The Road To Energy Independence

December 10, 2011 – 5:25 pm

Okay, forget Solyndra. If the Obama administration really is serious about “investing” in “innovation”, they should have a look here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Technology | Comments (2)

Bloody Well Right

December 9, 2011 – 11:44 pm

David Cameron is getting plenty of heat from the EU for standing up for his people, for once.

Well, good for him, I say, for refusing to surrender England’s ancient sovereignty to a lot of unelected Eurocrats as their doomed continent falls under the all-too familiar shadow of coalescing German dominance.

To quote Winston Churchill:

“You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (4)

PSA

December 8, 2011 – 11:40 pm

Let’s be careful out there, folks.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (1)

Wishful Thinking

December 8, 2011 – 10:23 pm

In a recent STRATFOR article, George Friedman uses the example of the “Arab Spring” uprising in Egypt as a case study in what he calls “an inherent contradiction in Western ideology and, ultimately, of an attempt to create a coherent foreign policy.”

At the root of this ideological confusion, says Friedman, is a tension between two central tenets of Western political philosophy:

Western countries, following the principles of the French Revolution, have two core beliefs. The first is the concept of national self-determination, the idea that all nations (and what the term “nation’ means is complex in itself) have the right to determine for themselves the type of government they wish. The second is the idea of human rights, which are defined in several documents but are all built around the basic values of individual rights, particularly the right not only to participate in politics but also to be free in your private life from government intrusion.

The first principle leads to the idea of the democratic foundations of the state. The second leads to the idea that the state must be limited in its power in certain ways and the individual must be free to pursue his own life in his own way within a framework of law limited by the principles of liberal democracy. The core assumption within this is that a democratic polity will yield a liberal constitution. This assumes that the majority of the citizens, left to their own devices, will favor the Enlightenment’s definition of human rights. This assumption is simple, but its application is tremendously complex. In the end, the premise of the Western project is that national self-determination, expressed through free elections, will create and sustain constitutional democracies.

I’m a recovered neoconservative, and as such I used to share this opinion myself. Many still do:

It is interesting to note that human rights activists and neoconservatives, who on the surface are ideologically opposed, actually share this core belief. Both believe that democracy and human rights flow from the same source and that creating democratic regimes will create human rights. The neoconservatives believe outside military intervention might be an efficient agent for this. Human rights groups oppose this, preferring to organize and underwrite democratic movements and use measures such as sanctions and courts to compel oppressive regimes to cede power. But they share common ground on this point as well. Both groups believe that outside intervention is needed to facilitate the emergence of an oppressed public naturally inclined toward democracy and human rights.

The problem with all of this is a curious modern blindness to vital historical and cultural realities, brought on by Western vanity about the universal appeal of its values:

The idea that the destruction of repressive regimes opens the door for democratic elections that will not result in another repressive regime, at least by Western standards, assumes that all societies find Western values admirable and want to emulate them. This is sometimes the case, but the general assertion is a form of narcissism in the West that assumes that all reasonable people, freed from oppression, would wish to emulate us.

Our choices, then, are not so simple as we would like to think they are:

Assume there is a choice between a repressive, undemocratic regime that is in the interests of a Western country and a regime that is democratic but repressive by Western standards and hostile to those interests. Which is preferable, and what steps should be taken?

These are blindingly complex questions that some observers ”” the realists as opposed to the idealists ”” say not only are unanswerable but also undermine the ability to pursue national interests without in any way improving the moral character of the world. In other words, you are choosing between two types of repression from a Western point of view and there is no preference. Therefore, a country like the United States should ignore the moral question altogether and focus on a simpler question, and one that’s answerable: the national interest.

The question then is: if the simplistic moral calculus applied earlier this year by giddy “Arab Spring” cheerleaders who saw little more in Tahrir Square than Westernizing hipsters with iPhones was based on a narcissistic delusion, then what is our real national interest in the region? If the creation of secular pro-Western Jeffersonian democracies in the Muslim lands of the Middle East and Maghreb is just a pipe dream — and it is — then we should evaluate our aims more coolly and clearly. I can think of a few (your mileage may vary):

1) Tamping down Islamism where we can, or at least ensuring that Islamist regimes understand that we will entertain no more costly fantasies about “nation-building” in response to the next hostile act on the part of their jihadis against us; that the next time around there will instead be a good deal of nation-demolition on offer, and very little indeed in the way of building.

2) Maintaining the economically vital flow of oil and shipping through Mideast waters.

3) Standing in solidarity with Israel: our only genuine ally, the only West-friendly democracy, and indeed the only non-barbarous nation in the region.

You can read all of Mr. Friedman’s excellent essay here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (1)

Destroying Civilization, By Degrees

December 7, 2011 – 11:53 pm

Here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Rubbish | Comments (14)

It Was Behind The Sofa

December 7, 2011 – 9:26 pm

There’s a buzz going round that the boffins at LHC may have found the Higgs boson.

By Malcolm | Posted in Science | Comments (7)

Changing Times

December 7, 2011 – 5:55 pm

President Obama gave a rousing speech for his base yesterday in Osawatomie, Kansas: a collectivist stem-winder in which he invoked the rough-riding spirit of Teddy Roosevelt to call for more leveling, more government regulation of everything, and more central planning — in general, more “tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato.”

The base liked it. The New York Times, for example, has been spoiling for Mr. Obama to put up a real fight against the evil Right for some time now, and seemed pleased to imagine that their man seems finally to be getting his Irish up:

In demanding “a new nationalism,’ Roosevelt supported strong government oversight of business, a “graduated income tax on big fortunes,’ an inheritance tax and the primacy of labor over capital. For that, he was called a socialist and worse, as Mr. Obama observed, having endured the same.

Mr. Obama was late to Roosevelt’s level of passion and action on behalf of the middle class and the poor, having missed several opportunities to make the tax burden more fair and demand real action on the housing crisis from the big banks that he excoriated so effectively in his speech.

But he has fought energetically for a realistic plan to put Americans back to work and has been stymied at every step by Republicans. That seems to have burned away his old urge to conciliate and compromise, and he is now fully engaged against the philosophy of his opponents.

