Bored?

September 15, 2011 – 3:29 pm

How To Artificially Inseminate A Rhino.

“Shameless Filler” seems about the right category for this one.

(HT: Derb.)

By Malcolm | Posted in Shameless Filler | Comments (2)

Use It Or Lose It

September 15, 2011 – 10:42 am

Here’s an encouraging item from Science Daily:

Older Musicians Experience Less Age-Related Decline in Hearing Abilities Than Non-Musicians

ScienceDaily (Sep. 13, 2011) ”” A study led by Canadian researchers has found the first evidence that lifelong musicians experience less age-related hearing problems than non-musicians.

While hearing studies have already shown that trained musicians have highly developed auditory abilities compared to non-musicians, this is the first study to examine hearing abilities in musicians and non-musicians across the age spectrum — from 18 to 91 years of age.

The study was led by Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute in Toronto and is published online Sept. 13 in the journal Psychology and Aging, ahead of print publication.

Investigators wanted to determine if lifelong musicianship protects against normal hearing decline in later years, specifically for central auditory processing associated with understanding speech. Hearing problems are prevalent in the elderly, who often report having difficulty understanding speech in the presence of background noise. Scientists describe this as the “cocktail party problem.” Part of this difficulty is due to an age-related decrease in the ability to detect and discriminate acoustic information from the environment.

“What we found was that being a musician may contribute to better hearing in old age by delaying some of the age-related changes in central auditory processing. This advantage widened considerably for musicians as they got older when compared to similar-aged non-musicians,” said lead investigator Benjamin Rich Zendel at Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute. Zendel is completing his Ph.D. in Psychology at the University of Toronto and conducted the study with senior cognitive scientist and assistant director of the Rotman Research Institute, Dr. Claude Alain.

The article doesn’t mention recording engineers, but I’m sure the effect is just as strong for them, if not stronger. Over the years people have often said to me what good hearing I must have to have had a long career as an engineer; I’ve always told them that one doesn’t need exceptional hearing (in fact I had both of my eardrums punctured as a child, to relieve a stubborn middle-ear infection), but must rather be trained to listen. And it seems that training makes a big difference as one’s auditory organs become less sensitive in later years.

By Malcolm | Posted in Music and Recording, Science | Comments (0)

A Lean And Hungry Look

September 15, 2011 – 10:01 am

Front page of today’s New York Times:

Islamists’ Growing Sway Raises Questions for Libya

TRIPOLI, Libya ”” In the emerging post-Qaddafi Libya, the most influential politician may well be Ali Sallabi, who has no formal title but commands broad respect as an Islamic scholar and populist orator who was instrumental in leading the mass uprising.

The most powerful military leader is now Abdel Hakim Belhaj, the former leader of a hard-line group once believed to be aligned with Al Qaeda.

The growing influence of Islamists in Libya raises hard questions about the ultimate character of the government and society that will rise in place of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s autocracy. The United States and Libya’s new leaders say the Islamists, a well-organized group in a mostly moderate country, are sending signals that they are dedicated to democratic pluralism. They say there is no reason to doubt the Islamists’ sincerity.

But as in Egypt and Tunisia, the latest upheaval of the Arab Spring deposed a dictator who had suppressed hard-core Islamists, and there are some worrisome signs about what kind of government will follow. It is far from clear where Libya will end up on a spectrum of possibilities that range from the Turkish model of democratic pluralism to the muddle of Egypt to, in the worst case, the theocracy of Shiite Iran or Sunni models like the Taliban or even Al Qaeda.

Islamist militias in Libya receive weapons and financing directly from foreign benefactors like Qatar; a Muslim Brotherhood figure, Abel al-Rajazk Abu Hajar, leads the Tripoli Municipal Governing Council, where Islamists are reportedly in the majority; in eastern Libya, there has been no resolution of the assassination in July of the leader of the rebel military, Gen. Abdul Fattah Younes, suspected by some to be the work of Islamists.

Mr. Belhaj has become so much an insider lately that he is seeking to unseat Mahmoud Jibril, the American-trained economist who is the nominal prime minister of the interim government, after Mr. Jibril obliquely criticized the Islamists.

For an uprising that presented a liberal, Westernized face to the world, the growing sway of Islamists ”” activists with fundamentalist Islamic views, who want a society governed by Islamic principles ”” is being followed closely by the United States and its NATO allies.

Well, you could knock me down with a feather. Who could have seen that coming?

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

Pot & Kettle

September 14, 2011 – 10:48 am

Or perhaps a better title would have been Sauce For The Gander.

Here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (5)

It Seeks The Center

September 14, 2011 – 10:26 am

This from John McCreary of NightWatch, on yesterday’s Taliban attack in Kabul (my emphasis):

Afghanistan: Special comment: The details of the five-hour complex attack in Kabul have been reported all day. An extremely knowledgeable, well-informed and brilliant Reader provided feedback that most of the news coverage is factually wrong, but NightWatch will provide more details as its sources clarify them.

Particularly misleading among the media comments are those that posit that the Taliban sent a signal or that the attack is part of the propaganda struggle. Those comments trivialize the Taliban achievement of destroying the security bubble associated with the most sensitive Coalition buildings in Kabul.

The media comments are comparable to describing the 1968 Tet offensive in South Vietnam as a tactical failure. That statement is accurate, but it is simply irrelevant. The Tet offensive in South Vietnam won the political and psychological war. It was a strategic victory, enabled by the military sacrifices..

Three major Taliban attacks have taken place in Kabul this summer. To characterize them as part of a public relations contest or signal-sending is to miss the point entirely. One such attack is a perhaps good fortune. A second might have been a coincidence, but three is a strategic trend.

Violent instability is always centripetal – it seeks the center of power. The images of the Coalition and Afghan forces fighting to defend themselves in Kabul mean the insurgency has reached the center of power. The small casualty count only means that the Taliban cannot yet seize power in Kabul. But if the Coalition were winning, these attacks should never have taken place at all. Kabul of all places should be kept secure, if the lessons of Tet 1968 had been learned.

The attacks signify that the Taliban have crossed a strategic threshold. The Afghans know the Coalition cannot guarantee their protection because the Coalition cannot be confident of its ability to protect its own soldiers and complexes. It does no lasting good to keep Helmand Province secure for a while, but repeatedly suffer these kinds of attacks in Kabul.

