Monday, July 31, 2006
REDS
One of the things my wife and I share is a deep and broad cinephilia -- we love movies, watch a lot of them and both have a lot of knowledge of the trivia of the movie business and culture of the classic age up through the early 1960s. But one part of the "culture wars" that never fails to cause a stir in our house is Hollywood's romantic attachment to its self-appointed role as hero in the "Red Scare" of the 1950s. Even the term -- "Red Scare" -- is a carefully crafted slant, to tilt the discussion in favor of the left, implying as it does that those who were concerned about communist subversion in the 1950s were cruel paranoids.
Although many of the younger generation of the left probably don't even know it, two of the defining landmarks of the historical landscape that gave birth to the contemporary American left were the espionage trials of Alger Hiss and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were accused of being Soviet spies. Good people in the 1950s supported Hiss and the Rosenbergs and bad people (like Richard Nixon, who prosecuted Hiss, and Joe McCarthy, who made people see "reds under the bed") attacked them -- that was the simple, black-and-white moral equation that became a straight-forward litmus test for ideology and culture. After McCarthy's public fall, this moral equation became dogma on the left, and the shame of McCarthy's methods was a cudgel used by the left and wielded by Hollywood to enforce leftist hegemony in America's popular culture. How many films have celebrated the heroes of the "Hollywood Blacklist"? They are still being made today -- we watched George Clooney's Good Night and Good Luck just recently, a film that faithfully and skillfully recites the heroic catechism once more.
But, with the fall of the Soviet Union and years of painstaking scholarship, we now know that one of the fundamental elements of this leftist dogma is dead wrong: Hiss and the Rosenbergs were guilty -- they were Soviet spies.
What does it mean? Well, one thing it means is that the world just isn't as simple as our popular culture teaches. But it also teaches that things like archetypical morality plays aren't subject to facts or reason. The myth of the Red Scare and the Blacklist will never die -- regardless of the facts.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:55 AM
Sunday, July 30, 2006
ASYMMETRICAL WARFARE II
Israel drops leaflets to warn civilians in advance of attacks, requesting that they leave the area, but hits a building full of cvilivans by mistake while trying to destroy an enemy rocket launcher that has been intentionally placed nearby to noncombatants. As a result, Israel suspends air attacks for 48 hours to investigate the tragic error.
Hezbullah would consider killing a building full of Israeli civilians to be a tactical success. But Israel's the bad actor here, right?
I get it.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 6:08 PM
ASYMMETRICAL WARFARE
If you don't spend too much time reading the political blogosphere (like I do), then you may not have noticed a small but disturbing phenomenon -- the incidence of threats of presonal violence by a certain segment of the leftist community against those whose opinions they oppose. In the last few weeks there have been a number of cases like this. This post, at a fairly right-wing site, documents a couple.
If you have the time and stomach for it, you can look through the recent posts at this blog to see a related phenomenon -- so-called "sock-puppets." This is the practice of creating false identities on the net to source stories or create the false impression of a dialogue between two or more people, when in fact there's only one talking. It seems that exposure of some sock-puppeteering on the edge of the mainstream media was the spark that ignited some of the recent ugliness.
Now, the targets of these activities often express opinions I don't share. They tend to be part of the Ann Coulter wing of the cultural conservative, attack-dog element of the blogosphere. But what strikes me is the fact that this phenomenon of ugly personal threats against bloggers seems to be one-sided. I'm unaware of any equivalent kind of thing going in the right-to-left direction. Likewise, the use of fictional sources for news stories and sock-puppeteering seems to be largely confined to the left end of the political comentariat.
Naturally, I have theory about this. I think this is an outgrowth of the Bolshevist influence in the Western left, the revolutionary mind-set that there is an ideological elect whose correctness empowers them to transgress the bounds of civil discourse. People who idolize Fidel Castro and Che Guevara have no qualms about making death threats against those they perceive to be reactionary class enemies, and they certainly have no compunction about using lies and false sources to prove what they believe to be a higher truth.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 10:54 AM
FINALLY
Finally. Finally, somone has done what needed to be done for a long, long time. Please set aside a little over an hour to watch this documentary. It is a professionally produced film about the serious threat of global jihad.
If you have any doubt that the threat is real, if you're an old friend who wonders why I have changed the course of my intellectual focus since 911, if you have seen some of the evidence from the corner of your eye and turned away, if you have children and care about their future ... if you simply want civilization to survive ... please watch this film.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:56 AM
Saturday, July 29, 2006
TARGET AFRICA
Looking for good information about the jihadis' rolling take-over of Somalia, I came across this article, that gives an in-depth review and analysis of the individuals, their Wahhabi salafist ideology and their aims. The picture is grim.
