War on Innocents

On this day:

218 BC
Second Punic War: Battle of the Trebia – Hannibal’s Carthaginian forces defeat those of the Roman Republic.

1271
Kublai Khan renames his empire “Yuan” (ࠠ3; yuán), officially marking the start of the Yuan Dynasty of Mongolia and China
1878

John Kehoe, the last of the Molly Maguires is executed in Pennsylvania.
hina.
1912
The Piltdown Man, later discovered to be a hoax, is announced by Charles Dawson.
1916
World War I: The Battle of Verdun ends when German forces under Chief of Staff Erich Von Falkenhayn are defeated by the French, and suffer 337,000 casualties.

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I’ve never seen an orgy of hypocrisy quite as brazen as how the exact same media corporations and journalists who spent years demanding more Big Tech censorship turned *overnight* into free speech champions: because now it’s their friends being silenced rather than their enemies.--Greenwald

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NYC now has nearly 50,000 empty apartment units, absent from the market either because their operating costs exceed legal rents or because they require considerable renovations.

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Kant’s middle way, tortuously explained in his magnum opus, the “Critique of Pure Reason” (1781), is that what he calls things-in-themselves—the reality of things independent of human experience—are ultimately unknowable but that does not leave us with mere subjective opinions. Experience is only made possible because it is framed by our perceptions in ways that all human beings share. So it is not a matter of opinion whether Newton’s laws are true or whether vaccines work, even though we remain ignorant of the essential nature of the universe that underpins our experiences of these facts.--wsj

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War on Innocents

It's getting hard to be sure about the nature of murder. Our modern world now gives murder a 'context'. But some murders just look like murders.

The word 'terrorist' seems inadequate. Its origin was in the French Revolution, referring to the Jacobins and their coercion to revolutionary conformity. The British picked it up when referring to Russian violence aimed at discouraging the ruling aristocracy in Russia in the mid-1800s.

Now it implies a violent act that is part of a larger, unspoken whole, some notion, like kidnapping, where innocents are threatened for some other purpose.

There comes a moment when every child believes he is 'the best boy', when the performers on The View believe their applause signs, and the bigger picture becomes very small. Every act becomes a tiny thread in a larger tapestry, a single piece of a larger puzzle. So a father can send his daughter ticking into a crowded plaza and rushes to sacrifice his Isaac under an Australian beach umbrella.

Can one be self-indulgent with another's life? Do the collateral victims hear the war cry? Can they decipher it? Is the obtuse warning lost in translation amidst the screaming and weeping? Or is it simply disregarded, like a madman's plea for some coherence?

And will the innocents wreak a cosmic vengeance in this, the octave of Nanjing? 

Bigotry and Madness

We find that the most generous welfare states in Europe do not perform better than other less comprehensive welfare state regimes.--a paper

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Reuters reports the German government, Siemens AG, and other parties will provide billions of euros in project-related guarantees to support Siemens AG's struggling wind turbine division. This financial assistance comes just weeks after the company warned about mounting losses amid a meltdown across wind and solar industries.

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The average Puerto Rico number of births per woman was 0.9 in 2021.

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Bigotry and Madness

Three Palestinian students were shot in Burlington, Vermont in late November. Initial reports were that the attack was a textbook case of Islamophobia: the shooter, James J. Eaton, had allegedly “harassed” the students and then opened fire on them because they were wearing keffiyehs and speaking Arabic.

But that description did not fit the shooter, who was a known “progressive” who had made social media posts in support of Hamas in the aftermath of Oct. 7. Nor did he say anything to the students before the incident. The shooting probably wasn’t political at all: According to Eaton’s mother and his girlfriend, he had a “history of violence and mental illness.” Probably, he simply picked his targets at random in his moment of lunacy. (from don)

I try to keep current on these things but I never heard that. Just as I haven't heard the motives of so many of these murderers. It is as if the generalities society demands we make of the subsets that we are told divide and separate us suddenly do not apply--or are mailable for some larger, unspoken purpose.

But should the culture allow these random mad acts to be translated by motivated people as bigoted animosity? Can a free people tolerate that?

The web of anti-terrorism

In roughly the same decade-long period of the cancel culture counterpart, that number is 200—almost double the number of people who were fired during the Red Scare. This is historically unprecedented. Historians will be looking back someday, recognizing that firing 200 professors, many of whom were actually tenured, is shocking. 91% of professors say that they self-censor, which is shocking to me. 16% had been disciplined or threatened with discipline for their speech, and 7% say that they've been investigated for their speech.--schlott

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Hamas killed 31 Americans that we know about. That death toll of Americans on the October 7 massacre ranks as the eighth-highest death toll of any terrorist attack against Americans — more dead Americans than the Fort Hood shooting, the San Bernardino attack, or the Pittsburgh synagogue attack.

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A former FBI counterintelligence chief who played a pivotal role in launching the Trump-Russia probe was sentenced to just over four years in prison for assisting a sanctioned Russian oligarch after leaving his post in 2019.

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The web of anti-terrorism


An alleged plot to attack Jews in Brazil has been foiled following the arrest of two men suspected of being linked to the Islamist group Hezbollah.

The arrests were made in São Paulo on Wednesday during what police said was an operation to "disrupt the preparation of terrorist attacks".

Brazilian authorities added other raids were carried out across the country.

The Israeli Prime Minister's office said its spy agency Mossad worked with Brazilian law enforcement.

So an Israeli Special Forces unit was running a Brazilian police crime operation?

Bubble, Bubble

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.--Chesterton

Alyssa got in last night and Chris picked her up.
My weight is up 4 pounds.
Federer lost and Mom stayed up to watch.

I spoke to a geologist about the Marcellus and the Utica formations. he says there is 250 years of energy in the Marcellus and 350 years in the Utica. He says that Putin will be destroyed.