As Jonah Goldberg pointed out today, however, the Times didn’t always feel this way about Mr. Roosevelt’s view of things. In a September 30th, 1913 editorial, which was entitled “ROOSEVELT’S SUPER-SOCIALISM”, the Grey Lady’s editorial board wrote (.pdf here, if you can’t get past the paywall):

Theodore Roosevelt has now thought out and matured his doctrine of Socialism. It is not the Marxian socialism. Much that Karl Marx taught is rejected by present-day Socialists. Mr. Roosevelt achieves the redistribution of wealth in a simpler and easier way. He leaves the land, the mines, the factories, the railroads, the banks — all the instruments of production and exchange — in the hands of their individual owners, but of the profits of their operation he takes whatever share the people at any given time may chose to appropriate to the common use. The people are going to say, We care not who owns and milks the cow, as long as we get our fill of the milk and cream.

… Mr. Roosevelt’s reconstruction of society would leave it inert by destroying individual initiative, hope, and ambition, which are the foundations of progress. It is a sterile system, yet being sterile, why has constructed it? Because he knew that with his great skill he could make this Utopian dream attractive to that very considerable part of society which is the material with which agitators work: the discontented, the unsuccessful, the envious.

Well, some things do change, I guess. Others don’t.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Politics | Comments (1)

Speak, Pencil

December 7, 2011 – 12:05 pm

Have you ever read this?

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (1)

Hitchens On The Mattress Grave

December 7, 2011 – 11:05 am

Christopher Hitchens has suffered the torments of the damned in the past eighteen months, and in this harrowing essay at Vanity Fair, he reflects skeptically on Nietzsche’s oft-repeated claim that “Was mich nicht umbringt macht mich stÁ¤rker“. What has not yet killed him, as he makes very clear indeed, has made him no stronger at all.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Does Size Matter?

December 6, 2011 – 11:30 am

Following on our recent post about race and intelligence: one question that often comes up is where brain size fits in. Brain size does seem to vary among human populations in the same way that the distribution of intelligence does — with East Asians, for example, having bigger brains on average than whites — so it is both tempting and reasonable to conclude that the correspondence indicates a causal relationship.

This often draws the objection, however, that females have distinctly smaller brains than males, but do not show lower average intelligence within their population groups than males. So if this difference doesn’t account for differences in intelligence within groups, why should mean brain volume be responsible for IQ differences between groups?

The answer is coming into view. It appears, as many have suspected, that the difference in brain size between males and females is due to the presence of extra machinery in the male brain for processing spatial-relationship data — a feature that is independent of general intelligence.

Charles Murray comments here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Mind and Brain, Science | Comments (3)

Potential

December 5, 2011 – 11:23 pm

Mulla Nasrudin was carrying home some liver which he had just bought. In the other hand he had a recipe for liver pie which a friend had given him.

Suddenly a buzzard swooped down and carried off the liver.

“You fool!” shouted Nasrudin, “the meat is all very well — but I still have the recipe!”

From “The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin”, by Idries Shah

By Malcolm | Posted in Inner Work | Comments (6)

How High’s The Water, Mama?

December 4, 2011 – 9:47 pm

Not really rising at all, according to sea-level expert Nils-Axel Mörner, who actually goes and measures it, all over the globe. David Duff has brought to our attention to a new article by Dr. Mörner in the Spectator, in which we read (my emphasis):

It has now become traditional for climate change summits to open with a new, dazzling prediction of impending catastrophe. The UN Climate Conference under way in the South African coastal town of Durban is no exception. This year’s focus is on a familiar and certainly arresting argument: that sea levels are rising at a catastrophic and unprecedented rate mainly due to man-made global warming.

No one makes this point with quite so much panache as Mohamed Nasheed, president of the Maldives. In the run-up to the summit, he declared that he leads ”˜an island nation that may slip beneath the waves if all this talk on climate does not lead to action soon’.

… I may be able to help. As someone with some expertise in the field, I can assure the low-lying countries that this is a false alarm. The sea is not rising precipitously. I have studied many of the low-lying regions in my 45-year career recording and interpreting sea level data. I have conducted six field trips to the Maldives; I have been to Bangladesh, whose environment minister was claiming that flooding due to climate change threatened to create in her country 20 million ”˜ecological refugees’. I have carefully examined the data of ”˜drowning’ Tuvalu. And I can report that, while such regions do have problems, they need not fear rising sea levels.

Dr. Mörner quotes the International Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report, from 2007:

”˜Even under the most conservative scenario, sea level will be about 40cm higher than today by the end of 21st century and this is projected to increase the annual number of people flooded in coastal populations from 13 million to 94 million. Almost 60 per cent of this increase will occur in South Asia.’

Sounds dire. But wait:

This is nonsense. The world’s true experts on sea level are to be found at the INQUA (International Union for Quaternary Reseach) commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution (of which I am a former president), not at the IPCC. Our research is what the climate lobby might call an ”˜inconvenient truth’: it shows that sea levels have been oscillating close to the present level for the last three centuries. This is not due to melting glaciers: sea levels are affected by a great many factors, such as the speed at which the earth rotates. They rose in the order of 10 to 11cm between 1850 and 1940, stopped rising or maybe even fell a little until 1970, and have remained roughly flat ever since.

… At Tuvalu in the Pacific, I found no evidence of flooding ”” despite claims in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth that it was one of those ”˜low-lying Pacific nations’ whose residents have had to ”˜evacuate their homes because of rising seas’. In fact the tide gauge of the past 25 years clearly shows there has been no rise.

But the best-known ”˜victim’ of rising sea levels is, without doubt, the Maldives. This myth has been boosted by the opportunism of Mohamed Nasheed, who stars in a new documentary called The Island President. The film’s tagline is ”˜To save his country, he has to save our planet’. It is a depressing example of how Hollywood-style melodrama has corrupted climate science. Nasheed has been rehearsing his lines since being elected in 2009. ”˜We are drowning, our nation will disappear, we have to relocate the people,’ he repeatedly claims.

But if sea levels in the Maldives really aren’t rising, why would the island nation’s leader go around raising false alarms? The question one must ask, as always, is: Cui bono?