In the long run, the weak states bordering the now well-established tumor of jihadi control in Mogadishu will not be able to put up a vigorous resistance. The group in control of Mogadishu is now getting arms from Iran and other state sponsors of jihad. In the past, Ethiopia has served as a bulwark against Somali Islamofascist expansion, but I think that only a small increase in the latter's firepower will turn the balance. If you look at a map of Africa, you can see that there is an eastern extension of Ethiopia that is ripe for being cut off and added to the dar al-Islam. Next stop, Kenya and Eritrea. With southern Sudan set to fall into jihadi hands eventually, Ethiopia would be hopelessly surrounded.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:24 PM
Friday, July 28, 2006
TWO TECHNOLOGIES FOR VICTORY AND PEACE
I am becoming steadily more firm in my conclusion that two technologies hold the only hope for ultimate victory in the growing war with Islam. These are nuclear power and theater missile defense. But for the lack of these two things, the West could do the only thing that will minimize violence with the Islamic world -- disengage from it as much as possible. Two factors require us to remain engaged with the Muslim world: oil and Israel. We have to develop ways to do without the first and to defend the second.
One thing America is good at is developing and implementing technological solutions to problems. And both of these two problems have real, achievable solutions right now. Nuclear power generators can be made safe and they are environmentally friendly. If we started on a crash program to build nuclear generators now, we could tell the Muslim world to stew in their own juices in less than two decades. By 2020, Sunnis and Shiites would be free to slaughter each other and tyrranize their own people to their hearts' content. And we could do it with a good conscience, having tried to do the right thing and getting a resounding slap in the face as a reward. If we had energy independence, we could simply tell the world that no ship that has called at a port in any Muslim country may come into an American port, and call our involvement with the Muslim world a sad but closed chapter. When people that live in those countries are tired of living in the dark ages, they can rejoin the cvilized world. But not until then.
As for Israel, it can and should be turned into a sole fortress outpost and defended. Israel should simply seal its land borders and protect its skies with lasers and missile interceptors. There can never be peace between Israel and the Muslim world. We have to make a choice. We should choose Israel and do what is required to turn it into a secure place. Beyond that, nothing.
Is there any chance of this happening? No, of course not. But I do believe it is possible.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 9:16 PM
I.D. EMBARASSED
Here's a post I made on a very international, science-related forum I frequent, in a thread dealing with the so-called "intelligent design" movement in America:As regular readers of [this] forum will know, I'm quite proud to be an American, but I flinch when I see posts that defend the idea that the Earth is 6000 years old, and that this idea is somehow identified with "American-ness." Of course, America is a very big, diverse country that was founded on a principle of open discussion and debate, and the sanctity of each individual's right to freely form and hold their own opinions. So we have this vigorous culture of messy, public, vigorous dialogue that takes place in the open for all the world to see. I suppose that being embarassed by the "intelligent design" movement is just one of the higher prices we have to pay for the liberty we cherish.
But it does make me despair for the future. I think that even a couple of decades ago, educated people in the West generally and the U.S. specifically assumed that, given enough education, the power of reason and science would prevail in the public sphere. Now I, at least, am not so sure. Our population is better educated than ever in terms of basic literacy. And we certainly have better access to information than we ever did -- by a large margin. But I perceive a rising tide of superstition and irrationalism in the U.S. and the world at large. The amplified means of communication appear to have merely provided an improved avenue for spreading simplistic, primitive ideas and cloaking them in the thinnest veneer of pseudo-science. I wish I could offer some countervailing factor that would offset this trend -- but look as hard as I can, I don't see one.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:05 AM
Thursday, July 27, 2006
GROSS DOUBLE STANDARD
When Israel's air force killed four UN "peacekeepers," every press outlet in the world scremaed it in headlines. But you have to dig in the UN's daily reports to find that Hezbullah has attacked UN outposts twice.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 6:40 PM
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
BELT-TIGHTENING FOR ORION
NASA has been working for some time on design of the vehicles and systems for it's next "big project" -- the manned spacecraft and boosters with which it is planning to ... do everything, i.e. go to the moon for multi-week exploration missions, on to Mars (eventually) and service and crew the International Space Station. Recently, this program got a name -- "Orion."
Outside observers had been noting a mismatch between the projected lifting capacity of the new rockets NASA proposes building and the initial designs for the spacecraft involved. NASA has now acknowledged that and has issued a new design for the core spacecraft, the so-called "Crew Exploration Vehicle" or "CEV."
I like the new design -- it's simpler and cleaner and more consistent with the idea of creating a fairly basic vehicle that could be expanded over time. Almost all of the components of the new system have now been assigned more realistic engines based on proven, existing designs. In other words, the over-all concept is becoming more like a real, flyable spacecraft.
But that begs the question of whether NASA should be involved in this program at all. There's a LOT of carping at the question in the space blogosphere and commentariat. I'm a fence-sitter in this debate. It wouldn't bother me at all if the proposal laid out at the immediately preceding link -- that NASA get out of the Earth-to-orbit part of the project and focus just on the lunar-and-beyond part -- ended up being the way forward. But there's also something to be said for the cost of NASA doing a completely integrated program being justified as acceptable to keep their over-all infrastructure in place and operating for the near term.
