Rainy Monday

Left the house this morning, sky was gray - hey, that sounds like the beginning of a song. But it's merely the truth. And I hopped unthinkingly on Swiftcurrent, barely feeling the first few scattered pinpoints of rain. And, you guessed it, by the time I got out on Apalachee Parkway the rain was driving down. Now I had thought I would take the truck when it rained. I gassed it up yesterday - almost fifty dollars' worth! - for such an eventuality. But I didn't turn Swifty around and put her back in the garage where she'd been sleeping or in a trance or something all weekend, absorbing electrons and dreaming about flying through a lightning storm. That would have been cruel. The little scooter handled the rain just fine. I got wet, but so what? I was dry by the time I had my first cup of coffee made. Now I just have to remember to bring a paper towel out when I go home, to make sure the seat's dry. I should get her a cover. And myself should get me a rain slicker. The all-weather electric motor scooterman! But I also don't want too much paraphernalia. Especially when I recall that the word "paraphernalia" means the gear and gadgets that a bride brought to her new home, which, as I remember, were to be hers alone and separate from her other property, which automatically became her husband's. Ah, the good old days! Of course the sneaky new brides, no doubt at their mothers' promptings, tried to get as much as possible included in paraphernalia. The unwary new husband had to be careful. In those days, love had better not be blind or you'd miss a few valuable objects that could be reposing in your strongbox instead of being concealed beneath piles of underclothes and hats.

Now here's something Swifty could use. I wish I could bring her inside and charge her up. And what I wouldn't give for a lithium-ion battery pack! Not that I really need it, but in a few years when the present set of lead-acids is clapped out, it would be cool to double the range and, perhaps, speed up the recharge process. Until then, I'll just keep it for commuting. And flying through lightning storms.

Go far, go fast

Swiftcurrent has two modes: "go far" and "go fast". I had to do a little shopping at WalMart, so afterwards, I decided to head out Apalachee Parkway and see what the little gremlin could do. I streaked out four miles or so, in "far" mode, until I started to get nervous about whether I could get back or not. I got to the Capital City Baptist Church, about a half-mile before the dump. Then I turned around and investigated a little side road, looking for likely residential properties. Back on Apalachee, where cars were whizzing along at 65+, I decided, what the heck, I'd try "fast" mode. The worst that could happen was that I'd have to walk the bike a few miles home. Boy, what a difference! I felt like I was flying, but I could feel the juice draining out of the batteries. I made it fine back to Capital Circle, though, in record time. It must have been seventy degrees, but I was chilled by the breeze. Beautiful day.

Free Baja!

So I bought some Skyy vodka to make vodka gimlets with. This was after, and related to the fact that I read the story of the silly ad for Absolut vodka that implied that the Southwest should still be part of Mexico. I went on and read the Wikipedia article about the Gadsden purchase. I did not know that the Mexicans had signed over much larger portions of what is now Mexico to the US but their cession was refused - not ratified - by the US Senate because they were afraid that the territory would come into the Union as slave states. So, if history had worked out differently, the US would have had Baja California! And Sonora and Coahuila and Nuevo Leon and who knows what all!! So all that area is US territory illegally occupied by Mexico. In commemoration of the expropriation of US territory by Mexico, I propose we set aside December 30, the day in 1853 when General Santa Ana of Mexico and James Gadsden signed the cession of enormous areas of what is now Northern Mexico to the US. We all need to move to northern Mexico and work for the liberation. Free Baja!

Trunk

Silvercurrent got a nice little trunk today at the scooter dealership. Now I can stow my helmet when I go in a shop or to work. And I can put a modest amount of groceries away. So I don't have to wear a knapsack to go shopping any more. Swifty just became more capable and convenient. I love it that the gas needle on my truck hasn't budged for two weeks. That's real savings. And the truck will last longer and always be there when I need it. I am looking into the situation with the battery, since the scooter guy told me the battery had a memory, so I should always drain it as far as possible before I recharge it. Yet in the Users' Manual it says there is no memory and you can recharge it as often as you like. It would indeed be less convenient if you had to drain it down completely, because there's no sure way to tell just when it's going to run out, like those old VW bugs. My commute probably doesn't even take half of the charge it gets overnight, but I have never yet run completely out of charge (and I don't particularly want to) so I don't really know. It's not like you can roll it into a gas station and refill, unless you have the charger cord with you and can convince the gas station guys to let you charge up enough to get home. If this thing takes off, will there be a market for padlocks for outdoor electric plugs?

Lunch with Swifty

Power went out at the building where I work today. So what could one do when one needs a computer to do almost anything? I went for a quick ride on Swifty, scoping out a better, less annoying route to the mall. She performed great. I needed to go to Sears to get a garage door opener remote control. I knew the choices would overwhelm me, but I just had to get an idea of what I needed to know to get the right one. That would be so cool, to buzz up to the garage on Swifty and have the door open automatically! Big thrill, but cool nonetheless.
I'm learning to ride the machine much more skilfully and I'm more familiar with the best routes. I noticed right away that I have a little trouble controlling the bike's path when I'm speeding up to merge into a street and when I'm slowing way down to check out an intersection to see if I can go across without stopping. Can't wait for the weekend for a free-form ride, so I can go wherever Swifty takes me.

Frosty Swifty!

So I took a couple of days off, one of which happened to be record-breaking cold in the morning - 34 degrees yesterday. In April, in Tallahassee, Florida! And today I woke up and turned on the web and it was 37, so I'm thinking, no way, the truck will be nice and warm. But then I thought, hey, summer's coming, I'll have six months of sweaty weather, better take my frostbite when I can get it. So I got it, all right. Oh, not actual frostbite, I guess, but goldurn was it cold. And not only my hands were cold, so was my body even though I was wearing a wool peacoat. Swifty did seem glad to be back on the road, though. She performed well through the mall, although one clueless morning coffee-ed up phone-user almost went through a stop sign right into us. Nobody's expecting an (almost) sixty-year old electric scooter driver in the mall at quarter past seven.
Which reminds me, I went into World Market to buy some wasabi peas and wine. They asked me for my ID! This has happened before, but not lately. So I got quite grumpy, especially when the salesgirl mentioned something about them wanting to be "non-discriminatory". Talk about pushing my buttons! So I said, "There's nothing wrong with discriminating between logic and nonsense!" Harrumph! Why do stores do that? It's like the airport security searching soldiers' shoes and grannies' sewing baskets. Not only is it a waste of time, it's an insult. Now that I think of it, the wine at World Market isn't any better than anywhere else. So next time I'll just buy the wasabi peas. Those I can't live without.

Swiftcurrent betrayed?!

OK, so I took the truck to work today. Big deal. It was cold - really cold. It was 52 degrees at noon, it might break the record of 36 tonight. So a nice warm truck was a lot more appealing after my second cup of coffee than a too-invigorating zoom on my favorite electric bike. I'm sorry, Swifty, nobody ever said you were the perfect vehicle for every situation. I don't have any gloves and my hands got quite cold yesterday. In New Hampshire you'd only be usable two months a year. And Tallahassee stays quite cold even after equinox. I can tell you're mad, but look at it as just a little rest, eh? Now Canada, there you'd be useless! HA! Oops, I didn't mean that, I apologize, OK, don't look at me that way. (just what I need, an oversensitive electro-bike. Well, she's new. She'll grow out of it.)

Swifty brings home the bacon - and more

Up early today and out to the supermarket on a somewhat hung-over Swifty. Misery loves company. Walking through the aisles, I warmed up from the more-than-a-little-breezy ride. I kept seeing things I "needed" and forgot that I would have to put everything in my backpack. No matter. Bacon, shrimp, hamburgers, bottles of soda, sausages - can you guess I'm on Atkins? But I was a bit dubious after stuffing everything in my Rick Steeves knapsack, which had survived Istanbul, Plovdiv and Sofia. Would a groggy Swiftcurrent carry me up the daunting hills between Publix and home with forty pounds of provisions? Not to worry. She (hmm - have I decided the bike is female? Interesting) zipped right along and I could sense the enjoyment in her heart as we swooped down Morningside, a very steep hilly street nearly covered in trees. Excellent job, my dear.

Not yet there aren't

The above was my reaction to this news story about unusual seismic activity off the coast of Oregon. I was especially taken by the following statement by heavily credentialed geophysicist Robert Dziak:

"It looks like what happens before a volcanic eruption, except there are no volcanoes in the area," Dziak said.

I was paying attention because the kids and I are planning to head out to Montana in June. It would be too bad if a new volcano chose to make its presence known just at that time. I shouldn't worry. We'll stay on the other side of the Rockies from the critical area. If it's big enough to get us there, we're all for it, anyway. You think global warming is bad? Try dealing with a couple of decades of volcanic ash-induced global freezing!

In the spirit of always looking for the good in fearsome events, we may be able to get in an early bid on some nice new oceanfront property in Idaho.

Swiftcurrent survives!