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

Hope And Change

September 14, 2011 – 10:22 am

Well, it appears Anthony Weiner’s vacated House seat has gone to Republican Bob Turner, in what various media outlets are calling an “upset” (despite polls consistently having shown Turner as the front-runner). The race was widely seen as a referendum on the Obama presidency, and is sure to foment further dissent within the already restive Democratic ranks. There is a growing possibility, it seems, of a primary challenge in 2012 [cough] -Hillary!- [cough] — and Mr. Obama’s gathering discomfiture is evident in a new website, AttackWatch.com, where apparatchiks can report suspicious opinions. (As seen on TV!)

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

On Merit

September 13, 2011 – 10:33 pm

A while back I quoted some passages from the book Before the Sabbath, which is a year-long collection of daily musings by the longshoreman and autodidact Eric Hoffer, written in 1974 and 1975, toward the end of his life. I was reminded of Mr. Hoffer again today, when I ran across an item by Matt Yglesias titled Scholarships Go Disproportionately To White Students.

In it Mr. Yglesias presents the following simple chart, taken from an academic study of scholarship grants:

As you can see, the majority of the scholarships represented here do indeed go to white students. They are merit-based scholarships, however, so presumably they are being awarded as intended: to foster the further development of those students who have demonstrated superior ability and academic discipline.

Mr. Yglesias doesn’t suggest that these scholarships are being awarded wrongly, in the sense of somehow being given to those not of demonstrably superior merit, and he makes clear that his complaint is not even really about race. But he doesn’t like it nevertheless, and sees this graph as “a symptom of the fact that the incentive structure of American higher education is totally screwy.” The problem, he laments, is that ” the way higher education works in America is to deliver the most resources to the people who need the least help.”

Well, that’s one way to look at it. Here’s another:

Civilizations, as they advance, create an ever-growing body of knowledge and lore that must be passed on to each new generation. Should a civilization reach a point where the succeeding generation has too few people of sufficient quality to receive that burden and carry it forward, it collapses. Because of this, it’s far more important for the survival of a high civilization that the men and women at its youthful vanguard be of the most superior quality possible than it is to lift a few more from lower to higher mediocrity. It makes sense for such a society to seek out the very brightest of its youth and give them all the support and encouragement it possibly can.

I’m making no point about race here, and Mr. Yglesias says he isn’t either (despite appearances). What he seems to object to is the very idea of meritocracy itself, presumably on the principle that the greatest good is rather to reduce inequality. Great civilizations build high towers, yearning for the stars — but those lofty parapets necessarily stand far above the warehouses, kitchens, armories, stockades and stables at ground level, and it seems Mr. Yglesias (along with, I think, many others on the Left) finds that objectionable.

These thoughts reminded me that Eric Hoffer had expressed just this idea, more or less, somewhere in his book, so I went looking for it. I found it on page 116, in a passage dated May 6th, 1975:

A nation is on its way out when it devotes much of its wealth and energies to the care and welfare of the least-endowed segment of its population and puts a low ceiling on those who ceaselessly strive and achieve.

Before the Sabbath is rich with such aphorisms and insights. I’ll offer some more excerpts shortly.

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

Uh-Oh

September 12, 2011 – 9:55 pm

This could be trouble, guys.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (1)

Ten Years After

September 11, 2011 – 8:17 pm

Here it is, then: September 11th, 2011.

On that black day ten years ago, Nina and I stood on the roof of our Brooklyn home and watched the towers burn, and fall. Our daughter, now in her twenties, was in school at Stuyvesant High, just a couple of blocks from the doomed buildings; we didn’t know until that evening whether she was alive or dead. Our city was shattered, stricken, numb with grief and horror. I lost no family members or close friends, but everybody — everybody — knew someone who had. The awful shock jolted me, as it did so many others, from a comfortable complacence about the security of Western civilization to acute concern, and led me to a decade-long study of Islam, and of the history of the ancient conflict of which this was just the latest engagement.

9/11 was, I think, the most significant historical event of my lifetime. But given the Niagara of commentary leading up to this anniversary — the airwaves and print media have occupied themselves with little else for weeks now, it seems — I haven’t much to add. I will, however, direct you to a retrospective analysis, by STRATFOR’s George Friedman, of the past ten years of the resulting “War On Terror”.

Friedman notes that the security challenge facing the US after 9/11 was of a new kind, and that no traditional framework existed for coping with it:

This particular war ”” the one that began on 9/11 and swept into Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries ”” is hard to second-guess because there are those who do not think it is a war. Some people, including President George W. Bush, seem to regard it as a criminal conspiracy. When Bush started talking about bringing al Qaeda to justice, he was talking about bringing them before the bar of justice. Imagine trying to arrest British sailors for burning Washington. War is not about bringing people to justice. It is about destroying their ability to wage war. The contemporary confusion between warfare and criminality creates profound confusion about the rules under which you operate. There are the rules of war as set forth in the Geneva Conventions, and there are criminal actions. The former are designed to facilitate the defense of national interests and involve killing people because of the uniform they wear. The latter is about punishing people for prior action. I have never sorted through what it was that the Bush administration thought it was doing.

This entire matter is made more complex by the fact that al Qaeda doesn’t wear a uniform. Under the Geneva Conventions, there is no protection for those who do not openly carry weapons or wear uniforms or at least armbands. They are regarded as violating the rules of war. If they are not protected by the rules of war then they must fall under criminal law by default. But criminal law is not really focused on preventing acts so much as it is on punishing them. And as satisfying as it is to capture someone who did something, the real point of the U.S. response to 9/11 was to prevent anyone else from doing something ”” killing and capturing people who have not done anything yet but who might.

The problem is that international law has simply failed to address the question of how a nation-state deals with forces that wage war through terrorism but are not part of any nation-state. Neither criminal law nor the laws of war apply. One of the real travesties of 9/11 was the manner in which the international legal community ”” the United Nations and its legal structures, the professors of international law who discuss such matters and the American legal community ”” could not come to grips with the tensions underlying the resulting war. There was an unpleasant and fairly smug view that the United States had violated both the rules of war and domestic legal processes, but very little attempt was made to craft a rule of warfare designed to cope with a group like al Qaeda ”” organized, covert, effective ”” that attacked a nation-state.