The question is when the right time is for NASA to get out of the space operations business and turn it over to private actors. Hopefully, I'll have more time to write about that soon.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:01 AM
Sunday, July 23, 2006
WAR NOTES
I'm becoming concerned that the Israelis won't have the time to do what needs to be done. There's really only two ways to win a war: Either engage your enemy head-on and "overmatch" him with strength, or bleed him until he runs out of logistical or political support. (When the U.S. has been defeated militarily, it's always been by way of depriving its forces of political support by simply staying alive and attacking with tactical pinpricks while the democratic process back home takes its course.)
It's becoming obvious that the Israelis can't choose the first option of crushing Hezbulla head-on: The destruction to Lebanon's civilian infrastructure and non-Hezbullah population would be too great for the U.S. diplomatic cover to withstand. Unfortunately, the logic of Arab and Muslim politics is such that the longer a conflict goes on, the greater the political support for Hezbullah will be -- after all, they've been on the losing side of every military conflict in which they've engaged since 1685, and the ideological base for growing support in the face of strategic losses has been well laid since the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood.
So the only option open to Israel is to force Hezbullah to exhaust its logistical support. Thus the Israeli opening gambit of attacking large-scale supply points like bridges, airports and seaports. But it looks like both the Hez supply cache in place and its ability to call on that cache is larger and more robust than many expected. Thus, it could take much longer than the week all the diplomatic leekers are talking about to press Hezbullah to the point of logistical exhaustion, after which it could be defeated in detail. And of course, not being a regular army, most of Hezbullah's human strength can simply melt back into the general Shiite population at that point, anyway.
Two or three weeks hence, we could be faced with what amounts to a strategic victory for the enemy: Diplomatic support for Israel will be shredding in the growing gale of media bias, while Hezbullah remains intact and more or less in place as a force able to fight on its terms once Israel is forced to withdraw and cease combat.
Which is, of course, a disaster. Hezbullah has demonstrated in this conflict that Iran can supply an irregular force of jihadis with a level of technology above any that's been used by such forces in the past. This establishes a new, higher floor on the capabilities of the best-trained and best-equipped jihadi forces; creating an example that outfits like Sadr's Mehdi Army, Hamas and the soon-to-be-reconstituted al Qaida base in Somalia can aspire to.
So, to all those working so hard to undermine Israel's ability to serve as the sharpened spear-point of the West in this war that you deny exists, I say well done!
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 9:24 AM
Saturday, July 22, 2006
NYT CONTINUES WORK FOR THE OTHER GUYS
Drudge links to this story at the NYT that the US has speeded up shipment of precision-guided bombs to Israel:The decision to quickly ship the weapons to Israel was made with relatively little debate within the Bush administration, the officials said. Its disclosure threatens to anger Arab governments and others because of the appearance that the United States is actively aiding the Israeli bombing campaign in a way that could be compared to Iran’s efforts to arm and resupply Hezbollah.Right -- so you be sure to do your part to give the disclosure the widest possible distribution. Well done, NYT!
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 9:12 AM
Friday, July 21, 2006
SKUNKED
The Lockheed Skunkworks (birthplace of the F-117 Stealth "Fighter" -- really a bomber, the SR-71, the U2 and who knows what else) has just unveiled its latest creation:With a 90-foot wingspan and a tailless design, the "Polecat" UAV looks like a smaller version of the B-2 stealth bomber. And like the B-2, the drone has been built to be stealthy and sneaky. But the twin-engine Polecat is "90 percent composite materials, rather than metal," the L.A. Daily News notes. "The vehicle is also made from less than 200 parts," adds Aviation Week. "Adhesives are used rather than rivets, decreasing the amount of labor needed to construct it -- that approach also contributed to a lower radar cross section inherent in the design."Very, very cool.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:15 PM
OH NO, IT'S NOT A WORLD WAR ...
From the Beeb:Look -- it is a world war. And the loss of Somalia to the enemy is a big deal. I don't claim to have the answer about how to win the war -- but I know that the first step is acknowledging that it exists.A Somali Islamist leader has ordered a "holy war" to drive out Ethiopian troops, after they entered the country to protect the weak interim government. "I am calling on the Somali people to wage a holy war against Ethiopians in Somalia," said Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys of the Union of Islamic Courts.
Ethiopia denies that its forces are in the government's base of Baidoa, but a BBC reporter has seen them patrolling. The UIC took control of the capital, Mogadishu, last month. Since then it has consolidated its power over much of southern Somalia.
But Ethiopia is strongly opposed to the Islamists and has repeatedly warned that it will send its army into Somalia if the interim government is attacked.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 2:12 PM
WAR UPDATE
Looks like the IDF is getting ready to roll. And when TIME reports that Bush's diplomacy in the conflict is going well ... well, you know it must be, since they'd rather cut out their tongues than say something good about Bush unless they had to.