Yes, the strong and the brave and the wise survive. Even after a few brandy-sodas. And so as the sun went slowly down Swiftcurrent V. (for voltage) Electrobike (Swifty for short) brought his master home from the fancy totally jam-packed French restaurant halfway across town. Oh, yeah, the voltage bars were flickering on the last mile or so but there was no need to worry. Even after commuting three miles each way in heavy traffic to work another four or more miles each way was no problem. The e-go bike has a plentiful supply of reserve power, just like those old VW's with no gas gauge. I was flying down Apalachee Parkway. Of course it had been a tad nerve-rattling. There I was with Bill and my old friend Joe Albright and some new friends Cesar and Gigi talking about Cadillacs and Sofia. And all the time I was thinking, hmm, I wonder if Swifty has enough juice to get me back home with the light on. So I left early like a doofus, before it started to get really dark so I didn't have to use the headlight. I am getting better at using the mirrors, though. And I only had one little incident where I forgot to let off the throttle and jammed the bike into the kerb (Brit. spelling). I learned a lot.

Swiftcurrent goes out and gets drunk?

So here's the first big test for Swifty. My friend Bill is going to this fancy French restaurant tonight - Chez Pierre's - not to eat snails, but to drink. So he wondered if I would like to come along. The truck's still hors de combat, so it's going to be Swifty or nothing. After an exhausting day carrying me to work and back, with no time to recharge, will Swifty still be able to get me to Thomasville Road and back? In the dark? Somehow I think I'm going to give it a try. It's so crazy, it just might work. And it would prove that an e-go bike is a practical vehicle for more than just commuting.

First electro-week

So I've completed my first five mornings of riding to work on Swiftcurrent. It has become routine to find ways around traffic, zipping in and out of parking lots and side roads and parking right at the door nearest my office. Swifty is still banned from the building. I'm thinking of protesting but may not bother. This morning I nearly forgot my helmet, which I don't legally need anyway, but I decided to go get it. Then I did forget my knapsack, which wasn't a real problem. I was definitely cold in short sleeves this AM. Monday I had better wear a jacket, since it's supposed to be in the thirties, which may break a cold record.

Overall I am very pleased with my first commuting week. It's getting a little boring but I am relaxing into the process of riding, even having fun with it. I love the surge of power when I take off from a stand. It always surprises me. And sometimes going uphill I'll call for more power and it will be there, which is a pleasant surprise. I've had many waves and comments and questions, making me feel like a pioneer and daring individualist. All I really am is a bureaucrat looking for a cheap and fun way to go to work.

So many different roads home

On my fourth day of electro-commuting, I'm realizing that there may be easier ways to get to work than the main highway I have used for five years with my pickup truck. So each time I'm trying a different way, like The Who and their magic bus, except this isn't magic, it's electric. I'm finding that I can get to work by about a dozen routes using mainly quiet residential streets, just crossing busy streets. The trip may take a little longer than blasting down Apalachee Parkway with all the other traffic, but it's a lot easier on the nerves, and maybe better for the bike, too. I can wave to joggers and mothers with baby carriages and check out all the "for sale" signs, since I'm kinda sorta looking for a good house.

A tactical matter: Am I right not to stop at all the stop signs I come to? I find myself coasting into intersections with four way stops, checking quickly for other cars and then blasting on through without fully stopping if the way seems clear. Seems safe enough to me. My gout-medication wooziness made me fall over at one busy intersection, but I recovered soon, realizing I had to be more aware. I continue to be surprised at the massive acceleration available in the first few seconds after a stop. Makes life easier when you're worried about holding up traffic.

Ridin' in the rain

Bummer. I came out of Publix with a knapsack full of food and it was raining. So what do I do, cry and call for a taxi? Nah, not with Swiftcurrent right there to get me home safely. Of course, Swifty's seat was wet, but what the heck, I was going to get wet all over anyway. I am becoming a careful, skilled electro-cyclist. I never take anything for granted. I shut off the power switch before walking the bike across a busy road. I find my hand has a tendency to twist the throttle when I'm walking along beside the bike, crossing a street. I've got a big bruise on my shin to prove the hypothesis. So I try to turn the e-bike off whenever I'm not sitting on it.

I survived the rain, obviously. It was pounding into me when I was going fast downhill. But it would have been the same on a bicycle. And worse, since it would have taken longer to get home. I was quite aware of the warnings in the user manual about the slickness of wet streets. The tires did seem to have good traction, though. And I had observed how little attention many auto drivers pay to dorky electro-bikers. But, gee, don't I have a right to the road as much as them? Of course not. Rights don't come out of nowhere. In fact, Nietzsche would opine that they don't exist. Only power exists. But when you're riding a 2-horsepower battery machine, you try not to think of things like that.

Swiftcurrent exiled!

I've been pulling my electrobike Swiftcurrent into my office building during the workday, locking it to a railing near an outlet from which I can recharge it. This morning a maintenance functionary told me that the head maintenance guy noticed it and said that it had to be kept outside. I asked the guy if he knew it was electric. Apparently he thought it was a gas scooter. Now I can see a possible reason for being forced to keep a gas bike outdoors - fumes and explosions and all that. But what possible danger was there from an electrobike? More to the point, how can one convince dubious bureaucrats that an electrically-propelled vehicle poses no risk? It would be reassuring to know Swiftcurrent was inside safe away from prying eyes and close to an outlet in case I needed to recharge it during the day.

Then I looked at the door through which I brought the bike in. It was for cripples, with their wheelchairs. And weren't some of those wheelchairs electrically propelled? Would an electric wheelchair be banned from the building? Somehow I don't think so. How un-PC would that be? So maybe when I talk to the head maintenance guy I can use that argument to get him to let me keep Swiftcurrent inside. Worth a try. Also, maybe I can guilt-trip him with "save the earth" nonsense.

That brings up all the enviro-weenie reasons for wanting to have an electric bike, none of which are my reasons. Global warming is an absurd delusion. Oil companies are not great big meanies pushing everyone around. There will be plenty of hydrocarbons for the foreseeable future. Cars and trucks are not evil, in fact they're some of the best things ever invented. So why do I want an electro-bike? Mostly because I enjoy it more than a car. I had been driving my Mazda pickup truck to work and back, maybe three miles each way. This was costing me almost $50 a month in gas, at the latest $3 plus per gallon price! I am, after all, at least half Scottish. And I guess I like to be different. I've discovered it's also quite a bit cooler on the bike at 20 mph compared to standing in traffic. No a/c needed! That coolness could come in handy this summer. Today I was positively cold riding into work, even though the sun was shining and it was over sixty degrees.

I can do just about everything on my bike that I was doing with my pickup, and I don't have to worry about finding a parking place near to a store I want to go into. Even at the Publix grocery store they have bike racks. And I want my shiny new bike to be protected from wet and hot weather. It would not be cool to get out of work and have to sit on a wet bike seat all the way home. So I think I should be able to keep it inside. We'll see if the powers that be agree.

Swiftcurrent

I bought an "E-go"(!) electric motorcycle at "All about scooters" to go to work on. Is it just a coincidence that I made a reservation at a place in Glacier National Park called "Swiftcurrent"? For that seems to me an ideal name for this contraption. So Swiftcurrent it is. It has fifty-five pounds of lead-acid batteries, which I am sure in a few years will sound awfully obsolete. By then I'll have installed a micro-mini black hole power source. Millions of miles without refueling.
But for now lead-acid it is. It gets up to a pretty good speed, especially right off the mark. I do have to plan my route smartly, avoiding canopy roads and older roads without a bike lane. My morning commute isn't noticeably longer than before. The bike seems rugged enough.

Four types of men

Some men are smart. Some are stupid. Some men are weak, some are tough. I do not use the word "strong" because the toughness I speak of has nothing to do with bodily strength, except in that tough men usually take steps to make sure their bodies are strong to the extent their genes make that possible. A very physically strong man can be mentally and morally weak.

These dimensions of men's characters lead to the following categorization. Four basic groups appear:
Population
A. Weak, stupid men. Most men in the world.

B. Tough, stupid men. Most criminals, most lesser authority figures

C. Weak, smart men. Most academics, bureaucrats, intellectuals

D. Tough, smart men All rulers and true warriors, some criminals.

So you have to be more than smart to be at the top of the heap, in any profession worth pursuing. A high IQ is necessary to dominance, but not sufficient. What I call TQ is as important.

Elephants create marshmallows

To those who say that government creates jobs, I say, sure, in the sense that elephants create marshmallows. So there's this elephant and he has gotten it into his fermented-banana-fried brain that marshmallows are evil. And he finds a factory that makes marshmallows. And, being an elephant, he starts stomping on the factory, driving away the workers, destroying the marshmallow-making equipment. Then, halfway through, he changes his mind and goes looking for something else to stomp on. And a bunch of Kos kids run up to him and bow down, crying and chanting, "Thank you, Mr. Elephant! You have made it possible to create millions of marshmallows! Thank you for not completely destroying the factory!"
So, yes, in that sense government can create jobs.

Do you really care?

What is the main producer of carbon dioxide - the poison that will make the Earth into Mercury by next Tuesday? The hydrocarbon combustion engine, of course, pushed tyrannically and cynically by the oil companies. So in the supermarket one should look around and see what is being transported more by oil and what less and buy the less-transported. Right? One immediate obvious villain is water from the Fiji Islands. People spend megabucks to have water put in bottles ten thousand miles away and shipped all the way to your local market when they have pure water coming out of their faucets at home and water fountains at work and school. How Gaia shrieks! Why are there no pickets with photos of dead baby seals in the bottled water aisle?