As U.S. President Barack Obama has discovered, the failure of the international legal community to rapidly evolve new rules of war placed him at odds with his erstwhile supporters. The ease with which the international legal community found U.S. decision makers’ attempts to craft a lawful and effective path “illegal and immoral’ (an oft-repeated cliche of critics of post-9/11 policy) created an insoluble dilemma for the United States. The mission of the U.S. government was to prevent further attacks on the homeland. The Geneva Conventions, for the most part, didn’t apply. Criminal law is not about prevention. The inability of the law to deal with reality generated an image of American lawlessness.

The primary mission as of September 12th was to prevent further attacks on American soil. This mission, at least, we have accomplished. But the mission became far less clear after that, and after we embarked on an enormously controversial war in Iraq, and an open-ended campaign in Afghanistan:

Heavy fighting continues in Afghanistan, Iraq is not quite done and new theaters for covert operations are constantly opening and closing. It is the first U.S. campaign ”” Afghanistan ”” that actually poses the most vexing problem, one that is simple to express: When is the war over? That, of course, depends on the goal. What is the United States trying to achieve there?

The initial goal of the invasion was to dislodge al Qaeda, overthrow the government that had supported it and defeat the Taliban. The first two goals were accomplished quickly. The third goal has not been accomplished to this day, nor is it likely that the United States will ever accomplish it. Other powers have tried to subdue Afghanistan, but few have succeeded. The Taliban are optimized for the battlefield they fight on, have superior intelligence and have penetrated and are able to subvert government institutions, including the Afghan military. They have the implicit support of elements in a neighboring major nation ”” Pakistan ”” that are well beyond American means to intimidate. The United States has no port from which to supply its forces except the one controlled by Pakistan and only complex and difficult supply routes through other countries.

On the other hand, the Taliban cannot defeat the United States, which can stay in Afghanistan indefinitely. But the major U.S. mission in Afghanistan is concluded. Al Qaeda has not used Afghanistan as a primary base since 2002. Al Qaeda in Pakistan, according to the United States, has been crippled. The Taliban, products of Afghanistan for the most part, have no international ambitions. Al Qaeda has relocated to other countries like Yemen and Somalia.

Given this, continued combat in Afghanistan cannot be linked to al Qaeda. It could be said that the reason to go to war in Afghanistan was to prevent al Qaeda’s return. But the fact is that it doesn’t need Afghanistan, and if it did return to Afghanistan, it would be no more dangerous to the United States than it currently is with its bases elsewhere.

In wars, and especially in counterinsurgencies, the mission tends to creep upward. In Afghanistan, the goal is now the transformation of Afghan society into one that is democratic, no longer corrupt by American standards and able to defend itself against the Taliban. This goal does not seem attainable given the relative forces and interests in the country.

Therefore, this war will go on until the United States decides to end it or there is a political evolution in Kabul in which the government orders us out. The point is that the goal has become disengaged from the original intent and is unattainable. Unlike other wars, counterinsurgencies rarely end in victory. They usually end when the foreign forces decide to leave.

Where do we go from here? Obviously we are still confronted by an implacable foe, the same relentless enemy the Christian world has grappled with since the seventh century. Its ideological foundation is no weaker now, and no less inimical to our own, than it was at Poitiers or Vienna. Can we, though, realistically imagine “victory”?

Most likely not:

There is talk of a long war against radical Islam. It had better not be. The Islamic world is more than a billion people and radical Islam is embedded in many places. The idea that the United States has the power to wage an interminable war in the Islamic world is fantasy. This is not a matter of ideology or willpower or any other measures. It is a matter of available forces, competing international interests and American interests.

Ultimately, there are three lessons of the last decade that I think are important. The first is the tremendous success the United States has had in achieving its primary goal ”” blocking attacks on the homeland. The second is that campaigns of dubious worth are inevitable in war, and particularly in one as ambiguous as this war has been. Finally, all wars end, and the idea of an interminable war dominating American foreign policy and pushing all other considerations to the side is not what is going to happen. The United States must have a sense of proportion, of what can be done, what is worth doing and what is too dangerous to do. An unlimited strategic commitment is the definitive opposite of strategy.

The United States has done as well as can be expected. Over the coming years there will be other terrorist attacks. As it wages war in response, the United States will be condemned for violating international laws that are insensate to reality. At this point, for all its mistakes and errors ”” common to all wars ”” the United States has achieved its primary mission. There have been no more concerted terrorist attacks against the United States. Now it is time to resume history.

The article is here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Jihad | Comments (1)

Beefeater, Very Dry

September 9, 2011 – 7:42 pm

With a hat tip to our friend David Duff, here’s a pungent English-history lesson from a Yeoman Warder of Her Majesty’s Royal Palace and Fortress the Tower of London, and Member of the Sovereign’s Body Guard of the Yeomen of the Guard Extraordinary.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (3)

Mission Accomplished

September 8, 2011 – 11:08 pm

It was the first of two long days for me, and I didn’t get home in time to watch the Speech. I did read it, though.

If I understand it correctly, there’s a bill Mr. Obama wants Congress to pass. Right away. If for any reason you don’t think that’s a good idea, you are probably a millionaire or billionaire who wants to expose kids to mercury. Also, you’ll be turning your back on the “fairness and security that has defined this nation since our beginning.” (Right, because who doesn’t look back fondly on the generous Federal entitlements, lavish social programs, and protective government regulations of the 1790s?)

Yes, it will cost a lot of money, some significant portion of a trillion dollars. Don’t worry, though: it’ll all be paid for. How? Well, you may recall that one of the results of the debt-limit scuffle was the creation of a “super-committee” that was going to take on the enormously difficult task of cutting the increases in Federal spending by $1.5 trillion over the next ten years. So while they’re at it, they can just figure out how to pay for this extra half-a-trillion or whatever, too. Should be a snap. (After all, if they can’t manage a little thing like this, they aren’t very “super”, are they?)

All told: pretty great! The only real downside, as blogger Iowahawk just pointed out in a “tweet”, is going to be “the traffic jams tomorrow, with all those businesses rushing to hire people.”

So there you have it, Congress: the President’s done his job. Now do yours.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (17)

Oops!

September 8, 2011 – 4:50 pm

Here.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (3)

Back

September 7, 2011 – 10:09 pm

Well, here we are in Gotham again (my, what a teeming, busy place this is!). Time to start catching up and getting things back to normal around here.

Anything happen while we were gone?