GB
posted by Greg 1:10 PM
Thursday, July 20, 2006
KEEPING AN OPEN MIND
I think I could support a politician who said this:The unprovoked attacks on innocent Israelis and the killing and abduction of Israeli soldiers by the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah are dramatic escalations of violence against Israel. The United States must stand by Israel as she defends herself. No government can stand idly by when its citizens and soldiers are attacked and abducted and when terrorist groups make incursions into its territory. These events demonstrate that Hamas’s ascent to power in the Palestinian Authority, and Hezbollah’s participation in the Lebanese government, are dangerous for the stability, not only of Israel, but of the entire region. Hamas and Hezbollah must return the Israeli soldiers they abducted and cease their attacks against Israel.
Israel’s right to exist, and exist in safety, must never be put in question. We must also continue to send a very clear message to Syria, Iran and others to join in condemning these attacks and to exercise their influence over Hamas and Hezbollah.A statement like this would be especially laudable coming from someone whose party is the home of appeasing sympathizers with Islamofasism. Way to go Senator Clinton.
Maybe she will be "America's greatest wartime president."
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 6:36 PM
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
CANADIAN BACKBONE
This is a refreshing change:[Canadian] Prime Minister Stephen Harper ... made no apologies for stating the government's position "somewhat differently and [more] forcefully" than Canadians are used to hearing from their leaders.
Mr. Harper repeated his defence of Israel's right to live peacefully, condemning the violence of Hezbollah terrorists and speaking out against the suffering of innocent people in Lebanon and Gaza -- responsibility for which he laid squarely at the feet of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas, the terrorist organization that forms the government of the Palestinian Authority.
"We all want to encourage not just a ceasefire, but a resolution. And a resolution will only be achieved when everyone gets to the table and everyone admits that recognition of each other," Mr. Harper said, in a pointed reference to the refusal of Hezbollah and Hamas to recognize Israel's right to exist.
"But I have to say this. I read in some papers somewhere that someone involved in this said, 'Well, Hezbollah will protect, Hezbollah will take care of us,' " the Prime Minister said. "Hezbollah's objective is violence. Hezbollah believes that through violence it can create, it can bring about the destruction of Israel. Violence will not bring about the destruction of Israel ... and inevitably the result of the violence will be the deaths primarily of innocent people."
Maybe there is hope ...
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 10:30 PM
I WANT ONE OF THESE
This link leads to one of the most amazing hot rod projects I have ever seen. This guy put a working jet engine in the back of a Volkswagen Beetle. I thought it was a photoshop job or a stupid "art car" at first, but there's no question in my mind that this is real, after looking at this page in some detail. He did all the work himself in a normal suburban garage.
Now THAT'S what America is all about!
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 9:56 PM
STEM CELLS
... or yet more "Why I am not a ..."
President Bush is set to issue his first veto in six and half years to block a very moderate increase in federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. This is one overturned car in the roadblock to scientific and human progress that true cultural conservatives are attempting to erect. Progress will continue, but GWB will, by doing this, make a clear statement that he really does want to stop it.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:22 AM
Monday, July 17, 2006
COMING HOME
Taking a sip of that first cup of coffee, I tuned in to NASA TV to hear the "go" for Discovery's de-orbit burn. It's all downhill from there.
UPDATE: Good de-orbit burn. Total delta-v is only about 205 mph. That just goes to show you what a razor-thin margin there is between being in orbit and not. 205 mph out of about 17,000 mph.
UPDATE: I've got NASA TV on one screen while I'm working through emails from the office on another. The orbiter status screen on the big board at JSC is showing Discovery payload bay doors as being open. I know that's not right (I heard the closing confirmed on the radio when I first woke up), but it's kind of spooky: It would be a Very Bad Thing if Discovery came back with those doors open.
UPDATE: Discovery's in the atmosphere -- surfing into the sunrise at Mach 25! (And the damned orbiter status screen at JSC is still showing the doors open.)
UPDATE: This is a little more exciting than one would like: Capcom just called up the development of a thunderhead at the south end of the main runway.
UPDATE: Well -- that's real drama. They've just redesignated the runway because of that thunderhead.
UPDATE: Wow! Beautiful video showing real-time video of the view from cockipt through the HUD. Discovery's down safe and the bird looks great. Coffee break's over -- back on your heads.
GB
posted by Greg 7:00 AM
Sunday, July 16, 2006
MARX, MUHAMMED, JESUS and ME
The correspondence keeps rolling in. Here's one from a fellow who describes himself as "a devout follower of Jesus Christ:"The challenge of a pure atheism to me personally is that, within my thought, it devolves into a nihilism straight away. All of Western Liberalism seems intellectual sandcastles. In a purely chemical world, why not let the Darwinism reign supreme? We can build Utilitarian arguments, but to have any _meaning_, the sounds of the trees of our lives falling in the forest require an audience, do they not? What _ultimate_ difference does it make if we commit atrocities or acts of kindness? We never exceed one heartbeat from our demise, irrespective of our opinions of what follows. In an aethistic mode, questions of "good vs. evil" amount to differences which make no difference. So, I'll admit that the question of God is a binary one, but I reject the 'no' route as unmeaningful, and would welcome a healthy rebuttal, sir.