Of course, almost all liquids sold as food contain water. Take milk, for instance, which supermarkets pump out in vast quantities in liquid form. The distance it is transported varies, depending on if the supermarket is surrounded by a dairy farm or not. But right there in the spices aisle is another product that contains no water at all. You take it home, put it in a bottle and fill the bottle with water and shake. Voila! Milk! And no water has been transported anywhere except out of your faucet. Think how the polar bears will love you. Juice is another product which offers tremendous carbon reduction value. Buying juice in liquid form should be a crime, because it is a crime against the Earth. How much diesel fuel is pumped into the air to bring bottles of orange juice from the Indian River to you? Even "reconstituted" juice is transported. But the "real, whole, undiluted, pure" juice should, nay, indeed, must be banned immediately lest we turn into glowing red sparks in a desert wasteland. Frozen concentrated juice is not quite so carbon-expensive, but we can do better, if we really care. In the beverage aisle, you will find little packets of fruit flavor, which weigh almost nothing and produce, when mixed with a little sugar and a half-gallon of untransported water, many drinks. And if you haven't tried Kool-Aid lately, I guarantee you will be surprised at the improvement in the flavor. I mean, if you're not willing to make that small sacrifice to take trucks off the road, what credibility is left to you in urging others to stop driving their gas-mobiles?

Fruits and vegetables also waste enormous amounts of transport energy if bought whole and "fresh". Compare the carbon cost of ten or more fresh tomatoes with that of a can of tomato paste, which gives almost the same tomato flavor. Aren't you ashamed of buying real fruits and vegetables? What do you think, you deserve luscious fresh produce and the penguins can just dry up and blow away? I'm sure, if they weren't bribed by the oil companies our chemists could produce a crystalline powder, that, when mixed with your water, would produce tomato paste analog, at an even greater carbon savings.

And that brings up the whole idea of refrigerating or freezing food. What a waste! Think how much electricity is wasted on those foods that have already cost mega-carbon being transported around the world. What is in your fridge that you couldn't get out of a can, anyway? Or reconstitute from a powder? Nothing! You'll just have to buy a cow for fresh milk and have fresh tomatoes once a year for a couple of weeks and real orange juice when you take a (walking, of course) vacation to Florida. You do care, don't you?

Just beginning

This war is just starting to get interesting. Until everyone's against it, there's really no reason to be for it. You'll just be one of a crowd. But now, when everyone's saying it can't possibly work, why that's the time to get into the details and figure out what's going on and what startling results could occur if things don't go as expected. And, of course, they never go as expected. That's why I can't believe these global warming buffoons. They're tying their whole view of the world to their ability to predict - wait for it - the WEATHER!! And not just next week, but a hundred years from now! Who could imagine anything so stupid could gain a mass following? Oh, sure, Spengler, but he must be the Antichrist. Me, I will decline the opportunity to be wrong about the weather. It's too easy.

Did you dance for rain?

So everyone is dancing for rain today, even though it was sprinkling most of the day here in Tallahassee. I didn't bother to dance. But I thought of another metaphor for voting. It's sort of like buying a lottery ticket, and thinking your purchase is going to affect the outcome of the lottery. Or buying a ticket on a horse and thinking you've made a difference in how the horse runs. The difference between voting and buying a lottery ticket is that your chance of winning anything - unless you're actually running for office - is vanishingly small. Hmm. Actually that's also true of buying a lottery ticket. But there at least you've got a hundred-to-one or so chance of getting a free ticket or five bucks. So if voting gets you nothing, why do so many people do it, why do all these idiots insist that everyone has a "duty" to vote?
I guess idiocy loves company. It's like the emperor's new clothes. If anyone admitted the true state of affairs, that, no, an individual vote doesn't do anything except gain you the transitory approbation of your fellows, the system would collapse. Of course further analysis reveals that not only does an individual vote not count for anything, even if it did, it wouldn't matter at all which candidate won in most times, most situations. And buying into the voting myth cements the officeholders in power, the last thing most people really want. But it is a spectacle.

Islamic analysis

Rants and Raves has a sharp and interesting essay on Arabs and tribalism and what he found out by living in Saudi for a year. A sample:

1) They don’t think the same way we do.

No, I mean THEY REALLY DON'T THINK THE SAME WAY WE DO.
***
3) Their values are fundamentally different from ours, their self-esteem is derived from a different source.

And you know what? Theirs is PHONY.

So I just had to comment, based on observing my sister's attitude after living among Muslims for almost ten years now and my own observations from a mere ten days, but an interesting ten days, in Egypt:

Excellent. The amazing thing is that so many Westerners can live among Arabs for years and fail to grasp the obvious facts you lay out.

I gleaned an interesting factoid from Spengler's The Decline of the West: the rise of Islamic civilization was largely traceable to the role of Jews, who were especially important in Moorish Spain. Arabs were as dependent on Jews then as they are on Westerners now. I believe many educated Arabs realize this and know that when they kicked all the Jews out of Arab lands, who then mostly went to Israel, they doomed themselves to social and cultural primitivism. This despair makes a peaceful resolution of the Palestinian problem impossible.

Analogy?

Thinking of the idiocy that is global warming theory, I was reminded of another collectivist delusion. Communists and fascists have long thought that a government can run an economy more efficiently than the free market. All it takes is massive amounts of computing power and the right theory, which they figured was handed to them by Marx or Hitler or Mussolini. How complex could it be? And for decades, seven in the case of Russian Communism, economies were massively screwed up, with hardly enough money produced for military needs. North Korea today is the poster child for the success of central economic planning.
Apparently collectivists cannot let go of their obsession with central planning. After losing on the economy, costing many millions of lives, they've turned their attention to the weather. Just put enough computers together with really smart people and not only can we come up with a theory that will convince people that the earth is in danger, but we can show them how to save the planet by simply turning their economic prosperity over to the weatherman computer geek. Right, the same computer geek who can't tell you within a thousand years when the local volcano is going to erupt next. And the same one who can't tell you within five degrees what the temperature will be five days from now.

Help with smoking

I need some help with my smoking. I never smoked tobacco when I was younger. I'm 58 now and I think it would be appropriate to my dignity to start smoking a pipe. My father smoked one and I have often remarked on the attractive fragrance of pipe tobacco. I bought myself a pipe and some tobacco and tried it out. Twice so far. The second time I felt a bit sick and disoriented. I still want to smoke, though and don't want to fail at this endeavor. I don't seem to be able to get myself to keep at it long enough to make it a habit. Sort of like playing my violin. I wonder if there's some easy way to get started. I aspire to the Sherlock Holmesian state of heightened mental functioning, which he attributed in part to smoking shag tobacco. Maybe I need a deerstalker cap. Hey, and he played the violin, too!

What he said

From the Ayn Rand Institute website (hat tip to Diana Hsieh):

It is often said that we must win the "hearts and minds" of supporters of totalitarian Islam. Indeed we must: their hearts must be made to despair at the futility of their cause, and their minds must be convinced that any threat to our lives and freedom will bring them swift and certain doom.

Amen, brother. Amen.

Discovery

I am impressed by this Adamant guy. I just can't see why he has so few commenters when idiots like Kos and Andrew Sullivan have hundreds. You don't think that's because most people are idiots, do you???

Here's a sample of Adamant:

Al Qaeda cadres and Islamist Kashmiri separatists can readily lose themselves among the flux of refugees in a region famed for discreet hospitality. It cannot have escaped Osama Bin Laden's attention that in the 19th century the Aga Khan spent tranquil years in Hunza while internecine war made him a hunted man elsewhere in the Islamic world.

Lots of stuff you won't see anywhere else.

John Buchan, Greenmantle:

As I follow events, there's a skunk been let loose in the world, and the odour of it is going to make life none too sweet till it is cleared away. It wasn't us that stirred up that skunk, but we've got to take a hand in disinfecting the planet.

Plus ca change, eh? And at that particular time British troops were having a hot time in Basra and the Persian Moslems were stirring up trouble.

As I continue to read Oswald Spengler's "Decline of the West", I get a clearer and clearer picture of just what Islam is and how it works. This is useful in an era when, as related by Victor Davis Hanson at RealClearPolitics:

Islamic fascism is also anti-democratic and characteristically reactionary. It conjures up a past of Islamic influence that existed before the supposed corruption of modernism. Like Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo, who sought to recapture lost mythical Aryan, Roman or samurai purity, so Islamic fascists talk in romantic terms of the ancient caliphate.

many are reluctant to call Islamists "fascists" because, after all, they're just like us. Well, they're not just like us. Their thinking is completely different from that of men reared in the Western tradition. To use concepts borrowed from Julian Jaynes' "The Emergence of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind", the Islamic consciousness does not recognize individuality at all. For instance, for Muslims there is no such concept as the separation of church and state. It isn't considered and rejected. It just isn't imagined. Anyone who mentions it must be mad or evil or both. The words of the Koran (which word itself, Spengler relates, means "reading") are not just a historical account or a series of exhortations. They are the stuff of life, or, as we might perhaps say, the fabric of space/time.