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (2)

Breaking The Spell

September 3, 2011 – 10:22 pm

A reader has sent along a link to a rousing speech given by Geert Wilders in Berlin today. An excerpt:

My friends, we need to give political power back to the nation-state, in the name of democracy, in the name of freedom, in the name of human dignity. By defending the nation-states we defend our own identity. By defending our identity we defend our liberties. By defending our liberty we defend our dignity.

I urge you: Stand up for the nation-state. Be proud of your country!

In his Farewell Address as American President, Ronald Reagan said that the thing he was most proud of in his presidency was ”“ I quote ”“ “the resurgence of national pride that I called, ”˜The New Patriotism.’’ ”“ end of quote.

Europe needs new patriotisms. Europe needs dozens of new patriotisms. We need True Finns, and True Danes, True Frenchmen, and True Irishmen, True Dutchmen, and, my friends, we need True Germans!

Reagan said that we had to teach our children what our country is, what it stands for and what it represents in the long history of the world. He said that Americans need ”“ I quote ”“ “a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions.’

Reagan’s words apply to us, Europeans, too. We need a resurgence of national pride, a love of country and institutions. Our national parliaments are our democratic institutions. We must defend them.

Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends, I have said enough. It is time to act. We must make haste. Time is running out for Germany, for the Netherlands, for all the other great nations of Europe. As Ronald Reagan said: “We need to act today, to preserve tomorrow’.

Here is a short summary of five things which we need to do in order to preserve our freedoms.

First, we must defend freedom of speech. It is the most important of our liberties.

Second, we must end cultural relativism. Our Western culture is far superior to other cultures.

Third, we must stop Islamization. More Islam means less freedom. There is enough Islam in Europe already. Immigrants must assimilate and adapt to our values.

Fourth, we must restore the right to decide about our own money. We should not pay the debts of others. The survival of the euro should not be used as an excuse to reward countries which have shown that they were not worthy to belong to the eurozone.

Fifth, we must restore the supremacy and sovereignty of the nation-state. Our nations are the legacy which our fathers bestowed on us and which we want to bestow on our children. We are the free men and women of the West. We are the true men and women of the West. We do not stand for a superstate. We stand for our own country.

You stand for Germany. I stand for the Netherlands. Others stand for Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, France, Spain, and all these other beautiful freedom-loving nations of Europe. Together we represent the nations of Europe. Together we stand.

Read the whole thing here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (11)

Guy Stuff

September 2, 2011 – 9:15 pm

Here.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

The Crowd

September 2, 2011 – 6:26 pm

Well, the summer’s winding down on the Outer Cape, and after the terminal Labor Day spasm, it’s going to get a whole lot quieter here in Wellfleet. It’ll get quieter here on our little wooded knoll too, because the lovely Nina and I will be heading back to Gotham ourselves, come Wednesday.

It’s been restful not to pay any attention to the news, but I do understand that some things have been happening here and there in the wider world — and when we get back to the big city it’ll be time to start catching up, and to rejoin the blogosphere’s braying chorus.

Not tonight, though. So for now, all I have is some end-of-vacation filler: a Google Maps mash-up displaying Wikipedia edits in real time, courtesy of our old friend Dave Pauley, way out in San Diego.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (3)

On Again, Off Again

August 30, 2011 – 11:36 am

Well, we’re stuck without power again, as of this morning. There are posts I’d like to write, but I’m not about to do so on this cell-phone, which is my only way of getting online.

Worst of all: beer getting warm again.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall

August 27, 2011 – 4:24 pm

Well here we are again, almost exactly a year later, perched on our little hilltop way out on a sandy spit in the Atlantic, bracing ourselves for a hurricane. Last year’s offering, Earl, missed us to the east; this one is supposed to pass by a little way off to the west. It’s always a lively ride being out here for these storms, though — whether it’s a hurricane, a nor’easter, or a blizzard — and I’m sure Irene will be no exception. At the least, we’ll probably lose electrical power for some interval of hours or days.

As always: should we not make it, dear Readers, thanks for coming round to visit these past seven years. It’s been a pleasure.

By Malcolm | Posted in Cape Cod | Comments (16)

Birth Of A Notion

August 25, 2011 – 10:33 am

It was Richard Dawkins who gave us, in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, the idea of the “meme”. The concept, by replicating itself into millions of human minds, has turned out to be a robustly successful meme in its own right — and Professor Dawkins is rightly credited with setting it loose in the wild.

I was surprised, therefore, to see that another Englishman — the Victorian author Samuel Butler — seems to have beaten Dawkins to the punch by a century or so. Yesterday I ran across this quote:

Opinions have vested interests just as men have.

The word “interests” is of particular relevance here, as it shows Mr. Butler taking the “intentional stance” toward ideas themselves. As I’ve stressed often (see here, here and here, for example) it is only by understanding replicators as things that can be seen as having “interests” that we can arrive at naturalistic accounts of intentionality and a Darwinian grounding for the notion of “design“.

I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this connection — a Google search of the quote together with “meme” turned up nothing — but I think Samuel Butler was perhaps the first carrier of the “meme” meme.

By Malcolm | Posted in Mind and Brain, Darwin and Biology | Comments (11)

The Honey Badger

August 21, 2011 – 1:44 pm

As advertised, we’re lying low out here in the remoter reaches of Cape Cod, and paying little attention to the wider world. I hear there are things going on out there — apparently something’s happening in the Middle East or something — but my attention has been more focused on oysters, old books, and keeping an ear cocked for the tinkle of ice at sunset.

Postings will continue to be sporadic till early September. For today, though, here’s one of those educational nature videos.

By Malcolm | Posted in Shameless Filler | Comments (0)

Goldilocks Chemistry

August 16, 2011 – 10:44 pm

If we infidels are going to go around insisting that life arose spontaneously without miraculous intervention, then we’re naturally going to have a keen interest in providing an explanation of how that could have happened. To make the story hang together, what’s needed is for some sort of self-replicating molecules to have arisen, and a plausible suggestion as to how that can have happened. (DNA won’t do, as it requires too much ancillary machinery to do its work.)

Progress has been made. Here’s an article that will explain where we’ve got to so far.

P.S. Don’t miss the bit about the fuzzy beast with seven sexes.

By Malcolm | Posted in Darwin and Biology, Science | Comments (20)

Perfect! Let’s Do One More

August 14, 2011 – 9:07 pm

Here’s the great voice-over artist Bob Kaliban in some recently discovered studio footage. Have a glimpse behind the scenes in the ad biz of old.