Let me begin by saying that I owe no ill will to moderate Christians who recognize a firm separation of church and state. As I've said to a couple of my good friends who count themselves as devout Christians, since 911 I've realized just how mild and inoffensive modern Christianity is. 400 years ago, Christians ripped Europe apart over a schism in their religion. But those days are gone, and I readily acknowledge that I am very grateful for it.
But to reply (very briefly) to this comment: I am an atheist, and I am not a nihilist: I have a very strong sense of right and wrong and concluded quite some time ago that a robust moral philosophy can be derived from a natural view of the universe; no Big Daddy required to lay down the rules.
My correspondent writes: "to have any _meaning_, the sounds of the trees of our lives falling in the forest require an audience, do they not?" To me, this is the moral equivalent of the flawed "first cause" argument in metaphysics. There, the "uncaused cause" just begs the question: "Who caused god?" To the moral equivalent of that argument, I ask: "Who gives god's life meaning?" The fact that many if not most religious people would find this question blasphemous is beside the point. If god looking on (and caring for humanity) gives our lives meaning, why can't we look on (and care), thus giving our lives meaning?
With all due respect to the many religious people who have written to me, I can't at this time rehearse the entire history of Western philosophy here in my blog. As I say, I have no quarrel with moderate Christians. Instead, I ask whether any of them would try, as the jihadis do, to impose their beliefs on others by force and, having done so, rule the world as a theocracy? Except for a very small rabid fringe of fundamentalist Christians of the Pat Robertson ilk, Christianity has by and large followed the teaching of its gentle and good founder, and are more than willing to render up to Caeser what is Caeser's. Where Jesus was a kind, poor man who (except for that one little snit with the moneychangers) never let a cross word or violent action mar his message, Muhammed was the violent leader of a group that engaged in warfare. I urge my Christians friends to read the history and see what we're dealing with here.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:48 PM
MARX, MUHAMMED and MORE
I'm continuing to get good comments on the "Marx and Muhammed" post linked from Instapundit. Here are a couple and my initial responses:I agree that the Bush administration has done a very poor job of communicating about the war's causes and goals. The problem, I believe, is that the Bush administration specifically, and the Right generally, draws much of its power from religious sentiment in America. But much of the most important logic behind the West's position in this war is the power of of the secular Enlightenment. So there's a fundamental disconnection between our leadership and the logic of our position of strength. Our leadership has to engage in the dissimulation of the "religion of peace" rhetoric because they believe (probably rightly) that they cannot attack the irrationality of religious faith as the motor of our enemies' hostility to us without inviting uncomfortable questions about their own religious faith. This realization has been one of the greatest causes of despair for me.It's definitely worth thinking and writing about the Islamic Challenge
Steve Grimaud writes:
You can't argue with faith, so there's no argument.
But they do argue. And write. Endlessly. Sayyid Qutb wrote a 30 volume commentary on the Koran, which has 114 chapters. I'd call this obsessive. But they do argue and attempt to persuade their fellow Muslims to follow the yellow brick road of jihad. They also rail against materialism, because that's so seductive to their fellow Muslims. The question is, do Muslims want to go on the path of permanent war and end up seeing millions or tens of millions of Muslims killed or do they want material progress?
That's why its important to defeat the jihadis and have the carrot of material
progress. That's why we need to argue against the ideas of jihad and make the choice clear to Muslims.
The Bushies have always been horrible [about] communication and understanding the importance of ideas. I've pulled my hair out at their failures in this area. Almost 5 years into the active part of the war and they're still not up to speed on this.
An Indian writer sends me the following comment:I found your short blog article via Instapundit. And I think you nailed down an accurrate description of the differences between Marxism and Islam and their resulting political movements.
What I would like to see is some further exploration on what you describe as the motivational appeal within Islam: an intangible, "imaginary" afterlife. If anything, I would say that most people on the planet at this time are motivated by the notion that there is an afterlife and a God who controls who goes where after death. Dare I say it, but within America and the West, there are many people (generally devout Christians) who feel that way, and they don't consider an afterlife or God imaginary. And whether or not their notions are imaginary, their beliefs do exert a strong influence on politics at all levels of human interaction. I think that because such a notion is not limited to Islam and is prominent even in liberal Western countries it should be examined more closely.
This is not to say that I do not find good things in Western liberalism--I do--yet because it is quite young as compared with established, major religions, I think it is also a bit premature to presume its superiority. Depopulation in affluent, industrialized countries has picked up momentum to the point that among people who study societies and demographics there is a growing consensus that Western liberalism may have an inalterable design flaw: it requires a religious society birth rate to maintain itself. And, in Hayekian terms, if Islam can maintain and preserve its culture and population and the West can't, would that not be something like the empirical evaluation you said people made of Marxism when they discovered it couldn't deliver the goods?
