Category Archives: News

Progressives Love Them Some Jailbait

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Here’s a joke from my old blog:

Q: How do you separate the grown-ups from the children at the Huffington Post?

A: With a crowbar.

This was in response not only to the linked material, but to the centrifugal talking points that accompanied the almost-extradition of Roman Polanski from Switzerland a few years ago. You remember, “it wasn’t rape-rape” and “what was that little girl doing there anyway?” and all of that. At the time, I turned it all into an essay entitled “With the Rich and Mighty, or is Roman Polanski as smart as Michael Vick?” (available as part of my Typing into the Void collection, which I mention instead of rattling any kind of tip jar. It’s only $2.99 on Kindle!) It seemed to me then, and seemed to me now, that proggies are entirely willing to give legal passes to members of Designated Victim Groups and/or Significantly Important Artistes. Polanski was both.

Kaitlyn Hunt, an 18-year-old charged with statutory rape on a 14-year-old girl, only meets the first requirement. But that’s good enough for the sterling intellectuals at Daily Kos, who are busily pretending that Florida law, which has set its age of consent at 16 or 18 years old, depending on closeness of age, somehow has a “unless it’s for hot lesbo action” corollary. Other McCain has the goods.

I seem to recall an Ally McBeal storyline along the same lines: defending a woman in her 30′s charged with seducing a 16-year-old boy because she was full of so many feels and just had to Bridge her Madison County, IYKWIMAITYD. It’s okay if you’re a woman, or gay, or a gay woman. Heterosexual males, on the other hand…

The only winning move is not to play.

(Sidebar: How stale are my pop culture references? I mean, Ally McBeal, Bridges of Madison County, and then I toss in a quote from Wargames. These jokes are all old enough vote. I need to hang out at Buzzfeed some more.)

A Reality Show to Send People to Mars?

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This would be the first reality show that would accomplish anything worthwhile.

My mind is filled with misgivings on this. In the first place, reality shows have less than a proven track record at distinguishing the truly talented from the merely photogenic (Name the debut albums of any five American Idol winners). I can’t escape the notion that a genius is going to lose to an attractive mediocrity in the race to be the first extraterrestrial human.

In the second place, can humans actually, you know, live on Mars?

How are they going to get food? What are they going to live in? How will they get air to breathe? Sure, they’ll be sent into space with these things, but a lifetime’s supply?

Also, Mars has complexities beyond it’s image of a planet-sized Arizona:

Mars is poorly suited for human habitation. There’s some ice at the poles and perhaps some water in underground repositories. Gravity is only 38 percent as strong as on Earth. The atmosphere is thin and consists mostly of carbon dioxide (95%). So colonists would have to either take air from Earth or make air on Mars. Plants efficiently separate the oxygen bound to carbon and therefore can make air we can breathe, so colonists should take plants along.

The Martian atmosphere is too thin to hold oxygen, which would just escape to space. So the plants would have to be cultivated in greenhouses and the oxygen they produce kept in flasks.

Mars has a very weak magnetic field, and its atmosphere offers little protection against radiation from space. So the Martian colonists would have to build radiation protection into their houses and wear thick suits. Unlike Earth, where most incoming meteorites burn up in the atmosphere, many meteorites crash dangerously onto the surface of Mars.

The Martian weather is awful. It’s cold: the average temperature of the southern hemisphere is minus 60 degrees Celsius; even at the equator, it’s seldom over zero. Winds are fierce and blow at speeds of several hundred kilometres an hour, and storms can last for months. The wind whirls up fine dust that penetrates everything and sticks to all surfaces, which literally would toss sand in the gears of vital mechanical and electronic equipment.

And even if all of that is overcome, what’s the next step? Are the First Martians merely going on an extended vacation, or are they planning on breeding? Since the contest is going to narrow things down to 4 people, does that mean 2 men and 2 women? We know that sex in space is well, difficult, and reproduction in space may be highly unlikely (and inadvisable anyway, due to the hightened levels of ratiation). Will Mars be any better? Even if the radiation issue gets handled, Mars’ gravity is not going to get any stronger.

Let’s keep in mind that it takes a little under a year to even get to Mars, and that’s when the planet is closest to us. So those winners better have monastic discipline even to survive the journey. If growing food doesn’t work out, resupply operations will probably be available at three-year intervals, at best. And unless some means of blasting off the planet is developed, a rescue operation is impossible.

Bottom line: The Martian Roanoke, without the thrill of mystery.

endwell

Russell Taylor – In praise of UKIP

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I don’t know anything about the UK Independence party, but Russel Taylor casts it in very Tea Partyish terms.

The Tories have responded by insisting UKIP has no real policies, to which I would say that this hasn’t held them back. Their ragtag combination of Keynesianism and liberal dogma doesn’t represent a coherent response to the mess we’re in. Then there’s the accusation that UKIP is merely a protest party that will dilute the conservative vote and let Labour back in. Well maybe they are a protest party, but the point of protest is to force change. If the threat of a Labour victory persuades the Tories to go back to their roots and adopt some of the ideas advanced by UKIP, that protest will have done its job. I would gladly vote for a Conservative Party that thinks like Nigel Farage.