Rate your spam


Certainly spam can be mocked and hated, but why not get a little more analytical about it? There's well-done, technically and artistically proficient spam - that almost, very nearly gets you to open it - and there's terrible, loser spam. I say tackle some of the boredom of wading through sixteen spam messages when you sit down to the computer and rate them on a scale of 1 to 10, or ! to !), if you want to be consistent. I mean, Mrs. Suha Arafat sat there typing for hours to get the information to you that she has six billion dollars that she desperately needs to transfer into your bank account and all you have to do is come up with your numbers. You could at least be grateful and appreciate her grammar, spelling and diction.

It's interesting to consider the art of misspelling spam messages just enough to get past the spam filter but not so grotesquely that the message doesn't get through. There's a PH.D. thesis there for some semiologist or semioticist or linguistician of some stripe. I mean, who would have thought years ago that everyone in the world who spoke English would have known immediately what the string "e*&^$#e your p(*@!s!" meant? It could mean "enrage your pyjamas" if it had a slightly different character count.

If you didn't dance, you can't complain

Today is Primary Election Day in Tallahassee and everyone is going around wearing those self-righteous "I voted" stickers. I've been searching for a metaphor to explain the voting phenomenon. And finally it came to me. It's like a rain dance. Your village is having a drought and everyone gets together and someone says,
"I have an idea! Let's do a rain dance! That will propitiate the gods and bring rain. But only if everyone participates!"
So everyone runs around strong-arming everyone else into doing the rain dance. But when they come to you, you assert your independence and say, "I don't think rain dancing will bring rain, so I won't dance."
They all dance and wear little stickers afterward, saying "I danced for rain".
Now one of two things will happen, although it won't matter to you, because they'll probably kill you for not dancing. It will rain or it won't. If you do survive, and it rains, everyone will mock you and say, "Since you didn't dance, you can't share in the benefits of the rain." If it doesn't rain, they'll be even more likely to kill you, but if they let you live, they might well say something like,
"Since you didn't dance, you can't complain about there not being any rain."
So that's how much sense voting makes. It won't do you any good to explain calmly that not only do rain dances not bring rain, but that, even if they did, your single non-participation in a rain dance would hardly be crucial to the success of a rain dance that had any pizzazz to it at all. I guess I should be glad that society has progressed from rain dances to voting. You don't get killed for not voting. Yet.

Rare Headlines

In the category of headlines you don't see very often, from Fox:

Balloon Fire Kills Circus Clown

Continuing the Eastern Europe theme from the last post, the doomed clown (I know it's heartless to say so, but that's still funny!) was from Belarus.

Cossacks and Tartars and Poles, Oh, My!
I just finished reading Henryk Sienkiewicz's "With Fire and Sword", a mind-bending 1100 pages of fury and passion in the steppes of the Ukraine and Poland. Well, OK, today you've got Belarus and maybe a bit of Moldava in there as well. But I was swept away by the narrative. And there are two more volumes to go! It has pre-echoes of The Lord of the Rings, even Star Wars. It perhaps owes a bit to Gogol's Taras Bulba, but outdoes it by a mile. As a commenter says on another Sienkiewicz work:

This man constructs plots like Alexander Dumas and ranks with Tolstoy's greatest novels for sheer scope.

I like him better than Tolstoy because he is more unapologetically masculine and consumed with notions of honor that are only shamefacedly acknowledged in order to be criticized these days.

I inserted a "meme" I've never seen anywhere else on a backtalk post that opined thusly:

...the only real question is this: what approach would you favor if you became convinced that Iran's actual plan was to develop a nuclear bomb no matter what they verbally agree to do in response to UN demands and no matter what the cost might be in terms of economic sanctions?

What then?

Here's the comment:

If Iran gets the bomb, why not let it slip that the Iraqi government has also been given access to nukes, to establish the same kind of balance of power that has kept the Indian and Pakistani governments from using their nuclear devices against each other? Iraq and Iran are the only two countries in the world that have fought each other in a war with over a million casualties since World War II.

The immediate response would be that we can't trust the Iraqi government to do the right thing, that giving access to a nuclear bomb to Shi'ites and Sunnis is nothing short of suicide. But those critics will have to explain why we're giving Muslims billions of dollars for all kinds of other weapons. Any Iraqi politician who would stand up to Iran, brandishing a nuke, would win over all the various sects within Iraq and gain enormous standing in the Arab world as their savior against the Persians. To say the least, it would change the political calculus.

Comment on Jihadwatch

Radical, infidel-butchering Islam is as powerful an ideology in large parts of the Islamic world today as Nazism was in the early twentieth century in Germany. So it will take as much death and violence, proportionate to population, to extirpate radical Islam from the Islamic world as it did to root out Nazism from Germany. And if that job is not done, we can expect the same results as if Nazism had not been excised from Germany. Not a nice prospect, but where has my reasoning gone wrong?

Name-dropper extraordinaire

Just finished reading The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig. What a wonderful book! It starts before the turn of the twentieth century and ends with Zweig's suicide in Brazil during World War II.

I love you, Caroline Glick!

This splendid piece in the Jerusalem Post is delivered by a splendid young woman who may be the last real man left in Israel:

Diplomatically, in the space of five weeks the government managed to undermine Israel's alliance with America; to hand Syria, Hizbullah and Iran the greatest diplomatic achievements they have ever experienced; and to flush down the toilet the unprecedented international support that US President Bush handed to Israel on a silver platter at the G-8 summit.

*****************
The job of the foreign minister is to defend Israel and advance Israel's national interests to foreigners, not to be their friend.

*****************
Because of the Olmert government's failures, ever greater battles await us. As the dangers mount by the hour, we must replace this misbegotten government with one that can defend us.

I don't really have to tell you to read the whole thing, do I?

Government, Lebanese-style

Let it never be said I lack for ideas. I didn't say good ideas, but:

Israel needs to proclaim that they recognize Hezbollah as the only legitimate government of Lebanon and Nasrallah as the head of government and then transfer the state of war to Nasrallah's regime. Then they would be free to attack and destroy the Lebanese army and Hezbollah, wherever they can be found within Lebanon and force Hezbollah to surrender.

Alternatively, they can recognize Syria as the de facto government of Lebanon, with borders containing what is now Lebanon and the capital at Damascus. Then a notice can be sent to Damascus that any aggression toward Israel from Syrian territory will be punished by an immediate attack on Damascus.

This was in response to a post on Pejman's Chequerboard, called "Why Should The Lebanese Government Be Strengthened?" linking to a New York Times story about Hezbollah's role in the reconstruction of Lebanon that they caused to be destroyed. What a bunch of guys! How good is that? Reminds me of that line in Back to the Future where the bully Buzz or Fuzz or whatever his name is (Biff - ed.) wrecks Marty McFly's father's car and then upbraids the wimpish dad thusly: "I have your car towed all the way back to your house and all you've got for me is light beer!@?"

Diana Hsieh's rather despairing post about the outcome of the Hezbollah War of 2006, typified by this line:

Without a doubt, any supposed military victory in which the enemy is also capable of declaring victory to the world is no victory at all.

stimulated me to leave this comment on Noodlefood:

The only good thing about Olmert's half-war is that its outcome seems to have stiffened Israeli spines considerably. I am now seeing talk about transfer of Islamic terrorist sympathizers and reannexation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank (Judea and Samaria) that would have been unthinkable a few weeks ago. It is now utterly clear to anyone who really wants to see that Israel needs defensible borders. And I wouldn't worry about the Muslims calling a defeat a victory. They do that every time. There's a huge square in downtown Cairo called Midan Tahrir (apparently "Tahrir" means "victory"). I asked what victory it commemorated. I was told the great victory over the Israelis in 1973 (The Yom Kippur war). That war ended with Israeli armies 101 kilometers from Cairo and occupying all of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Islam is nothing but self-deception.

This VDARE article by Steve Sailer about how to deal with Islam:

"Can we all get along?"
Well, when it comes to Muslims and Westerners, the answer is:

No, we can't.

So, deal with it. When we get in each other's faces, we get on each other's nerves. It's time to get out of each other's faces.

*************
In particular, as I outlined last fall, Europeans need to begin a push-pull system to persuade Muslim legal residents to leave.

prompted me to email Sailer thusly:

Steve,

I agree that we should withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan and stop supporting Israel just as soon as we are sure that no Muslims live in this country who could possibly harm us and that we will let no more in. So as soon as Congress passes a Muslim exclusion measure and it is enforced at our borders and all foreign students from Muslim countries are prevented from attending US colleges and universities and all Muslim "scholars" are barred from conferences in this country, we can retreat from their godforsaken dustholes with little danger. And soon after that pigs will fly over the frozen reaches of Hell.

Since our political system will never - as in NEVER - bar Muslims from this country on the basis of their religion or ethnicity, your suggestion is futile at best and disingenuous at worst. Until the concept of "diversity" and the deity called "multiculturalism" are expunged from the minds of liberals in positions of political power, such a measure will never be passed and enforced. When will that happen? Oh, did I mention the word "never"?

