Well, that cease-fire in Libya might not have involved all that much actual ceasing of fire after all. According to STRATFOR it’s looking more like a race to control Benghazi before the curtain falls. Here.
Update: more strategic analysis from George Friedman at STRATFOR, here. Qaddafi would have been wiser to make the cease-fire real, it seems.
In the wake of the UN no-fly resolution, Libyan foreign minister Moussa Koussa has called an immediate cease-fire. This is by far the wisest move for Qaddafi, because with the government’s reconquest of all but Benghazi and eastern Cyrenaica complete, there will now be a consolidation period during which, with far greater resources, Qaddafi’s strength relative to the poorly organized rebels with surely grow — as will the security and robustness of the supply lines he had obviously outrun. It’s a safe bet that the “international community” will not have the stomach to put troops in to roll back Qaddafi’s gains.
Should we intervene in Libya? This is the subject of a fierce debate at National Review. The editors say yes; Andrew McCarthy and Victor Davis Hanson say no. (As do I.)
Meanwhile, the havering continues at Foggy Bottom. Regarding the escalating Iran vs. Sunni Arab proxy war in Bahrain, Hillary Clinton said yesterday in Egypt that:
“Our message is consistent and strong: There is no way to resolve the concerns of the Bahraini people through the use of excessive force or security crackdowns. There have to be political negotiations that lead to a political resolution.”
There “have” to be? And what, exactly, will we do if there aren’t? We’ve been awfully quick, lately, to say what is “unacceptable”, what “must” happen, and so on, but it is becoming increasingly obvious to all — particularly after our waffling on Mubarak’s departure — that our words these days mean almost nothing. “Speak softly, and carry a big stick,” wrote Teddy Roosevelt; instead we prefer to speak loudly and often, and it is increasingly clear to all that we can barely lift the stick.
I’ve mentioned the outstanding strategic security summary NightWatch before (see here for a bio of its author, John McCreary): it is the best of its kind, I think, and certainly the most condensed.
Last night’s entry included an analysis of the situation in the Middle East that was so informative I thought I’d reproduce it here. (Make sure you read the “Notes for new analysts” at the end.)
Bahrain: Soldiers and riot police used tear gas and armored vehicles Wednesday, 16 March, to drive out hundreds of anti-government protesters occupying a landmark square in Manama. The assault was executed at daybreak. Press reports carried witness accounts that two protestors were killed during the attack in the square. Officials at Ibn Nafees Hospital reportedly said a third protestor later died from gunshot wounds in his back.
The General Command of the Bahrain Defense Force issued a statement about the attack. “The Bahraini national guard and Public Security Force initiated an operation to clear ‘outlaws’ from several public areas in Manama. The operation targeted protesters in the Bahrain Financial Harbour, the Salmaniya Medical Complex and surrounding areas, and the Gulf Cooperation Council Roundabout. The roundabout previously has been referred to as Pearl Square, or Martyr’s Square by the protestors.”
Comment: This action represents a significant escalation of force, enabled by the arrival of Arab reinforcements from the Peninsula Shield Force. The emergency declaration banning protests automatically makes the protestors “outlaws”. It deliberately increases the consequences of protests in order to separate the timid from the hard core. Most of the time it makes matters worse. What happens after Friday’s prayers will provide insight about whether the escalation of force is likely to stabilize the situation.
Multiple government officials resigned in protest because of the security operation.
Saudi Arabia: Update. A few hundred Saudi Shiite protesters took to the streets of Qatif, Eastern Province, on 15 March in solidarity with Bahraini Shia, Ahram Online reported. These gathers are banned, but they persist.
Yemen: Update. At least 120 people were wounded when Yemeni police and pro-government supporters attempted to break up an anti-government rally in the western city of al-Hudaida, according to a local doctor treating the protestors. The doctor said the protestors were attacked with tear gas, rubber bullets, live ammunition and daggers.
Comment: Yemen is increasingly using force against the protestors, but the forces indicate the situation is still manageable without applying extraordinary resources.
Libya: Rebels. Three rebel jets bombed Libyan leader Gadhafi’s forces located east of Ajdabiya, Al Jazeera reported .
Comment: This is the second reported attack by combat aircraft supporting the rebels. No sources have reported their origin, their operating base or who is piloting them, but they offer a better prospect of delaying the attackers than the exuberant but disorganized rebel youth. The location of the attack, east of Ajdabiya, is the best evidence to date that Qadhafi’s forces have moved beyond that town, which is on the road to Benghazi. According to eyewitnesses, clashes occurred at Ajdabiya and Misrata, Al Arabiya reported.
Qadhafi’s Forces. Qadhafi’s son, Saif al-Islam, told the media that military operations are finished and everything will be over in 48 hours (18 March). He said loyal forces are close to Benghazi. When asked about world powers’ discussion of imposing a no-fly zone over Libya, he said whatever decision is taken, it will be too late. Libyan state television reported the Tarhuna and Warfalla, two major tribes in Benghazi, have confirmed their support for Libyan leader Qadhafi.
A message on Libyan state TV said that residents of Benghazi should leave rebel-held locations and weapon storage areas, saying that the army was coming to support the citizens and “cleanse your city from armed gangs.”. Libyan state TV also reported that Qadhafi supporters had rallied in Benghazi, but foreign news outlets could not confirm that report. The Libyan army set a deadline of 2200 GMT on 16 March for Benghazi inhabitants to leave rebel locations and weapon storage areas, Reuters reported, citing Libyan state TV.
Comment: Saif al-Islam has emerged as the chief propagandist for Qadhafi and is one of the hard-line children. He exaggerates almost childishly, as part of his amateurish propaganda campaign. While his statements have often proven to be inaccurate, the government’s tight control of information leaves limited alternative sources of information.
Abdul Basit, a rebel spokesman in Misrata, denied reports made by Libyan state television that two major tribes in Benghazi, the Warfala and Tarhuna, now back Qadhafi. Basit said that state television is lying and that it wants to create divisions among tribes. Note: Basit is much more reliable than Saif al-Islam.
Algeria: Police in Algiers used tear gas March 16 in an attempt to disperse a crowd of young men who were throwing petrol bombs and stones. The protesters said they had no political demands but wanted the authorities to give them better housing. The protest began when about 60 young men blocked a road and demanded a meeting with senior officials about their living conditions. Their numbers swelled to about 150. About 300 police responded with tear gas, but failed to disperse the rioting crowd.
Comment: The Algerians get it. They used two policemen for every protestor. That is the Chinese model.
Notes for new analysts: understanding violence in instability problems (Long essay alert)
Internal instability problems are not chaotic, despite the way many people describe them. They move through definable phases that have benchmarks indicating progress in the processes. Violence is a particularly important indicator because it occurs twice, but its significance depends on when it occurs.
