Category: CULTURE

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“Peak Oil” Joins The List

 

     The modern marriage of science and politics has not seen such a loving relationship since the Catholic Church and Geocentric theory.  Control the conclusions and the power to direct policy and sublimate people is yours.  The concept of  the Earth as the center of the universe and all celestial bodies revolving about it were the brilliant conceptualizations of great men of science such as Aristotle and Ptolemy, providing for their time far reaching logical interpretations of the natural world. The piggybacking of the religious conception of an omnipotent God whose acknowledged greatest creation was Man and the planet man inhabited dovetailed nicely into the scientific tome.  When the “settled” science developed cracks – and what science could be more settled than the science of an omnipotent supreme being’s creation – the Church found the observations of those such as Galileo heretical.  The very concept of an alternative universe where the earth was just another planet orbiting a sun of many suns was antithetical to a universe where God expressed Himself most perfectly through his earthly creations, and most importantly, through His placing of the Church in the position of earthly arbiter of What Is.  The beauty and mystery  of God’s creation is undeniable and awe inspiring, but what is also clear is the many facets of the Mystery is not held forever in the hands of a solitary truth. Science untethered from restrictive thought evolves ever more masterfully toward bringing clarity to the natural world’s mystery. Tie its existence and conclusions to the current elite, and what you have is a recipe for trouble.

     Thus, the framing of  The List.  The list is many examples through history of “settled” science threatened by the progression of knowledge and objective vetting, resulting in violent reaction and suppression. The list extends over the centuries in linear fashion, from the geocentrism of the middle ages, to Man as God’s directed creation rather than through Darwinian evolution, to the Racialist Theories of National Socialism, to the globalist theories of “anthropogenic global warming”.  Each declared a settled science to maintain the political and economic levers such settled conclusions provided, and dictatorially suppressed any other conclusions.

     The concept of “peak oil” takes its roots from similar origins of other such dire armageddon theories of the last five decades, such as “Population Bomb”, “Nuclear Winter”, and “Global Warming”.  Each defined the Development of Western Man  as the culprit, a out of control species that destroys the careful balance of the natural world for his own selfish interests, plundering the Earth, and plowing onward to the destruction of everything out of his own spiteful need for individual expression and pursuit of happiness.  Only a global consortium of like minded tenders can “manage” this tendency for self destruction, and through the levers of economic control and rationing, assure a fair and appropriate distribution of the diminishing resources of the planet.   Science joined into this radically reactionary tome for the same reasons Willie Sutton stated bank robbers rob banks – that’s where the money is. The dolling out of billions of dollars of “directed” research money assured that those with appropriate conclusions prospered and those contrarians starved- and thus the “settled” science.

      “Peak Oil” has been typical of this science vein, nurtured on strands of facts and locked in against any potential threats.  The simple tome goes like this – there is a defined amount to available oil carbon based energy on the planet, the amount has been discovered, and the earth’s spiraling need for oil will come up against this finite and ever diminishing source with dire consequences unless we immediately transition to other sources of energy and live “within our means”.   The concepts are based on known oil sources and extraction capacities, progressive utilization, and the untoward effect of continuing reliance on oil on the environment.   As the “Peak Oil” advocates similarly harp to similar dire predictions, the science of diminishing oil has long been “settled”.

     Unfortunately for elitists, and to the benefit of those who seek a self directed individual life defined by freedom and choice, science is never settled.  Anthropogenic global warming has recently crashed against the rocks of facts, and now Peak Oil is seeing a similar demise.  The driving forces in the United States promoting the concept of Peak Oil have run up against the explosion of technology, that has separated the facts from the “science”.   Available oil has always been artificially limited by availablity and now through new technology availablity has sky rocketed.  New technological feats in shale oil extraction and deep water drilling have opened the United States, Canada and the world to spectacular new oil finds, to the extent that known available oil has doubled with no end in sight.  The United States in particular, once the nunber one oil producer in the world, but in production decline since the 1940’s  due to ever cheaper easily available middle east sources, now finds itself in the midst of an oil boom on the scale of the original oil rush , and could amazingly prove oil self sufficinient by 2022.  This accounts only from newly discovered resources and does not take into account the spectacular availability of carbon based energy locked in coal  that has yet to find a science to safely harness, and of which the United States is uniquely blessed with abundance.

     How can this be?  How is it possible that in three short years, one has gone from a convinced world in which man induced global warming and plundering of self limited natural resources, is now a world that appears to be cooling despite man’s efforts and is bountiful in cheap energy?  It is of course the result of individual man’s ever searching intellect, that drives forward toward truth no matter what artificial constraints are applied to suppress it.  These innate internal drives are what drove the discovery of the telescope by which Galileo exposed the universe’s reality,  and what powered the intellects of the supposed racially inferior Jewish scientists cast out by Germany that powered U.S. atomic technology winning the race with German scientists to the secrets of the atom. 

     The List is an elitest one, designed to suppress free expression economically and materially, so that a certain hierachy is maintained.  Their brief setbacks, created by facts they have not yet found the means to control, has given us all a brief respite.  It is, however, an eternal struggle, and those striving for control of the nation’s and world’s resources control governmental avenues of power, and are not about to easily give up their drive for ultimate control of the new religion of “settled science”.   Whenever necessary, we must stand strong and express doubt regarding their conclusions and demand independent observation.  It is the way of science, it is the way of this democracy, and it is the way of free will.

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Dog Days of February


     We are in that part of the winter in the northern climes where the novelty and romance of snow and fireplaces are wearing off and the cold, hard facts of an extended winter are becoming apparent. Like my faithful old dog, it would be nice to simply stay in and ignore the elements but harsh climate has to be considered and faced.  So must we recognize that the lulls created by the blanketing cold does not allow ignorance of what is just simmering beneath the tundra and will possibly envelop our days in the very near future. Events are warming up and warming up in a hurry.