By Malcolm | Posted in Music and Recording | Comments (4)

Ship Of State

August 14, 2011 – 2:18 pm

The Tea Party has taken heavy fire lately: blamed by the MSM for our recent market volatility and S&P credit downgrade, derogated as “hostage-takers” and “terrorists” by prominent Democrats, while leading Tea Party candidates have been the subject of scary magazine articles and intentionally hideous cover photos. (All part of the rough-and-tumble of American politics, of course; the Right does the same thing too.)

Yes, I’ll admit many of our new Tea Party pols are what could fairly be called zealots — or even, in a stretch, “extremists”, if you like (though clearly of the sort that carries the Barry Goldwater seal of approval). Nevertheless, I’m glad they’re out there. For all that their tactical choices may be unschooled and unsubtle, the principles they defend so ardently are those that have been the key to America’s greatness in the past, and are necessary for the preservation of what rump-greatness America has left. There’s no doubt that the Tea Party is carrying a lot more sail than ballast — but zoom out a little, and the Tea Party is the ballast desperately needed to right a badly listing ship that has been sporting, for a very long time now, far too much government sail.

As I was thinking these thoughts I ran across a cartoon that seemed apt enough to include here (also with a nautical metaphor), by Chuck Asay:

Long ago, Winston Churchill said more or less the same thing:

Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Summertime

August 13, 2011 – 10:40 pm

Ah, the Casuals at the Beachcomber. What could be better? Here’s a live feed, if you read this in the next little while.

They’ve been playing this joint for 31 years.

By Malcolm | Posted in Music and Recording | Comments (0)

Snob-goggles

August 13, 2011 – 11:57 am

Here’s some trenchant commentary on the UK’s oikophobic response to its wave of riots, from Brendan O’Neill at spiked.

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

Tiger In The Tank

August 13, 2011 – 11:09 am

Charles Murray saw it coming.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Retrieval From Multiple Heterogeneous Sources

August 12, 2011 – 9:13 pm

I have a feeling this could really catch on…

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (3)

must… save… planet…

August 11, 2011 – 4:18 pm

What’s the biggest problem facing America today? What’s the Obama administration’s top priority?

Jobs, you say? The economy?

Of course not, silly!

It’s carbon.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (5)

Well, Blow Me Down

August 11, 2011 – 3:17 pm

In the past day or so Dennis Mangan and others have mentioned this important new study confirming the heritability of intelligence. The results will hardly be a shock to denizens of the HBD blogosphere, or for that matter anyone who has been following the actual science of psychometrics, but are bound to raise a hackle or two here and there.

The notions that this paper supports — that intelligence is real, that it is measurable, and that it is in large part heritable — are a good example of PC orthodoxy contradicting the findings of both everyday experience and scientific inquiry. Yet the orthodoxy persists. I recently had a fairly heated dinner-table argument with a Harvard sociologist in which she denied that the idea of ranking “intelligence” had any value at all, because there are so many “kinds” of intelligence. I suggested that even if that were so (and even if we generously leave aside the general problem-solving sort of intelligence that people usually think of and is the metric usually sought), one could still entertain the notion of being more or less intelligent as regards whatever particular “kind” of intelligence one might choose to consider, and that surely we would have to say that someone who did better in every “kind” of intelligence than someone else could fairly be ranked, by any reasonable examiner, as “more intelligent” than that other person.

At this she bobbed and weaved a bit, and then finally gave away the real basis of her resistance by saying that regardless of any of these points, we shouldn’t be conducting such research, as it could be fodder for discrimination. In her mind that was more or less the end of it, and in the interest of friendship and good digestion I let the matter drop.

She’ll be sorry to hear that the research has gone ahead anyway. I’ll try not to mention it.

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

Head In The Sand

August 10, 2011 – 8:10 pm

As the long-awaited global apocalypse unfolds before our eyes, I’ve done what any responsible citizen with a proper sense of duty — or in fact, any sense at all — would do: run away. The lovely Nina and I have withdrawn to a well-provisioned bolt-hole in one of the nation’s easternmost extremities, and as long as the booze and oysters hold out, we should be fine.

I’d add some pithy comment on the accelerating collapse of civilization — I might, for example, toss off a post about how neatly the outbreak of racial mob assaults in the US, and of full-scale rioting by the UK’s feral underclass, provide a tangible, earthy complement to the rather more abstract convulsions currently laying waste the financial markets — but there isn’t much one can say, really, that isn’t perfectly obvious to all anyway. Simply put, we’ve made a fine mess of what was once a highly promising civilization, and now it’s all going to hell.

The wisest course, as far as I can see, is to drink a lot and read old books until the mighty wave crashes through the door, or the waters subside. As a result, it might be rather quiet around here for a little while. Please feel free to browse our archives, or try the “View a Random Post” link at upper right.

Or, if you’ve never visited it, go poke around James Lileks’s fabulously entertaining website. Just the thing to distract yourself with while you’re bracing for impact.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (16)

A Poor Standard

August 9, 2011 – 9:25 pm

In today’s Times there’s a harsh look at Standard and Poor’s ratings system, by Nate Silver.

An excerpt:

[T]he evidence from the past five years suggests that it may be worthwhile to adopt a contrarian investing strategy that specifically bets against S.&P.’s ratings. If you were trying to predict a country’s default risk today, based on the market’s perception of its default risk two years ago as well as its S.&P. rating at that time, you would find that accounting for S.&P. ratings actually subtracted value from your model. That is, if the market had priced two countries as having a 20 percent default risk in 2009, but one of them had a AA rating from S.&P. and the other had a BB rating, the country with the worse S.&P. rating is likely to have proven to be the safer bet.

The reason for this is that S.&P. ratings probably have some influence on market perceptions about default risk ”” even though they aren’t very good. If markets evaluate a country as having a 20 percent chance of default, but S.&P. rates it as being quite safe, that price represents a compromise between daft investors who take S.&P.’s ratings to be gospel, and savvier ones who have conducted their own analysis and have concluded that the country is at significant risk of default. By betting against S.&P.’s ratings, you’re taking the side of the smart investors ”” and getting a subsidy from the suckers who think S.&P.’s price is right.

But there is another “tell’ to indicate that S.&P.’s ratings are slow to incorporate new information. It’s something which they seem to think is a feature of their ratings, but which instead is evidence that they are fundamentally flawed.