Background
Political authority flows back and forth between the government and the opposition, depending on their respective strengths. Usually the government will under-react to the first outbreak of protests. That will start the three phase under-reaction, over-reaction, concession cycle, which characterized government actions in all the Arab states under stress. In Tunisia and Egypt, the Army sided with the protestors for parochial reasons and brought an early end to those crises. Instability persists because no fundamental changes that address the causes of instability have occurred. The unrest is resetting and recycling.
The three-phase cycle enables analysts to track government management of the instability, but its context is the shift in authority between the government and the opposition, represented by the youthful protestors in the Arab world. As the government’s authority weakens, the opposition’s strengthens. They converge. Right before the division of authority equalizes, either or both sides will resort to violence.
The government will use the army to prevent sharing power with the opposition, which an equal division of authority makes inevitable. The opposition resorts to violence because it judges the government might topple from a violent surge. It is compelled to test the government because that is how the opposition gains authority.
The use of extraordinary armed force always signals that convergence has reached the point that the government fears it will have to share power”¦ and make changes if it fails to fight. This is convergence violence.
Convergence Violence
If there has been no government sharing of authority with the opposition – no power sharing — before the use of extraordinary force, then the violence is always convergence violence and the government is in grave danger.
This is where Bahrain and Yemen are. Oman has not yet reached that point. In Bahrain, at the end of one three-phase cycle, the Crown Prince offered significant concessions for greater political participation by the Shiite opposition, but which preserved the monarchy By 8 March, when the opposition started to demand systemic change in the form of a republic, that demand set the condition for a violent crackdown or capitulation by the monarchy. The chronology indicates the monarchy’s unsuccessful use of violence in the earlier “over-reaction phase” caused the Shiites to escalate their demands.
In a convergence fight, government force must be overwhelming and must succeed or the government will change for a time, possibly permanently. As early as 21 February, Bahrain’s King apparently doubted he had the forces for the task, and asked the Arab monarchs for the Peninsula Shield Forces.
Most governments have no allies willing to add more guns to their side of the fight to prevent further convergence. Bahrain does. It is not clear whether Saudi or UAE forces participated in today’s crackdown in Manama. They at least freed up Bahraini forces to enable the government to try to break the protest movement.
The Bahrain monarchy with the backing of the Peninsula Shield Force contributors has raised the stakes substantially, and maybe existentially. If this escalation fails, which it could, the Bahrain government must change. If the monarchy survives a failure, it probably would be as a figurehead or ceremonial head of state.
The Peninsula Shield Forces also carry another dimension of risk because of the linkage to other governments — Saudi Arabia and UAE plus any other Gulf Cooperation Council contributors. The Peninsula Shield Force makes Bahrain a regional problem. It the Forces fail now, authority will decline in other Arab capitals. The downside of integration is that, if it fails, it threatens to bring down the whole architecture. That consequence suggests the Forces in Bahrain will fight to the last Shiite to prevent the collapse of the monarchy.
If the Forces succeed in routing or deterring protestors or in inducing them to accept the offers of the Crown Prince, then the authority of the monarchy will have been restored. The side with the most or the best guns wins, provided the forces remain loyal and respond to orders. The introduction of outside forces – the Saudi and UAE personnel -also has reduced the likelihood of mass desertions by the Bahraini forces. This is what China did in the Tiananmen massacre at an identical stage of its successful convergence struggle.
Yemen also is in a convergence fight, but it has not yet escalated as Bahrain’s has. President Saleh, however, is using violence in a way that is similar to Bahrain. The trend is towards escalating uses of force, but Saleh will be guided by what happens in Bahrain.
Divergence Violence
Leaders in Bahrain and Yemen might have been heartened by Qadhafi’s successful counterattacks in Libya. If so, that would be a misread of the Libyan fighting. Qadhafi lost his convergence fight, but is winning a divergence or breakout fight. Two weeks ago, when the rebels took towns just west of Tripoli, they achieved de facto power sharing. Qadhafi had Tripoli and parts of Tripolitania. The Benghazi Council had control of Cyrenaica and was moving into Tripolitania.
Power Sharing and Divergence Violence
The division of authority manifest by a geographical split is a rare form of power sharing, usually associated with secession – fragmentation of the state. But the Benghazi-based rebels went for Tripoli.
Libya has showcased several key points about instability problems. Most important is that the opposition will not win if it does not take the capital, Tripoli in Libya’s case. Instability is centripetal because authority and political power reside in the center, which explains the rebels’ march into Tripolitania and that the only serious confrontations in Bahrain occur in Manama.
Second, power sharing is relatively quiet. For a short time before the Qadhafi counterattack, there was very limited violence. Qadhafi famously offered talks, almost certainly a ruse to build his forces, but the kind of overture that takes place in power sharing.
Third, it is always temporary, though the length of time varies widely. It is temporary because the parties seek to prepare for a breakout. The breakout need not be violent and might take a long time to develop. Hezbollah demonstrated this in its parliamentary procedural ouster of the Hariri government in Lebanon. It took from 2006 to 2011 for Hezbollah to make its parliamentary breakout that toppled the Hariri coalition.
Even in Lebanon, there was fear of violent street protests. If violence associated with a breakout occurs, it is divergence violence.
Qadhafi began a successful breakout last week. His success may be measured by the distance from Tripoli that Qadhafi’s forces are fighting. Divergence violence always happens after there has been de facto or de jure power sharing.
Qadhafi’s successful breakout also reinforces the most salient and predictive point of instability. The side with the most and best guns wins. If Benghazi falls in 48 hours, the rebellion is crushed and Qadhafi’s authority will be fully stronger than ever”¦for a time.
To recap, convergence violence, as in Bahrain, means the government is in so much stress that it is resorting to extraordinary means to prevent power sharing. Divergence violence means a party is trying to break out of power sharing to seize control of the government.
Finally, successful convergence or divergence fights are never final solutions, but they can add decades to the longevity of a regime as in Libya and Algeria. Instability always resets and recycles, even if it takes 30 years, until the underlying problems are solved or changed.
It’s hard to know what to say on a day like today; the world just seems to be falling apart everywhere you look. Japan is barely breathing after a Trifecta of staggering catastrophes. The Mideast is in flames. Western civilization is slowly throttling itself. The once-great American nation, its citizens having learned that they can vote themselves money and import unlimited cheap labor, has borrowed and denatured itself into certain doom, and is now little more than a motley, multicultural mélange of squabbling factions rushing to snatch what remaining loot they can before the whole thing comes crashing down on their heads. The fish have all been hauled up from the oceans and eaten, and birds are falling from the sky. The stock market is plummeting earthward, and it looks like there won’t even be any football this year. Newt Gingrich is lining up against Sarah Palin for the privilege of losing to Barack Obama in 2012. Owsley is dead.