Robert Speirs
Tallahassee, Florida

So the obvious question arises - what to do, since "disconnect" is politically impossible, at least right now? And the obvious answer is to support a policy that makes the Islamic world pay a price that discourages them from causing trouble for the US. Like, for instance, toppling a couple of regimes that support terrorism. And supporting Israel. Just like Bush is doing. And Sailer's obsessive repetition of the mantra "Invade the World, invite the world" is just as disingenuous as his "disconnect" strategy. For Bush hasn't "Invaded the world". We didn't invade Iran. Or Lebanon. Or the Gaza Strip. We left Saudi Arabia, where we had gone in at the request of the Saudis. The main "invite" problem is with Mexicans, who even VDARE would admit do not pose a significant terrorism problem. The US has hardly invited the rest of the world. The presence of millions of illegal, "uninvited" aliens is evidence of that. Sailer's becoming increasingly "disconnected" all right. From reality.

This is excellent:

Dignity is having your entire neighborhood bombed, your children killed, and your only reaction is to dance in the streets like zulu warriors in support of Hezbollah. That's what dignity, pride and honor are all about. I get that now.

You never expect the Objectivist Inquisition!

Polipundit had a news post about the difficulties of controlling Islamic access to airlines after the recent bomb plot:

Tell me again why it’s ok that security isn’t allowed to pull more then 2 Middle Eastern looking passengers off of airport check-in lines for searches or how nuts it is that security is strip searching a 75 year old grandmother or making a new mother drink her babies formula from the bottle

.

I have an easy solution:

Require each potential passenger to step on a picture of Mohammed in order to board a plane. Serve pork with every on board meal or snack.
More realistically, all flights from or to nations with a significant portion of Muslims should be funneled through a "quarantine center" where lengthy and utterly thorough investigations of every Islamic passenger are carried out as slowly as possible. They want to mess up the air travel system? Fine. They suffer.

Come to think of it, they should have to pay for it, too. And they should be required to contribute to a disaster fund to compensate victims of any terrorism perpetrated by any Muslims who are citizens of their countries or who trained or plotted with any citizens of their countries. Let's see how long that oil money lasts.

Mice, bees and Castro

Marginal Revolution had a speculative post on Castro's situation:

Note that Raul has not shown his face either. Are there alternative hypotheses? The desire for a grand reentrance? After all, a growing number of Cuban officials are talking of Castro's return...

I had to respond to a comment about how if you judged someone's potential for continuing tyranny by whether they appeared on television or not Mickey Mouse would be a tyrant thusly:

"a lot of the world thought that Mickey Mouse was a tyrant during the last century..."

Better ask Minnie about that. And maybe, while you're at it, ask her to answer the question of the century: You and Mickey are mice, Pluto's a dog, Donald's a duck but what the heck is Goofy, anyway?

I can't help thinking though, that the queen bee who is born first after the old queen dies has to go around and kill her royal sisters before they emerge from their cells. If she doesn't act quickly and one emerges, there's a fight to the death.

Maybe El Beardo is in a coma. If Raul is his closest relative on the island and the doctor asks if extraordinary measures should be taken to keep him alive, I wonder what Raul would say? Because I think we know what his daughter in Miami would say. I predict a radical reversal of positions since the Schiavo affair on whether people in comas should be kept alive, especially by the lefty Fidel-is-God crowd.

Mark Steyn gets it

A propos of my last post, it would appear that Mark Steyn understands the importance of using the right terminology:

"In the struggle between America and global Islam, ...

After all, since the Islamists are railing against the whole "modern" world, to treat them as a unit would only be "proportionate", right?

War on Islam

OK, for Conundrum purposes, it's no longer the "War on Terror". It's the "War on Islam". Amounts to the same thing, anyway. A real concentration on undermining the existence of the Mohammedan religion is the only practical path to reducing the risks of terrorism. Whatever it takes.

Nazis as role models?

The Cap'n posts about German soldiers protecting Israel's borders:

So now we have the spectacle of another genocidal nutcase threatening to kill off millions of Jews in the form of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the nation that will protect them will be the last nation with the same genocidal impulse, if Olmert gets his way.

Some German history would appear to have application to the process of reducing Islamic terrorists to the Middle Eastern analogue of a bunch of drunken thugs universally despised by the people they live among who are permanently barred from political power:

The involvement of Germany may send a message that a murderous, racist, warmongering ideology which controlled millions of people can, with enough time and effort, be expunged from the soul of a nation. If the influence of Islam in Lebanon or Iraq can be reduced to the level of influence exerted by Nazism in present-day Germany, modern rationalism will have won. Unfortunately, the example of Nazism in Germany shows how much blood and time it can take to extirpate such a violent cult.
Posted by: Robert [TypeKey Profile Page] at August 4, 2006 11:10 AM

Spengler agrees

I have always said that instability in the Middle East favors the US, not the Islamists.

Now Spengler at the Asia Times agrees with me.:

The benefits of chaos most likely redound to the US and Israel, even though squeamishness prevents Washington from thinking this way. The Iranians, who are utterly ruthless, profligate in the expenditure of human blood, and adept at the use of chaos as a strategic weapon, know just what is afoot.

I think I'll write him a letter.

Cedar Fraud

I'm bemused by the lack of attention paid in the press and among pundits of all stripes to the obviously fraudulent nature of the "Cedar Revolution" that supposedly marked the emergence of an independent Lebanese state a couple of years ago. It's now clear that everyone, including me, was fooled by the euphoria of a few upbeat pictures of proud, independent, young Lebanese women into thinking that Lebanon had freed itself from rule by Syria and by Hezbollah and that it was master in its own house. This obviously was only a cover strategy by Hezbollah to lull the Israelis and the West into a false sense of security, into thinking that Hezbollah and its Iranian and Syrian masters would not cause trouble because they were afraid of the reaction of the Lebanese. In retrospect, it was absurd to think that the Islamonazis cared one little bit about the well-being of anyone, themselves included, and that the Lebanese had any real power over Hezbollah's actions. I just hope that no more surprises of this sort await us.

Freedom and The Scotsman

David Farrer, one of the intrepid blogsters at Freedom and Whiskey, posted (scroll down) about his surprise that Brian Wilson (no, not that one!) founder of the West Highland Free Press, published an article in the Scotsman showing some sense about the Israeli reaction to Hezbollah aggression:

When criticised, it (Israel) can point out with justification that listening in the past to the same voices calling for restraint would have led to it being wiped off the map many years ago.

So I had to add my favorite analogy for Lebanon, which supplies grounds for approval of Israel's actions and explains the status of Lebanon in terms most Westerners can understand:

I like the comparison of Lebanon to Vichy France in WWII. Certainly the French weren't one hundred per cent in favor of the Nazis, but that made no difference to the tactical realities. Many French "civilian" facilities - train stations, factories, docks, road junctions - were bombed in order to deny resources to the Germans. But Paris escaped nearly unscathed. Then again, the Nazis didn't launch V-1s and V-2s from the roofs of French kindergartens.

Or the towers of Notre Dame.

VDH agrees

Victor Davis Hanson must have received my thought transmissions. He points out the factor that is energizing the terrorist world:

Why, then, are socialists such as Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia now expanding an anti-capitalist bloc in Latin America--nationalizing companies, jailing dissidents, and whipping up the cult of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro from Peru to Mexico? Why here at home, when the stock market is near all-time highs, the unemployment rate low, and home ownership at record levels, with interest rates and inflation both in check, do the American people express little confidence in their economy and President Bush's leadership?
***********************
The answer to all of these diverse anomalies is oil, oil, and more oil.

I need to think not only outside the war, but outside the Middle East as well. Establish a rule for the American century: Mess with America and we take your oil. All of it. Anywhere in the world. Sounds "proportionate" to me.

Thinking outside the war

Remember all those people saying that without oil the Muslims would be irrelevant? Well, let's do something effective about the Middle East, something to convince Bill in DC that, though he's right:

there's a common idea, almost exclusively promoted among right-wing pundits, that more force is necessarily more effective force.

that more force exerted against the right target can be more effective force:

Perhaps the answer lies in concentrating on the source both of the terrorists' power and their leverage over us, namely, oil. Protesters incoherently shout that the GWOT is a "war for oil". Maybe the problem is that it isn't. So let's make it one. Let's go in and take all the oil fields of the Middle East and put them under US - not NATO, not UN, not EU - control. Anyone who tries to stop us gets nuked or at least carpet-bombed. Let's see how many Iranians are willing to die for control of oil, how many Muslims will fight when we make it clear Mecca and Medina and Qom aren't threatened. Limited objective. Result - Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, etc. no longer have any oil. They can eat sand. We control the oil price. The EU and Japan and China and India pay the price we set. Hezbollah gets no more oil money for missiles. Gasoline, eventually, goes down. Win-win.

Four Mothers

If you want to understand the last few decades of the struggle, you have to understand this article and especially this statement from it:

I am in Israel, because only in Israel will my child not be turned into soap.

Haaretz is one of the most left-leaning Israeli newspapers. And yet even they understand. The latest Hezbollah outrage makes me understand even better the nature of this war. It is a war to the last civilian. Hezbollah kills as many Israeli civilians as it can and then uses its own civilians as cannon fodder. Makes sense to the average Arab/Iranian fanatic. If the death of a two-year-old living in a house with rocket launchers on the roof can put pressure on the Israelis so they stop bombarding Hezbollah "fighters" then that two-year-old is worth as much as, perhaps more than a fighter. I can just hear the shouts of "Praise be to Allah!" when that tactic was discovered. And in two years there can be another two-year-old. Yep. It's that nasty and that inhuman.