The giveaway is that S.&P.’s rating changes are serially correlated ”” that is, downgrades tend to follow downgrades, and upgrades tend to follow upgrades. According to the company’s internal analysis, once a country is downgraded it has a 52 percent chance of being downgraded again in the next two years. By contrast, there is just a 9 percent chance that S.&P. will reverse course and upgrade the country.

What this implies is that S.&P.’s ratings are inefficient about how they incorporate new information. If a country is downgraded from AAA to AA, and that implies that the country is quite likely to be downgraded again in the near future, the question is why S.&P. didn’t apply a steeper downgrade in the first place.

Consider the case, for instance, where I had a model to determine the value of shares in Google. Initially, my estimate had been that a price of $600 per share is appropriate. But then there is some shock to the system ”” say, some fresh evidence that the country is on the verge of another recession and that this could adversely affect Google’s profits. I estimate that $500 is now a fair price.

So I tell you that I’m willing to sell you Google shares, today, for $500. But I also tell you that tomorrow, I’m likely to lower my estimate further, so you can probably buy Google stock from me for $400 per share.

No competent brokerage firm would ever convey that kind of information to investors. If I signal to you that I’m likely to accept a cheaper price tomorrow than I am today, nobody would buy at today’s price.

But this is essentially what S.&P. does. Rather than downgrade (or upgrade) a country by several notches, even when there is abundant to support it, they instead do so in stages. Greek debt, for instance, has been downgraded seven times since January 2009, as S.&P. has slowly caught up with the grim realities that investors had long ago perceived.

I suspect the reason that S.&P. behaves this way is because they know that their ratings can have reverberations on the market and are trying to avoid a sudden downgrade that might induce panic.

But in so doing, they are violating their mission of providing the most earnest and accurate assessment of a country’s default risk at any given time. A country that is downgraded from AAA to AA is riskier, in S.&P.’s view, than one that was just upgraded from A to AA ”” even though they now have the same rating ”” since the former country is likely to be downgraded again and the latter is likely to be upgraded again. S.&P. knows this, and smart investors know this. But they won’t tell you this because dumb investors might get spooked, which could rattle the markets.

Read the whole thing here.

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

Help Wanted

August 8, 2011 – 4:12 pm

Winston Churchill was, in my opinion, the greatest statesman and wartime leader of the 20th century, and America’s surest friend since Lafayette. In the aftermath of 9/11, the UK sent a bust of Churchill to the President, as token of enduring solidarity from our closest and most natural ally among all the nations of the world. It stood in the Oval Office as a remembrance of how England and America stood shoulder to shoulder in the Second World War, and of how the English-speaking peoples, alone together, rescued Western civilization in one of its darkest hours.

It stood in the Oval Office, that is, until Barack Obama took office in 2009 and promptly sent it back. (Blood is thicker than water.)

Would that we had a Churchill to lead us now. David Gergen thinks so too.

“When the war of the giants is over the wars of the pygmies will begin.”

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (15)

Big Bottom

August 6, 2011 – 4:37 pm

Here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Music and Recording | Comments (4)

Nothing Gold Can Stay

August 6, 2011 – 2:00 pm

Awful news: 31 US troops, including 22 members of Seal Team Six, were killed in Afghanistan by a Taliban attack on a Chinook helicopter in Wardak province, Afghanistan.

This adds deep, and deeply symbolic, sorrow to what is already a very grim weekend indeed here in America.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe,
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

– Laurence Binyon, For the Fallen

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

S & P

August 5, 2011 – 8:50 pm

If you’ve ever wondered what it feels like to be a drug mule who’s just swallowed five condoms full of heroin, ask someone who’s long in the market this weekend.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (22)

High Road

August 5, 2011 – 8:25 pm

“In the mountains the shortest route is from peak to peak, but for that you must have long legs.”

– Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

By Malcolm | Posted in Apophthegmata | Comments (0)

Oslo and the Right, Two Weeks On

August 5, 2011 – 4:24 pm

It’s been a fortnight now since Anders Behring Breivik’s havoc in Oslo. Cultural-conservative bloggers, aghast, have mostly tried to do three things in their subsequent commentrary:

First and foremost, to condemn Breivik’s mass slaughter as irredeemably evil;

Second, to dissociate themselves from any responsibility for it;

Third, to attempt, within the context of the strongest possible disapproval, to demonstrate that Breivik’s actions, however despicable, can nevertheless be understood as a consequence of the ethnically masochistic and self-abnegating immigration policies of European liberal elites.

This latter is a tricky business, and those commenting from the Right have had to wriggle a bit to avoid giving the impression that Breivik’s young victims in some sense “had it coming”.

The really awkward part for the anti-mulitculti, defense-of-the-West commentariat has been that Breivik’s view of the problem is roughly congruent with our own.

Read More »

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

Easy Come, Easy Go

August 4, 2011 – 11:02 pm

Got home too late to write anything tonight — worked a long day at the office, then stopped off on the way home to grab a couple of slices with what was left of my 401(k).

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (1)

A Very Serious Delusion Indeed

August 3, 2011 – 6:06 pm

A “tweet” from Iowahawk just now:

Read this, then read this.

O’Brien:

You know perfectly well what is the matter with you. You have known it for years, though you have fought against the knowledge. You are mentally deranged.

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

Time, Effort, Focus

August 3, 2011 – 11:01 am

New blog on the way from our friend Kevin Kim.

Here.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (1)

Get This

August 2, 2011 – 9:07 pm

I had the TV on just now, and was watching Piers Morgan. He had on a fellow named Brad Thor, who apparently is a “terrorism expert” and author of “thriller”-style novels. They were talking about Norway, and about how much of a shock the Breivik rampage was to a nation that never saw it coming, and so was very poorly prepared to respond quickly or effectively. Mr. Thor, just in passing, made a remark of such breathtaking and unintentional irony that I feel the need to reproduce it here, without further comment.

He said, with a perfectly straight face, “I’d hate to see this result in a change to Norwegian culture, but it probably will.”

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

Done Deal!

August 2, 2011 – 8:13 pm

Well, we got our debt-limit increase.

It’s a fantastic piece of legislation: it starts right off by “saving” almost a trillion dollars over the next ten years. (We’ll borrow that much in the next nine months, but hey: politics is the “art of the possible”.)

Next, I think we should take care of the drunk-driving problem by raising the blood-alcohol limit.