Is there an election coming up? I really have no idea.

We Do Not Understand the Middle East

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That’s a pretty obvious statement, but Michael Totten’s article about the End of Hezbollah (his lips to God’s ears) underlines it wonderfully:

Part of Hezbollah’s support used to come from the fact that they were perceived as not being corrupt, but that’s over now, too.

“Even my family members who are big Hezbollah supporters are talking about the corruption,” she said. “One of my relatives told me she hates them now. And she has always been a huge resistance supporter.”

A large number of Lebanon’s Shia may not like Hezbollah so much anymore, but the support is still there because they feel like they don’t have any choice. They are afraid. Every sect felt this way during the civil war, when even people who are natural cosmopolitan pacifists supported one of “their own” sectarian militias because they were afraid of the others. It would happen to you, too, if you lived in an environment with a weak and dysfunctional state that can’t provide security while your neighbors are trying to kill you.

We discuss the Middle East in simple, monochrome terms, because drawing a distinction between radical Muslims seems like angels-on-pinheads territory. They all want to kill us, so what’s the difference?

But the Middle East is rife with faultlines and divisions: Shia, Sunni, Salafist, Alawite:

The Alawites—Bashar al-Assad’s minority sect—are not actually Shias, not really. Washington thinks they are, but that’s because back in the 1970s the Lebanese cleric Musa Sadr issued a fatwa declaring them Shias. For a thousand years before that, no one thought of the Alawites as Shias or even Muslims. What they are is a secretive and closed heterodox minority that fuses Christianity, Gnosticism, and Twelver Shia Islam together into something else entirely. Muslims have always considered them infidels.

I consider myself reasonably well-versed on the subject of basic Islam, and I’ve never heard of these people. I’d always assumed Assad was a Sunni Muslim, because I always figured the Tigris-Euphrates was the faultline between Sunni and Shia.

Until we learn these things institutionally — until the State and Defense Departments, the CIA etc. develop policy that exploits the complexities of the Middle East — we will make no headway.

Fortunately, it’s going to be a Long War.

Why Would Amazon Want a Physical Presence?

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Over at Quartz, a suggestion that Amazon, which has been making moves toward having physical stores (at present, “lockers” which function like post office boxes where people can pick things up), should buy Radio Shack, which has been faltering in just the way you would expect.

It sounds exciting, but it’s a bad idea.

The reason Radio Shack is faltering is because it can’t compete with Amazon. Who wants to take the trouble to drive somewhere, ask a harried clerk a question he cannot answer, and then pay retail markup for your item when you can just scan through customer recommendations, select your product, and have it delivered from the comfort of your home anywhere you can connect to the internet?

Why would Amazon want to add a high-cost element that undercuts its own effectiveness? So it can sell a small amount of it’s myriad of products from a small-box location?

While I can appreciate the symbolic value of an Internet company taking over a piece of meatspace, adopting Barnes & Noble’s business model doesn’t sound like the recipe for success.

Moats dug round Chinese villagers’ houses to drive them out

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 This is the Kind of thing you expect to read about in Dickensian portraits of 19th-century capitalism.

Yangji village in the southeastern city of Guangzhou has reportedly existed for some 900 years.
As China’s economy exploded and the port city’s population ballooned to more than 12 million, real estate developers moved in and Yangji’s 4,000 residents found themselves facing eviction.

This is the part about socialism that no one talks about: that in the late phase of any socialist/communist state, the ruling oligarchy’s behavior is indistinguishable from that of a corporate/capitalist oligarchy of socialists’ fevered imaginations.

Animal Farm

Rand Paul Suggests the Containment Strategy for Islamic Terror

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It’s not a bad idea. Containment was more than just a military strategy; it was a holistic assessment of the weakness of the Soviet Union, an assessment that turned out, on the whole, to be right.

In Kennan’s famous X article he argues that containment meant the “application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and manoeuvres of Soviet policy.” He later clarified, though, that did not necessarily mean that the application of counter-force had to mean a military response. He argued that containment was not a strategy to counter “entirely by military means.”  “But containment was not diplomacy [alone] either.”

Like communism, radical Islam is an ideology with worldwide reach. Containing radical Islam requires a worldwide strategy like containment. It requires counterforce at a series of constantly shifting worldwide points. But counterforce does not necessarily mean large-scale land wars with hundreds of thousands of troops nor does it always mean a military action at all.

Read the whole thing.

Retired Cardinal “Stripped of Duties”

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He spent decades shielding priestly molestors. He deserves no less.

A Church expert said the “very unusual” punishment showed how seriously the US Catholic hierarchy was taking the case.

“To tell a cardinal he can’t do confirmations, can’t do things in public, that’s extraordinary,” said Jesuit scholar the Reverend Thomas Reese, a Georgetown University fellow, told the Los Angeles Times.

His judgement cometh, and that right soon.