If this is what President Nasheed believes, it seems strange that he has authorised the building of many large waterside hotels and 11 new airports. Or could it perhaps be that he wants to take a cut of the $30 billion fund agreed at an accord in Copenhagen for the poorest nations hit by ”˜global warming’?

But what about all that satellite data we keep hearing about?

The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment claimed that ”˜there is strong evidence’ of sea level rising over the last few decades. It goes as far as to claim: “Satellite observations available since the early 1990s provide more accurate sea level data with nearly global coverage. This decade-long satellite altimetry data set shows that since 1993, sea level has been rising at a rate of around 3mm yr”“1, significantly higher than the average during the previous half century. Coastal tide gauge measurements confirm this observation, and indicate that similar rates have occurred in some earlier decades.’

Almost every word of this is untrue. Satellite altimetry is a wonderful and vital new technique that offers the reconstruction of sea level changes all over the ocean surface. But it has been hijacked and distorted by the IPCC for political ends.

“Hijacked and distorted”? That’s strong stuff. What have you got?

In 2003 the satellite altimetry record was mysteriously tilted upwards to imply a sudden sea level rise rate of 2.3mm per year. When I criticised this dishonest adjustment at a global warming conference in Moscow, a British member of the IPCC delegation admitted in public the reason for this new calibration: ”˜We had to do so, otherwise there would be no trend.’

This is a scandal that should be called Sealevelgate. As with the Hockey Stick, there is little real-world data to support the upward tilt. It seems that the 2.3mm rise rate has been based on just one tide gauge in Hong Kong (whose record is contradicted by four other nearby tide gauges). Why does it show such a rise? Because like many of the 159 tide gauge stations used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, it is sited on an unstable harbour construction or landing pier prone to uplift or subsidence. When you exclude these unreliable stations, the 68 remaining ones give a present rate of sea level rise in the order of 1mm a year.

Read the whole thing here.

Can we have our light bulbs back?

By Malcolm | Posted in Global Warming | Comments (3)

Dead Civilization Walking

December 3, 2011 – 5:08 pm

Pure insanity in deep-blue Boston:

First-grader accused of sexual harassment

A Boston elementary school is investigating a 7-year-old first-grader for sexual harassment after he struck another boy his age in the groin.

But the mother of the accused said her son was fending off the other child, who had choked him in an altercation on a school bus on Nov. 22.

Mark Steyn comments:

The mother said she spoke with the principal, Leslie Gant, who supposedly told her:

“It doesn’t matter who hit who first”¦ He said he hit him in the testicles. That’s assault. That’s sexual assault.”

There may be “another side’ to this story, but it’s hard to foresee any version of events in which a First Grader can plausibly be guilty of “sexual assault’. Nevertheless, if found guilty, Mark Curran when he turns 18 will be placed on a “sex offender registry’, and his life will be ruined. If officials of the Boston public schools system genuinely believe that when a seven-year old kicks another seven-year old in the crotch that that is an act of “sexual harassment’, then they are too stupid to be entrusted with the care of the city’s children. If, on the other hand, they retain enough residual humanity to understand that a seven-year-old groin-kick is not a sexual assault but have concluded that regulatory compliance obliges them to investigate it as such, then they are colluding in an act of great evil.

Sometimes societies become too stupid to survive.

Yes, they do. Too stupid — or too effeminized, too weak, too decadent, too pampered…

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (1)

Fa-La-La

December 3, 2011 – 2:30 pm

The merry Christmas season is upon us once again, so in a joyous Yuletide spirit, let’s put aside all this partisan bickering and enjoy a little light-hearted holiday cheer.

Why, I’ve got just the thing.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Third Rail

December 3, 2011 – 1:40 pm

The wall of ideological taboo around frank discussion of race and intelligence is beginning to crack. So far we’re used to hearing about it mostly from beyond-the-pale HBD bloggers, or rare damn-the-torpedoes authors like Charles Murray — but truth, when buried, has a way of patiently seeking daylight. (Or, as Churchill put it, “you must look at the facts, because they look at you.”) In this case, the facts appear to be that a) general intelligence is reliably measurable in ways that are independent of cultural bias, b) that it is highly heritable, c) that it is strongly predictive of life outcomes, and d) that its distribution varies in persistent ways in different human populations.

Even though it is repeatedly stressed by everyone that the research behind all of this concerns itself only with statistical aggregates, and has absolutely nothing to say about the intelligence of any individual person, the subject is obviously Kryptonite for public figures, and discussion of it has been ruinous for more than a few. (Just ask James Watson, for example.) The widely read blogger Andrew Sullivan has now rather bravely taken up the topic in a series of posts; the latest of them is here. (HT: Dennis Mangan.)

Given what a lethally electrified topic this is, it’s fair to ask: even if this is all true, why bring it up? In a conversation I had a while back with a friend in Wellfleet who was a professor of sociology at Harvard, she actually went so far as to insist, when pressed, that this sort of research simply should not be conducted, as nothing good can come of it anyway. Here’s Mr. Sullivan’s response to that (my emphasis):

Two points: research is not about helping people; it’s about finding out stuff. And I have long opposed the political chilling of free inquiry into any area of legitimate curiosity or research. I’m not going to stop now. Secondly, I agree that there would be very little, if any, use for this data in our society, apart from the existence of affirmative action. But when public policy holds that all racial difference in, say, college degrees, are due to racism, a truth claim has already been made. So the p.c. egalitarians have made this a public and social issue by a statement of fact they subsequently do not want to see debated or challenged using the data. That’s an illiberal position, in my view.

I remain gob-smacked by the resilience of IQ differences between broad racial groups, controlling for much other data. Maybe if we understood what was going on – which particular and subtle combination of genetics, culture and generation makes this the result – we could help increase equality of opportunity. Maybe racial categories themselves have become so fluid and opaque the whole area is now moot. Maybe we should accept that differences in outcomes among racial groups have some element of irreducibility to them. Maybe the answer is to abolish racial affirmative action and replace it by class-based forms. Maybe the answer is to abolish affirmative action altogether (my preferred outcome). But all these questions depend on a thriving research culture which has been chilled by politics. That’s what saddens me.