Darrell Silver is the cofounder and CEO of Thinkful, a coding academy that currently has about 1,600 students. Online. No real estate. Part-time teachers.
Lean.
Thinkful trains mostly young adults (the average student is about 30) in computer programming and related skills needed by American business. The cost is somewhere between $10,000 and $14,000. But if you are struggling financially and if Thinkful believes you have the desire and the ability to succeed (and only 10 to 20% of interested students do), they will make you a deal: pay nothing, but sign a contract giving them somewhere between 10 and 14% of your post-training income for two or three years. It is the ultimate “skin in the game” model—both the student and Thinkful have enormous incentives for the student to successfully complete the program and get a job utilizing newly acquired skills. Unlike in traditional higher education, the student’s interests are very closely aligned with that of the school. Mr. Silver says about 85% of participants get a full-time job within six months of completing the academy’s program. 
He thinks a five to ten fold growth in scale over the next few years is highly reasonable and, indeed, expected. Now expansion will eventually outstrip demand but would the coding academy model work in other occupations as well, for example learning skills like welding or becoming experts in hospital patient information system management?


After months of stonewalling, Amazon's smart doorbell company, Ring, revealed last week that it's working with over 400 law enforcement agencies across the United States. Facial recognition?


The U.S. is projected to experience a shortage of between 46,900 and 121,900 physicians in both primary care and specialty care by the year 2032, according to a report published in April by the Association of American Medical Colleges.

The maniac who shot the people in El Paso was not the guy describes initially. He wrote--like the Unabomber--a crazy philosophy. There are two main themes. First, he hates non-whites and wants them exterminated. Second, he despises commercial capitalism. This is a crazy portion of it:
"Consumer culture is creating thousands of tons of unnecessary plastic waste and electronic waste, and recycling to help slow this down is almost non-existent. Urban sprawl creates inefficient cities which unnecessarily destroys millions of acres of land. We even use god knows how many trees worth of paper towels just [to] wipe water off our hands. Everything I have seen and heard in my short life has led me to believe that the average American isn't willing to change their lifestyle, even if the changes only cause a slight inconvenience."
His positions, such as they are, have been cherry-picked to fit an anti-Trump narrative.


Hundreds of women have joined Birthstrike, a group for those who have decided "not to bear children due to the severity of the ecological crisis." But isn't the advance of the world the result of human intelligence and creativity? How could anyone deny the contribution of the human species? There is some serious pessimism out there. And self-hatred.
The Talmud records that when the enslavement of the Hebrews in ancient Egypt grew unbearable, their leaders advised couples to stop having babies — why raise more children to face a life of slavery? Eventually one of those leaders was persuaded he was wrong, and that child-rearing should go on even in the teeth of murderous oppression. So he and his wife had another baby. That baby, named Moses, became the liberator who led his people to freedom.
So there!


                          Bubble, Bubble

Tired of worrying about the American culture? Or warfare in the Middle East. Try Kashmir.

Kashmir was once the most dangerous place in the world. Disputed between India and Pakistan—two nuclear weapons states—the stunning Himalayan redoubt is India’s only Muslim majority state. Until the arrival of India’s Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi, tensions in Kashmir were on the wane. Terrorist incidents and deaths were down, tourism was up and the erstwhile nuclear flashpoint was as close to peaceful as it had been in decades. That peace is now over.

Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government took the drastic step of abolishing the constitutional provision that guaranteed Kashmir’s autonomy. The government also announced a plan to partition Kashmir and downgrade it from a full-fledged state to a federally administered “Union Territory.” It deployed over ten thousand soldiers, blocked internet access, and placed leading Kashmiri politicians under house arrest. The separatist insurgency, which has accelerated under the BJP government after a period of relative calm, is now poised to explode.

The roots of Kashmir’s conflict are deep, embedded in the acrimonious partition of the South Asian subcontinent and mired in on again off again India-Pakistan military tensions. Pakistan does its part to stoke flames, funding Kashmiri separatists while its intelligence services train them. Terrorists who enjoy safe haven in Pakistan cross the border to conduct attacks in India while religious groups in Pakistan recruit young men to join the jihad. Groups involved in the conflict have hijacked airliners, attacked India’s parliament, and kidnapped and killed American and European tourists. In short, Pakistan’s hands are far from clean.

Prior to 2014, Pakistan’s Islamist insurgency consumed the Army’s attention at home while India’s government continually engaged with Pakistan and the Kashmiris. The result was a relative quiet on the subcontinent. Yet as Pakistan’s insurgency died down and the army reasserted itself over the country’s politics, increasing numbers of Pakistan-based militants crossed into India. Relations between the countries again started to deteriorate. (Frost)

Kashmir is a convenient cauldron for a couple of malignant witches

Violence and Whitman

Charles Whitman was a young man who grew up in Texas in the 1950s. He was raised as a Catholic and eventually married in the Catholic Church. He was a hunter and an excellent shot, a skill he developed as a Boy Scout and Eagle Scout. He was tested in school with an IQ of 139. He graduated  from high school, joined the Marines and took courses in physics and math that would allow him to become a mechanical engineer. He was a gambler and lost a rank in the Marines because of it. He was always upset about the poor relationship between his parents; his father was a heavy drinker who abused his mother. Eventually his parents divorced, which upset him more. He got headaches. He began to worry about his own mental health and consulted a psychiatrist. There were a number of social factors in this man's life that could influence his happiness and he discussed these with the physician. He was trying to get help.

 

At one point he wrote this letter:

I do not quite understand what it is that compels me to type this letter. Perhaps it is to leave some vague reason for the actions I have recently performed. I do not really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I cannot recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts. These thoughts constantly recur, and it requires a tremendous mental effort to concentrate on useful and progressive tasks.

In his note, he went on to request an autopsy be performed on his remains after he was dead to determine if there had been a discernible biological contributory cause for his actions and for his continuing and increasingly intense headaches.