Agriculture
From Marginal Revolution, a post on how agriculture got its start stimulated this comment:

I remember reading somewhere (Spengler?) that agriculture developed because some smart, aggressive guy realized he could use control of agricultural resources like water to expand his power over other men and expand the size of the unit over which he has control to maximize his wealth. Sounds very - human. Settling down and farming was not a collective decision but a command directive. There does seem to be some evidence that agriculture did not benefit the individual hunter-gatherer sufficiently so that it would have been adopted without force being used. Cowboys, for instance, don't see "sod-busters" as having a better life. All changes in society don't have to lead to better lives for the masses. But those that lead to more power for those in power may be falsely portrayed as leading to better lives for all.

I'm right again
On a trenchant post titled "Is Israel's strategy working?" on Alenda Lux, a blog I've just found, after this statement:

Even without taking Israel's side, world opinion has clearly come down against Hezbollah as the instigator of the crisis. Admittedly, this is a somewhat more complicated situation than those that simply involve two governments and the people of the target state. In some cases, therefore, nationalism could be causing the Lebanese to side with the Hezbollah-skeptic government over the arguably more powerful Hezbollah. At the same time, claims by the usual suspects (which, as I mentioned, I considered myself) that Israeli bombing would turn the Lebanese back to Hezbollah are apparently unfounded.

I had to lay out my analysis of the Hezbollah attack on Israel, in terms I've seen nowhere else. Which makes me think I'm right:

The most interesting aspect of the Hezbollah attack is their lack of success. They've had six years to accumulate weapons and refine tactics. Their rockets have accomplished nothing. Those who say Israel cannot win without going in on the ground do not apply the same logic to Hezbollah, who cannot win by standing off and sending inaccurate rockets. They cannot invade Israel in significant force. They cannot keep the IDF out of South Lebanon. They have been condemned by Saudi Arabia (!). Looks like a loss to me.

I might add, that when the only suspense in a military situation is whether one side (Hezbollah) is going to be completely annihilated or not, it isn't too hard to figure out the balance of power. And the lack of practical non-verbal support from the Muslim world, thanks to the liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan, is also remarkable. Those Islamic terrorists (but I repeat myself) who think they can make a career out of sending a few rockets over the Israeli border and getting other murderers to blow themselves up in crowds of Jewish civilians had better think about getting some job retraining.

Israel=North Korea?
I was playing War Nerd, considering how things could be if Syria got crushed and its territory could be used by our - and Israel's - military. this post on The Adventures of Chester stimulated my thinking with these remarks:

In the past few days, Tigerhawk has excerpted two reports from StratFor discussing the likelihood of an Israeli attack on Syria. First was an excerpt on Friday with this tidbit:

Israel will not put ground forces in Lebanon, particularly in the Bekaa Valley, without first eliminating the Syrian air force; to do otherwise would be to leave Israel's right flank wholly vulnerable. If al Assad does nothing, Israel will have to assume that Syria is waiting for an opportune moment to strike, and will act accordingly.

So I kicked this in. I don't know if it will make it into the comments any time this century:

On the plus side, consider the tactical situation if Boy Assad is overthrown, even if no invasion/occupation of Syria occurs. The Syrians would end up fighting each other as well as the Lebanese factions that hate them. Iran has all of a sudden no staging ground for resupply to Hezbollah and Hamas. The battle space is clear from Israel right through to Iran. This prospect must be irresistible to US war planners. Israel is our North Korea. Jordan and Egypt and SA will stay out, not knowing which side to back in Syria. Iran will back down, end their nuke program or see it utterly destroyed and blame the Arabs' lack of fighting ability, as always.

Trouble in the Mideast?
Yeah (And I don't just mean the misspelling of a three-letter word in the title of the post):

On Sunday, Jeff Jacoby writes “It all boils down to Iran.”:

A sustained assault into southern Lebanon, one that leaves Hezbollah in shards and Israel's northern border at peace, would be welcome evidence that the old Israel is back. And it would represent a significant victory in the worldwide war against Islamist terrorism.

For Hezbollah:

Hezbollah is in trouble. If they don’t bring down Israel in this new offensive - and they won’t - they have nowhere else to go, nothing else to try. Iran and Syria aren’t going to intervene, thanks to the liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Sooner or later Hezbollah will run out of rockets and suicide bombers and hideouts. Then we will see that this was their last effort. Faster, please.

40. Denial of reality

This Frontpagemag.com story makes it clear how far the organs of Western culture will go to deny an obvious threat to the very existence of that culture:

“In investigators’ offices, an intricate graph plotting the links between the 17 men and teens charged with being members of a homegrown terrorist cell covers at least one wall. And still, says a source, it is difficult to find a common denominator.” But illustrating the story was a photo of two women in full Islamic dress, their faces entirely covered except for a slit for their eyes.
******
Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair joined in the denial, noting proudly that during the press conference following the arrests, “I would remind you that there was not one single reference made by law enforcement to Muslim or Muslim community.”

No reference at all to the fact known by everyone that it is Muslims - and Muslims alone - who are willing, eager and at least somewhat able to kill innocents in the name of destroying Western Culture. For the Unabombers and Timothy McVeighs of the world are not attacking the culture per se, on behalf of a competing - but even more decrepit - culture. They are simple nihilists, as have existed on the fringes of all cultures, even at their heights. No culture has ever thrived, though, when it appeases and simultaneously denies the existence of threats from competing cultures. The lack of self-confidence and simple unmanliness shown by this reaction is definitely a sign of the death of Western culture.

The post from Samizdata containing this:

For myself I'm only surprised the cops did not take careful note of the brand of footware, and take his footprints for the national footprint database, which they have recently acquired the power to do - I kid you not. Or perhaps they did...

inspired my favorite comment of the day:

If we all started wearing Bozo-size shoes when wearing offensive T-shirts we could get the clown in all kinds of trouble.

39. Too many laws

This preposterous story from the Washington Times relates the failure of the bureaucracy responsible for administering the Social Security system to, you know, ADMINISTER the Social Security system:

Privacy concerns prevent the Social Security Administration from notifying an employer that a hired foreign national is not authorized to work in this country, including someone who may be a potential national security risk, says a government audit.

Since 2003, the SSA has issued Social Security numbers, dubbed "non-working," to foreign nationals who need them to collect state or federal benefits, such as public assistance.

But, gee, guess what? Some are using these non-numbers to work and report income to the SSA. To the tune of $4 billion dollars a year. And no doubt expecting to qualify for SS benefits in due time. All illegally.

Can anyone still maintain that our culture knows what it is doing? As in late Rome and Hellenic Greece, laws are ignored and confidence in the right is absent.

39. The decline of Suspenders, rise of the proletarian belt

Not to be confused with the Bible belt, where I'm sure some men still wear suspenders. At least some people still revere the suspender:

In theory, suspenders should be functionally superior to belts and therefore belts would be expected to be the rarity. Suspenders, provided they don't become detached, can be adjusted just so in order to keep trousers at a desired position. The crease is maintained and there is no piling up of the legs atop one's shoes as can happen wearing a belt that can work its way down an inch or two during the day. This is why men's formal clothes are worn with suspenders and not belts.

I made a related point:

Every stall in men's bathrooms has a survival from the suspender era - the hook on the back of the door. When men wore suits, with suspenders, the hooks were absolutely necessary. Suspenders make it impossible to take your pants down without taking your jacket off. And the hook gave you somewhere to hang your jacket - and your hat. Today's suits have belts, so the hooks are no longer necessary. But they're still there. Perhaps the suspender revival will happen before the hooks are discontinued or rust away from disuse.

and Spengler would agree, I'm sure. Can one even imagine him wearing a belt?

38. "Humankind" instead of "Man"
Need a man say more? What reason is given for this replacement? What argument is allowed or listened to? A Man's a Man for a' that.

37. oikophobia

Hatred of the culture within which one has been brought up is an unmistakable feature of decline. And I do not mean to imply that such hatred does not exist in cultures on the rise or at their zeniths. But in such times self-hatred and the lack of self-confidence it signifies is not tolerated or even glorified the way it is today. This feeling is certainly relevant to 31. on immigration and 27 about the reluctance to punish treason. An obvious marker of the predominance of such feeling is the failure to exhibit such symbols as the national flag. How many homes in Britain or America fly the flag? Or display any symbol, such as the Cross or a picture of the Queen or the President - formerly de rigueur, at least in governmental offices - that would express cultural self-confidence? Nowadays the foreign and the destructive are the only "cool" symbols allowed in most homes. Even taxpayer-funded bureaucracies shy away from any display that might express solidarity with Western culture.

36. He/she and Ms

Of course these are related to 2. and 3., as part of the attack on men and the family. The rewriting of history to portray women as the stupid powerless dupes and victims of men by insisting on the need to remake the language is one of the most arrogant and irrational aspects of the attempt to restructure the culture. The irrationality is not hidden, it is proudly on display, as in the use of a "." after the new abbreviation "Ms." even when there is no ellipsis to be memorialized. Perhaps the most annoying aspect of "Ms." - and I cannot believe it is unintentional - is that the pronunciation approximates that of the sound made by uneducated Southerners when pronouncing the traditional "Mrs.". And this from a group which despises the regional and redneck dialect! No further proof could be needed of the corruption of thought. One is brought close to tears by this pathetic attempt to insist that a change in the language can cause a change in power relationships. And this from the generation that always insisted that those in power would never give up that power without physical violence! The horsemen truly ride.