      Syria and the collapse of the old order of things:    

     The Associated Press reports the assasination of a top Syrian Army general in Damascusand with it the myth that the Syrian revolt against the Alawite regime of President Assad is a tribal backwater problem is progressively being dismantled.  A conflict that is extending to nearly a year has proven resistant to the usual brutal bully tactics of Baathist thugs using tanks against people with rocks, despite the reported deaths of  over 5000 Syrians.  Now, in a truly ominous sign to the old guard, an attack against a army leader in the fortress of the capital city reveals none of the old guard can consider themselves safe.  The usual advantages utilized by tyrants for centuries, dominance of the military and security forces are beginning to seriously unravel.  New complications to order are rising- the suspicion that the assassins may be elements of Al Qaeda Iraq asserting themselves in Syria, trying to create further anarchy, their specialty, and making things more troubling for Western powers, who like to see the world in clean shades of black and white, casting the Syrian protesters as simple democrats striving for personal freedom.  Syria matters to everybody in the region, the local tribes, Shia versus Sunni, Iran and her Hezbollah proxies, Al Qaeda and its lust for suffering and chaos, Israel with her vulnerable border, Lebanon and Iraq with their proximity and internal interested parties, Russia, Europe, and the United States in their ongoing need to interfere and try to control events.  The poor average citizen of Syria is getting crushed in the process, the passive blanket  upon which all these bludgeons are striking, and the future is dimming for a rational, contained end to the violence.  The warming spring is going to bring progressive calamity and may yet involve all the players, in an ever expanding mess.

     Europe and the Euro:

          The winter blues in Europe are going to be replaced with a red hot summer of economic crisis.  Greece is struggling for simple survival in its quest to achieve the unachievable, a stabilization of its debt crisis while keeping the Euro as its currency.  Stiff austerity measures are being demanded of Greece in payment of the bailout of billions of owed bonds that were foolishly supplied by generations of banks to prop up Greece’s unwillingness to stop promising its citizenry a life without responsibility.  The final loaner is the one that the rest of Europe thought they had shorne themselves of forever after World War II, Germany – and frugal, powerful Germany is in no mood to forever passively funnel money into an endless sinkhole. 

     The spectre of a German economic and political superpower dictating in authortarian fashion how things are going to be from now on in Europe is being consumated politically just 60 years after its attempt to achieve the same result through military force led to Germany and Europe’s devastation.  Try as they might, I don’t see how the Greeks are going to possibly be able to maintain austerity and economic vitality at the same time under the Euro, and Greece’s default and Euro withdrawal is probably only a matter of time.  The idea of a vassal state will be extremely unappealing, and a return to the drachma as a flexible national currency seems inevitable.  So Greece goes to drachma…so what?  The so what is the significantly larger economies and debt messes of Spain and Italy that are next in line and Germany will feel only more pressure to secure its prosperity at the expense of its fellow European states.   The American led recession of 2008 will look tame compared to the European caused recession of 2012, and Europe will likely see a return of the type of unrest that has plagued it for 500 years – the suspicions of intelligent, competitive people who share neither language nor history, but are locked in the same landmass  nevertheless.

     Iran and the coming “high noon” moment :

     As dangerous as the above two scenarios are, the third has the potential to dwarf both.  Iran, in the clutches of an authoritarian regime with a seventh century mindset toward the world and twenty first century capability, is coming ever closer to the moment of truth regarding its nuclear ambitions.  Whether months or years away from fruition, the repeatedly stated purpose of Iran’s leaders to use nuclear weaponry to initiate a conflagration over the existence of Israel, has led to the complete attention of all parties.  Iran, with an economy in near collapse puts its precious resources into the dream of a super-weapon that will bring the Israelis to their knees, and the leaders of Israel, who finally led the Jewish people off of two thousand five hundred years of bended knee, are not going to stand back and allow anyone to corral them again into subservience.  The tipping point is likely this spring or summer and no one in the world is unlikely to go unaffected if the two nations go head to head.  Tod Lundberg of the Weekly Standard suggests the drawing in of every major player should Israel feel compelled to act for her own survival is inevitable, and will create the potential for world wide conflict.  The United States, despite the investment of thousands of lives and billions of dollars in trying to stabilize the unruly middle east crescent over the past twenty years, will find this final destabilization will dwarf the previous commitment.  High Noon is coming – Iran wants it, Israel can’t avoid it, and the rest of the world will find itself helpless to stop it.

     From the cold northern climes, the summer beckons for travel and adventure.  If you had intentions this summer, however, of walking the steps of the Acropolis, riding through the gates of Damascus, experiencing the seaside cafes of Tel Aviv, or contemplating the ruins of Persepolus, I would suggest you rethink your travelogue.  Its going to be a hot, uncomfortable summer.

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2011- Annus Horribilis or Mirabilis?

   

    The end of the year leads defenders of the Ramparts to reflect as to whether the year preceding advanced the ideals of western civilization, or damaged them. The year 2011 had its positive moments that suggested some slivers of hope as to the ultimate triumph of man’s battle with himself to secure a better future, but there were also dark clouds galore. It seems to be fundamentally a year in transition, the middle set of a three set match, the pawn takes pawn of a chess battle. We at the Ramparts project the events as threads of a tapestry, that show why this site and others like it that look at events with some perspective of history, have their place. Lets work our way through the significant moments and reflect upon them from our perspective as guardians of the Ramparts of Civilization.

     January 8th – U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords experiences an attempted assassination :     In a horrific moment in time, a deranged sociopath severely wounds congresswoman Giffords and kills six others during a political event in her home district in Tucson, Arizona.  Though the murderer is quickly identified as a disturbed individual with no identifiable rationalization beyond anarchy and medical evidence of schizophrenia, the killer is trumpeted in the media as a presumptive right wing “tea party” extremist possibly inspired by an innocuous graphic on a Sarah Palin website using targets as a means of identifying potentially politically vulnerable politicians for the next election. President Obama declares the event at a memorial for the fallen as an example of an outgrowth of our lack of civility in our discourse, then proceeds to vilify the rest of the year those who civilly disagree with him.  The use of a national tragedy to advance political  ends – not unique, but certainly not our shining hour.