On August 1, 1966 Whittman killed his mother with a knife and then killed his wife the same way. He left notes praising both of them by their bodies. Then he took weapons to the tower at the University in Austin, killed three on his way to the top of the tower and then spent an hour and a half firing at people at random, killing an additional eleven, wounding another thirty-one, before being killed by police officers.

An autopsy was done which found an astrocytoma, a fatal brain tumor.

Here was a talented man from a disturbed background who seems to have been a victim of a serious disease, sought treatment and eventually  performed many savage and cruel acts that he himself did not understand. 

There are 300 million people in this country and the bell curve does not change.  

So someone on low end of the 3 standard deviation curve, would be .15% of the population. The population is 300 million; so .15% of the population would be .45 million people on the low end of the 3 standard deviation curve. 450,000 people.

And we seem to think with surveillance, guards and algorithms we can prevent these outbreaks.

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Agitprop

The New York Times editorial board the following morning ..[of the baseball shooting]...gave a nod toward civility by acknowledging that conservatives and "right-wing media" were right "to demand forceful condemnation of hate speech and crimes by anti-Trump liberals." But then they tainted their momentary lapse into fairness with a false debating point that Jared Lee Loughner, who shot Rep. Gabby Giffords, was more incited by Sarah Palin than James Hodgkinson had been by his diet of political extremism. Actually, there is no evidence that the mentally ill Loughner had ever been influenced by Palin's "target map" of districts, and by recycling this bit of left-wing agitprop, The New York Times contributes to the very extremism it is purporting to condemn. (Charen)


Charen had another point: Shaun King, a New York Daily News columnist, also managed to miss the point when he objected that "if 20 Republican congressmen were shot and killed, it would not improve the chances of us having a better health care system. It's nonsensical."
This is a common theme. People often condemn "senseless violence," as if there were some forms of violence that make sense."


What is of most interest here is this:  Most goofy opinions are uneducated and/or uninformed. What is so horrible about the current Press, and their accomplices hidden in the government, is that these people know--know--what they are saying is untrue. In this respect, they are more like the lynch mob agitator than the mob.

Babe Ruth/Jeffrey Dahmer

Loretta Lynch asked Comey to call the government inquires into the Clinton emails a "Matter" not an "investigation." News management.

There has been an effort to call Comey's revelatios as the work of a "Wistleblower," not a "Leaker." News management.
 

Years ago the baseball teams closed up their Grapefruit League season and headed north on the train. Late in the evening the reporters--all men--sat in the smoking car drinking and smoking when the car door opened with a bang and Babe Ruth ran through the car and out the other door, naked. A moment later the door banged open again and a women ran through, naked, with a knife, chasing Ruth, and ran after him through the other door.
Great story, right. Not a word of it was written. The reporters liked Ruth too much. And the game too much. News management.

Almost everything has a bit of a slant.  When Bush was president, Middle East combat deaths were common on the news but that information rarely appeared during Obama's tenure. Remember when HIV was primarily a heterosexual disease? Is Trump's immigration plan a religious ban or a country-of-origin based slowdown? How could Bernie Sanders possibly be accepted as a national presidential candidate by the Press without at least some hesitation? Is it common to publish the cost of the First Lady's dress?

Let us accept for argument's sake that some element of subjectivity creeps into news stories. And the news media seems to have accepted a certain oppositional stand to Trump as if it were the media's job. Sort of the "loyal opposition." During warfare, such news management was planned, considered perfectly reasonable, and was known as "propaganda." Dangers to society should not be presented in a favorable light.
We currently have a problem with people who consider themselves paramilitary enemies of the West and might qualify for a little "management," particularly since there is a significant on-line recruitment program for them that needs opposed. If that is so, I have some suggestions for some news "management" regarding the current fad of murdering strangers for no reason:

1. Stop naming and showing the pictures of terrorists. Never describe them. When possible, denigrate them.
2. When the organizer is revealed, refrain from writing, "..[  ]... claims responsibility.' Instead write "...[  ]... apparently accepts blame."
3. Get rid of the phases "terrorism" and "terrorist acts." Write instead "atrocity" or some synonym.
4. Never imply a motive in reporting an atrocity, apply a diagnosis. We are quite willing to have public figures diagnosed from afar, why not terrorists? The Press should make every single lunatic homicidal maniac sound like Jeffery Dahmer. They are serial killers, just very fast ones, and should sound like serial killers. Ted Bundy was never presented as the complex and interesting guy he was and should not have been. "Homicidal Derangement Syndrome" would be a pretty good diagnosis to hang on these people. If you can add some sexual deviance to them, do it. (For example, a study from professors at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law found that 46% of transgender men and 42% of transgender women in the study had attempted suicide. So......)
   

The Press seems to think they have a duty to influence us. This might be a reasonable place to start.

Dahmer, ready for the NYT's annual Men's Fashion Shoot:

A Death in Pakistan

We are beginning to see public ruminations on demonstrations. The American presidential campaign looks to be as fertile a ground as the police shootings in the last years.

This article appeared in the NYT, written by Aatish Taseer  

ON Feb. 29 — a bad day for anniversaries — Pakistan executed my father’s killer.

My father was the governor of Punjab Province from 2008 until his death in 2011. At that time, he was defending a Christian woman who had fallen afoul of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, which are used by the Sunni majority to terrorize the country’s few religious minorities. My father spoke out against the laws, and the judgment of television hosts and clerics fell hard on him. He became, in the eyes of many, a blasphemer himself. One January afternoon his bodyguard, Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri, shot him dead as he was leaving lunch.

Mr. Qadri became a hero in Pakistan. A mosque in Islamabad was named after him. People came to see him in prison to seek his blessings. The course of justice was impeded. The judge who sentenced him to death had to flee the country. I thought my father’s killer would never face justice.