I'm sure this is right -- most humans still believe, more or less fervently, in an afterlife and one variety or another of supernatural superbeings that (on an unpredictable basis, apparently) interfere in the natural world and human affairs. And there does indeed seem to be a correlation between religious belief and human biological fertility: The more you believe, the more you reproduce. (Although I don't think enough work has been done to separate the effects of material prosperity from religious skepticism in reducing human biological fertility. For instance, while U.S. citizens are more religious than their European counterparts, they are far less fertile than people in highly religious, but also materially poor areas of the world.)
If mere numbers of people were the only determinant of success in cultural conflict, then the West would indeed be irretrievably doomed. The only hope is that the culture of the secular Enlightenment has power far beyond the numbers of people who hold its values. This is due to two factors. First, the scientific method, which is at the heart of Enlightenment culture, produces results in the material world at a far higher level of success than any other culture humanity has given birth to. If you are reading this, it's because of the Enlightenment. (How many scientific or technological advances have come out of the Muslim world in the last thousand years? Answer: Zero. How long did it take the Enlightenment to put humans on the moon or determine the fundamentals of biology? Answer: About 300 years.)
Second, societies that truly adopt liberal political and legal culture become extraordinarily creative compared to those governed by any other form of social organization. So, even though we are very few, we generate immense material power.
Is this enough for liberal values to triumph? The jury is still out. Stay tuned.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 1:06 PM
CATCHING UP OFF EARTH
What with mundane matters like the possible beginning of the next World War, I've been remiss in noting some important developments where things really matter -- off Earth.
The shuttle mission to ISS has proceeded to its next-to-last day in an impressively trouble-free manner. Except for the extremely minor APU fluid leak that's being watched, it looks like NASA pulled off an extremely good mission. I'm a well-known NASA skeptic with little or nothing good to say about the STS. But when they do well at it, I'm the first to be happy.
I watched a good deal of all three EVAs in real time. With all my carping about NASA, the shuttle and their space station, one thing I readily admit is that NASA has really figured out how to do EVA well. In the beginning, this turned out to be a much harder problem than the original space visionaries like Willy Ley and von Braun had imagined. The EVAs in the Gemini program were plagued by very low productivity, because the problem of working in zero-G in bulky, baulky space suits was a lot harder than just putting on a cool-looking space helmet, strapping on a rocket pack and stepping outside to tighten up a few bolts. But over the period of only a very few years, NASA went from pretty scary trips outside the pressurized can that involved tumbling astronauts blinded by sweat from exertion to what they now accomplish -- very productive work in relative comfort and safety. My hat's off to the people who accomplished that with little or no public support.
Meanwhile, a more important development for the long term is the so-far completely successful launch and deployment of Bigelow Aerospace's inflatable test spacecraft. This system is an outgrowth of an inflatable "hab module" that was once planned for the ISS but, like so many smart things in that program, subsequently abandoned. Bigelow didn't give up, and now they're well on their way toward demonstrating that the independent space industrial community can build and fly real hardware. My money's on Bigelow to be the company that does what I've envisioned for many years -- build and deploy relatively inexpensive, modular space habitat structures. The ISS modules like Destiny and the MPLMs should have, could have been that. But it took visionary entrepreneurs to make it really happen.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 9:31 AM
MARX, MUHAMMED and ME
With the rocket-powered hit increase from my first Instalanche in a while comes some good comments from readers flung my way by Glenn's gravity well. I long ago disabled comments because I don't have enough time to monitor them daily the way I would need to to make them a good addition to my blog. So these comments come via email. Among the best was this one from Steve Grimaud:Interesting thoughts expressed in your post. One comment I'd make is that Marxism, by depending on the scientific method, built its own internal visible inconsistencies. It could not develop without a strong hand (dictator) to force it along.
Islam on the other hand avoided those visible inconsistencies by basing itself on faith. You can't argue with faith, so there's no argument. That doesn't make the religion right, just not "provably" so. Faith as a basis for a government sets that government in an unasailable (and indfensibe) position. Either you believe or you
don't.
Thanks for the good read.
Grimaud points to another important distinction between Marxism and Islam as totalitarian world-views: The latter has, thoughout most of its history, tended toward a kind of polycentric, centrifugal power structure, whereas Marxism seems to inevitably lead to centralization of political and cultural authority. This presents one of the primary challenges of the long struggle the West now faces: There's no "head" to strike at and Islam as a meme has a very robust ability to adapt to local conditions because of its lack of central ideological authority. The latter point is especially ironic. While the core orthodoxy is deeply infelxible, the ideology's ability to mutate its exterior face is very high. This is a phenomenon I have yet to fully understand, despite reading thousands of pages on the subject over the last nearly five years.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:55 AM
Saturday, July 15, 2006
MEANWHILE, IN EURABIA ...
Here's a very good country-by-country round-up of the facts of the rising Islamic tide in Europe.
..GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 3:55 PM
HOROWITZ SCREWS UP
Or -- yet another installment of "Why I am Not a Conservative"
I’ve been pretty much of a fan of David Horowitz for years. But I think he made a serious mistake recently when he invited a couple of authors of the Euston Manifesto to talk at his site, FrontPage.