     February 6th – the Green Bay Packers win Superbowl XLV 31-25 over the Pittsburgh Steelers : A win for western civilization as a team with numerous injuries and the worst starting position of all the teams in the playoffs triumphs over adversity to win the game of games.  Okay, maybe not earth shaking in terms of the effect on preservation of our western ideals, but as a part owner of said team, I felt a need for some shameless trumpeting.

     February 7th – Southern Sudan celebrates its ‘peaceful’ independence from Sudan and forms the Republic of South Sudan- President Woodrow Wilson would take pride in the principle of the right of self- determination of indigenous people (excepting his own country), but the founding of South Sudan from Sudan divided one of the poorest nations of the world and managed to create two economic and health care basket cases from one.  The previous battle for the secession of southern Sudan from Sudan was marred by genocidal tendencies on both sides in what was termed by one international aid official as “human rights abuses off the Richter Scale”.  The world continues to confuse the concept of the rights of a collective people to self govern regardless of their ability to be sustainable, thereby promoting the generation of conflict after conflict without the possibility of any hope or life improvement of the individual people suffering within the conflicted lands.  Basket case governments continue to proliferate.

     February 11th – Arab Spring Revolution brings the resignation of President Mubarak of Egypt – The most populous Arab nation in the world throws out its President dictator of nearly three decades in a tumultuous revolution.  The initial exuberance of the international elite to declare a victory for freedom and individual liberty, however, is chastened over the year as the military remains entrenched and a series of elections turns the government over to Islamists antithetical to the rights of minorities, personal liberty, and western concepts of human rights and justice, and with more than a little passion for the concept of “jihad”. The popular liberal naivete of clamoring for democracy before the societal principles of rights and responsibilities are encrypted and political and judicial institutions are in place to assure its unbiased utilization remain a damning weakness of the clamor for unfettered democracy as a cure all tool for civilization.  Across the Arab world, the individual must continue to live in fear of what “democracy” may mean to his individual freedoms, a harrowing thought.

     March 7th – President Obama renews military tribunals at Guantanamo – President Obama declared upon his inauguration that within a year the penitentiary at Guantanamo, Cuba would be closed and the terrorists held within, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 murderer, would be tried under domestic civil courts and laws. Two years later, the well thought out process of the Bush administration to deal with country-less war combatants, so impugned by Obama and his Justice department, proved to be unassailable.  The cave in of the President on this issue hurt him severely on his support from the left, and exposed the rank political nature of the arguments that followed the 9/11 tragedy. The consideration of providing the rights of a U.S. citizen under the constitution to enemy combatants who claim no country as their own was shown to be illogical, and served only to reflect the administration’s disdain for the special nature of those rights, when they later in the year killed remotely the American citizen terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki, without a trial or tribunal of any kind.

     April 5th – Justice David Prosser wins re-election to the Wisconsin Supreme Court – The story that perhaps best outlines the progressively titanic battle of the forces of government statism and the rights of individuals has been running non-stop in the state of Wisconsin since the November, 2010 election of Republican governor Scott Walker and an accompanying republican legislature.  Faced with the strangulating deficits accrued by incompetent and irresponsible predecessors in office, Governor Walker campaigned on a platform of budgetary discipline and solvency that once in office, he fulfilled almost immediately.  A balanced budget required by law was achieved partially by restraining the unfettered perks of government unions and asking government employees to pay a percent of their health and pension benefits, more reflective of what the private sector employee faces.  In an explosion foreshadowing the cataclysm to come on a national level when even more spectacular debt is finally faced up to, the unions fought back with a vengeance and furor, pouring tens of millions of dollars and thousands of protesters into the maelstrom that became the Wisconsin capital of Madison. Having little sway in effecting the popularly elected governor and legislature, the unions turned the ratchet tightly onto their own, demanding legislative obstruction and obtaining the flight to Illinois of their democrat legislative stoolies, and using the courts to attempt to obstruct the legislative process.  County liberal justices put forth restraining orders on the legislative process restricting the democratic will of the populous from the previous election, and the restraint came down to the ultimate control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court in the election between sitting judge David Prosser and his rabidly liberal opponent Joanne Kloppenberg, as to whether a democracy would function through its elected legislature or its courts.  In a race with huge implications and massive turnout, Prosser beat back Kloppenberg by 7000 votes out of over a million and a half cast, and the voice of the elected legislative process was preserved.  The result in Wisconsin has been a balanced budget for the first time in over a decade without federal stimulus dollars or stolen funds from other constituencies, an emerging national hero for governmental sanity in Walker, and a never say die anarchist strategy of the unions who fear their power over the democrat party is at risk.  The result has been never ending special recall elections to attempt to overturn the results of the previous election, and one that is planned to threaten Walker himself in April, 2012.  Will the perks of the privileged and protected be preserved in the face of obvious crisis?  The question is one that all western governments are facing and will likely determine our future as responsible democratic republics. Stay tuned. In a Wisconsin microcosm, this is The Story of our times.

     May 2nd – American special forces kill Osama Bin Laden –  A spectacular raid into Pakistan leads to the cornering and killing of the central figure of the 9/11 attack and murderer of 3000 people,  who premeditatively ignited a world wide war on terrorism that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands.  The principle concept of a death cult that saw the suppression of the rights of millions and slaughtering of innocents for the ‘assured’ reward in the afterlife came to a instantaneous end in the identification of a pathetic old man who watched himself endlessly on videos and titilated himself with pornography.  The inherent emptiness of a philosophy that determines for others at the threat of a gun a righteous life was once again exposed.  For President Obama, and a world that believes in human worth, a huge victory.