But then, in the past few months, it became possible to see glimmers of a new resolve on the part of the Pakistani state. The Supreme Court upheld Mr. Qadri’s death sentence last October. Earlier this year, the president turned down the convict’s plea for mercy — which, at least as far as the law goes, was Mr. Qadri’s first admission that he had done anything wrong at all. Then on the last day of last month came the news: Pakistan had hanged Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri. How would the country — not the state, but the people — respond?

I spoke to my sister in Lahore and for a moment we dared to hope that Pakistan, which had suffered so much from Islamic terrorism, might turn a corner. A lot had happened in the five years since Mr. Qadri killed our father. There was attack after hideous attack. In December 2014, terrorists struck a school in Peshawar, killing 132 children. Was it possible that Pakistan was tired of blood and radicalism? Had people finally begun to realize that those who kill in the name of a higher law end up becoming a law unto themselves? Had the horrors of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria done nothing to dampen enthusiasm for Islamism? Perhaps. I hoped.

But when a BBC interviewer asked me about this, something made me equivocate. I said it was too early to say and that we should be careful not to confuse the hardening resolve of the Pakistani government with the will of its people. Mr. Qadri’s funeral was the next day. That would give a better indication of the public mood.

And so it did.

An estimated 100,000 people — a crowd larger than the population of Asheville, N.C. — poured into the streets of Rawalpindi to say farewell to Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri. It was among the biggest funerals in Pakistan’s history, alongside those of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the father of the nation, and Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister, who was assassinated in 2007. But this was no state funeral; it was spontaneous and it took place despite a media blackout.

As pictures emerged of the sea of humanity that coalesced around the white ambulance strewn with red rose petals that carried Mr. Qadri’s body, a few thoughts occurred to me: Was this the first funeral on this scale ever given to a convicted murderer? Did the men who took to the street in such great numbers come out of their hatred of my father or their love of his killer? They hardly knew Mr. Qadri. The only thing he had done in all his life, as far as they knew, was kill my father. Before that he was anonymous; after that he was in jail. Was this the first time that mourners had assembled on this scale not out of love but out of hate?

And finally, I wondered, what happens when an ideology of hate is no longer just coming from the mouths of Saudi-funded clerics but has infected the body of the people? What do you do when the madness is not confined to radical mosques and madrasas, but is abroad among a population of nearly 200 million?

The form of Islam that has appeared in our time — and that killed my father and so many others — is not, as some like to claim, medieval. It’s not even traditional. It is modern in the most basic sense: It is utterly new. The men who came to mourn my father’s killer were doing what no one before them had ever done. As I watched this unprecedented funeral, motivated not by love for the man who was dead but by hatred for the man he killed, I recognized that the throng in Rawalpindi was a microcosm of radical Islam’s relationship to our time. It drew its energy from the thing it was reacting against: the modernity that my father, with his condemnation of blasphemy laws and his Western, liberal ideas, represented. Recognizing this doesn’t pardon the 100,000 people who came to grieve for Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri, but it reminds us that their existence is tied up with our own.

The Investigative Press

I do not know much about Eric Zuesse but I admit to suspicion of a guy called an "investigative historian" who writes a lot for The HuffPo. But he has written a fierce article about the UK and US in the Middle East. Some is just quoting reasonable people, though. Some excerpts, fwiw:

Peter Ford, who was the UK’s Ambassador in Syria during 2003-2006, was asked by the BBC in the "The Big Question" interview on Feb.14th, whether the current Syrian President Bashar al-Assad would have to be a part of the solution in that country after the war is over, and Ambassador Ford said:

“I think sadly, but inevitably, he is. Realistically, Assad is not going to be overthrown. This becomes more clear with every day that passes. Western analysts have been indulging in wishful thinking for 5 years; it’s time to get real, we owe it to the Syrian people to be much more realistic and hard headed about this. The West has to stop propping up the so-called ‘moderate opposition’, which is not moderate at all.”

This was quoted by Almasdar News on Feb. 18th, which went on to note that,

"The frustrated interviewer asked Mr. Ford about 'what we should have done,' and he responded that 'we should have backed off, we should have not tried to overthrow the regime.' Mr. Ford eloquently added that this policy has been 'like a dog returning to vomit.’”

"...we never saw a secular Arab regime that we didn’t want to overthrow.”
He was saying there that we support only non-secular regimes, sectarian regimes, in Arabia, this meaning fundamentalist Sunni governments — especially Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, the very same regimes that even the U.S. Secretary of State acknowledged in a 2009 cable that was wikileaked are the chief regimes that are funding jihadist groups.
Ford was noting that the United States and UK strive to keep in power those governments, the ones that are led by royal families that supply the bulk of funding for jihadist groups — jihadists who perpetrate terrorism in the United States and Europe.
“We never saw a secular Arab regime that we didn’t want to overthrow”: Ambassdor Ford was so bold as to imply that our governments are supporting, under the table, the very same ruling families that they know to be funding (as that cable only vaguely referred to them) “Sunni terrorist groups worldwide” (which includes in Western countries, too).
The BBC’s interviewer ignored that statement; he wasn’t struck by it, such as to ask: “Why are we supporting the chief funders of Islamic jihad? Why are we overthrowing (or in Syria are trying to overthrow) a secular regime, against which we join foreign jihadist groups in order to overthrow that non-sectarian regime; why are these dogs, as you call the U.S. and UK, returning time and again to that vomit?”

This was a live interview program, and so the BBC censors weren’t able to eliminate Ambassador Ford’s responses from the interview; but, instead, the interviewer did his best to interrupt and to talk over Ford’s shocking — and shockingly truthful — assertions about the government (ours) that supposedly represent our  interests (and not the interests of Western oil companies etc.). Ford will probably not be invited again to be on live television in the West to air his views about Syria.