Leaving aside Mr. Sullivan’s more general sentiment about stifling free inquiry, his highlighted point is exactly right: the reason we ought to be able to engage in this particular research, and to discuss its results without opprobrium, is that others have already used truth claims about the distribution of intelligence as the basis of a great deal of public policy, while at the same time declaring it off-limits for debate. But if we can come to accept, for example, that the prevalence of Ashkenazi Jews and East Asians in elite intellectual occupations, and the low representation of other groups in those areas, merely reflect actual differences in the distribution of innate intelligence rather than malevolent racism, perhaps we can finally stop making futile and polarizing gestures at terrible expense, stop falsely demonizing statistically more-successful groups as vile oppressors, and eventually learn to treat people as we should have been doing all along: as individuals.

By Malcolm | Posted in Science, Society and Culture | Comments (11)

How Insensitive

December 2, 2011 – 2:24 pm

Hot on the heels of Climategate II, Walter Russell Meade brings to our attention a peer-reviewed paper from the latest Science that calls into question “settled” wisdom about the sensitivity of global temperature to increases in atmospheric CO2. Here.

Traffic’s up around here lately, and this might be a good moment to reiterate our position on Global Warmism for new readers. We break the issue into four questions:

1) Is the Earth currently getting warmer?

It may well be; we have no idea. The Earth has certainly has got warmer and colder many, many times in the past — most of them long before humans could possibly have had anything to do with it. No reason it mightn’t be doing so now.

2) If the Earth actually is warming, is it due to human activity?

Given that the Earth’s climate has fluctuated continuously throughout the eons, then any current warming trend isn’t necessarily due to human activity. But if the Earth is indeed in a warming spell, it’s certainly possible that human activity may be partly or even largely responsible this time around.

3) If the Earth is warming, and that warming is in large part due to human activity, can it be ameliorated or halted by curtailing that activity?

We don’t know. Perhaps it can. On the other hand, if any ongoing warming is simply the latest of the natural fluctuations that Earth’s climate has always been subject to, perhaps not.

4) If the Earth is warming, and that warming is in large part due to human activity, and can in fact be ameliorated or halted by curtailing that activity, is it worth it to do so?

We’re stacking up a pretty big pile of “ifs” by this point. To answer this question we need to weigh, as best we can, the adverse social, political, and economic costs of taking action, against the negative (and positive!) consequences of doing nothing. (We also need to factor in the chance that whatever we try to do, at terrible cost, may not even be effective.) There are all sorts of hidden agendas and ulterior motives in play here, and most of the remedies on offer are burdensome indeed, mainly in terms of economic cost and bureaucratic infringement on national sovereignty and individual liberty.

Our position, then, is best described as conservative: distrustful of grand, disruptive schemes, mindful of the fragility of prosperous, happy societies, and keeping a cynic’s wary eye on the various Utopians, collectivists, grant-recipients, professional uplifters, and “green-energy” grifters who see all this as little more than a juicy opportunity for self-advancement, and a “crisis” not to be wasted.

We set the bar, then, rather high: to justify the drastic responses that many currently seek, we will need to be convinced beyond any doubt 1) that the Earth is indeed in a warming phase, 2) that we are the cause, 3) that drastic measures can actually make a meaningful difference, and 4) that the consequences of not taking drastic action are clearly worse than the costs of doing so.

By Malcolm | Posted in Global Warming | Comments (3)

Mideast Roundup

December 1, 2011 – 11:27 am

In the latest NightWatch, John McCreary makes some important points about recent developments in Iran, and about the West’s policy of economic sanctions:

Iran: Comment: Several reputable analysts have suggested that the attacks against the British Embassy are symptoms of a fundamental political struggle in the Iranian leadership elite. The argument is not new, but suggests that the underlying disagreements are not resolved.

The strong fundamentalists, embodied by the Revolutionary Guards Corps and the Basij militia, are hostile to outsiders and react violently to sanctions on Iran. They advocate that Iran can survive and be strong without concessions to the UN or the West.

A more pragmatic and worldly-wise group of leaders advocates dialogue with the West and others to discuss differences. This group has influence but lacks power at this time.

UK-Iran: Foreign Secretary William Hague said Britain ordered Iran to vacate its embassy in London by Friday, stressing it did not mean diplomatic ties between the two countries had been entirely cut off. It does mean they have been downgraded.

Norway-Iran: Norway has temporarily closed its embassy in Tehran due to security concerns after the British mission was attacked by an angry mob, the government said on Wednesday.

France-Iran: The French Foreign Ministry said it is recalling the French ambassador to Iran for consultation after the attack on British Embassy in Tehran. According to a Ministry statement, the attack was a violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and that France must respond.

US-Iran: The United States unveiled sanctions against the energy and petrochemical sectors, as US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke of a “significant ratcheting-up of pressure” on Iran.

She said Iran’s oil and gas industry and its financial sector would also be targeted by the sanctions.

Comment: Sanctions on oil and gas and on banks dominate public conversations about restraining Iranian nuclear programs. The logical or practical connection between oil and banking sanctions and Iran’s nuclear program, however, has not been well explained. To paraphrase Kissinger, means must match ends in order to achieve successful policy outcomes. Thus far that match has not been established, demonstrably.

Both oil and banking sanctions contain significant threats of unintended consequences. China relies on Iran for 10% of its petroleum imports. That means that it will never cooperate in imposing sanctions on oil exports because it cannot without disastrous effects on its economy and Europe’s economy as well, because of global economic linkages.

Germany and Italy import Iranian oil, as well as India, China, Japan and South Korea. The economic stability of those countries could be affected by French President Sarkozy’s proposal to sanction Iranian oil.

Higher oil prices would ripple across the world. Oil producers would reap a windfall and consumers would go into recession. That is why hedge fund managers are buying options that oil will reach $140 or $150 the barrel.

Banking sanctions have extensive backlash potential as well. India favors non-proliferation of nuclear weapons programs and related capabilities. Earlier this year an Indian bank agreed to cooperate in limited banking sanctions against Iran.

When Indian oil refiners found they could not use Indian banking facilities to pay for Iranian oil imports, Iran stopped shipping oil to India, 12% of whose oil imports come from Iran. The refiners found a work-around to keep the oil flowing.