Whew! Let us lift our eyes skyward.
Well, we’ve spent far too much time lately dwelling on trivialities. Time for some serious news:
Snake Dies of Silicone Poisoning After Biting Model’s Fake Breast
With video! Here.
(Have to file this one under “Shameless Filler”, I think…)
A reader has emailed me to take me to task for the title of my previous post. The note began:
To me, G_d is synonymous with the Explanation for Everything; for you, He is an angry, immature old man.
I responded:
Just to set the record straight, to me God is not “an angry, immature old man”, or anything else; my view of God is that the word “God” is simply a placeholder for a variety of fictional entities.
For most religious believers, though, God is directly, actively involved in what happens down here: for a natural disaster to occur, it must be caused, or at least permitted, by God. On the other hand, your own view — of God as an actually existing, ineffable abstraction, but not the sort of agent that plays a deliberate causal role in things like earthquakes that crush and drown thousands of innocent people — while far more defensible intellectually, is shared by only a microscopic minority of theists. Obviously my title does not refer to the God you appear to believe in, so you shouldn’t be offended. (That you are just shows what a confused and confusing term “God” is.)
I’ve been re-reading the Bible and the Koran over the past few weeks. That’s the sort of “God” I’m referring to here; and it’s the one that most people believe in, and that they think of when they use the word “God”. It amazes me that people are capable of the cognitive dissonance required to witness natural disasters like this, or the awful earthquake in Haiti that killed and maimed multitudes of the innocent faithful, square it somehow with the idea of an involved, active, personal God who is nevertheless infinitely loving and merciful, and then keep coming back for more. It just boggles my mind [in the same way that it boggled Voltaire’s mind after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755], and I can’t help remarking on it from time to time.
I will say this — given my growing conviction that secularism is, from a group-level perspective, most likely maladaptive, I’ll admit that I am, for tactical reasons, somewhat conflicted lately about making these points, and so I have been largely mute on the subject of theism v. atheism for a while now. Every now and then, though, something comes along that prompts me to let out a little squeak of protest.
Weighing all of this, then, I do admit that the title was stingingly, and rather gratuitously, harsh, and given the rawness of the wound, it might have been better not to have chosen it.
I’ve wanted to post something about the horror in Japan, but everything I’ve begun to write has seemed so trivial, so trite, next to the awful reality. Nothing I can say, or even imagine, from the safety and comfort of my home here in New York can gain any traction on what that reality must have been like for those who experienced it: to feel the solid rock beneath your feet shudder in sudden pain and buckle and snap and heave and roll — and then, still reeling, to look up as the infinite ocean itself rises high above you and pours itself down upon the land, sweeping away everything — everything.
The hideous indifference of Nature! Again it yawns and extends a finger, shearing us away en masse, and I think: “we are nothing”.
Then I look at the brave Japanese: doing what they can, and what they must.
With a tip of the hat to David Duff — nay, for this one a low, sweeping bow, with a scrape and a fawning obeisance — I introduce you to Private Frazer, whose acquaintance I had not made myself until just the other day.
Here. High point: the auld empty barn.
Just discovered in the National Archives: a forgotten collection of photos of Eva Braun.
Here.
This is good: Rand Paul confronts Kathleen Hogan, the Deputy Assistant Energy Secretary for Efficiency, on light bulbs, toilets, and bureaucratic busybodies.
Please note, by the way, as an example of how terrifyingly deep the nanny-state mindset goes, that when it comes to the crappy toilets the government has forced us all to use, the best defense Ms. Hogan can offer for the decision to impose them on us is that it was “bipartisan”.
Well, here’s an odd little story: it seems that in the little town of Ilulissat, Greenland (69° 13′ N) the Sun, which rises exactly once a year, did so two days early this time around. This sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen; if there’s one thing you are supposed to be able to count on, after all, it’s the rising and the setting of the Sun.
The boffins are all over it, of course: early attempts at an explanation have included the lowering of the horizon due to melting ice, and refractive anomalies in certain layers of the atmosphere. (That the stately dance of Earth and Sun might actually have permitted a faux pas of this magnitude, especially without causing similar rhythmic hiccups in other parts of the world, is not among the hypotheses they have brought forward, and understandably so.)
If, however, you are interested in a slightly zestier interpretation of this event (and others of recent note), you might enjoy this worrisome little video, sent our way by — who else? — the indefatigable JK. You’ll want to have a roll of tinfoil handy.
As you may have heard, things are changing rapidly in the Middle East. Libya is in flames, Egypt staggers uneasily under military rule, and throughout the region political structures of enduring stability now creak and totter as the ground trembles beneath them. Meanwhile, the U.S. position is shifting too: we are soon to withdraw from Iraq (having come up short of our goals there), our relations with Pakistan are near the breaking point, and our presence in the Persian Gulf is complicated by events unfolding, particularly, in Bahrain.
What Mideastern nation, if any, seems entirely immune to this epidemic of political unrest? What nation gains the most from America’s withdrawal from Iraq? What nation will find it easiest to intimidate its neighbors by the strength of its military? What nation’s interests are best advanced by the conflagration of political and ethnic instability in the region? What nation is best positioned to inflame it further?
The answers are Iran, Iran, Iran, Iran, and Iran — as STRATFOR’s George Friedman explains in this penetrating analysis.
I’m working late tonight, with no time for writing. So I’ll just pass along this shocking item:
Racial Identity Tied to Happiness, Study Finds
Here.
On the commercial street near my house, there’s a comic-book store, and as I walked by it today they had a big picture of Superman on display. It looked something like this:
It seemed to me that the Man of Steel was looking even more buff than ever, certainly way more so than when I was a kid. Look at those lats!
At first I thought: Way to go, big guy! But then I started wondering: when Superman wants to bulk up a bit, how the hell does he do it?
For that matter, why does he even need to be in shape at all?
In the hugely popular sci-fi video game Halo, humans do battle with something called the Flood — a disgusting parasitic fungus that takes over the bodies of its victims, converting them into mutilated zombie soldiers.
When that happens to one of our boys, the result looks like this:
According to Wikipedia’s account of the Halo story-line, the Flood were so successful, and so terrifying, that the “ancient Forerunners were forced to kill themselves and all other sentient life nearly 100,000 years before the beginning of Halo in an effort to starve the Flood to death.”
(Kind of like what conservatives are going to have to do to get the deficit under control, I’m afraid. But I digress…)
Well, dear Reader, if you happen to be a South American ant, you’d best be wary, because it seems you might soon find yourself in a similar fix. Have a look here.
As long as we’re on the subject, here’s a little mission statement that’s been making the rounds today.