     September 17th – Occupy Wall Street begins its sit in in New York City-  The reverse mirror image to the Tea Party first presents itself in New York as the people’s representative of the economic inequities that exist in society, as emblazoned in their chant, “we are the 99%”.  Unlike with the Tea Party of the previous year, the clarity of the message quickly degenerates into the concerns of multiple special interests, that have as their core philosophy, they have it, we want it! .  The stated cohesion of the eventual demonstrations that broke out the world over is that society has an obligation to assure the security, comfort, and health of all, and the concept of self actualization and personal responsibility an outdated concept.  Like so many events of recent years in western society, Occupy is driven by the desire to separate the will of a society to provide from its means of production, and as Hayak surmised, would inevitably lead to the demise of free will and the power of the market to improve the life experience.  TEA PARTY vs OCCUPIERS , the battle royale of the 21st century.

     October 5th – Apple founder Stephen Jobs dies –  the genius behind the development of the personal computer, the portable music library, the smart phone, and the interactive tablet started his dream in his parent’s garage, daring to be different and self reliant, and ended it feeling the same way.  Jobs’ very being was tied up in providing to each individual sufficient connection to the surrounding universe to assure each  maximal freedom in interpreting their place in it.  He made the world forever an interconnected place, and disdained the idea of a government picking technology winners.  At a time when creative invention was felt all but lost, Jobs sent it soaring towards the heavens.   

     October 18th – Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, five years in capitivity is exchanged for over 1000 Palestinian prisoners –  The only functioning democracy in the middle East respecting the rights within the government of religious and political minorities, shows its vulnerability in the commitment made to one of its own.  Israel, in weighing the trade of a single human life, for many who sought the death of innocents to further their cause, shows the way for all belligerents to wear down the will of the nation state that believes in its citizens.  For Gilad Shalit, freedom.  For the nation of Israel, the strength of the commitment to one of its defenders, threatens its very defense.  The most difficult of trades, for sure.

     November 12th – Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi resigns – The burgeoning crisis of the Euro and its underlying exposure of the frailties of the concept of a social democracy, progressed through Italy with the fall of the elected government of Berlusconi and the appointment of a pan- European techi-bureaucrat, showed the progressive failure of European democracies to convince their populations of the need to show fiscal discipline and improved self reliance.  Like the Greek government before it, the Italians faced an intolerable situation of more citizens receiving the bounties of society than those capable of underwriting it, and collapsed under the weight of burgeoning debt.  The inflexibility of the Euro to allow the southern European  Union nations to manage their debt led to a crisis in the pan European economic union and the eventual fragmentation of the united front governing single market policy, with great Britain on one side and Germany and France on the other.  Far from solved, the temporary fix through “market fracture” only delays into 2012 the telling bill of this crisis.  In a continent where previous wars were measured in decades and even centuries, the inequities that are developing are an ominous sign of what could develop.

     December 18th – the last American troops leave Iraq ending eight years of American military involvement –  The quiet withdrawal seems anti-climatic to a military force that overthrew a vicious dictator in Saddam Hussein, endured a violent, costly guerilla war, birthed a messy arab democracy, and crushed a world wide terrorist network on the battle fields of the Tigris and Euphrates.  Whatever the outcome to Iraq (and the fragile democracy within hours of the withdrawal already seemed perilously close to collapse), the incredible performance of the military force in the face of severe conditions and variable public support stands as an epic performance in the annuals of western military actions.  The dominant conqueror in the field, they left with no territory ever as the goal, only the sacrifice to bring the fragile sprout of human freedom a tenuous root in an ancient soil of humanity that had been so long without.  It was a supreme ramparts of civilization effort, and no outcome can ever diminish it.

 

     2011 ended with little settled and many open ended story lines.  Historically, the perspective is too soon to discern titanic shifts in the human experience.   The defenders of the Ramparts will have to stay vigilant, as the enemies to freedom are many and persistent. 2012 will be the palate upon which the varied colors of the mosaic of history will be drawn.  Here’s hoping for the good guys winning out.

    

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White Christmas

    

      From my vantage point on the ramparts in Wisconsin, a white Christmas is a distinctly unlikely possibility.  The strange fact regarding Christmas in the northern climes is that most everybody hopes they will experience Christmas under a heavy blanket of the whitestuff, and then insist that for the rest of the forlorn winter they will be free of the burden of snow.  The connectivity of Christmas with snow is obviously a phenomena of its northern European inflections.  The birth of Christ in the sacred isolation of a manger occured in Bethlehem, Judea, a region of earth in which the climate is obviously not conducive to snow.  The great proportion of Christians in the world celebrating the Christmas event live in the temperate band around the equator, and will likely never experience snow without travelling to it. 

     The image of a white Christmas as a positive and comforting vision is I think directly related to the underlying unique conceptionalization of Christmas as an event celebrating man being at peace with himself.  The enormous stresses and strains of a modern society allow for almost no period of restful reflection and introspection.  The holiday of Christmas itself has been subsumed by a commercial pressure to buy  and exchange gifts, find time to acknowledge everyone who interacts with you in your life, and provide these public expressions in a short pressure cooker in time while continuing to perform your daily duties.  It all sounds exhausting, doesn’t it?  And thus the power of snow to put a progressive blanket that slows all that hyperkinetic activity to a halt.  We envision ourselves having a moment where the element of snow has put all the world on hold, and we are therefore forgiven for taking a collective breath, and just relaxing.  The momentary lull allows the sublimated emotions to take root – man at peace with himself and with others, the beauty of the natural world, the shared experience of slowing down and taking stocking of one’s blessings, the direct connection of man with his God through the gift of His only Son.  It can all happen without snow, but snow in its universal whiteness blanketing all, and exempting none, makes these subliminal emotions a communal experience shared in real time.

     In 1940, Irving Berlin, the songwriter, recognized the power of juxtaposing the images of snow and Christmas in a song that has become the pre-eminent reflection of the emotions of the holiday.  He was writing in balmy California where snow had no chance of occuring in his immediate pervue but understood what people were seeking was a return to a simpler less stressful reflection of the holiday.  The world was at war and the United States struggling to stay out of the confligration.  The future was highly uncertain, and frankly, felt ominous.  Berlin, maybe the best reflector of his nation’s emotional pulse, projected in the song White Christmas  a world where emotions were cooled by a blanket of snow, where the centerpiece of all thoughts was home, and no one need feel negativity.