The lesson is that sanctions on Iranian banks would have consequences for China, India, Russia, Italy, Germany, Japan, South Korea, the UAE and Turkey, before the sanctions hurt Iran. Iran is one of the few countries that continued to grow during the 2008 global economic crisis; has a favorable balance of payments, and has significant cash reserves owing to the high price of crude in the past three years.

It might be time for world leaders to devise more imaginative policy responses than punishment through sanctions to achieve compliant behavior by Iran. One of the downsides of an increasingly integrated global economy is the unintended consequences of sanctions.

He also had this to say about the recent “friendly”-fire incident on the Af-Pak border:

NightWatch research of operations reports from the northern border region of Afghanistan, where the Haqqanis operate, suggests that Pakistani tribal paramilitary forces or regular army forces stationed near the border routinely provide artillery and mortar fire across the border into Afghanistan in support of Taliban infiltration or Haqqani attack operations inside Afghanistan. This has been occurring for a decade, but this time it backfired.

Meanwhile, John Hood comments at the Corner on the rash of explosions in Iran:

I guess U.S. and Western politicians has been treading carefully around the reality of the situation, perhaps for good reason, but does the political class really think the rest of us don’t know what’s happening in Iran right now? The Israelis or agents acting in their behalf or interests are subjecting the Iranian nuclear program to attack. First they hit a base outside of Tehran two weeks ago, taking out the head of Iran’s missile defense force along with a couple dozen other military personnel and some key real estate. Then on Monday they hit a facility near Isfahan that houses one of the country’s uranium-enrichment sites.

Presumably, American leaders and other Western officials know what is going on, even if they haven’t been actively supporting the strikes on Iran. In response, the Iranian government orchestrated an assault on the British embassy ”” there being no comparable Israeli or American target handy ”” and will attempt terrorist or military reprisals as soon as they can.

In other words, the question of whether the military option should be used against Iran’s nuclear program is now moot. It is being used. Now what?

With regard to Pakistan, today STRATFOR published a substantial essay, by Nate Hughes, on the context and consequences of the latest mishap. Read it here.

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

Too Rational?

December 1, 2011 – 10:20 am

Here’s some common sense from Thomas Sowell, in the context of an essay about Newt Gingrich’s position on immigration:

Let’s go back to square one. The purpose of American immigration laws and policies is not to be either humane or inhumane to illegal immigrants. The purpose of immigration laws and policies is to serve the national interest of this country.

There is no inherent right to come live in the United States, in disregard of whether the American people want you here. Nor does the passage of time confer any such right retroactively.

…When you import people, you import cultures, including cultures that have been far less successful in providing decent lives and decent livelihoods. The American people have a right to decide for themselves whether they want unlimited imports of cultures from other countries.

At one time, immigrants came to America to become Americans. Today, the apostles of multiculturalism and grievance-mongering have done their best to keep foreigners foreign and, if possible, feeling aggrieved. Our own schools and colleges teach grievances.

Read the rest here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (17)

Well, I’ll Be!

December 1, 2011 – 12:04 am

Here’s a stunning development, a real shocker:

Early Results in Egypt Show a Mandate for Islamists

Seems to me there was somebody who saw this coming almost a year ago, even before the Times started writing things like “We can think of no better rebuttal to Osama bin Laden and other extremists.” Back around January 28th, I think it was. Wish I could remember.

The older I get, the more it amazes me how persistently people expect things to go well, even when there are other people involved.

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

It Only Encourages Them

November 30, 2011 – 11:47 pm

Interesting item over at Jeffery Hodges’ place: Jeff comments on an interview with the prominent Egyptian Protestant Ramez Atallah.

Atallah talks about the unique centrality of Islam in Arabic-speaking lands. He also has this to say about Western indignation over the ubiquitous persecution of Christians in Muslim territory:

I need you to please understand that Muslims hate it when the West speaks up for Christians. They absolutely despise it and we become the victims.

More here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Religion | Comments (2)

Grumble

November 30, 2011 – 11:25 pm

This from the Telegraph:

Olympic swimming records set to tumble at London 2012 as Speedo unveil Fastskin3 swimwear system

I realize I’m just an old fossil, but this is a depressing trend. Next it’ll be quantum-tunneling suits, or something.

I think the ancient Greeks had the right idea: make ’em compete in the nude. It’d boost ratings, too.

By Malcolm | Posted in Sport | Comments (3)

Carotica

November 29, 2011 – 9:28 pm

Bonneville Salt Flats, 462 m.p.h. Here.

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

Ask Chuck!

November 29, 2011 – 9:12 pm

As you already know, the Congressional deficit-reduction “supercommittee” failed to find a paltry $1.2 trillion dollars worth of trimmable fat in the Federal budget over the next ten years. Given that you could confiscate all corporate profits each year in America and still only cover six months of government spending, we’re obviously living way, way beyond our means, and it’s hard for a lot of us to believe that even these seasoned professional money-sluicers really couldn’t agree on any adipose tissue to excise. ($1.2 trillion over ten years doesn’t even begin to solve the problem, of course, and the real fact of the matter is that this once-great nation is now completely, utterly screwed — but it would at least have been a nice gesture.)

Well, here’s game-show host Chuck Woollery to show us just how easy it can be.

By Malcolm | Posted in The Economy | Comments (0)

Keeping The Heat On

November 28, 2011 – 8:59 pm

There’s been another wave of leaked “Climategate” emails, if you’re interested in this sort of thing.

Jim Lacey discusses them over at NRO, and Alana Goodman does the same at Commentary.

See also this searchable database — and this item too, over at Duff and Nonsense.

By Malcolm | Posted in Global Warming | Comments (2)

Mola Mola!

November 28, 2011 – 5:19 pm

I stopped by Wellfleet Harbor shortly before sunset today to take in the view. Here’s the scene, looking southwest from the seawall at Kendrick Avenue (forgive the poor quality – I took these shots with the camera in my phone, which has a blurry lens):

Wait a minute — what the hell is that thing on the beach? I climbed down for a closer look. Here’s a closeup:

Another angle:

What is it? It’s a mola, also known as an “ocean sunfish“: weird critters that are little more than a gigantic swimming head. (They look like this when they aren’t decomposing on the beach.) This was a small one, maybe about about four-and-a-half feet long — but they can grow to truly enormous size, as you can see here.