Lawrence Auster brings to our attention an article, published by the National Association of Scholars, about a Christian student’s experiences in the Islamic Studies department at the Hartford Seminary (which is, by the way, the oldest Islamic Studies department in America). The Seminary represents itself as a secular institution dedicated to interfaith dialogue and comparative study; when it comes to Islam, however, it appears to be anything but.
The student, Andrew Bieszad, who graduated this past May with a master’s degree, describes systematic harassment and intimidation for his Christian beliefs, and for his questioning of Islamic dogma. His Muslim classmates told him on at least one occasion that he deserved to die.
Before recounting these details, though, Mr. Bieszad points out a fundamental reversal in the academic study of Islam in America (and presumably in the West generally):
Islamic studies in Europe began as a Christian missionary enterprise, born out of necessity rather than interest. Islam was the first religion Christianity encountered that, as theological doctrine, sought to convert Christians and regulate their religious practices. In turn, Catholic priests and monks, particularly in the Middle East, Spain, and Italy, worked to convert Muslims from Islam, as well as to educate Christians so they would not convert.[1] This changed following the fall of Muslim Spain in 1492 and the military expansion of Spain and Portugal and later England, Holland, Belgium, and France into Islamic countries. Catholic and Protestant missionaries followed their nations’ armies and compiled information about Islam and Muslim peoples. This information made its way back to European universities and gradually transformed Islamic studies from a missionary enterprise into a full-fledged academic discipline, sometimes called Orientalism.
Orientalism was originally defined by both political and religious visions. Politically, the colonizing governments sought to understand people to rule them more efficiently. Spiritually, missionaries sought to understand Islam to convert Muslims to Christianity more effectively. Both groups took an interest in studying the Muslim world. They translated and studied thousands of Islamic texts from Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish sources. Their work formed the foundation for academic disciplines such as archaeology, anthropology, Egyptology, Assyriology, and of course, Islamic studies.
Islamic studies changed significantly in the decades following World War II, with the massive reorganization of European empires, national boundaries, and colonial identities. One idea that gradually took root in academia was that the Muslim world was the victim of systematic prejudice stemming from European “ignorance.’ The only way to rectify this was through embracing Islamic ideals and peoples while repudiating the Christian and Hellenistic roots of Europe. Edward Said, the Palestinian-American professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia, eventually codified these views in his highly influential Orientalism, in which he argued that criticism of Islam or of the Muslim world is either a covert attack on the humanity of Muslims or gross ignorance in need of enlightenment.[2] Simultaneously, Muslim groups exploited this situation to promote Islam by funding Islamic studies programs and cultural venues at universities, who in turn reformed curricula in order not to offend Muslim sentiments. In a short time, scholarship in Islamic studies was overtaken by Islamic missionary and political interests.
Academia is filled with biases and presumptions upon which entire belief systems are constructed. The inhabitants of the West are privileged to have the freedom to examine and criticize ideas and beliefs and respectfully agree to agree or disagree. This concept is anathema to Islam, since in Islam academia exists to propagate orthodox Islamic dogma. In Islamic studies at universities today it has become difficult to disagree with Islam and still maintain one’s credibility, safety, or ability to study in school. Academia has refused to question Islamic teachings, and has thus become a participant in promoting Islamic orthodoxy at the expense of academic integrity. I know this because I am a product of this environment.
In other words, an academic system originally intended to prepare Westerners for projecting political or missionary influence into the Muslim world now serves almost exclusively as a conduit for Muslim influence to infiltrate the West.
In The Hinge of Fate, the fourth volume of Winston Churchill’s incomparable history of the Second World War, Churchill wrote (page 279):
I have often tried to set down the strategic truths I have comprehended in the form of simple anecdotes, and they rank this way in my mind. One of them is the celebrated tale of the man who gave the powder to the bear. He mixed the powder with the greatest care, making sure that not only the ingredients but the proportions were absolutely correct. He rolled it up in a large paper spill, and was about to blow it down the bear’s throat.
But the bear blew first.
Read Mr. Bieszad’s article here.
With a tip of the hat to Norman Geras, here are some amazing photographs of an expedition to the lava lake in Africa’s Nyiragongo Crater.
All over the Middle East and the Maghreb, freedom-loving people are shrugging off the yoke of tyranny. Soon the world will be a far better place, as the entire region emerges from a tenebrous netherworld of medieval despotism into the broad, sunlit uplands of representative government and post-Enlightenment liberal society. Everywhere you look, the yearning for modern, secular democracy shines in the eyes of brave young idealists — as we see, for example, below:
I’ve been reading Here, There, and Everywhere, a memoir by the Beatles’ recording engineer Geoff Emerick, and enjoying it no end. Though Mr. Emerick’s name may not be familiar to the public at large, it’s a very different matter for those of us in the recording studio’s hermetic brotherhood; in our little pantheon, he is Jove.
The other day I had just read his recollections of the recording of Strawberry Fields Forever, when a few hours later I noticed in Science Daily an item about that very song (thanks also to Bob Wyman, who sent me the same link shortly thereafter). It seems that one Jason I. Brown, a Dalhousie University math professor with an abiding interest in Beatles arcana, had spent some time puzzling out the numerical details of a tricky little edit that Emerick and producer George Martin had made to join two takes together at John Lennon’s request, and had written a brief item about it in a mathematical newsletter.
The problem was that the takes were not only recorded at different tempos, but also in different keys. The preferred intro, from Take 7, had been recorded at 85 beats per minute in the key of A, while Take 26, the take to be used for the body of the song, was in the key of B, at 107 BPM.
To match the two takes and make a seamless edit would be trivial nowadays, because digital audio software allows us to alter pitch and tempo independently: we could pick the tempo we liked, and the key, and let Pro Tools do the rest. But this was 1966, and all that Emerick and Martin had to work with was two pieces of tape. Changing the tape speed would affect pitch and tempo together.
To solve the problem, then, they decided to try to split the difference — to speed the intro piece up a bit, and slow the body of the song down a little, making the pitch meet somewhere in between the two original keys. It wasn’t a perfect solution, though, because when the tape-speeds were adjusted so the pitch matched up, the tempos, though closer, were still a bit off. Also, everyone liked the stately tempo at the beginning of Take 7.
What to do? John, who had little understanding of studio technology, was insistent that the beginning had to be Take 7, and the production team didn’t want to disappoint him. Emerick (who was all of about twenty at the time, by the way) spent hours trying to make this edit work, and looking for the right place to make the cut. Finally, he and Martin decided to let Take 7 start at the natural tempo, then gradually (and, they hoped, imperceptibly) speed it up until the edit point they had settled on (which was at the word “going” in the second chorus, about sixty seconds in: “let me take you down, cause I’m / going to...”). The tempos still differed by about 11 beats per minute, though, which made the edit sound a bit jarring — so instead of splicing the tape at the usual 45°, Emerick cut at a much shallower angle, making the join more of what we call a “cross-fade”.