I recently wrote here on Burchismo that I thought the Euston Manifesto was a good sign that there was some light on the Left. Horowitz missed a golden opportunity to build bridges to people who share basic liberal values. But he couldn’t resist what seems to me to be a rude and rigid attack from “right orthodoxy” on people who are trying to salvage the liberal tradition on the Left.
Here’s the problem: I agree with everything that Horowitz says in this interview. But his lack of diplomacy arises from the same kind of ideological rigidity he claims to have left behind when he abandoned his socialist background. This incident raises the question of how to carry out “kulturkampf.” The socialist fantasy is probably ineradicable in the larger sphere of human existence. Given that, some kind of productive modus vivendi has to be developed. Horowitz's attack-dog methodology does no good, IMO.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 10:46 AM
QUO VADIS?
In recent years, I’ve been subject to some fair criticism from people who claim that since 911 I have abandoned the libertarian and minarchist political philosophy I espoused in the 1990s. It’s true, I have significantly modified my views. I have not abandoned my ideals of minimal government and maximal individual liberty. What has happened is that I have realized that implementing those ideals broadly and deeply requires a substrate of shared cultural values that doesn’t exist in the world. In fact, just the opposite is true: Significant portions of the human race hold cultural values that are antithetical to human liberty. I would very much like for there to be something other than state power with which to protect liberty from those who would destroy it. But when the gulf is wide enough, I am unable to find any substitute for the state as a defender of liberal culture.
GB THHotA
posted by Greg 10:42 AM
WAR METER INCHES UP
I'm upping the war-meter to a considerably higher level this morning, based on this news item at Drudge, to the effect thatIsrael gave Damascus 72 hours to stop Hizbullah’s activity along the
Lebanon-Israel border and bring about the release the two kidnapped IDF soldiers or it would launch an offensive with disastrous consequences.
The original source is a crappy London-based arabic newspaper. Until confirmed by better sources, I consider this only rumor, but a very dangerous one. If true, it marks a significant step toward all-out war. Syria and its puppet-master, Iran, can't back down in the way called for in this purported ultimatum. This would mean that Israel would have to follow through with massive attacks at least along the Lebanon-Syria border, which would run the very significant risk of bringing Syria in, which would trigger Iran's security guarantee. At that point, Tehran would have to put up or shut up.
UPDATE: By the end of the day, Drudge seems to have dropped the story and no one else has picked it up, so it's probably not true.
Of course, the Euro-left has made its position completely clear, siding with the terrorists. The Beeb's headline this morning: "Israel Kills Lebanese Civilians." They really do make me want to puke.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 10:24 AM
MARX AND MUHAMMED
Lately I've been feeling the need to clarify things to myself -- to try to restate as clearly as I can ideas that I've been developing for quite some time. One of these is the parallels and distinctions between two of the greatest challenges that the Western Enlightenment has faced: Marxism and Islam. Although the former began later in time, the nature of the challenge seems to be clearer to more people. Both Marxism and Islam present claims to possess complete world-views that are distinct from and superior to that of the liberal Enlightenment. Both developed into potent geopolitcal forces that resulted in the need for protracted struggle.
But there is a set of extremely significant distinctions between these two threats to the liberal world. These distinctions arise from the philosophical foundations of the two challenges. Marxism is a set of assertions about the world and how people should arrange their lives and relationships with each other based on a materialst philosophy that, at least in theory, accepted the rational scientific method as the final arbiter of truth or falsehood. Marxism made predictions about the material world and, most importantly, promised specific material results in the material world to a broad group of people (the proletariat).
Islam could not be more different. It rejects science as the arbiter of truth and makes no very specific promises to improve the material conditions of life for its adherents. Instead, it projects the reward for submission to Islam in an imaginary afterlife. The truth of this assertion cannot be inspected or tested for accuracy. After 60 years of communism in the Soviet Union, Russians could make a determination that Marxism wasn't delivering on its promises. But when the reward for adherence to an all-consuming world-view is placed beyond the ability to test or question, real conditions in the world cannot be used as a yardstick to check whether one is being sold a bill of goods.
This difference makes the nature of the protracted struggles faced by the West against these two fundamental challenges very different. In many ways, there was a basic premise inherent in the policy of containment taken against the communist world: Wait long enough and the truth of the superiority of liberal societies will become apparent to the world. But a policy of containment against Islamic imperialism cannot hope for such eventual success. Since Islam does not make any ambitious proposal to improve the lot of its followers in the real world, but only in an imaginary afterlife, no amount of waiting can undermine its claim to truth.
