers! And for all I know, things really will turn around in 2012, and we’ll look back on this moment in history as the time when the West, at the very brink of disaster, awoke in sudden terror to the folly of the course it had charted, and with desperate resolve managed to steer clear of the fatal catastrophe.
Ha! Just kidding. Anyway, bottoms up, folks — and thanks as always for reading and commenting.
There’s something for everyone here at waka waka waka, and we’ve made it a late-December tradition to take a look back at some of the thousands of keyphrases that brought visitors our way from Google and other search engines over the past year. Here’s our 2011 selection; it’s a curious crop as always.
We’re on something of a holiday schedule this week — so for tonight, just a grab-bag of little diversions:
— An item that, if it were a post of its own, would surely have been titled “Bird Brains”, or perhaps “Counting Crows”.
— A little hibernal music from the late Jackie Gleason.
— For you city dwellers yearning for a rustic getaway, some Cabin Porn.
— Some very detailed doodles.
— Music hath charms, etc.
We’ll be back to normal operations sometime early next year. Until then, we’ll be focusing on our habitual last-days-of-December routine, which consists mostly of deserted seascapes, cheery blazes, old books, introspective rumination, and potent seasonal beverages.
Whatever Christmas means to you — be it everything or nothing — I hope you all have a warm and happy one, in the company of people you love.
Here’s a time capsule from December 24th, 1941, seventy years ago today: Christmas Eve remarks from the White House lawn by Franklin D. Roosevelt and the visiting Winston Churchill. The US had just entered the war; Britain had until a fortnight earlier stood alone against the Nazis, and since September had endured the horrors of the Blitz.
This was a far different era of Western civilization. It’s hard to imagine that it was within living memory of many who are still with us.
Diana West comments here on the dismal verdict in the Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff trial in Vienna.
Her crime, if you haven’t followed the case, was to comment disapprovingly on Mohammed’s deflowering of his nine-year-old wife Aisha.
Well, tolerance is paramount in a decent society, I guess.
Meanwhile, Christmas masses have been canceled in Iraq due to fears of anti-Christian violence.
Well, there you have it: a bumbling, humiliating performance by the House GOP on the ridiculous two-month payroll-tax moratorium (which, among its other shortcomings, is so idiotically brief that it presents costly problems to payroll processors). Nice work, guys.
Charles Krauthammer offers a scathing summary here.
Here’s a page that shows a live stream of Wikipedia edits. You can filter the stream by language version and edit size. It’s curiously fascinating, for a minute or two at least.
For you strategic-security wonks, John McCreary has published a substantial post on events in North Korea today at NightWatch — complete with a parting jab at the Times. I’ll reproduce it here.
North Korea: North Korea is demanding that foreigners either remain in their homes or leave the country. Pyongyang authorities ordered some foreigners to leave, according to Chinese nationals who frequently visit North Korea.
A Chinese student in Pyongyang said North Korean professors ordered their Chinese and Russian students to avoid leaving their residences. According to a Chinese man who flew out of Pyongyang on 20 December, foreigners were not allowed to leave their accommodations after the announcement of Kim Jong Il’s death on the 19th.
North Korea also is deporting some foreigners from Pyongyang, Sinuiju and the Rajin-Sonbong special economic zone, Chosun reported on 21 December. Missionaries and US businessmen engaged in charity work in Rajin-Sonbong and Sinuiju have been forced to leave. North Korea is preventing foreigners from entering the country and will not issue any new visas until after 29 December.
Comment: Control of foreigners, including expulsion, is one of the national civil readiness measures prescribed in a semi-war state of alert, which is a preparatory stage of war preparations for an attack as well as for defense against an attack. Such measures are out of sync with a global and increasingly integrated economic system, but for North Korea they are normal during conditions of stress, such as leadership change.
Kim Jong un’s first military order, according to Korean news services, was to order all military units to return to garrison. His military mentors, most likely Vice Marshal Ri, the chief of the General Staff, had him sign this order on 18 December. This also is prescribed in a semi-war state of alert for rear and mobile military units. For forward forces just north of the Demilitarized Zone, they are supposed to report to wartime defenses and commence tunnel living.
Comment: The context for this order is that the annual Winter Training Cycle for the Korean People’s Army began on 1 December. Winter is the period of the most intense and extensive training for the entire Army.
In December, which is the first month of the cycle, soldiers are in classrooms or at shooting ranges and other basic field training sites for the early phases of the cycle. The cycle culminates in large unit – corps- and multiple corps- echelon — field exercises in early spring.