Reading all this in Emerick’s memoir brought back a lot of memories for me. When I was coming up as an engineer back in the Seventies, this was still how we did things, and I spent many an hour splicing little bits of tape together in the same sort of way. (My mentor Tony Bongiovi, the owner of Power Station Studios, was a phenomenal tape-editor — one of the best I ever saw — and he made it very clear that any engineer on his staff should be able to cut tape fast, fearlessly, and musically, as indeed all engineers were expected to do back then.) It’s interesting to read Dr. Brown’s mathematical analysis, which is very accurate and informative, but I can tell you that what happened in that control room at EMI Studios was strictly a seat-of-the-pants operation, relying only on four expert ears and two steady hands.
Back in Gotham, but too pooped to post. Will resume shortly.
The lovely Nina and I will be on the road for a couple of days — off to southern CA to pay my dear old Dad a visit on his 85th birthday. Might be quiet here till we get back, early next week.
Lawrence Auster asks:
“Is some kind of intensification of the world going on? At the very moment that uprisings are proceeding in several Muslim countries simultaneously, uprisings are proceeding in several states of the United States simultaneously.”
Yes, some kind of intensification of the world is going on, and I think we can find an apt metaphor in the laws that relate the volume, temperature, and pressure of a gas in a closed container.
As you reduce the volume of the container, or add more molecules of gas, the average distance between particles decreases, and the energy density of the system increases. Pressure also goes up, because collisions with the walls of the container become more frequent, and because collisions between particles inside the container happen more energetically and more often, the pace of chemical reactions rises as well.
This is exactly what has happened to the world, and very dramatically so, in the last few years. Not only has crowding increased in the world’s crowded places, but far more importantly, the revolution in electronic communications — in particular, the advent of massively interconnected, global social networks that operate with zero latency and with little regard to political boundaries — has decreased the average distance between individual human beings by orders of magnitude in a very short time. In effect, the world has been compressed to a small fraction of its former volume, almost in the blink of an eye — and what we see now is the sudden increase in pressure, temperature, and chemical reactions that the gas laws tell us should happen under such circumstances. And as those reactions happen, they in turn liberate even more energy into the system, creating shock-waves of localized increase in pressure, and raising the overall temperature and energy density.
So yes, a very rapid “intensification” of the world is underway — and we should expect it to continue.
Well, it’s hard to feel cheery tonight, I have to say. Muammar Qaddafi, pausing on his way to martyrdom, is strafing his people, and blowing up oil pipelines. It is becoming clearer every day that the wave of “freedom” sweeping the Arab world is a disaster in the making. Europe watches aghast, bracing itself for a tide of human flotsam. Nuclear-armed Pakistan edges closer to ignition. Iran send its navy into the Mediterranean. World fisheries are in freefall. Christchurch, New Zealand, lies in ruins.
Here at home, the nation is cracking apart at the seams. Public-sector labor unions, having managed finally to kill the golden goose, march in open revolt against the taxpayers, while the legislators they own flee their state capitals rather than allow the will of the people to be done. With oil prices racing north as a result of chaos in the East, gasoline prices are rising fast, and economic markets are plummeting. Meteorologists predict record floods throughout the nation’s heartland, and the gigantic magma chamber under Yellowstone is expanding.
And right here in Gotham: smoking banned outdoors, and an epidemic of sidewalk rage.
Well, they say that all a person needs is something to believe in. I believe I’ll fix myself a drink.
If you haven’t heard, the University of Arizona will announce on Monday the establishment of a new alma mater, to be called the Institute for Civil Discourse. The effort to institutionalize its important new curriculum — which will target militaristic metaphors, contumacious dissent-mongering, and other unseemly manifestations of political faction — was triggered by the recent tragedy in Tucson, in which intemperate articulation of right-wing opinions led directly to violent mayhem. The Institute’s frontal assault on indelicacy of expression will be spearheaded by former presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, who seem determined to take no prisoners when it comes to winning the war against petulance in politics.
It’s going to be an uphill battle, according to Institute founder Fred DuVal, vice-chairman of the Arizona Board of Regents:
“How do we nurture robustness on one hand and not in any way chill speech, and keep it in bounds that are not destructive to democracy?’ he said. “Will it change the nature of dialogue? That will be a tall order.’
Indeed.
Anyway, I’m awfully relieved to hear that the University of Arizona is leading the charge here. After all, it’s a cinch that the I.C.D. won’t accomplish a blessed thing (other than to plague us all, starting a few years hence, with its graduates). Meanwhile, I’d been pretty sure something big was in the works, and figured we’d likely be getting a whole new Cabinet department; to have a new college instead seems just fine.
In fact, the more I think about it, the more I like it; this is going to be great. I wonder what they’ll call the football team!
Story here.
We’re back from our little retreat. Over the transom while we were en route:
First, a tireless and Argus-eyed reader has noticed an item at Iran’s Press TV website reporting that Muammar Qaddafi (or however we’re supposed to spell that moniker of his; I never seem to see it the same way twice) has left Libya. Biggish news if true. Here.
Also, a correspondent has sent along a link to an in-depth item over at Half Sigma about why programming is a lousy career. Not being one of those anonymous bloggers, it might be imprudent for me to comment from a personal perspective, so I’ll just suggest that you read it here.
I’ve been “offline” for a couple of days — avoiding the computer and the news media — but plenty has been happening.
If you’ve been waiting for the Muslim Brotherhood to extend its hand in Egypt, wait no longer. The Ikwhan’s éminence grise and foremost theoretician Yusuf Qaradawi — the one who explained to the ummah that Hitler was simply one of the many agents sent periodically by Allah to punish the Jews, and who urges Muslims to reconquer Jerusalem and finish the job — addressed an enormous rally in Cairo yesterday.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the similarities between various ideas in the physical sciences and the processes that drive global social change (there are many), and in that context a simple metaphor for what’s happening in Egypt comes to mind. It’s hardly an important insight, but I never metaphor I didn’t like, so here it is anyway.
Are you familiar with “supercooling”? It happens when a liquid drops below the conditions of temperature and pressure at which it would normally freeze, but doesn’t. This can happen when there are no particles in suspension around which crystals can begin to form. Highly purified water can be held in a supercooled state at temperatures far below 0° C. When a “seed”, like a grain of sand, is dropped in, the water solidifies around it at once.
Egypt has been in a similar condition for the past week or two, caused by the sudden release of pressure, and subsequent expansion of political freedom, brought about by the toppling of the Mubarak regime. It’s been just like a supercooled liquid, looking for a seed upon which to crystallize. When one appears, the phase transition can happen in a twinkling.