Now, on Clinton:

Here she was, expressing her current view regarding Syria, in a recent debate against her Democrstic Pasrt opponent Bernie Sanders:

QUESTIONER: In respect to when you take out Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Right now or do you wait? Do you tackle ISIS first? You have said, Secretary Clinton, that you come to the conclusion that we have to proceed on both fronts at once. We heard from the senator just this week that we must put aside the issue of how quickly we get rid of Assad and come together with countries, including Russia and Iran, to destroy ISIS first. Is he wrong?

CLINTON: I think we're missing the point here. We are doing both at the same time.

QUESTIONER: But that's what he's saying, we should put that aside for now and go after ISIS.

CLINTON: Well, I don't agree with that.

She's still (now after five years, and even though she knows that we’re supporting jihadist-backing Arabic royal families and their Shariah-law regimes) comes back to that “vomit”: that "we never saw a secular Arab regime that we didn’t want to overthrow.”She does this even though, in October 2014, the man who had collected the mega-donations to Al Qaeda (all of which had been in cash) had detailed, under oath, in a U.S. court proceeding, that the Saud family were the main people who paid the "salaries" of the 9/11 terrorists. The Saud family are now the chief backers of the overthrow-Assad campaign. Do politicians such as Clinton actually represent the Sauds? It’s not only the Bush family who do. What’s exhibited here is a double-scandal: first, that a person such as that would even be a Democratic Party candidate for the U.S. Presidency (and Jeb Bush shares Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy prescriptions, though he’s virtually certain not  to win the Republican Presidential nomination); and, second, that the Western press try to avoid, as much as possible, to expose the fact that this is, indeed, “vomit,” and avoid to explain to their audience the very corrupt governmental and news-media system that enables people such as Ms. Clinton to become and remain a leading Presidential candidate in the United States. Clearly, a person like that isn’t qualified to be in government at all; she’s corrupt, or else incredibly stupid. And no one thinks she’s that stupid. But lots of people accuse her of being corrupt.

You Say ISIL, I Say ISIS, You Say Tomato...

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible… Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness… the great enemy of clear language is insincerity. Where there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms-- Politics and the English Language, George Orwell

It is high time that everyone sees the Heroes of Beslan clearly.
Burnings. Beheadings. Torture. Mass gang rapes. This kind of man is not unknown among us. The drug cartels, Mengela, the murderers of the Clutter family all have spotted human history with unspeakable savagery and pain.
It is clear that governments the world over are paralyzed with some inexplicable conflict here. There seems to be uncertainty, some unique thinking that exceeds our grasp, that makes even the name ISIS--spoken pointedly as "ISIL" by administrators--abstract. With such ambivalence, action is hard to follow.
I have a modest proposal. I propose a popular uprising of words. No more use of words and phrases like "action," "violence," "terrorism" or "attack" by these people. Only "atrocity, " "fiendishness" and similar words and phrases should be used. And no more "fighter," or "Islamist," or "terrorist." Only truly judgmental words like "Unhinged," "Deranged," "Sadist" and "Maniac" should be used. No "killed," only "murdered." When a maniac is killed , he should be "put out of his misery." Everyone involved is an "accomplice" or "enabler" until proven otherwise.
And everyone should spread the word that "virgin" is a mistranslation of "raisin." Fewer guys are likely to die for 72 raisins. And nothing hurts self-absorbed mania like humor.

Orwell believed language meant something and could do things. Let's try to prove it.

Nice

We are products of history. We must be; Hegel, Marx and Fukuyama all agree.
Europe is awash with theoretical responses to the current terroristic Politics of Derangement. One was Hollande’s plan to strip French nationality from dual citizens convicted of terrorism. Quite a threat.

There is a review of Christiane Taubira’s Murmures à la jeunesse on the terrorism in France. The reviewer says the short book, translated as "Whispers to the Young," offers a "particularly compelling (and upbeat) contribution to the debate of managing this"... Politics of Derangement. Taubira, from Guyana, was France’s Justice Minister until her resignation in late January 2016 because of her opposition to Hollande’s plan. As she notes pointedly, none of the nine men who carried out the November 2015 attacks in Paris was binational; but twenty-seven of the victims were. Her tract caused a sensation when it was published a week after Taubira’s resignation.

Taubira’s silent interlocutor, never mentioned explicitly, is her nemesis the hardline Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who publicly declared that there was no point trying to understand the appeal of jihadism, as “to understand terrorism was already in some sense to justify it”.

The reviewer states "Taubira makes a powerful case against the securitization of Islam, and of Muslims in general: she points out that jihadism is attractive not for its religious message, but in its quest for a radical break with the established social and political order. She observes, in this context, that a high proportion of jihadist sympathizers are recent converts to Islam. Above all, she affirms that jihadism is not a purely home-grown phenomenon, but is inextricably intertwined with the calamitous failings of Western policy in the Middle East, from Palestine and Iraq to the more recent cases of Libya and Syria."

It is a reaction, a dialectic, of history.

But there is a lot less going on here in Nice and Orlando than that. These were peripheral philosophical acts, at most. These were acts of seriously deranged people who, in the heat of a homicidal frenzy, wrapped themselves in an available flag.

There is an obvious problem here: Every individual , however destructive, if sane, has a point. He has some combination of educational and personal factors that led to his position and action. Nazis, embittered over the first war and its treaty, had a point. But the homicidal derangement syndrome we are watching unfold (and, probably, develop to larger and more efficient weaponry) has a very special characteristic: The loss of human empathy, the inability to identify with fellow members of the species.
That is very rare among the sane although it is characteristic of shards within the culture like drug cartels. And, of course, cartels have their story too. But dealing with them as a logical outgrowth of history might be giving them a lot more depth than they deserve..