35. Loud cars

Surely there could be no more certain sign of imminent collapse of a civilization than idiots crusing around in flashy cars booming out loud music that they know 95 per cent of the public hates. This is done simply to annoy and proclaim the idiots' immunity from punishment or even verbal chastisement. Not that I don't try. Add in that this occurs in the early morning on a holiday like July 4th and the signal is clear. I noticed a similar phenomenon in Paris last April, but on a much smaller scale. That is, the cars are all smaller, and there were fewer of them, probably because most of them were burned in the recent rioting. Can anyone still believe that Western culture is on the upswing?

Not doom, just change
I hasten to make clear that my new pessimism about the chances for survival of classic Western culture have nothing to do with the moronic doomsaying characterized by Frank Furedi in spiked as:

fantasies of romantic primitivism

I do not see any prospect that the race of Man will disappear from the Earth, even through lack of breeding (both kinds!). We will struggle on and in some distant future a new culture will arise that will delude its adherents that theirs too will last forever, increasing without end in power, complexity and spirit, until Truth holds sway at last. I'm just saying it's entirely possible that will never happen and it might not be the best thing for Man if it did.

34. Depopulation

An older A/Spengler column that I don't remember reading before goes over the descent into infertility that characterizes declining cultures:

In fact, the main reason societies fail is that they choose not to live. That is a horrifying thought to absorb, and the average reader would much rather delve into the details of obscure ecosystems of the past than reflect upon why half of Eastern Europe will die out by mid-century.

There's some good commentary in there, too, about Jared Diamond's hodgepodge mishmash "Collapse". Why is it people can't see what's right in front of their faces? This one relates to the preservation of species, too (29).

33. Primitive authenticity

I stole this one from another Spengler:

Primitive peoples, it appears, were nasty, brutish, and short, not at all the cuddly children of nature depicted by popular culture and post-colonial
academic studies.

Rousseau is the archetypical villain here. And the acceptance and promotion of his "noble savage" idiocy was among the first indications that it was all over with Western culture. Spengler's on about Nicholas Wade's book "Before the Dawn" here. There's another one I have to read. I really don't have time to work.

Another

32. International law, in general. (Higher level than 21. Related to 27. Hey, maybe I should make this a sort of organizational chart of stupid ideas, ranked by internal relatedness and level of stupidity. Hm. Thinking hyperlinks here.)

Can't believe I missed this one

31. Control of national borders. This one is obvious:

In recent times it has been fashionable to talk of the levelling of nations, of the disappearance of different races in the melting-pot of contemporary civilization. I do not agree with this opinion, but its discussion remains another question. Here it is merely fitting to say that the disappearance of nations would have impoverished us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colours and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention.

But if Western countries can't prevent people who have zero commitment to their culture from infiltrating the lands where that culture thrived, they have given up on defending that culture. This is exactly what happened to Rome. Again, to be clear, I should say these signs are not exhortations to action. They are merely notes of the movement towards the ultimate destruction of a rationalist, active view of the world. This includes the death of individualism, the end of the true competition of ideas and the disappearance of any possibility of victory over the sempiternal enemies of Man - Nature and mysticism. Heck, even my sentences are getting as complicated as Spengler's. But that should make the German translation easier!

Update: VDARE, as usual, has a trenchant post on the failure to even pretend to defend American culture from the alien tide. Gee, it's almost as though everyone knows Western culture is on the way down and is determined to make their way to its center to bleed it dry before it's gone. I started to think, though, if poor foreigners are desperate to come to America, why are relatively prosperous Americans such as myself eager to leave and live in the wider world? And the only answer that came to mind was "in order to get away from the negative effects of the immigrant tide". Or, more generally, to find the living situation that enables me to live the best life I can while I watch the culture deteriorate. Me and St. Augustine. But he couldn't hop on a jet plane and leave Hippo any time he wanted.

More signs

27. (From a comment on Rush) The decline - heck, the absence - of a desire and commitment to punish treason, not just to a particular nation but to a culture. Again, the failure to defend a culture equals and is caused by apathy toward its loss.

28. Global warming, ozone layer, etc. hysteria. Acceptance of such myths on feeble grounds and without even considering whether they would really make things worse even if they were true. Related to guilt-worship. Note the self-flagellation:

MEPs voted in favour of the “immediate introduction” of a tax on jet fuel for flights within the 25 member states of the EU. The charge would double the cost of millions of budget airline flights.

29. Preservation of species, even the ugly ones. Failure to even ask for or wonder whether there is a reason for such nonsense.

30. Tolerance - in general - and especially for dissenting viewpoints that transcend reason and self-preservation.

More signs

21. The UN. World peace through empowering bloody dictators with a vote on policies meant to assure collective peace.

22. Socialism - sort of goes without saying, but I had to get it down. And of course guilt-trippers have been around forever. What changed was the response by the dominant culture to this dishonest piece of corrupt pathology.

23. Worship of youth and childhood. This leads to the final obscenity - fifty-year-old women in capri pants.

24. Cell phones. Newly predominant. But a true straw in the wind. No one wants to explore the world alone any more.

25. The waltz. Positively demonic.

26. Sweet foods. The decline of pickles is obvious and horrific. (OK, this one's kind of a joke). The rise of hot peppers, though, is a sign that the tastelessness of life is becoming more and more clear to the meanest intelligence. Any stimulant, even if it involves physical pain, is wildly popular.

Untergang des Alles

I am in the process of reading The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler. It is as mind-boggling as advertised. So I thought I'd start making a list of signs that Western culture is becoming a "civilization", that is , declining, becoming a "thing-become" rather than a "becoming":

1. The Cold War (set the seal on the culture's unwillingness to defend itself)

2. The attack on men (who also do not defend themselves)

3. The attack on the family (parallel to 2)

4. Toleration, amounting to idolatry, of homosexuality (related to 2 and 3)

5. Jazz

6. Prohibition of alcohol and drugs, going back to the beginnings of temperance. I know such movements have been around forever, but they became mainstream in the middle of the 1800s.

7. Dieting

8. Allowing women to vote.

9. Allowing anyone to vote.

10. Worship of exercise.

11. Worship of pets.

12. Unearned guilt.

13. Novels, especially detective stories.

14. Democratization of dress.

15. Credit.

16. Non-representational art.

17. Obsession with cleanliness.

18. Obsession with a long life.

19. Obsession with being "happy".

20. Psychoanalysis.

As Dylan said, "he not busy being born is busy dying." Perhaps I can be the chronicler of our death as a culture. More to come, if and when I get around to it.

It's that bad

I am totally disgusted. Global warming, tobacco fascism, cholesterol, alcohol puritanism, ADD, Universal allergy panic, it's all wrong and no one will listen to me. Believe nothing you read in the papers. Especially about "the environment" or tobacco Michael Fumento has pretty much nailed the passive smoking nonsense on Townhall.com:

“Secondhand smoke debate ‘over.” That’s the message from the Surgeon General’s office, delivered by a sycophantic media. The claim is that the science has now overwhelmingly proved that smoke from others’ cigarettes can kill you. Actually, “debate over” simply means: “If you have your doubts, shut up!”

But you definitely should have doubts over the new Surgeon General’s report, a massive 727-page door stop.

The comments on that column provide a perfect example of people talking right past each other, with some apparently not even having read the column, just seeing that it was about smoking and copy-and-pasting their decades-old rant for a grant about smoking. They don't even pretend any more. I definitely need to start smoking a pipe. Right in their faces.

'ello, 'ello

How depressing!

These guys are just as bad

I blogged about how pathetic the play seemed at the US Open, but I have been equally unimpressed lately with the sorry spectacle that is the World Cup of soccer. Is it my imagination, or is the standard of play noticeably lower than four years ago? Germany is the only team that has shown me anything, and then not much. And yes, since you ask, I will pick the Deutschies to win the whole thing. I watched the English beat Ecuador yesterday, 1-0, and boy was that a snoozer! If you had been asleep for the whole match and just woke up for Beckham's free kick goal and went back to sleep, you would have missed nothing. Even the near-goal by Ecuador was pathetic. The Ecuadorian would have scored that nine times out of ten, but dubbed around just long enough to let the diving Englishman deflect the ball just enough to hit the crossbar. Snooze.

I have yet to see any team, even the Krauts, which passes accurately and can keep control of the ball all the way down the field. Pro players at this level still don't seem to realize they have to avoid being offside. And when one side gets up by two goals, it's just dum-de-dum and kick it back to our goalkeeper and dum-de-dum for five more minutes and kick it back to our goalkeeper again. Maybe now and then a shot from fifty yards that goes twenty feet over the goal will keep everyone from going to sleep. Blah. I guess there's an analogous tactic in American football where one side gets ahead by a couple of touchdowns and then calls nothing but running plays, but even that requires the team to move down the field somewhat, now and then. And the fouls! Or, to follow Popper, Kuhn and Lakatos, I should say "fouls"! How hard is it to fall down in front of someone when you've lost the ball to them? Haven't the referees had a bit of time to realize this might happen? How many players can be carried off the field on a stretcher, moaning and clutching the opposite knee to the one that was just barely touched by an opposing player, then can jump off the stretcher and run back into the game when something exciting happens before the refs, you know, catch on??