Meanwhile, the plates are slipping, and the fault-lines rupturing, here at home as well, as we see in Wisconsin. There is rage this week in Madison — where, as elsewhere, disruptive change is necessary and inevitable. John Derbyshire made an important point about it all in last night’s podcast (transcript here):
I won’t play down the degree to which these unionized public-sector workers have been parasitic on the national economy. I mentioned Scott Walker raising state employees’ health-care contributions to 12 percent and their pension contributions to 5.6 percent. Who pays for the other 88 percent on health care? Who pays for the other 94.4 percent on pensions? Why, the taxpayers of Wisconsin, of course. That’s the kind of distortion, the kind of injustice, that public-sector unionization has brought us. It’s wrong and it needs fixing.
We’ll be seeing a lot more of these kinds of battles, and the public sector will have to lose them, if the dollar is to retain any value at all. So there’s a certain glee, a certain anticipatory triumphalism among conservatives here. The public-sector unions are, after all, the backbone of the Democratic Party.
Let’s please remember, though, while we’re exulting, that these are our fellow citizens here. The root cause of the problem is a systemic one that we have to fix, and I hope we do fix it. A patriot should always be troubled by large-scale civil dissension, though. America has enemies enough in the world, without us exhausting ourselves battling each other.
Let’s fix the problem; let’s get the public sector into some kind of reasonable alignment with the private sector on benefits. When it comes to vituperation against our fellow citizens, though, let’s keep a sense of proportion. Someone has to teach the kids and collect the garbage. These sweetheart deals arose from faults in our political arrangements. I want the faults fixed, but I don’t blame anyone for taking the deals.
We’re going to win these fights, listeners, and the public-sector unions, and the Democratic Party they nourish, are going to be humbled and brought low. Let’s just keep in mind the American tradition of magnanimity in victory. These are our neighbors, our friends, sometimes our family members; and we’re all Americans.
Well, enough for now. Time to switch this thing off again for another day or two.
After a very busy spell we’re traveling tonight, and things might be quiet here for a couple of days (though you never know). But for now, here’s a gruesome item about the Tunisian uprising, with an odd twist: a mysterious blonde sniper.
How one thing leads to another! With my glory days as a globe-trotting big-shot recording engineer behind me (for now at least), I earn my daily crust in a small cubicle in midtown Manhattan, writing C++ code for a medium-sized global corporation. It is now 9:15 P.M., and as is so often the case, I am still here in the office (whence all but I have fled), trying to get some software to work.
Earlier today someone mentioned Donald Knuth, the great programming pioneer and all-round Renaissance man, and as I sat at my computer just now waiting for my compiler to do its work, I looked him up on Wikipedia to see what it had to say about him. I discovered that among his many distinguished achievements, he had even written an article for MAD magazine back in 1957, on the “Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures” (which, as I also found out, is an available system of units in Google Calculator).
All this led me in turn to Wikipedia’s List of unusual units of measurement and List of humorous units of measurement, where I learned about such useful quantities as the beard-second, the attoparsec, the microfortnight, and my favorite of the lot, the Sheppey, which is “A measure of distance equal to about 7â„8 of a mile (1.4 km), defined as the closest distance at which sheep remain picturesque.”
Hey, the compiler’s done, and no errors! Gotta run. Back in a few millifriedmans.
We’ve heard a lot for quite a while now about America’s stubborn Achievement Gaps. The stubbornest and most notorious of these is the gap between the races in primary-school education (as mentioned again in yesterday’s Times, where it is fully explained), but another lingering blot on our escutcheon has been the scandalous underrepresentation of women in the sciences.
It is thoughtcrime to imagine that the Science Gap could have anything to do with actual differences between men and women, and therefore it must be the result of sexual discrimination. We know, after all, that except for the various and admirable ways in which females are superior to males, women and men are otherwise exactly alike in all respects. (That’s why it’s so difficult to tell men and women apart, why they enjoy all the same things, etc.)
Lawrence Summers learned a lesson some years ago about the wages of crimethink when to a mixed audience he suggested, with concentric and obsequious disclaimers, that it might be interesting just to ask whether it mightn’t be the case that human intelligence is distributed such that females are on average more clustered around the middle of the scale, with more males way out at the high and low extremes — meaning that at the far right end, where elite scientists come from, there’d be a larger pool of males to draw on. (He hated even to mention it, of course, but it was just that, well, as it happens there had been these studies, you see…)
For his trouble, Summers was hounded out of the presidency of Harvard, and was lucky to get away with his hide intact. And rightly so: as all goodthinkful people know, the persistence of the Science Gap shows that even in 21st-century America, an oppressive andrarchy still holds women in chains. Fortunately, we know also that things can be put right with adjustments to the power structure and forcible re-education of the misguided, if we will but brace ourselves to the task. Onward to a brighter future!
Well, not so fast. A new paper, published by Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams of Cornell in the eminent journal Nature, makes the astonishing claim that the Science Gap may in fact largely be due — are you sitting down? — to differences between the sexes.
Christina Hoff Sommers has a recap here, and you can read the original paper here.
Well, I realize that I’m probably the only person outside of Pyongyang who didn’t already know about this website, but my son just introduced me to the Perry Bible Fellowship. My first click of the ‘Random’ link brought me to this, and I was stuck for the next hour or so.
I wonder how many of you this happens to: I see a headline like “Clinton To Announce New Special Envoy To Afghanistan And Pakistan“, and the Clinton that comes to mind is that taller one, the one who doesn’t really even have a job any more.
I have a feeling that doesn’t just happen to me. I’ll bet Madame Secretary knows it too. It must bug the hell out of her.
The website spaceweather.com has been offering some amazing solar images lately. Here’s a good one: a video clip of a gigantic plasma ejection.
From Stephen Fry, by way of David Duff:
A girl goes into a bar and asks for an example of double entendre, so the barman gives her one.
The latest from STRATFOR:
Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman delivered the following statement Feb. 11: “In the name of God the merciful, the compassionate, citizens, during these very difficult circumstances Egypt is going through, President Hosni Mubarak has decided to step down from the office of president of the republic and has charged the high council of the armed forces to administer the affairs of the country. May God help everybody.’
Suleiman’s statement is the clearest indication thus far that the military has carried out a coup led by Defense Minister Field Marshal Mohammed Hussein Tantawi. It is not clear whether Suleiman will remain as the civilian head of the army-led government. Egypt is returning to the 1952 model of ruling the state via a council of army officers. The question now is to what extent the military elite will share power with its civilian counterparts.
At a certain point, the opposition’s euphoria will subside and demands for elections will be voiced. The United States, while supportive of the military containing the unrest, also has a strategic need to see Egypt move toward a more pluralistic system.