Confining units to garrison means the early phases of the training cycle have been interrupted and the entire cycle must be truncated by at least a month. Army readiness peaks in April, after the cycle ends and remedial training is completed for units that failed to meet standards. The Army cannot now meet that schedule without sacrificing readiness.
The North Korean Marshals and Generals will appreciate that the coming year will be a period of extraordinary military vulnerability until the summer training cycle is completed. They may be expected to be prickly and prone to violence over perceived provocations by the Allies.
The order to confine troops to barracks during a time of internal stress always means the leadership does not trust its lower echelons of leadership. It does not want troops to have access to live ammunition and will not risk normal training because of the danger of a military revolt.
Special comment: The succession of Kim Chong il in 1994 was not peaceful or smooth, despite western punditry and North Korean propaganda. There were multiple assassination attempts against Kim Chong il during his first year as leader, although he was his father’s understudy for more than a dozen years. An entire North Korean Army Corps revolted against him in early 1995 and requested American and South Korean assistance, which it did not receive. Its leaders fled to China. The corps was disbanded.
Despite the North Korean propaganda and the shallow Western news coverage, the succession of Kim Jong un is likely to be much more unstable than was Kim Chong il’s, once the mourning period ends in January 2012.
All the video reports and written news items on the home pages of the Korean Central News Agency stress that the Army and the people support Kim Jong un. Every video of Kim Chong-il during his life shows Kim Jong un in the background. But all the images are quite recent and they are few. Kim Chong-il did not take his designated heir everywhere with him, as his father did with him.
Moreover, the videos and other reports do not mention that the communist party or the government support Kim Jong un. The Army always is listed or mentioned first. The North Korean people will understand that for now they are under army rule.
Finally, North Korea is an oriental despotism as described by Professor Karl August Wittfogel in his seminal book “Oriental Despotism.” It is not inscrutable or unpredictable or mysterious. It is Asian.
That means that an extended royal family governs and risks being destroyed if the government changes. It will exhibit no interest in reform that jeopardizes its status and life style.
That family pampers and depends on the loyalty of the armed forces leaders. That means that every army corps commander has a villa, Mercedes Benz personal vehicles, Rolex watches, flat screen HD TVs and all the luxuries that North Korean can afford. Kim Chong il never neglected his senior commanders and they are now in charge of national security.
All of that means that peace with South Korea is highly unlikely because the generals and vice marshals will lose their life style and the Army will lose its reason for existence.
Internal economic reform will be measured by whether it helps the Kim extended family. The young Kim is a victim of the decisions of his grandfather and father.
Anecdote: South Korea’s director of the National Intelligence Service told the press today that US satellite photos show that all of the leadership trains used by Kim Chong-il were in their normal parking areas in Pyongyang rail yards on 17 December, the day Kim died.
This means that Kim could not have died on a train during a field tour, as the Pyongyang government announced on the 19th, and as the official media broadcast. He died with no heroics.
On the 18th, however, the North Koreans did move a leadership train from Pyongyang, apparently and belatedly recognizing their gaff.
The South Korean intelligence chief reported that Kim most likely died in bed, or at least in Pyongyang. The story about dying on the train was part of the mythology the North Koreans love to indulge, but which no North Koreans believe.
Final comment: The New York Times published an absurd article about a massive intelligence failure because the US did not know that Kim was dying in his villa in Pyongyang, and learned of his death from official North Korean press statements … as it did when Kim Il-sung died in 1994.
The intelligence failure thesis reveals an ingénue’s complete misunderstanding of US intelligence. No one knows or can know when a national leader is dying suddenly, including the Chinese, even in a Web 2.0 world. There is no App for dying national leaders.
I’ve been getting robocalls over the past few days for a “Draft Hillary” campaign. Mounting a primary opposition to the President would be a smart move for the Democrats, I think, given how deeply Mr. Obama has disappointed so many of his supporters. I have a feeling Hillary would be a lot harder to beat in November then the incumbent would, though a primary battle in which the Obama attack machine trained its fire on a fellow Democrat might be more than the party has the stomach for. It would certainly be fun for those of us in the loyal opposition to watch those two flay each other for a few months, I have to say.
This could get interesting.
Here is a long and deeply depressing essay about California’s dying Central Valley, by one of its lifelong residents, Victor Davis Hanson.
How did we let this happen to ourselves?
Time for some NRBQ, I think. Here’s Wild Weekend. And here’s Get Rhythm.
Man, what a band.