I’d heard that they’d been washing ashore in these parts lately, but this is the first one I’ve seen.

By Malcolm | Posted in Cape Cod | Comments (1)

Paul Motian, 1931-2011

November 27, 2011 – 4:36 pm

Here’s one that I missed on Tuesday (and thanks to our friend Peter for mentioning it) — Paul Motian, a jazz drummer of sublime artistry and one of the most versatile and influential players of all time, died last week at the age of 80. (The cause was myelodysplastic syndrome, the same affliction that took Michael Brecker from us in 2007.)

I saw Mr. Motian play many times, and had always hoped that I would have a chance to work with him in the studio someday, but never did.

His genius was attentiveness, understatement, nuance, and elegance. There was nobody else like him.

Here he is with his quintet — featuring Lee Konitz, Joe Lovano, Marc Johnson, and Bill Frisell — back in 1995.

By Malcolm | Posted in Music and Recording | Comments (3)

Tom Wicker, 1926-2011

November 26, 2011 – 5:06 pm

Tom Wicker, one of the leading journalists of his era, has died at 85. His New York Times obituary is here.

Wicker was with JFK in Dallas on November 22nd, 1963, and filed his report from a pay phone on the evening of that awful day. You can read it here.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (2)

This And That

November 25, 2011 – 10:54 pm

We’ve been on the road all day, so nothing substantial here tonight — just a few brief items.

First: yesterday’s Thanksgiving prep presented a good example of why punctuation matters, with particular regard to the hyphenation of compound adjectives.

When you string together a pair of adjectives so that the first modifies the second, as for example in the sentence “I disciplined the recalcitrant okapi with a red-hot poker”, there should be a hyphen joining the two so that the meaning is clear to the reader. A phrase such as “a long dead eel” is ambiguous: our piscine corpus delicti might simply be an outsized specimen (a long, dead eel), or it might be an eel of unspecified proportions that passed on ages ago (a long-dead eel).

Which brings us to baby carrots. As it happens, those “baby” carrots you can buy bags of in the produce section aren’t really baby carrots at all — they are ordinary grown-up carrots that have been cut down (presumably on some sort of carrot lathe) to look like babies. The people who sell us these things would rather we not think about that, though, and still want to reel us in with that appealing word “baby” — so what do they do?

It’s very sneaky: they call them “Baby Cut Carrots”. What they really are is “Baby-Cut Carrots”, of course — but the missing hyphen makes all the difference. In a literate society, they’d be hauled into Punctuation Court for false advertising, but this is America.

Second: I don’t know if this has been happening to many of you lately, but it’s been bugging me a couple of times a week now. I’ll switch on my computer and get a pop-up message telling me that there’s an update available for my machine’s Java framework, and asking me if I want to install it. I stop what I’m doing, click OK, grant the necessary permissions, and the installer starts downloading the update. The progress bar creeps along — and when it’s done, up pops another message saying that this software had already been installed on my machine, and asking if I want to install it again anyway.

Of course I don’t. Why the hell doesn’t this work correctly? It’s absolutely trivial for the Java framework to keep track of what version is currently installed, and to communicate in silence with the Oracle Corporation server to find out what the latest available version is, before bothering me about it. What the bejesus is wrong with these people?

Finally, here’s an interesting post (with a comment from your humble correspondent) by Dr Bill Vallicella, in which he says that in his opinion the core problems of philosophy are probably insoluble.

I’m pooped, so that’s all for now.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (8)

Happy Thanksgiving!

November 24, 2011 – 2:20 pm

To each and every one of you. Among the many blessings I am grateful for today is having you all as readers and correspondents.

I’m too busy cooking to write an extended meditation, but for a perfect Thanksgiving homily it would be hard to do better than the one Dr. William Vallicella posts every year. Here it is.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (1)

It’s All Good Fun, Till Somebody Puts An Eye Out

November 23, 2011 – 7:20 pm

For centuries, Sikhs have been the warriors of choice for elite fighting units throughout South Asia.

And here’s why.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (5)

Euro Watch

November 23, 2011 – 4:49 pm

Matt Yglesias comments at Slate on the three realistic prospects for the Eurozone: disintegration, German domination, or… actual democracy.

As Mr. Yglesias points out, creating a unified, pan-European democratic republic would be a very “tall order”. As for German domination, my memory’s not as good as it once was, but it does seem to me that there was already some problem or other with that, a while back.

Meanwhile, over at Gates Of Vienna, Baron Bodissey writes:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel says that Eurozone member states that do not stay within budgetary rules will face a partial loss of national sovereignty. Yet any country that submits to the EU’s budgetary restrictions has already lost part of its national sovereignty. That’s some catch, that Catch-22!

It sure is!

Finally, (with a hat tip to our friend David Duff) here’s UKIP’s Nigel Farage, speaking plain truth to smirking power. It won’t accomplish anything, but I have to admit it does give one rather a Chris-Matthews-style thrill up the leg.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (3)

Skunk Works

November 23, 2011 – 12:31 pm

A recent article in the Times took a look at Google X, Google’s hush-hush advanced-projects lab.

It’s a place where your refrigerator could be connected to the Internet, so it could order groceries when they ran low. Your dinner plate could post to a social network what you’re eating. Your robot could go to the office while you stay home in your pajamas. And you could, perhaps, take an elevator to outer space.

These are just a few of the dreams being chased at Google X, the clandestine lab where Google is tackling a list of 100 shoot-for-the-stars ideas. In interviews, a dozen people discussed the list; some work at the lab or elsewhere at Google, and some have been briefed on the project. But none would speak for attribution because Google is so secretive about the effort that many employees do not even know the lab exists.

I’d be mighty curious to know what they’ve got in the pipeline. Might have to call upon some of our deep-cover operatives…

By Malcolm | Posted in Technology | Comments (6)

All Roads Lead

November 21, 2011 – 11:19 pm

Here’s something odd I just read in a tooltip at XKCD:

Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at “Philosophy”.