When There Is No Collateral Damage

French President Hollande referred to Islamist terrorism recently but the phrase apparently was edited out by the White House. The Obama administration has had trouble uttering the dreaded phrase “Islamist terrorists.” This is not totally nuts. George W. Bush himself named the conflict the Global War on Terror. Not all Muslims are murderous radical Islamists, but all murderous radical Islamists are Muslims and the help of Islamic nations is essential in the conflict against the terrorists. Indeed, most of the victims are Muslims.
The problem with proclaiming a “war on terror” lies in defining a war against a strategy rather than an opponent. And a big conceptual difficulty is the seeming separation created between "War" and "Terror." Has there ever been a war without terror? In the Second War terror was integral to the plans of all participants.
But is such terror a war? Bush pledged to bring the perpetrators of 911 to justice. "Perpetrators." "Justice." Similarly, Obama sought to have Guantanamo prisoners tried in a US criminal court. Yet U.S. divisions in Iraq and Afghanistan surely looked to be at war and both presidents frequently referred to it as a war. But conflicts in war are not punishment or retribution--although they may start out that way. Their aim is destruction of the enemy. Obliteration of them and their threat. Criminals, however well organized, are not attacked preemptively; no just society would stand for that. Yet the drone war is exactly that.
This problem is not new. Vicious irregulars are spread throughout history as patriots, partisans, pirates, rebels, freedom fighters, fifth column,...the list is endless. The Geneva Convention of 1949 recognizes the right of forces that are not formally military to conduct organized resistance to occupation, such as the resistance in Europe during World War II. However, the Convention requires two things. First, the partisans--they called them "partisans"-- must be marked as soldiers. They must at least wear armbands if they lack uniforms. Second, they must carry their weapons openly. These guys do not do that. As Nathan Hale and Captain Andre can attest, a soldier not in uniform has no right to the protections of the laws or the customs of war. In World War II, Americans executed German soldiers who were captured wearing American uniforms at the Battle of the Bulge.
The Geneva Convention offers no protection to these people. But, again, who are they? A non-uniformed attacker of civilian site must be defined.
A contributions Obama could make to the world is exactly this: Define these people. The ambiguity of the government and their careful mincing around definitions is unsettling to a worried people. Imprecision is leeching and debilitating. Define these guys. If they are not pirates, if you insist upon dignifying their motives as a movement, fine. Make the combatants in Syria "soldiers." But hold them to it. When they attack out of uniform or attack a non-combatant, make them war criminals with all the definition entails. Such a declaration would put this kind of behavior in a very cold light as words mean things; in this instance, none of it should be good. Himmler's "rights" should be, at best, limited. And it would get rid of a lot of the youthful romance. Joining a group generally agreed upon as the spawn of Goebbels, Mengele, Mladić and Kabuga should be daunting. Calling something an "atrocity" gives it a lot less dignity than an "attack." And saying that there are no "non-combatants," that "everyone is guilty" of whatever these maniacs are mad about is no excuse. It is time for us to do some defining.
Being at war with the world is adolescent. Taking up arms to war with the world is insane. Joining a group of armed men at war with the world is the act of a war criminal.

San Bernardino

"I say this every time we've got one of these mass shootings. This just doesn't happen in other countries," the president claimed recently in Paris.
He just says these thing, you know.


John Lott has done a lot of research on gun violence and his conclusions are that these incidents are very complicated and do not analyze easily. People with easy solutions are either mistaken or insincere. He has written a response to the President's statement--a statement on a national stage that puts the Americans in a most unflattering light. These are some of his observations.

The French have witnessed three mass public shootings this year. January saw two attacks, one on the Charlie Hebdo magazine and another on a Paris supermarket. In the November attacks, 129 people were killed and 352 were injured. In 2015, France suffered more casualties than the U.S. has suffered during Obama's entire presidency (508 to 394).
Obama also overlooks Norway, where Anders Behring Breivik used a gun to kill 67 people and wound 110 others. Still others were killed by bombs that Breivik detonated. Of the four worst K-12 school shootings, three have occurred in Europe. Germany had two of these — one in 2002 at Erfut and another in 2009 at Winnenden, with a total death toll of 34.
Obama isn't correct even if he meant the frequency of fatalities or attacks. Many European countries actually have higher rates of death from public shootings that resulted in four or more murders. It's simply a matter of adjusting for America's much larger population. (The larger population is a very important element, again requiring care in analysis.)
Norway had the highest annual death rate, with two mass public shooting fatalities per million people. Macedonia had a rate of 0.38, Serbia 0.28, Slovakia 0.20, Finland 0.14, Belgium 0.14 and the Czech Republic 0.13. The U.S. comes in eighth with 0.095 mass public shooting fatalities per million people. Austria and Switzerland are close behind.
In terms of the frequency of attacks, the U.S. ranks ninth, with 0.09 attacks per million people. Macedonia, Serbia, Switzerland, Norway, Slovakia, Finland, Belgium and the Czech Republic all had higher rates.

Underlying all this misinformation--and Obama's willingness to embarrass the U.S.--is the administration's diagnosis and proposed solutions. Gun control. I have no problem with a careful look at gun accessibility. But the problem, found over and over, is that gun control does not correlate with violence. It is a placebo for administrators. The background checks ubiquitous in Europe and the U.S. always failed. So too did France and Belgium's complete bans on the weapons used in those attacks. The terrorists who attacked those countries still got the weapons that they wanted.
There is information out there, much of it the government's. And it is interesting stuff:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/01/fun-with-numbers.html
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2015/10/guns.html
The question should be, why do these people insist on this mythology?

Hard Men and Brittle Men

"Apparently, they're scared of widows and orphans coming into the United States of America."
That was how Obama, in Manila, rebuked Republicans on Tuesday for expressing concern about ISIS terrorists slipping into America amid the 10,000 Syrian refugees he wants to bring here. He may be lukewarm about ISIS but he is flat out furious at Rube-publicans.
I have not heard a single idea from the Rube-publicans that would solve the terrorist problem but there are some concerns that simply cannot be ignored. Even if one accepts the nihilistic notion that terrorism, like the flu, is inevitable and will cause its mortalities, if the state has any value, one would expect it to accept some responsibility for prevention and contagion.
Obama's response here is simply inadequate. And, as his peculiarities mount, I think insincere. He is besieged by events, by malignant men, by rivals on a stage that gradually is dwarfing him. Putin is rising, an almost comic foil for Obama, placing him in an increasingly ludicrous position.
My bet is that in the future his grand presentation of himself amidst the Greek columns will be the universal example of bathos.
Thoughtful men hate to become silly but not every uncertain man is Hamlet.