Whether the military stays true to its commitment to hold elections on schedule in September remains to be seen. If elections are held, however, the military must have a political vehicle in place to counter opposition forces, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood. The fate of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) thus lies in question. Without the NDP, the regime will have effectively collapsed and the military could run into greater difficulty in running the country. While the military council will be serving as the provisional government, it will likely want to retain as much of the ruling NDP as possible and incorporate elements of the opposition to manage the transition. Sustaining its hold over power while crafting a democratic government will be the biggest challenge for the military as it tries to avoid regime change while also dealing with a potential constitutional crisis.
Barry Rubin weighs in here, with customary acuity.
“Hosni, old boy, it’s time you made your farewell address to the Egyptian people.”
“Why? Where are they going?”
As you’ve probably heard by now, our second-term upstate Congressman, Republican Christopher Lee of New York’s western 6th District, has resigned after having been exposed, quite literally, by a woman to whom he had sent a half-naked picture of himself by way of Craigslist. (Mr. Lee is married, with a young child.)
Booth Tarkington said “There are two things that will be believed of any man whatsoever, and one of them is that he has taken to drink.’
I’m swamped again at work, with no time to write. So for this evening, just a provocative little tid-bit.
I had coffee very briefly today with my friend Salim Ismail, a remarkable fellow who was most recently the director of the Singularity University. I don’t get to see Salim very often, because he is always either hard at work out in California, or jetting around the world explaining the future to international conferences and heads of state. But we always try to have lunch or dinner or coffee whenever he’s in town, and I always find that even a brief chat with him is enormously stimulating. He’s a human dynamo, and he’s always up to something interesting.
Today our conversation revolved around the fascinating topic of consciousness research. By way of introducing the subject, Salim produced a curious little gadget, about the size of a smartphone, that turned out to be a quantum-mechanical random-event generator, developed by Princeton University’s “Engineering Anomalies Research” laboratory, and manufactured by a company called Psyleron — upon which he has cast an interested eye.
Have a look here.
In the comment thread of our previous post, we’ve been looking at Sam Harris’s claim that there can be a prescriptive natural science of human morality, one that uncovers objective normative truths. This would rebut, it seems, the idea that there are no “oughts” in nature.
People do want there to be absolute moral truths, and many people feel that there can’t be any such truths in the absence of God. Without an absolute authority to appeal to, moral disagreements cannot be resolved, the center will not hold, and society will disintegrate in relativism and nihilism. Plenty of folks will tell you that this is already happening.
But grounding moral truth in divine command — the whim of God — has its problems too. What if God commanded us tomorrow to fry our children in hot oil? We would mutiny in moral revulsion. It seems, then that there is some deeper moral truth to which we expect God to adhere, and with which we would still comply even if He didn’t. So why not cut out the middleman?
What, though, can moral “truth” be under a Godless, naturalistic worldview? Answering this question has has been one of the most pressing challenges for our current crop of atheist intellectuals, many of whom are scientists and philosophers working in the relevant fields of biology, evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience. It’s pressing because before they can wean our civilization away from religion, as they would like to do, they need to come up with a new story about the foundations of morality. People still want their moral truth.
There are at least a couple of ways it can go. One way is to say that yes, there are moral facts, and they are simply “there”, existing alongside other Platonic abstracta like mathematical truths. It is a mathematical fact that any angle inscribed in a semicircle is a right angle; in the same way, it is simply a moral fact that torturing children is evil.
The problem with this (even if we accept the actual existence of Platonic abstracta, which I’m reluctant to do) is that we have objective ways of verifying mathematical facts: if you deny that any angle inscribed in a semicircle is a right angle, I can offer a simple proof. (I can also suggest that you just go out and start inscribing; you’ll soon see that you always get a right angle.)
But we have nothing like that for moral truths. If you and I disagree, say, about whether bestiality is morally wrong, it seems there’s no authority to which we can appeal the matter, other than social convention, religious dogma, and the subjective moral intuitions of our own consciences.
The angle that folks like Sam Harris and Steven Pinker are working these days is to claim that there actually is a naturalistic foundation upon which moral truths can rest. It is nothing more or less than the “fact of the matter” about which codes of behavior best enable intelligent social primates like us to live together successfully in thriving and happy groups. In other words, there are accessible natural facts about which moral systems maximize our fitness.
But wait — is that it? We want bedrock moral truth here, not just what happens to optimize our Darwinian outcomes.
Well, how deep do we really need to drill? Let’s say that reciprocal altruism is such a powerful fitness-maximizer that any intelligent, social life-form will either hit on it and thrive, or miss it and dwindle into misery and extinction. In other words, it is a basic fact of the Universe that a moral system based on reciprocal altruism is the optimal, most fruitful strategy for generating successful and well-functioning social groups.
“That’s all well and good,” the absolutist might say, “but all this is awfully contingent. What if it maximized our fitness to pick a child at random once a week, roast him over a slow fire, and eat him? Then we’d see that as an obvious moral ‘truth’.”
“But you see,” comes the reply, “it seems that the world is so constituted that doing what you suggest doesn’t maximize our fitness. Instead, it turns out that there are other things that clearly do — things like the Golden Rule — and with careful study we can learn what they are, with enough certainty that we can say with confidence that any society that does roast and eat its children is making a factual moral error.”
“Well”, says the absolutist, “that may be, but even so you still haven’t got me an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. Why should some brute fact about the superior Darwinian fitness of altruistic groups mean that we ‘ought’ to be altruistic? Even if we do develop a metrical science of human well-being, and learn very clearly what types of behavior increase and diminish it, all we’ve done is establish some facts about social animals. But there is still nothing in Nature that makes it a moral fact that we ought to encourage behavior that will maximize human well-being; that is still just a subjective valuation on our part.”
To which our Sam Harris might answer:
“So what? If you can know with certainty that one direction leads to a maximally miserable world, and the other to a maximally happy one, what deeper moral ‘truth’ do you need? Your insistence on supernatural bedrock is nothing more than an intellectual fetish, of no practical value. Why should anyone care about that?”
So there it is, if I understand it all correctly: there are natural moral facts, because there are optimal strategies for maximizing well-being — strategies that are optimal for any intelligent social creature. And this is different from simply positing moral facts as Platonic objects, because we can actually use the tools of natural science to discover what these optimal moral systems are.
Are you convinced? I’m not — but I will say it is certainly an interesting argument, and not without its merits. And again, to be fair, I haven’t even read Sam Harris’s book yet, so I should be careful about putting words in his mouth. I do think I get the gist of it, though; these ideas have been in the air for a while now (I even had a chance to discuss them briefly with Steven Pinker up in Wellfleet a couple of summers ago, after a talk he gave for our local library, and what he said then was pretty much what Sam Harris appears to be saying here).
There are a lot more questions to ask, and soft spots to poke at, but it’s late now; they can wait for another post.