I’ve spent the past fifteen minutes trying it. So far, it’s worked every time, and it hasn’t taken very many clicks, either.

By Malcolm | Posted in Reason and Philosophy | Comments (2)

Two Pictures

November 21, 2011 – 10:35 pm

Here’s an unusual image, courtesy of Wish I Didn’t Know:

Read More »

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (3)

Into This Nothingness

November 21, 2011 – 7:46 pm

Here’s an almost unbearably poignant tale of the Japanese tsunami.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Diana Moon Glampers, Call Your Office

November 21, 2011 – 6:24 pm

Here’s one that’s been making the rounds: it’s an Op-Ed from yesterday’s Times making a point that in a less Orwellian world would come as no surprise to anyone, namely that innate qualities make a significant difference in the statistical distribution of life outcomes. We read:

Exhibit A is a landmark study of intellectually precocious youths directed by the Vanderbilt University researchers David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow. They and their colleagues tracked the educational and occupational accomplishments of more than 2,000 people who as part of a youth talent search scored in the top 1 percent on the SAT by the age of 13. (Scores on the SAT correlate so highly with I.Q. that the psychologist Howard Gardner described it as a “thinly disguised’ intelligence test.) The remarkable finding of their study is that, compared with the participants who were “only’ in the 99.1 percentile for intellectual ability at age 12, those who were in the 99.9 percentile ”” the profoundly gifted ”” were between three and five times more likely to go on to earn a doctorate, secure a patent, publish an article in a scientific journal or publish a literary work. A high level of intellectual ability gives you an enormous real-world advantage.

… It would be nice if intellectual ability and the capacities that underlie it were important for success only up to a point. In fact, it would be nice if they weren’t important at all, because research shows that those factors are highly stable across an individual’s life span. But wishing doesn’t make it so.

No, it doesn’t. Neither does pretending it isn’t so, or insisting it isn’t so, or making public policy based on the assumption that it isn’t so.

Here’s a related statistical fact, of no less significance: the qualities under examination here have been repeatedly demonstrated to be highly heritable (another commonsense datum that would once have been obvious to all, but nowadays only to professional psychometricians, black-hearted curmudgeons, and breeders of livestock).

Taken together, what are we to make of these results? Gee, I really can’t say. And you’d better not, either.

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

Suitable For Framing, Or Wrapping Fish

November 21, 2011 – 12:00 pm

Here’s a summary of the prospects for the Obamacare case coming up at SCOTUS. This one’s a biggie: it’s the last line of defense for those who believe that the idea of “enumerated powers” has any meaning at all.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (0)

Wow, Pretty Super

November 20, 2011 – 7:08 pm

Well, it looks as if the deficit-reduction “supercommittee” is about to fail. Political analyst Larry Sabato tweeted:

Could it really be that 12 able legislators will fail utterly at the most important task they’ll ever be asked to do?

Yeah, I’m sure he’s shocked, along with the rest of us. U.S. government spending is an utterly intractable problem; you could confiscate 100% of annual corporate profits in America and still only cover six months of it. As a sage observer pointed out in a book I read recently, we are doomed.

Once the committee officially chokes, a series of automatic cuts will go into effect. On the block will be discretionary defense spending.

I just hope we’ll still be able to build a few of these.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics, The Economy, Military | Comments (8)

Blood-Baath

November 20, 2011 – 6:36 pm

This from VOA:

Grenades Hit Syria’s Baath Party Building in Damascus

Syrian activists say several rocket-propelled grenades hit a ruling Baath Party building in Damascus Sunday, as President Bashar al-Assad vowed he will not “bow down” to international pressure to ease his brutal crackdown on dissent.

The Local Coordination Committees activist network and several residents Sunday reported numerous explosions in the center of the Syrian capital. They said fire trucks were headed to the area amid a heavy police presence. There was no immediate verification of the reports, and other eyewitnesses saw no signs of damage.

If confirmed, the attack would be the first such incident in the Syrian capital since the anti-government uprising began in March. The reported assault occurred hours after an Arab League deadline passed for Damascus to end the bloodshed.

As security analysts remind us, uprisings against government authority are “centripetal”: they seek the center of power. As long as violence is limited to outlying districts, the ruling clique is in no immediate danger. That attacks are now beginning in Damascus shows that this conflict is entering a dangerous new phase.

Meanwhile, as the social framework breaks down in hotspots like the city of Homs, diversity has, predictably, begun to confer its usual blessings — with savagery on the rise between the majority Sunni population and the Alawites (the offshoot Shia sect to which Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, belongs). Christians are just trying to keep their heads down, but if they have any sense will soon be fleeing in droves.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (2)

Angels And Demons

November 18, 2011 – 11:03 pm

Here’s a dark item by Victor Hanson on the supple reality inhabited by our chief executive.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (0)

The Doomsday Machine

November 18, 2011 – 12:07 am

More Shatner! This time a cautionary tale, and a timely one, too.

Can you believe this guy’s 80 years old?

By Malcolm | Posted in Tomfoolery | Comments (1)

iSpy

November 17, 2011 – 10:59 pm

As we grow more and more dependent on interactive electronic media, we’re also giving away more and more information about everything we say and do. We don’t seem to mind much, given that we’ve blithely been making this tradeoff en masse for some time now, but the latest generation of smartphones have upped the ante a bit.

Learn more here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Technology | Comments (0)

Bears In The China Shop

November 17, 2011 – 10:42 pm

In the discussion we linked to yesterday (well worth your time, by the way, if you are interested in matters military and strategic), George Friedman argued that although China has made a Great Leap Forward beyond anything Mao could have imagined, it is now reaching a point of economic fatigue, if not exhaustion. In particular, he pointed out that China’s manufacturing system produces far more than China itself can possibly consume, and so its economic security depends very sensitively upon the fiscal health of Europe and the United States. A serious collapse in those interlocking markets would be very bad indeed for China; perhaps far worse than for the consumer nations themselves.