OK, so maybe this is all a setup and sooner or later I will see a good match and it will seem even better by comparison. But this World Cup will not make the fantasy of pro-soccer-in-the-US that's been touted for decades any more real or more desirable.

Birthday whisky and bacon

So why shouldn't I have a bit of single malt with my breakfast on my 58th birthday, when I'm off work? Who knows if I'll make it to my 68th? I changed the spelling of "whisky" after consulting a certain great Scotblog even though they're on a mild hiatus. My that sounds painful.

And my sister from Nigeria is coming to visit tomorrow and my older son is moving in with me next week, so things are happening. Movement clear, direction not quite so well defined.

I pity the altruist
Been reading"Beware of Pity", by Stefan Zweig, one of my favorite authors (The Buried Candelabrum, Balzac, Erasmus, etc.) So coincidentally (lot of that going around these days!) I found a discussion of pity on Noodlefood:

In the case of pity, I'm struck by the difference between his concept of pity and our modern concept thereof. In particular, notice that Aristotle holds that the object of pity must be morally good -- and thus not deserving of his fate.

So I appended a comment:

Stefan Zweig wrote an insightful novel, "Beware of Pity", wherein he differentiates two kinds (page 256, Viking Press, New York, 1939):

"One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart's impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another's unhappiness, that pity which is not compassion, but only an instinctive desire to fortify one's own soul against the sufferings of another; and the other, the only one that counts, the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about, and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond. It is only when one goes on to the end, to the extreme, bitter end, only when one has an inexhaustible fund of patience, that one can help one's fellows. Only when one is prepared to sacrifice oneself in doing so - and then only!"

So Zweig neatly makes the wrong but powerful point that pity can only be purged through absolute altruism. Yet it is a natural, an understandable emotion. I imagine this "com-passion" or fellow-feeling, stems from fear that what has happened to another may happen to you, especially in the bygone (for some!) demon-haunted days. Roark's pity for Keating, therefore, is only another emotional obstacle to be overcome through reason. Rand never denied the humanity of her characters.

A realistic proposal

A sensible approach to the Mexican border problem has to deal with two realities. First, Mexicans and other immigrants with few skills and low cognitive awareness levels are coming to this country illegally because they have no or very little economic opportunity at home. Second, illegal immigration poses an unacceptable risk of economic and cultural dislocation, as well as real security threats, to the United States. I have an approach that tackles both problems.

The key is to secure the present border at the Rio Grande and west to the Pacific. This means a highly secure fence or wall, patrolled and electronically monitored 24/7/365. This is well within our capabilities. That doesn't deal, however, with the fact that it is the economic opportunity available in the United States that is attracting undesirable immigrants.

I propose the creation of an economic and security zone in northern Mexico, extending from the present border with the United States to a line joining the Gulf of Mexico shoreline to Monterrey to Chihuahua to Hermosillo and then to the Gulf of California. All of Baja California would be included in the zone. Special security and identification measures would be in effect in the zone, so that all residents would be unequivocally identified and their status clearly established. The idea will be to establish within this zone the economic and legal framework which has been so successful in making the states of the United States prosperous and attractive. This would have to include clear and effective real property and commercial transactions regulations, as well as incorruptible law enforcement and political organizations. The United States will consult with Mexico as to the nature of these changes in the present failed and fragile social framework within this area. The only real difference between this zone and the states of the United States would be that social welfare provision would remain at the level that obtains in the rest of Mexico. It is to be anticipated that economic development in this zone would be rapid and healthy. All the economic migrants who pose security and cultural risks to the United States should be able to find the opportunity they seek for legitimate economic activity in this zone. It may even turn out that this zone will be a magnet for those migrants from around the world who cannot meet the standards that legal US immigration should require. Perhaps many Mexican citizens who have immigrated illegally or legally to the United States will find this zone just as economically attractive and more culturally and linguistically comfortable than the areas in the United States where they find themselves today.

Should it become impossible to establish this zone by agreement with Mexico, it will become necessary to impose, by whatever means may be required, a border control zone, a hundred miles wide, from the present border south into Mexico. Within this zone travel will be prohibited and all existing settlements will be removed. Such a drastic measure should not be necessary, however. If Mexican immigrants only want to come to the United States to work and prosper, they will have that opportunity within their own country. Perhaps when the rest of Mexico, and eventually the rest of Latin America, observe the results that can be achieved by a rational regime of laws and a government with integrity, they too will adopt the measures prevalent in the zone. Then the border zone will no longer be necessary and men of all cultures and ethnicities can be free and prosperous in their own countries.

Update: Just to show I'm not a complete nut, there's a good article by Tom Bethell at the American Spectator about Hernando DeSoto's theories as they apply to the third world, and specifically to Mexico:

Hernando de Soto's organization was invited to Mexico and did some work on the question. He says that only 6 percent of Mexican enterprises are legal, the rest are informal. If you want yours legalized, it will take you four years with no certainty in the outcome.

This is the kind of problem that could be addressed in the economic and security zone.

Cheapest so far?

Another fare to Istanbul in the fall - but I know I can do better. What amazes me is that the fare right from Tallahassee is so little larger than the fare direct from Atlanta or New York. It's almost like they're flying me to Orlando or New York for free. Every time I think of driving to another airport I look at what I'd save and it just isn't worth it.
The only kicker in the QIXO fare is that they haven't disclosed all the taxes and fees yet, so it may not really be the cheapest. Maybe by Labor Day I'll have a fare I can live with - and fly with!

Whale of a tail

A story on Samizdata about the fishy goings on at the World non-Whaling Conference led me to hook up with this burger saga about whaleburgers. This is one of the reasons I want to go to Japan - so I can eat some good cetacean. So let's look at a package tour:

Package details
Price details
Total: $1,746.55
Included:

* Items selected, taxes, & fees for flight.

Flight: 1 roundtrip ticket flight
7:00 am Depart Tallahassee (TLH)
Arrive Tokyo (NRT) 3:00 pm tip+1 day Tue 24-Oct
Duration: 19hr 0mn
United United United 3588 operated by US /US AIRWAYS EXPRESS-PSA AIRLINES -- US22383588 / United 2265 operated by US AIRWAYS -- US9262265 / 881
Connect in Charlotte (CLT), Chicago (ORD)
3:20 pm Depart Tokyo (NRT)
Arrive Tallahassee (TLH) 6:49 pm Tue 31-Oct
Duration: 16hr 29mn
United United 884 / 432 / United 3480 operated by US /US AIRWAYS EXPRESS-PSA AIRLINES -- US22693480
Connect in Chicago (ORD), Charlotte (CLT)
Choose a different flight for this package.
Hotel: 1 room for 6 nights hotel
More lodging info
Shinbashi Atagoyama Tokyu Inn
2.0-star Tokyo, Japan
# This 14-story high-rise, located in downtown Tokyo, is less than two km (one mile) from the Imperial Palace.

# Refrigerators come in all ... More lodging info
Check-in: Wed 25-Oct-06 Check-out: Tue 31-Oct-06
Room options Price
Std Single - Annex Main Wing Sale! Included
Std Twin - Annex Main Wing Sale! + $23.55 per night
Choose a different hotel for this package.

Hey, not bad, but I'll probably have to get another flight to Sapporo to get the advertised whaleburger. I'll settle for a Tokyo version.

And of course I couldn't resist the chance for a good comment:

It's just a fluke, that's all. Whale "meets" with my approval! It may seem fishy, but I wouldn't beef about a whaleburger. See whale? Se(a) - food! Now don't blubber, get to the meat of the matter. You have to loin there's a lot at steak here. Stop spouting off and being such a blowhard!

I always hope this sort of thing causes a pun-demonium. Or at least a pun-demic.

These guys are ... terrible!

Just finished watching the US Open golf tournament. I don't think there was one birdie in the last six holes among the top leaders. It was drives in the rough, in the sand, in a garbage can, in the corporate tent - and that was only Phil Mickelson! And the iron play wasn't any better. The putting made one think these so-called professionals had never seen a fairly complex green before. A good college player could have won today. I kept wishing Tiger was playing, because I knew he would have won by fifteen strokes. Then I remembered he didn't even make the cut, with two successive 76's on Thursday and Friday! Then I also remembered John Daly, not the most successful golfer, if perhaps the most obnoxious, saying that he lost $55 million dollars gambling. When someone pointed out he hadn't won any more than $15 million in twenty years on the Tour he explained all the other ways a golfer could get money. I guess I'm in the wrong business. I wonder if a fat 58-year-old can take a few lessons and go on tour and win an easy million or two and then retire. How hard could it be?

OK, I'm glad Ogilvy the Aussie won, but really - he didn't win, the others lost. I watch to see men win by making great shots, not to see someone back into the trophy because the leader double-bogeys the last hole. Disgusting