     The song was not an immediate success, but as the nation became consumed by war and 15 million men and women were pulled far from their homes into mortal danger, the song struck a powerful chord with the nation, and has never let go.  The version performed  by Bing Crosby in 1942, and rerecorded in 1947 has become the greatest single recording seller of all time at over 50 million, and the many versions by other artists have sent White Christmas well over 100 million in sales making it easily the most recorded song of all time.  The song became an Academy Award winner in the 1942 movie Holiday Inn and likely secured for Crosby the position as chief interpretor of the Christmas song catalogue for the rest of his life.  Corny in its setting and using a female performer to voice over Crosby’s duet partner, the original movie performance still holds a special power of the Christmas song genre to this day.   We are always caught by the song’s special awareness of how complicated the world has become, and how we all need to take a breath, and forgive ourselves for our pressured lives.

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Eulogy For A Thought Warrior

 

    Christopher Hitchens died today of esophageal cancer at age 62. With his death, an ancient tradition of debate and discourse suffered a retrenchment, and intellectual freedom lost a true champion.  With his death, Christopher Hitchens achieved something that no opinionated writer has managed to do for decades, perhaps since the Age of the French and American Revolutions, an outpouring of sincere regret and admiration from thinkers on both the right and the left side of political discourse.  He managed in a lifetime of writing to essentially alienate everybody at least once in his acerbic attacks on prominent contributors to world history, and he was to the end, gloriously unapologetic.  A Marxist sympathizer, atheist, hater of Zionism, Mother Theresa, Henry Kissinger, and Ronald Reagan in equal measure, he also managed to be an unabashed supporter of the war to oust Saddam Hussein and at a broader level the War against Islamic Fascism.  Despite this intemperate man’s literary extremism, he was as likely to be published in the National Review as in the Nation, due to the depth of his analysis and the strength of his prose.  Above all, Hitchens was a thought warrior, who led with his mind, and was not afraid of an intellectual cage match in a hostile arena.  I personally had almost nothing in common with his thought process or his prejudices, but always enjoyed immensely his love of the debate.

     Christopher Hitchens hated what he hated, but never hated ideas or the people who could sufficiently articulate them.  In D.G. Myers’ insightful essay on Hitchens in Commentary Magazine, a particular quote stands out that beautifully describes the core of the Hitchens persona:

His detractors on the left and among the religious never understood this about him: everything Hitchens wrote was a provocation to rethink and an invitation to reply. He could be disdainful of his opponents — this is the usual reason given by people who refuse to read him — but Hitchens’s essays are a call to defend themselves. His essays are never bullying, because Hitchens never pretends to have the last word on a subject.

 

     ‘A provocation to rethink and an invitation to reply’…I wish I had written that.  Hitchens achieved what few writers have dared to do in the modern world – think a position over on the basis of significant reading and analysis, stake the position out, and defend it like a pit bull, no matter how many friends he admired might find his conclusions contrarian.  Hitchens participated in the concept of the old fashion democratic debate, the debate style of Lincoln and Disraeli – that it was all right to face hostility and outright derision, hold a minority view and suffer frankly defeat, if you believed in what you said, and felt you could articulate it with clarity and good conscience.  During the Iraq War and its aftermath, Hitchens faced hostile after hostile audience with his pro-interventionist  thinking, when almost all of the original supporters of aggressive action had turned hypocritical tail and renounced their support when the going got tough.  Hitchens would have none of it.  He didn’t believe that overthrowing Saddam Hussein was politically appropriate, he thought it was morally and intellectually appropriate, and that what all that mattered to him.

     I will miss Christopher Hitchens for his beautiful writing, his cohesive expression, and his warrior attitude about the importance of thinking in developing ideas and philosophies.  So many of our modern commentators speak to what is acceptable as opposed to what is conceivable, and it speaks to the superficiality of their understanding and the rigor of their investigation.  Christopher’s brother Peter, as rationally conservative as Christopher was irrationally liberal never failed to point out the waywardness of Christopher’s conclusions while admiring the synthesis of his argument.  It was the ultimate gift of brotherhood, to decry the message, but love the messenger.  And now the messenger is silenced by fate, but never, never defeated.  It is sad to think of all that is about to transpire, that will not be filtered and commented  upon by one of civilization’s great interrogators.  Safe journeys, Christopher…

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An Inconvenient Truth

 

     The several decade long crusade to achieve directorship of the western world’s economies through the mantra of stopping so-called anthropogenic global warming is finally beginning to come up against the rocks of unbiased scientific analysis.  As leaders of this blog know, I have been a long standing skeptic of the argument of human directed global warming for its lack of historical perspective, the nonsense of arguing the concept of investigatory science as “settled” when the science is in its infancy, and the obvious and overt political overtones of those who would “redirect” our resources in an effort to “stop” the unstoppable.  Science as politics has been a long standing failure in regard to scientific truth, and a dangerous weapon in the hands of those who rest their argument on their superior will, rather than the available data.  Whether it was the Church’s long standing earth centric vendetta against the science of Galileo or Copernicus, or the race theories of the National Socialists propped up in the pseudoscience of Eugenics, there has been a dark suppression to individual thought and contrary opinion through history by those who desired to “own the truth” for their own political purposes and profit. 

      The critical tenets of linking the natural processes of climatic warming and cooling to man’s societal advancement through the use of carbon based energy offered a massively powerful tool to those who would seek to “control” man’s individual initiative in favor of some specified collective good.  The weapon of choice was to tie the natural component of the atmosphere the gas carbon dioxide to the moniker “greenhouse” gas, and the production of it as a byproduct of an advanced society, the driver of ‘dangerous and irreversible’ global warming.  Through such linkage lay the mother-load of environmental activism, governmental activism, and massive fortunes for politicians and politically connected scientists and industrialists.  The king of the scare Prophets was the American politician Al Gore, who recently rejected by the American electorate in the close election of 2000, found a post-election venue for political idolatry and personal fortune in the narrative of anthropogenic global warming.  His thrown together cinematic slide show of patchy science and ludicrous predictions, An Inconvenient Truth, electrified the political left and created the edifice for the argument that only through the reining in of the superior economic position of the West through elimination of their reliance on a carbon energy economy and the ‘redistribution’ of the West’s ill-gotten wealth to the impoverished, less developed world, could the globe be saved from utter destruction.  It was a socialist’s wet dream – the critical key to reforming 500 years of individual initiative and progress, and putting the acquired wealth into the hands of the bureaucratic few who would be considered ‘smart and sensitive to the planet’.