A while back I noted that Sam Harris has a new book out (The Moral Landscape), in which he argues that it is possible to develop an objective, entirely naturalistic science of human morality that would be not just descriptive, but prescriptive as well. From a philosophical perspective this is a hugely audacious assertion, because it says, contra just about everyone, that you can in fact derive an “ought” from an “is”: that even in a Godless world there are objective moral facts.
I still haven’t read his book, but I’ve been awfully skeptical that Harris can pull this thousand-pound rabbit out of the hat. Many have tried, and all have failed, and I have no doubt that most philosophers will greet this latest attempt as just another perpetual-motion machine. Reason tells us the thing can’t be done; any stack of “oughts” must ultimately bottom out on some subjective valuation, or on the whim of God — take your choice.
Nevertheless, it looks as if Dr. Harris is really serious about this, and in a long response to the book’s many harsh critics, he has mounted a spirited defense. His point is that there are various “facts of the matter” about human well-being, and that it is within our grasp to develop a moral code that tends to increase, rather than decrease, that well-being. (Utilitarianism, in other words, harnessed to a forthcoming metrical science of human happiness.) He argues that the vicious philosophical regress of “oughts” can be foreclosed by simple common sense; it’s just obvious that we “ought” to favor a moral framework that moves the world in the direction of decreasing human misery.
I probably shouldn’t say much more about it until I’ve read the book.
Among the linked items in Harris’s response is a televised “debate” on the question “Does God Have a Future?” Brandishing the pikestaffs of rational naturalism are doughty Sam Harris and Michael Shermer; arrayed against them are the grotesque New Age flim-flam man Deepak Chopra (who reminds me more and more, as time goes by, of Liberace) and a spectacular hot-air balloon by the name of Jean Houston, awareness of whose existence I had been spared till now. (Serious intellectual theism, sad to say, went entirely unrepresented.)
Have a look here, and watch words lose all meaning.
While I was in our local upscale grocery-market today, an amazing little vegetable caught my eye. It was something called “Romanesco” broccoli (Brassica romanesco, as it turns out), and it is one of the most beautiful natural fractals I’ve ever seen. Smitten, I bought one, and when I got it home I snapped a couple of pictures of it with my cell-phone. Here it is:
There are lots of better photos online, for example here and here — and here’s a computer-generated version.
I’d never seen this before. Have you?
What’s your favorite color? Mine are the darker blues and greens; best of all are the deep and aqueous tones in between.
The blues and greens are horizontal, and patient, and extended in time, like the sea and the sky and forest; the reds and yellows and oranges are vertical, and call us to the present moment — like fire, and blood, and flowers, and ripe fruits.
I’m chastened; things are worse than I thought. It seems Paul Krugman, Sherrif Dupnik, et al. were right after all: there really is a lot of racist, violent, over-the-top, “eliminationist” rhetoric out there. At a political rally deep in the Southwest, a cameraman has captured on video chilling footage of this vitriolic, inflammatory hate-speech: people so enraged by a black man wielding enormous power that they want not only to impeach him, but also — in a frightening echo of our nation’s darkest era — to “string him up”.
I’m sure this will be all over the papers, and that the editorial board of the Times will be outraged. Frankly, this time I can’t blame them. Have a look here.
Amongst all the turmoil in the Mideast, some good news: Lars Hedegaard has been acquitted — on a technicality, but we’ll take it. He published this statement at the website of the International Free Press Society:
As my ancient forefathers, the Vikings, would have said: It is always good to fight. It is better to win.
My detractors ”“ the foes of free speech and the enablers of an Islamic ascendancy in the West ”“ will claim that I was acquitted on a technicality, namely that the judge in the Court of Frederiksberg resolved that my supposedly offensive comments on the violations against little Muslim girls were not intended for public dissemination.
That is absolutely true. The judge chose the way out provided by my capable counsel. However, the public prosecutor has been privy to the circumstances surrounding my case for a year ”“ and yet he chose to prosecute me. Obviously in the hope that he could secure a conviction given the Islamophile sentiment among our ruling classes.
My acquittal is therefore a major victory for free speech.
have no doubt that the massive support I have received from freedom fighters around the world has been instrumental in securing my acquittal.
This outcome will encourage people all over the West and beyond to speak up.
The battle for freedom is far from lost.
Courage!
Everlasting shame to the Western media who ignored this story.
Prominently featured at the IFPS page is this fine rant by Pat Condell, in which he reminds us that:
…without the right to speak your mind, all other rights are worthless. Free speech is … as intrinsic and essential a part of our identity as the Koran is for Muslims — and nobody has the right to restrict it or to modify it, regardless of who claims to be offended.
Oh my. Here’s the Tera Patrick of fiscal conservatism, steaming up the lens again. Republicans concerned about the Presidential field will want to watch this in private.
Allan Sherman, Dean Martin, and Vic Damone. A previous age of the world.
A hat tip to Lawrence Auster for bringing to our attention an excellent article by Caroline Glick on the strange-bedfellow convergence of rose-bespectacled, democracy-exporting conservatives and West-loathing, Howard-Zinn-style leftists in cheering on the uprising in Egypt.
Both viewpoints, argues Ms. Glick, are animated by narcissism about the West, though of very different kinds: the democracy-evangelists imagine that the abstract values of Western liberal societies (and in particular, this one) are so universal that in any nation given sufficient exposure to them, the light of sweet Jeffersonian liberty will begin to glow as soon as the fetters of tyranny are struck off. The anti-imperialist left, on the other hand, believes that Western civilization, though utterly vile, is nevertheless the engine of all human destiny: that the oppressed peoples of the world, in their helpless and dusky multitudes, are not accountable agents, bearing any measure of responsibility for their fate, but mere objects, upon which the Western devil exerts his will, for good or ill (almost exclusively, of course, for ill).
Meanwhile, the realistic prospects for a West-friendly, secular democracy in the region fall, as an English record producer I used to work with might have put it, “somewhere between nil and fuck-all”. Ms. Glick, reminding us that “the character of the protesters is not liberal”, refers us to a recent poll:
According to a Pew opinion survey of Egyptians from June 2010, 59 percent said they back Islamists. Only 27% said they back modernizers. Half of Egyptians support Hamas. Thirty percent support Hizbullah and 20% support al Qaida. Moreover, 95% of them would welcome Islamic influence over their politics. When this preference is translated into actual government policy, it is clear that the Islam they support is the al Qaida Salafist version.
Eighty two percent of Egyptians support executing adulterers by stoning, 77% support whipping and cutting the hands off thieves. 84% support executing any Muslim who changes his religion.
Read the whole thing here.
Now King Abdullah of Jordan, stalling for time while he makes his arrangements, has dismissed his cabinet.
Meanwhile, in Egypt, Mubarak no longer has the support of the Egyptian Army, and is presumably wrapping up the last of his official duties: emptying the vaults of the national treasury into a waiting aircraft.