Diversity and it Discontents

I deeply support the right of anyone to speak freely. I supported, for example, the Nazis' right to march in Skokie (home to numerous holocaust survivors at the time). But I certainly didn't announce, at the time, "I am a Nazi."--Jim Leff


"Ugly American" is a term used pejoratively to describe arrogant or insensitive behavior of Americans in foreign countries. (Of course, such behavior was exclusively American. Curiously, in the book of the same name, he was a hero.) The Americans were always fretting about showing the sole of the shoe to someone who is offended by it, mentioning Hitler to Germans, disparaging local royalty. But times have changed. We are eager to show how stupid local traditions and beliefs are and are outraged when the locals react badly. The entire foreign policy of the American government last decade was to encourage undeveloped countries to recreate themselves in the American economic and governmental mode. We crave diversity and are amazed when that diversity is not shared back in return.

There is an arrogant quality about this. We know better. A lot better. And everyone can benefit from our insight. We are no longer People of the Book, we are People of the Enlightenment. We have freed ourselves from others' foolishness and are eager to share our knowledge. And we expect to be shielded by the victim's good taste, their sense of propriety, that somehow does not apply to us. We are proudly baiting the bear, tethered by his social restraint and expect him to tolerate the cruelty in our truth. That is the key to satire: It must be clever, humorous or insightful enough to earn a nod from the subject. The satirist and his object must have some agreement on terms; contempt, opprobrium must never peek through. And being non-selective is no excuse; skinhead groups are non-selective. 
So now we step on to a bus, see an elderly lady proudly wearing a ridiculous hat, and tell her so.

The editors of Charlie Hebdo feel it their right to offend Islam, feel it their duty. They attack the very heart of the religious and social belief of an astonishingly unsophisticated and defensive culture and expect to be treated like Jonathan Swift.
I believe in the Right of Free Speech, the Right to Assemble. But we are losing our moorings. (Pun intended.) I also believe in an unspoken social compact, something that might best be translated as respect. I have great sympathy for these people and their families. And I would defend their rights of free speech, assembly and the rest of the social and political freedoms that the West has, at long last, begun to assume. Nonetheless, Je ne suis pas Charlie.

Obama at the U.N.

Obama made a speech to the U.N. about the problems in the world, especially those problems he sees as stimulating some international efforts to rectify.
He spoke about the Ebola epidemic, the situation in Ukraine, and terrorism in Iraq and Syria, and described “a pervasive unease in our world – a sense that the very forces that have brought us together have created new dangers, and made it difficult for any single nation to insulate itself from global forces.”
Then he said this:
"I realize that America’s critics will be quick to point out that at times we too have failed to live up to our ideals; that America has plenty of problems within our own borders. This is true. In a summer marked by instability in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, I know the world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri – where a young man was killed, and a community was divided. So yes, we have our own racial and ethnic tensions. And like every country, we continually wrestle with how to reconcile the vast changes wrought by globalization and greater diversity with the traditions that we hold dear."

Ebola. Ukraine. ISIS. Ferguson, Missouri. What are people to make of this guy?

The Hot and Beating Heart of Terrorism

This is an e-mail that is apparently making the rounds. (I came upon it in another circumstance.) With it is the Snopes assessment. I took some subjective commentary out. It is important to note the writer grossly underestimates the woman's motive. I thought this would be a good day for it. So often the stupidity and aimlessness of terrorists is the emphasis of a story.

The success of a movement often depends not on its arms or its head but on its heart.

From: Dr. Arieh Eldad:

I was instrumental in establishing the Israeli National Skin Bank, which is the largest in the world. The National Skin Bank stores skin for every day needs as well as for war time or mass casualty situations.

This skin bank is hosted at the Hadassah Ein Kerem University hospital in Jerusalem where I was the Chairman of plastic surgery. This is how I was asked to supply skin for an Arab woman from Gaza, who was hospitalized in Soroka Hospital in Beersheva, after her family burned her. Usually, such atrocities happen among Arab families when the women are suspected of having an affair.

We supplied all the needed Homografts for her treatment. She was successfully treated by my friend and colleague, Prof. Lior Rosenberg and discharged to return to Gaza. She was invited for regular follow-up visits to the outpatient clinic in Beersheva.

One day she was caught at a border crossing wearing a suicide belt. She meant to explode herself in the outpatient clinic of the hospital where they saved her life. It seems that her family promised her that if she did that, they would forgive her.

This is only one example of the war between Jews and Muslims in the Land of Israel. It is not a territorial conflict. This is a civilizational conflict, or rather a war between civilization & barbarism.

From Snopes:

 Arieh Eldad is a medical doctor specializing in plastic surgery and a member of Israel's Knesset. He served as the Director of Hadassah Hospital, Ein Kerem's Department of Plastic Surgery from 2000 to 2003 and is the Founder and Chairman of the Israeli Burn Association. 
Everything up to and including "a war between civilization & barbarism" in the piece quoted 

above is a direct excerpt from an interview given by Dr. Eldad to New English Review in November 2008.

It is indeed an account of an actual incident, except for the small detail of how the aspiring terrorist came by her burns. (She was injured by a gas tank explosion rather than deliberately by her family in retaliation for a suspected affair.)

Morally Repugnant Elites (MRE)

So now we are in the distribution phase of the Iraq disaster: Who will end up with the Old Maid card? The new and improved maniacs are taking more and more territory, the Americans have washed their collective hands of it and Obama apparently agrees. Quo Vadis?