     Whole nations have stood in line since the Kyoto protocols of the 1990’s to profess their subservience to the dogma of “settled science” and thereby prove their fidelity to the mother Earth.  They have allowed the climate data to be collected and doled out by a few chosen oracles such as the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, without asking the critical questions all science should be required to withstand- is the data sufficient to prove a hypothesis, is the data set reproducible, are the data points incontrovertible or corrupted, does the science hold up to skeptical scrutiny?  It turns out, with the billions and billions of dollars and euros at stake, the delicious conclusions were too desirable for those responsible for the science to question their own observations for risk of being cut out of the moneytrain or the exalted position as oracle to the world.

     The “settled science” has finally come under appropriate scrutiny, and we have the intrepid computer hackers of the East Anglia University e-mails to thank.  The thousands of e-mails between the oracles of the settled climate science have shown them to be data corrupted, politically biased, suppressive of their own contrary evidence, and willing to bend their own work to fit the narrative they had established regardless of the facts – a perfect storm of pseudoscience and politically twisted desires.  The fact that scientists can be tempted into self corruption based on their all too human flaws of ego, political bias, or evangelical sense of mission shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone given the immense power, money, and influence that was waved in front of them by political pirates such as Al Gore for whom they served his purpose.

     Thankfully, despite the willful suppression of information, a more balanced interpretation of the science of climate and the multiple effects upon it are beginning to emerge.  The inconvenient truth that appears to be forming is that multiple factors influence global temperatures, and that man’s effect is difficult to isolate, and perhaps minimalist in effect.  It has been clarified that the computer models that suggested direct correlation between CO2 levels and temperature have been shown to be incorrect, with the world in a cooling, not warming,  phase since 1998 while Co2 levels have continued to climb.   As Karin McQuillan’s review article in the American Thinker cogently observes, climate scientists are finally finding the courage to speak out when the data does not fit the assigned narrative:

But within a week, Muller’s lead co-author, Professor Curry, was interviewed in the British press (not reported in America), saying that the BEST data did the opposite: the global “temperature trend of the last decade is absolutely flat, with no increase at all – though the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have carried on rising relentlessly.”

       This is nowhere near what the climate models were        predicting,” Prof Curry said.  “Whatever it is that’s going on here, it doesn’t look like it’s being dominated by CO2.”  In fact, she added, in the wake of the unexpected global warming standstill, many climate scientists who had previously rejected sceptics’ arguments were now taking them much more seriously.  They were finally addressing questions such as the influence of clouds, natural temperature cycles and solar radiation – as they should have done, she said, a long time ago.

          The telling argument regarding global warming hysteria is that it fit a political rather than scientific narrative, long before the infant science had a chance to develop into a rational understanding of the influences on climate, and man’s relationship to them.  No one desires a world without clean air, clean sources of water, efficient utilization of resources, but the dominance of bureaucratic oversight at the risk to personal freedoms must be understood for what it means for humanity’s future development.  The argument ultimately turns out not to be one of the temperature of the earth, for we live on a globe that was dramatically both hotter and colder than the one we currently inhabit, but rather, who will define human progress, individual rights, and the means to achieve personal happiness.  We are stumbling our way to an inconvenient, but, universal truth, that the last five hundred years of human achievement, driven as it was by the hard fought acquirement of individual expression, property rights, and individual freedom, is the best possible device to preserve the world for the greatest proportion of those who inhabit it.

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The Disappearing Will

      Max Boot has a definitive article in this week’s Weekly Standard regarding the progress being made by American forces in their “hold and build” strategy in southern Afghanistan, and collective yawn back home in a tired nation that cares little regarding the details, only the end game. The hard work and sacrifice of the nation’s finest in the dusty cauldron of a far away land holds almost no interest for the country that once bought the Democrat Party’s argument that Afghanistan was the key to control of islamoterrorist problem and that Iraq was the side show. Well, come the end of the year, Iraq will truly be a sideshow as all American troops will leave, and Afghanistan, despite the apparent mission put forth by their Commander in Chief for the nation’s troops to surge and hold territory, the withdrawal following the surge has already been scheduled. Winston Churchill must be turning over in his grave. There will be no ” we will fight them on the beach, we will fight them in the hills” this time.

     What has happened to the concept of will?  The disintegration of this one time bedrock characteristic of western civilization is showing itself across a slew of crises and societal challenges.  The southern tier of Europe is crumbling like a stack of dominoes under the lack of will to restore reasonable relationships between the governed and those that govern them.  First Greece, then Italy, Spain, and Portugal are collapsing under the weight of mandates to their citizens, unable to put forth the argument that with self responsibility comes personal freedom, and the ultimate security of a good life.  The governments of these forlorn countries frame the argument as enforcing austerity, rather than restoring rational expectations.  The abandonment of will is pervading the United States, not only in its schizophrenic involvement in Afghanistan, but also on the issue of its own domestic securities.  The state of Ohio determined to stop the steady slide into eternal state budget deficits, stagnent job growth and strangulating business climate by electing a Republican government in 2010.  The elected officials instituted a capacity for fiscal sanity, and promptly were rejected by the very population that electing them to fix things, with yesterday’s defeat of the recently instituted mechanisms for such fiscal sanity.  The desire to want things better was not reinforced by the will to make things better.  The collapse of will shows itself in the west’s acquiescence of state sponsored demonization of Israel, and the timid response to Iran’s increasingly belligerent and apocalyptic attitude regarding its relationship with Israel and the greater world.