Anyway, soon we’ll have a brand-new deficit-reduction commission working hard to find ways to cut a little fat. (Of course we’ve had 17 of these in the last 30 years, during which period US government spending, in constant dollars, has more than doubled. But if at first you don’t succeed…)

They shouldn’t have much trouble finding places where the federal government’s looking a little zaftig — but just to get them in the right mood, they might like to read this.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (1)

That’s A Big Fringe

August 2, 2011 – 11:39 am

Here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Politics | Comments (4)

Iko Iko

August 1, 2011 – 10:19 pm

As advertised in this space a few weeks ago, Dr. John played at the Prospect Park Bandshell this past Saturday night (with go-go legend Chuck Brown and another very funky band called Red Baraat as openers). It was a fabulous show. Sorry you missed it.

Dr. John is a walking encyclopedia of the American musical heritage, and probably the foremost living exponent of old-school New Orleans piano-playing. In this video clip, he demonstrates some serious left-hand “trickerations”. Check out those tenths!

By Malcolm | Posted in Music and Recording | Comments (0)

Nyaah Nyaah

July 31, 2011 – 12:45 pm

Here’s Paul Krugman talking to Christine Amanpour this morning about spending cuts:

“From the perspective of a rational person — in other words a progressive…”

If you want to foreclose on civil discourse, to go beyond argument to mere polemic, to whip up bitter factional antipathies, to make the process of democratic government little more than a civil war without (for the moment) actual physical violence, well, this is the way you do it.

Not only is Krugman going out of his way to be as insulting and provocative as possible, but in his foaming anger at all things conservative he also exhibits a gross misunderstanding of the very concept of reason itself, and of the difference between axioms and theorems.

“Progressivism” is a collection of axioms about what constitutes a desirable society. Once you have accepted those axioms, then you can use reason to evaluate policy on the basis of the foundation they provide. If, however, you build your worldview upon a very different set of axioms, as conservatives do, then the same process of reason — reason being what “rational” people do — will lead to different policy choices.

The choice of progressive vs. conservative axioms, as with any axioms, is not a matter of reason, but of temperament, intuition, and disposition. But so blinded by partisan rage is Paul Krugman, so besotted with ideological fanaticism, that he has rendered himself oblivious to this essential aspect of human reason.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (5)

Over There

July 30, 2011 – 12:24 pm

John McCreary at NightWatch, always an indispensable resource for those who like to keep an ear to the ground, has offered some particularly pointed commentary on the Mideast over the past few days.

First, Afghanistan. Our open-ended nation-building project having foundered on some sharp and immovable realities, we are leaving. But rather than make clear to all the dismal facts about how matters stand in Afghanistan — public awareness of which might help us to make wiser choices in future — we seem to be engaging in a serious campaign of what Mr. McCreary refers to as “perception management”. (Other apt terms might be “disinformation” or “propaganda”.)

From yesterday’s dispatch (emphasis added):

Afghanistan: Suicide attacks occurred on 28 July in Tarin Kot, the capital of Oruzgan Province in southern Afghanistan north of Kandahar, and appear aimed at killing the governor and his staff. Clashes continued between assailants and security forces.

Comment: After the assassination of three top Afghan officials this month, the attack in Tarin Kot appears part of the Taliban tactic to eliminate the senior agents of the central government wherever they may be found.

Special NightWatch Comment: Citing a US officer acting as spokesperson for the NATO Command, USA TODAY reported on 28 July, “For the first time in five years insurgent-initiated attacks in Afghanistan have not increased with the start of a new fighting season, suggesting that a surge of U.S. forces has blunted Taliban momentum, according to the coalition forces.”

“The Taliban is ‘feeling the effects’ of a surge strategy over the winter to drive militants out of former Taliban strongholds and hold the terrain, said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Colette Murphy, a spokeswoman for the coalition command in Kabul, though she cautioned that the Taliban is not defeated.”

“In May and June, insurgent attacks were down about 2% compared with the same period last year, says the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Since 2006, insurgent attacks grew by 20% or more each year, according to the data. The NATO command in Kabul released a summary of the statistics in response to a USA TODAY request.”

The NightWatch data for May 2011, which is compiled only from open source reporting, indicate May 2011 was the most violent month in Afghanistan since 2001.

NightWatch‘s open source data is a sample and, thus, a sub-set of all insurgency and counter-insurgent violence. Thus, the 2,300 violent incidents reported in unclassified sources in May 2011 represents probably a third of the total violence for the month. Compared to May 2010, the May 2011 total is nearly six times larger.

The real story in Afghanistan is that violent clashes, attacks and IED incidents have grown steadily between November 2011 andJuly 2011. Despite cheerful NATO press releases, open source data indicate security steadily declined in nearly every province of Afghanistan in the past year. The UN data on security corroborate the downward trend.

Without knowing the actual data on which NATO bases its claim of improved security, it is impossible to evaluate the statement by the US officer in Kabul. The NightWatch and UN data, however, indicate clearly that Pollyanna-ish assertions about improved security conditions in Afghanistan are simply unfounded and unjustified. The recent spate of high-profile assassinations reinforces that conclusion.

And from today’s report:

Afghanistan: During an unannounced visit to Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, Admiral Mullen, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave a pep talk to the allied forces in which he mocked the significance of the recent assassinations of key Afghan officials in the south, including President Karzai’s half-brother, Wali Karzai. He said some believe this is all the Taliban can do, thereby quoting but not owning a highly controversial statement.

Special comment: The US military, for understandable reasons of morale, continues to put a positive spin on security developments, but Readers need to know that the facts continue to run in the other direction. The US military is engaging in a perception management operation apparently for English and American speakers. The message is the job is getting done and it’s time to leave.

It is time to leave because the US civilian political leadership has made that decision and is holding the military leadership to their agreement in 2008 that they could make significant gains in 18 months. The time has passed; the gains are local and impermanent, according to every tactical-level interview; and the Taliban know it. Resident reporters have described the situation in Kabul as a fragile structure waiting to collapse.

Assassination of stalwarts of the Karzai regime cannot be minimized. If Wali Karzai, Jan Mohammed and Hamidi can be assassinated, so can President Karzai.

This is a warning: the Taliban and other anti-government fighting groups are engaged in their own decapitation campaign ”¦ without drones, but up close and personal in Kabul and Kandahar. They appear to be capable of killing anyone they decide to target.