Well, where did the creature come from in the first place?
In 1998 President Bill Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 into law which supported regime change in Iraq; he gave a speech on the dangers of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.
After 9/11 both houses of Congress voted overwhelmingly to pass a resolution authorizing the removal of Saddam Hussein by force. Support was unusually bipartisan with Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Harry Reid all speaking on the Senate floor in support of the bill. Sen. Jay Rockefeller and Rep. Nancy Pelosi spoke in the House about the dangers of Saddam's stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. (They were not nuts; they drew on the same classified domestic and foreign intelligence reports that had led Bush to call for Saddam's forcible removal. They all heard the same evidence.)
There were 23 points offered as reason to get rid of Hussein, most of them unconnected to 9/11. His attempts to commit genocide against the Kurds, the Shiites and the Marsh Arabs, his attacking four of his neighbors, his attempt to arrange the assassination of a former U.S. president (George H.W. Bush), his bounties for suicide bombers on the West Bank, his harboring of global terrorists, and his almost maniacal flouting of U.N. no-fly zones.
George Will, David Brooks, William F. Buckley, Fareed Zakaria, David Ignatius and Thomas Friedman all wrote in support of the action.
But....no WMDs. Now virtually no Iraq.

So who is to blame? Everyone? No one? Well I nominate arrogance. I nominate the astonishing confidence that led a Western nation whose graduate school students couldn't find Iraq on a map to think they could remake an ancient land in their own image. I nominate the pride of a monolithic bureaucracy that sees everything else as a monolithic bureaucracy when all the evidence is that our mortal enemies are miniaturizing and downsizing like American start-ups.

Guard the borders. Buy Geiger counters. Invest in immunology.
Winter is coming. 

DARPA and SIGA

Several leaders of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) were in town today for some meetings. I was unable to go but would loved to have asked this question:

Siga Corp. is a small pharmaceutical research and development company that has developed a new anti-viral drug, ST-246. This drug can treat people successfully if they have contracted Smallpox. There are some theoretical problems with ST-246, not the least of which it can not be tested on people because that would mean giving them Smallpox first. But there are significant lab studies, animal studies, and some real life instances where the drug has been shown to be effective and safe. The DARPA and the Defense Department have made commitments to buy and storehouse this drug.

Recently the drug has come under fire from two sources, politicians and newspapers. (Of note, Siga has long been a short target where people sell the stock and then harass it publicly to drive the stock price down.) The politicians, especially Claire McCaskill (D) and Darrell Issa (R), argue that the drug has been developed against a disease that has been eradicated and thus has no target. The newspaper attack came from the LA Times which wrote, "The government's pursuit of Siga's product raises the question: Should the U.S. buy an unproven drug for such a nebulous threat?" More ammo has arrived because of our anxiety over wealth and political convictions: Siga's controlling shareholder is billionaire Ronald O. Perelman, one of the world's richest men and a longtime Democratic Party donor.

Smallpox immunization has been remarkably successful, so much so that vaccinations are not done any more. But thinking its absence means it is no threat is naïve, especially when we know that Smallpox was the lead bioweapon developed by the Russian Biopreparate weapons lab and elaborated upon (they tried to link it to Ebola to increase its infectivity) until the Russian Communist political structure dissolved.

So my question is this: What do you think the motives of this campaign against such a reasonable and needed drug are? Is it a financial link to short-sellers, treasonous allegiance to some foreign entity or simple stupidity?

 

9/11 reflected in Boston's Broken Glass

The mom of the Boston bomber, in the middle of her ridiculously implausible "denial tour," said if her son were executed "I will say Allahu Akbar!“

Somehow this fits. In fact all of this seems a non sequitur. Nothing leads from one point to another.
A family flees to this country and is welcomed and protected. The family goes on welfare support. They become comfortable and the children pursue their educations. One marries a local girl and has a child. Then they blow up countless strangers. Afterwards they go to several social events.

Any of these episodes might be individually coherent, even reasonable. But together they are more like that charming boy on the bus trip from Florida to Washington State, Ted Bundy. Except we know Ted was quite mad and these boys are not. They are just vicious. But purposelessly so to the Western mind. Any connection to the world of politics or religion is more senile than symbolic; there just is no obvious reason, at least to us. Is there a new social madness, like the obscene phone caller, made possible only by some innocent modern circumstance?

So what is going on? Is it really beyond reason?

A great worry is the tremendous variability of social norms. American prisons, as an isolated culture, look nothing like the culture its constituents came from. Pirate ships demonstrated a democratic structure that was not present in any of the cultures the pirates left. The savagery of the western American farmer in the Indian Wars had nothing in common with the east coast of his origin. Shards from shattered societies like the Symbionese Liberation Army or Jonestown or Amish communities look fantastic to the rest of us but are, nonetheless, quite well ordered and often of great integrity.

Solzhenitsyn thought the American inclusiveness was charmingly naive on a local level and blunderingly stupid internationally. At his 1978 Commencement Address at Harvard, Solzhenitsyn said, "Every ancient and deeply rooted self-contained culture .....constitutes a self-contained world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking.....But the persisting blindness of (Western) superiority continues to hold the belief that all the vast regions of our planet should develop and mature to the level of contemporary Western systems....such a conception is a fruit of Western comprehension of the essence of other worlds."

George Bush was an evangelist for democracy. Almost all Westerners believe the progress the West has made is towards a preordained ideal. Francis Fukuyama wrote about it as "The End of History." All was fulfilled in us.

Imagine, then, that all the behavior we see as so strange and inconsistent is being viewed through a distorted Western prism, that bombers are not indoctrinated or "brainwashed" but progressing along their cultural norm, that the acceptance of adult-on-children violence is not acceptance at all but rather the norm, that their connection to Western development is tangential, not incremental.

Maybe these cultural "divides" are rather ancient schisms and have more consequence than we ever thought.

(from an old post.)