      Historian and professor Niall Ferguson delineates a set of characteristics that have defined the West’s unique position in the world over the past 500 years and are components of will.  He notes them as Competition, Science Revolution, Rule of Law and Government, Medical Advance, Consumer Society, and Work Ethic.  All are in essence the will of an individual to take command of  his existence and desire the ability to prosper, create, function under rational rules of behavior, maintain health, repeat the benefits of his endeavors, and accept his role in controlling the outcome.   Ferguson as historian reminds us that typical for dominant empires in history the end comes suddenly rather than gradually, and that the pattern is that “you are fine, until you are not fine, and when you are not fine, you are in a death spiral.”  The legitamacy of a society is a fragile flower and is more easily destroyed from within then by any external threat. 

      The process of collective will is not a cheerleading slogan, but rather an collection of individual desires to be better, and individually live well.  Will we find our will to stop the dithering and accept responsibility, roll up our sleeves, and fashion a new standard of human freedom and life quality?  Time will tell, but the game is nearly up, and the fourth quarter we find ourselves in, despite all our enormous talents and advantages, finds us playing from behind.

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Searching for Something, or Somebody

 

     The world is in a bit of a funk right now.  The cherished elements of human progress and life quality assumed as the societal pinnacles for most of the twentieth century – good government, impartial laws, secure health, universal education, individual freedom, and unfettered commerce – are tottering, and we seem unable to know what to do to re-invigorate them.  Europe,  having sustained two devastating world wars, looked to the collectivist instinct and social safety net, building eventually the greatest guarantee of a life comfortably safe from the pain of failure or circumstance, yet it now finds an unmotivated, unhappy population, and a surging inability to financially underwrite the created lifestyle.  America, the beacon of personal freedom and achievement, is progressively committing itself to the same kind of  securities for its population it has viewed in European society, accepting progressively oppressive indebtedness at the very moment it sees its European cousins collapsing under theirs. The Arab world, so long under the yoke of dictatorial regimes, has risen to throw off the oppressors, only to appear to except an even more oppressive religious dogmatic rule.  The Asian behemoth China hurtles forward to modernize at an unabsorbable rate, ignoring its internal conflicts to aggressively project upon its wary neighbors India, Korea, and Japan a new subtle hegemony.

     What the heck is going on?   The air feels heavy and stagnant, the humidity high, the threat of rain and storm on the horizon.  The sense of helplessness and inevitability of a lesser existence continues.  The world’s  human spirit is feeling worn; almost as if it is tired of the burden and simply waiting for a new species to take over.  Its not just economic recessions, scarcity of resources, theoretical climatic doom, or looming conflicts that suppress the primordial fight or flight response of individuals.  It seems progressively our innate give-a-damn is busted.

     I really think a large part of the collective funk is the world’s indifference lately to seek great leaders who worked to achieve great universal truths without regard to their personal advancement.  Where is the Arab world’s George Washington, who threw the tyrants out, secured his nation’s future, then threw himself out to prevent any possibility of despotism?  Where is Europe’s  Abraham Lincoln, who recognized the importance of a federal unity while carefully protecting the capacity and rights of every individual citizen?  Where is China’s Konrad Adenauer, who can marshal the enormous potential of his citizens while respecting and working with his neighbors to the benefit of each?  Where is Islam’s Martin Luther King, who spoke from the depth of his religious conviction about the universal basic rights of all people, regardless of individual circumstance, color, or creed?  Where is America’s Alexander Hamilton, who recognized the balance between the national investment and the individual responsibility to create the foundations for the  greatest economic engine the world has ever seen?

     I am fairly certain they are out there, but classic selflessness is not currently considered an attractive virtue.  The American experience currently may be the test best as to whether the world is willing to wake up and look for leaders that project our better nature.  The current American President, enmeshed in an economic downslide progressively of his own making, is incapable of putting forth an agenda that frames clearly the problems we face, nor propose recognizable and constructive solutions.  He is post modernist, reaching back to past strategies to provide securities to the populous supposedly denied ignoring the effect of those strategies on the future.  He is a created hologram of an inward looking society that wanted its President to look, sound, and emote a certain way, but never assessed as to whether the experience or track record of achievement was there to act. The result is a political process that doesn’t remotely correct the inequities of the past, while assuring through its actions the inability to solve this problems in the future.  We have as a society, through this man, achieved perfect political irrelevancy.

     I think the world is going to watch America over the next year to see if the concept of leadership will come back into vogue.  Is there a collective will to see the re-establishment of common sense, restoration of personal responsibility,  return of right and wrong, promotion of individual talent and creativity, and mature and aggressive true shared sacrifice to secure the nation’s future?  Will a leader come out of the current malaise to harness human capacity and articulate the path to a better future?  The world will watch closely to see if the country most designed for course correction can self correct.  The way forward is fairly well delineated.  Lets see if America, and the world, can once again accept the better angels of our nature, and recognize the current pathfinders that mirror those that at one time were celebrated in our textbooks.

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On the Bloody Road to Damascus


      Over 1900 years ago, a battalion of soldiers lead by Saul the Pharisee road on the road to the already ancient city of Damascus to rout out a major threat to the ruling hierarchy at that time, the cult of religious extremists known as Christians. Well educated and convinced of the righteousness of his task, Saul determined to deal firmly and resoundingly with the upstarts in a conclusive fashion. Just short of the gates of the city in the presence of his soldiers, Saul was struck from his horse by an unseen force and held paralytic to the ground while a voice heard by all spoke to Saul and revealed to him the error of his mission and proposed the path to his true calling. On the road to Damascus, Saul the Pharisee, destroyer of the breath of life, came to from his interaction with the Supreme Being, blinded but now clearly seeing, converted to his new life, as Paul the Apostle.