Also in today’s report are notable items about Turkey and Egypt:

Turkey: Turkey is experiencing stress because the Chief of the General Staff, the Commander of the Land forces, the Air Force Commander and the Navy Commander resigned on 29 July to protest the anti-military actions of Prime Minister Erdogan’s government.

General Isik Kosaner, the Chief of the General Staff, said he resigned from his post in protest of the jailing of military officers in a variety of court cases. Kosaner reportedly said it is impossible for him to continue in his post because he is unable to fulfill his responsibility to protect the rights of his personnel.

The senior officers who resigned with Kosaner are Land Forces Commander General Erdal Ceylanoglu; Air Force Commander General Hasan Aksay; and Navy Commander Admiral Esref Ugur Yigit.

Turkish President Abdullah Gul signed a decree appointing Gendarmerie Commander General Necdet Ozel as Chief of Land Forces. A reporter said Ozel would later be appointed the Chief of the General Staff of the Turkish armed forces in the place of General Kosaner.

Comment: The overarching issue is civilian control of the Turkish armed forces. Control of promotions and promotion policy is central to any military leadership structure. The resignations were as a reproach and a challenge to the Erdogan government for meddling in the military promotion system.

Kosaner’s position and that of the other service chiefs is that officers under arrest but no brought to trial should be promoted on schedule because they have committed no crime. There are some 400 officers in this condition as the result of the AKP government’s discover in 2007 of a coup plot in 2003 that never took place. This is the Ergenekon or Sledgehammer coup plot by the military to overthrow the pro-Islamist AKP government a year after its election.

Since coming to power in 2002, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government has worked to break the political power of the armed forces and to erode its ethos as the guardian of the secular traditions of Ataturk. It has used a rising standard of living, relative prosperity and application for membership in the European Union, increased influence in Europe and the Middle East and promotion of more devout Islamic practices in public to marginalize the armed forces.

Outside the cities, the mass of Turks have proven in two elections that they support pro-Islamist and fundamentalist policies. The AKP has won both elections easily.

It also has used the Ergenekon investigation to keep the military leadership on the defensive and in the barracks under threat of arrest and prosecution for supporting a coup, now eight years ago. Respect for the military has declined significantly as a result.

Today’s resignations are without precedent and appear aimed at arousing sentiment against the strongly Islamist tendencies of the government. Grand gestures such as resignations almost always are sophomoric and fail to make a difference because no one is inexpendable and replacements, such as General Ozel, are always waiting for their chance to lead.

The exceptions are when mass military leadership resignations are precursors to popular uprisings or to a military takeover of the government. There are no signs and no chances of a popular uprising in support of the armed forces. The time for a coup would seem to have passed, but analysts said that about Pakistan in 1999 right before General Musharraf overthrew the Nawaz Sharif government.

Egypt: Tens of thousands of protestors gathered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on 29 July after Islamist leaders called for nationwide demonstrations, BBC Middle East reported. The demonstrators called for Sharia law and an Islamic state.

BBC reported that most of the protesters were Muslim Brotherhood supporters. Egyptian Nile News TV channel reported that Salafists (i.e., essentially, Islamic fundamentalists) control Tahrir Square, and that there was no representation of other political factions.

Earlier, twenty eight other political groups, including the Youth Coalition and 6 April Movement, announced that they would continue their sit-in in Tahrir Square that began 8 July but would not join protests today because the Islamists violated an agreement made the week of 24 July to call for common demands, form a united front and avoid controversy, such as creating an Islamic state.

According to the secularist leaders, the Salafists broke the agreement by chanting pro-Islam slogans during the mass protest after Friday prayers in Qena. Salafists and other Islamists in Alexandria also started chanting after Friday prayers, Al-Masry Al-Youm reported.

As the day ended, Islamist protestors were said to be leaving Tahrir Square in Cairo. According to several Salafist clerics, the Islamists did not intend to turn the protests into an open-ended sit-in or to spend the night in the square.

Comment: The Islamists turned the weekly demonstration into a show of their political strength. Until today, the Islamists (Salafists) always preferred to remain in the background of the uprising. Today’s events prove the secular activists have been pawns who are unable to challenge the much more organized Islamists.

The message for readers is that the Islamists have the capability to become the next government of Egypt by dint of organization and democracy, unless the Egyptian military stops them.

US leaders should expect to have to choose between democratic elections that bring anti-US, anti-modern and anti-Israel Islamic fundamentalists to power in Cairo or undemocratic actions by the Egyptian armed forces to prevent that result.

You can subscribe to the NightWatch newsletter here.

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

How Not To Use The Word ‘Unique’

July 29, 2011 – 12:50 pm

Here.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (2)

Pain At The Pump

July 29, 2011 – 12:47 pm

Blogger Iowahawk tweets:

Instead of car that gets 55 miles per gallon, how about a govt that gets 180 minutes per billion?

I like that: minutes per billion as a measure of government bloat. Currently we get about 137 MPB.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (1)

Mulligan

July 28, 2011 – 9:55 pm

I find myself imagining a gathering crowd watching the Capitol from some safe distance as the frenzy increases inside, with the two houses of Congress joined by the President in a furious battle-royal. The mighty building starts to quiver and shake. Clouds of steam begin to rise, and the walls start to glow — at first a dull red, then brighter and brighter. As the crowd uneasily steps back, the shaking and shuddering become more violent, and are joined by a low, almost sub-sonic rumble. The ground trembles, and then with a loud crack! the building begins to sink into the earth, as the glow turns fiery orange.

Through the billowing clouds the crowd watches as the Capitol slowly disappears from view. Now the dome, incandescent, is all that can be seen … soon it too is gone. After a while the clouds and rumbling begin to subside, and the crowd moves closer. The earth has fallen in, filling the hole, and all that remains is a few wisps of steam rising through the soil.

Silence.

It’s all gone — Democrats, Republicans, Tea Party, Boehner, Reid, Cantor, Pelosi, POTUS, the whole enchilada. Done.

The people stand amazed for a little while. Then one of them says:

“OK. Let’s all go home, take a little break. Think about what happened here. And then we’ll try this again.”

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (4)

Whoops!

July 28, 2011 – 3:29 pm

As the markets begin to totter in anticipation of the coming global collapse, investors are naturally wondering where to put their money. According to the latest data from NASA, I’d say definitely not the beach-umbrella or swimwear sectors. Maybe coal-mining and hockey equipment.

By Malcolm | Posted in Science, Rubbish | Comments (0)