In this morning’s KGS NightWatch, analyst John McCreary made the same points:

China: The Ministry of Commerce said on 16 November that China’s exports are feeling pressure from global economic uncertainties. A spokesman said the ministry cannot be optimistic about the export situation during the coming period, citing a downshift in global economic recovery, a downgrade of the US credit rating and the expansion of the European debt crisis. He said that frequent protectionist measures and trade disputes have had a “relatively large influence” on China’s exports and that these issues, along with rising costs at home, have complicated China’s foreign trade outlook.

Comment: The Xinhua report is significant for several reasons. First it disclosed that the Chinese government expects that the credit rating of the United States will be downgraded. Second, the Chinese economists predict a contraction of the global economy. Finally, the Chinese anticipate a contraction of globalization as the result of protectionist policies, in other words, a reassertion of economic nationalism. The Chinese seem to expect that the export markets for cheap Chinese manufactures will shrink and the prices for raw materials will rise.

The apparent Chinese linkage of the US credit rating to the European debt crisis implies that the Chinese know or believe that US banks have much greater exposure to European sovereign debt than they have admitted. The Chinese assessment evidently is that Europe will drag down the US.

One Chinese economist, a professor of finance at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, recently wrote that the Chinese banking system is nearly bankrupt already and China’s Gross Domestic Product is declining, but the Chinese are hiding the data. He wrote that “every province in China is Greece.”

This note is a warning to hedge bets in China in 2012.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs, The Economy | Comments (0)

China’s Blue-Water Navy

November 16, 2011 – 10:24 pm

For you strategic-security wonks, here’s a meaty item: an in-depth discussion between foreign-policy expert Robert Kaplan and STRATFOR’s George Friedman on the changing balance of sea power between the U.S. and China.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs, Military | Comments (1)

Jon Gomm

November 16, 2011 – 8:10 pm

I don’t usually go in much for “tappers”, but this is pretty cool.

HT: Devin Townsend.

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

A Wellfleet Walk

November 14, 2011 – 6:12 pm

It was an unusually mild November day here in the Outer Cape, and I went for a walk in Wellfleet’s Fox Island Marsh & Pilgrim Spring Woodlands Conservation Area, which I’d never explored.

While it’s hardly the Bridger Wilderness, the conservation area offers a lovely trail through pine forests down to the salt marshes at the edge of the bay. I snapped a few photos (of varying quality, I’m afraid).

Just past the trailhead at Pilgrim Spring Road, the path passes a steep bank, and gives us a good look at a common Outer Cape soil profile. It’s called by the Russian name podzol, meaning “ash soil”. In podzol soils the colored materials — dark-brown humus from decaying plants, and oxides from rusting minerals — have been leached away down into the sandy ground, leaving an ashy-looking layer that is light grey or even white. You can see it in this photo, sort of:

The ashy layer is right at the surface in many places along the path:

Although the climate in the Outer Cape is more temperate than the mainland’s, there aren’t very many trees that can flourish in the sandy, nutrient-poor soil. Mostly it’s pitch pines and scrubby little oaks. We see both as the path ascends from the trailhead into the forest:

Once we get deeper into the woods, the scrub oaks thin out, and the understory opens up:

Here’s another shot of these quiet pine woods:

Mosses and lichens seem to do well here. Here’s a pale-green lichen, well-established on a fallen pine:

Here’s the common lichen Usnea, also known as “Old Man’s Beard”:

More Usnea, on a pitch-pine branch:

Here’s a young pitch pine that had managed to produce exactly one pine-cone:

After a mile and a half or so the trail approaches the bay:

And here we are, near a little bend in the shoreline called Whalebone Point. We’re looking southeast, more or less, toward Old Wharf Point, Loagy Bay, and Lieutenant Island:

Here’s another shot from the same place, looking a bit more to the east:

Wellfleet’s a small place — the Cape is only about five miles wide here at its widest, and narrows to only a mile or so just south of town — but thanks to its fabulously convoluted bayside coastline and its rolling glacial-moraine “knob-and-kettle” topography, it has more secluded hollows, woodlands, ponds, marshes, islands, beaches, creeks, coves, and inlets than you’d ever imagine possible. I’ve been poking around out here for more than 25 years, and still haven’t seen them all.

By Malcolm | Posted in Cape Cod | Comments (2)

Offense Taken

November 13, 2011 – 1:36 pm

There’s a good piece by Katie Roiphe on “sexual harassment” in today’s Times.

Money quote:

The creativity and resourcefulness of the definitions, the broadness and rigor of the rules and codes, have always betrayed their more Orwellian purpose…

Also:

Codes of sexual harassment imagine an entirely symmetrical universe, where people are never outrageous, rude, awkward, excessive or confused, where sexual interest is always absent or reciprocated, in other words a universe that does not entirely resemble our own.

Read the rest here.

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

Land of Opportunity

November 12, 2011 – 1:26 pm

One melodic voice in the complex polyphony of the “OWS” uprising is the lament of the young college grads who, despite their hard-earned degrees in important fields of study, today find themselves laden with scholastic debt and unable to descry a clear path to prosperity. It’s terribly unfair: they’ve done what they were supposed to do, but the System, which is blatantly rigged against “the 99%” in favor of an entrenched plutocracy, has failed them.

They demand Social Justice, by any means necessary.

Meanwhile, a fellow by the name of Shawn Carter — a young black man who, abandoned by his father, was raised in a housing project in one of the worst inner-city districts in the country, dropped out of high school to pursue an interest in rap music, and who is now better known as the music- and fashion-industry mogul ‘Jay-Z’, husband of the R&B siren Beyoncé — will be selling “Occupy Wall Street”-themed t-shirts.

Mr Carter will be keeping the proceeds. He is worth an estimated $450 million.

The “moral of the story”? As Satchmo famously said: “Man, if you have to ask, you’ll never know.”

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

The Last Best Hope Of Earth

November 11, 2011 – 9:18 pm

Longtime readers will know that I am something of a chauvinist as regards Western civilization, ever-ready to mount the ramparts for the sake of its defense and preservation.

Every now and then, though, I think it’s important to remind ourselves just why this incomparable edifice is so worthy of our devotion and sacrifice — and this being Veterans Day, I can think of no better opportunity.

Here you go.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (5)

Surf’s Up!

November 10, 2011 – 10:00 pm

Way up.

By Malcolm | Posted in Sport | Comments (0)