      No such moment has occurred yet on the modern road to Damascus to another educated man convinced of his own righteousness to violent action, the president of Syria, Bashar al- Assad.  Unfortunately the opthamologist from London has rapidly taken on the worst instincts of a base tribal instinct to dominate and destroy other that has brought horrific destruction to a country that has seen too large a share of domination over the ages from many invaders.  The city of Damascus may be the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, extending as an identified destination back to before 6000 BC. Mentioned in Genesis, the city has seen the rule of Assyrians, Hittites, Canaanites, Arameans, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, and Islamic Caliphates. The most recent period of independence has occurred since 1946 with withdrawal of French overseers, and the country has been left to its own devices since, with tribal fault lines suppressed under a nationalist Baathist civilian structure ruthlessly maintained by the army.  Since 1970, the government and army have been dominated by the minority Alawites with the Presidential power first in the hands of father Hafez, and now son, Bashar.  The overriding theme of Baathist “progress” in Syria has been the ruthless domination of all other political structures in Syria and the external focus of a belligerent permanent state of war with Israel.  The father Hafez laid the template for the dealing with internal opposition with the essential leveling of the uncooperative city of  Hama in 1982 with an estimated 25,000 casualties.  The son Bashar, the western trained physician, has now set an altogether different standard, sending troops, tanks, and internal security thugs nationwide to destroy the nidus of a unified opposition movement.  This is not the Muslim Brotherhood insurrection of the 1980’s.  The tenets of the Arab Spring are seen in the demographic of the modern Syrian opposition, and al-Assad’s carefully developed western face as a “reformer” has been exposed as a farce.

     The only residual support the increasingly butcher like Bashar has been able to maintain is the traditional Syrian ethnic and religious minority fear of the majority Sunni Islamic population.  Christians, Druze,  and Shia alike see the religiously nebulous Baathists as their best protection against the other culturally insensitive Sunni tradition.  This has allowed Assad thus far to crush the increasingly aggressive opposition with impunity, but the greater Arab world is noticing the effect of his actions potentially on their on restive populations and are no mood to see the Assad “example” grow as a rallying cry.

     The role of the United States as a supporter of individual human rights has come to an untenable position in Syria.  President Obama’s stated policy of middle Eastern non-interference has been exposed as hypocritical in Lybia, and rudderless everywhere else.  The current adminstration’s desire to “lead from behind” has left the door open for other countries to fill the vacumn.  Turkey, former home of the Ottoman Empire, and Iran, keeper of the fundamentalist Shia flame find themselves on opposite sides of the Syrian conflict and raise the possibility that the Syrian civil war could expand into a greater conflict.  President Obama, who appears progressively tired of the demands of the office, has made no visible moves to stop the Syrian government’s vicious actions, define a position, or engage a plan for the various potential dangerous outgrowths of the Syrian violence.  We may be in the midst of the most anti-philosophical foreign policy in American history, who has determined their only weapon of policy or diplomacy is the drone strike or Tomahawk cruise missle.
      The suffering people of Syria populating one of the most epic pieces of land in the human story, may unfortunately be the set pieces of a building tragedy that has no answer except pitiless individual demolition. It is sad to relate, that the only potential salvation of the people is the whisper of a chance of a modern miracle occuring on the road to Damascus, this time to the butcher of his own people, Bashar al-Assad.

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Rue Brittannia!

    

      Great Britain is slowly regaining its breath after a week of ferocious riots that collapsed the civilized veneer of London and several other large British cities. The presence of willful anti-social behavior is nothing new in western society, but the scale and scope of these riots was something Brits and other Europeans had always associated with the more uncouth United States. No more. A particularly rabid form of animal behavior surged over British cities and it was led by a concoction of races, ages, and crime behaviors. The physical damage was in the hundreds of millions and the psychological damage to British society staggeringly more. A completely uncontrolled youth Clockwork Orange-like thuggery met up with a completely unprepared police “service”, and the outcome was predictable – arson, looting, beatings, and worse on a countrywide remorseless scale.
     The British stiff upper lip is now stiff from a self induced beating. The underlying causes of such acts are being hashed out. Mark Steyn is quite sure he knows what happened. His new book has a chapter on the elements causing collapse of British cultural stability and prophetically predates the violence, but predicts it as inevitable. His National Review Online article points to a concerted effort by British governments to remove responsibility and risk from British life, with cradle to grave support regardless of personal contribution or effort. A generation whose central meaning for existence is pure unadulterated want has been created, and Steyn traces the rapidness of the conversion from the generation that tolerated insufferable hardship in World War II fighting off the Nazi menace to a generation in whom tolerance for any hardship is insufferable. He suggests that the lesson learned is a society that has forgotten its identity, discipline and culture has no capacity to defend itself against its own destruction. Great Britain practically invented the rights and principles of due process, international trade, the industrial revolution, the universality of education, and taking time for tea but can not seem to discern the destructive virus of lives without meaning and purpose. The portrait of a broken society is sharply brought into view every week on Prime Minister’s questions when one of the great deliberative legislative bodies in history spend the greater portion of their time excoriating each other as to their inability to micro-manage the quality of sanitation at local hospitals, or the length of their waiting lists. No one bothers to ask as to why such conditions exist and why their efforts continue to be so ineffective. Like everything else in a crumbling society, the argument is how to drag everyone to mediocrity for fear of exposing any one individual into a personal decision of responsibility.  The government wastes its time trying to keep every citizen from feeling stress in any way, only to create a citizen that can barely feel anything.

      The obvious corollary of a Great Britain that has lost its way with an America that is heading down the same path is unavoidable.  The elite in America see as terrorists a grassroots movement that has asked the country to live within its means, promote personal responsibility, and conform to the principles that are outlined in its own Constitution. Pretty radical stuff, no?  Its radical of course only because those that would see in the British social experiment a course to emulate rather than a course to avoid are the principle tea party name callers. The resistance of a mature society to these invectives is the measure of its energy, resilience, and progress.  Great Britain may have lost its soul but its not too late for us, if we recognize in time the format of destruction.  To those in great Britain and greater Europe I say:

     Save your Lectures, but, Thanks for the Lessons…