UPDATE: Welcome Instapundit readers; thanks for stopping by. Please take a moment to check out the rest of my blog.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:39 AM
Friday, July 14, 2006
OP FOR ON
OP FOR has a very good analysis of the big-picture condition for Israel. I highly recommend it.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 6:43 PM
WAR SENSE
I'm still busy with work, posting very quickly from out of town. Scanning the news on Friday morning, my "war sense" indicates a slight retreat from the red line. The lack of significant escalation in the last 12 hours or so, the Saudi signal that they see this as Hizbollah's fight and not their business, Syria's deafening silence, the defeat of the anti-Israeli UN resolution ... all seem to point away from the current crisis slipping into general war in the Middle East.
With any luck, this may well turn out to be a chance for Israel to smack Hizbollah down (but not out), and things will slowly return to the usual simmering violence in the Middle East.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 6:59 AM
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
WW V?
I'm busy with work today, but I want to go on record that early this morning, when I saw the first news of what was going on at the Israeli-Lebanese border, I sent a message to some friends that I thought there was some chance that this was the beginning of a general war throughout the Middle East, or even on a wider scale. I don't have time now to go into my reasoning on that call. Hopefully I'll be able to write more on the subject later.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 4:36 PM
Thursday, July 06, 2006
STILL COOL
I'm watching the day's video highlights from the shuttle flight. Awesome, clear sequence of the orbiter's backflip for inspection of the reentry protection. And then when the shuttle's crew came aboard the station, even this harsh ISS critic had to be impressed: Men, women, black, white, American, Russian, German, English ... all working together in space. Sometimes, it does seem right.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 9:28 PM
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
BATTERIES INCLUDED
I've been thinking a lot about electric cars lately. So has this guy. I like this one a lot.
But really practical commuter all-electric or "pluggable" hybrids shouldn't be curiosities like this. It wouldn't take much -- just some courage and some leadership -- to get good electrics into the market and onto the roads.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:21 PM
SHUTTLE UP
Everyone knows I hate that vehicle, but that was a smoooooth launch. Great video from the camera on the ET. Didn't look like anything came off.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 1:53 PM
Monday, July 03, 2006
SHUTTLE CRACK
CNN's reporting that there's a crack in the foam insulation on the external tank. I'd be willing to bet this means a complete scrub of the flight and rollback to the Vehicle Assembly Building. Although it shouldn't be so, this may well have been caused by the additional fuel loading cycle the tank went through after the first scrub.
AAAAAHHHHHHH! This development is so perfectly indicative of the basic problems with the shuttle's design. First, a flaw like this would be inconsequential if the important part of the system was on top of the fuel tank, where it ought to be, instead of slung alongside. But, if the orbiter wasn't mounted on the side of the tank, there wouldn't be a need to have the kind of complex shape that the foam in this area is covering, anyway. The fuel lines would all be internal and wouldn't have to pierce the side of the tank.
Here's the terrible idea gnawing at the back of my mind: The shuttle may never fly again. But before the day comes when that decision is made, how many more hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent keeping it on life support?
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 10:17 AM
MEXICAN STANDOFF
This is gonna be fun. I've spent a lot of time in Mexico, working and playing; and I've gotten to know a lot of people there, from the top to the bottom of Mexican society. My heart hurts for what's already broken there -- and I almost can't stand to think about how bad the tied election could be.
If you're looking for a great book about Mexico by a great writer, try Buried Mirror, by Carlos Fuentes. It's beautifully written and full of important insights.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:09 AM
Sunday, July 02, 2006
GLOBAL SMARMING
Here's a very good piece by a professor of atmospheric scince at MIT:[N]onscientists generally do not want to bother with understanding the science. Claims of consensus relieve policy types, environmental advocates and politicians of any need to do so. Such claims also serve to intimidate the public and even scientists--especially those outside the area of climate dynamics. Secondly, given that the question of human attribution largely cannot be resolved, its use in promoting visions of disaster constitutes nothing so much as a bait-and-switch scam. That is an inauspicious beginning to what Mr. Gore claims is not a political issue but a "moral" crusade.The author points out that, while there is consensus that there is some general warming, Al Gore has far overstated the case that there is a "scientific consensus" regarding the cause of that warming, how permanent it is and what lasting effect it may have.
I'm all for reduction of CO2 emmissions. I'm especially in favor of drastically reducing our dependence on imported oil. But Gore's "inconvenient truth" is an abuse of the public's attention.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:12 PM
SHUTTLE SCUTTLE
Another weather delay. As much as I rant about how bad the shuttle is here, it's all we have and I just can't fail to get excited about the prospect of monkeys hurling themselves into space.
Sometimes when I'm watching the non-human primates we have in the house here and see them puzzling out something in their monkeyish way, I think -- one day you're leaping through the trees and being curious and, next thing you know, you're walking on the moon.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 6:59 PM
Saturday, July 01, 2006
WHY I AM NOT A CONSERVATIVE
A Continuing Series
I try not to pay much attention to the shrill talking heads on the right. But somehow, this evening, I surfed into discussion of Ann Coulter's latest book, and found this at National Review Online:The biggest chunk of the book goes where few conservatives so far have dared to tread. Of her eleven chapters, four comprise a sustained assault on liberalism’s holy of holies, Darwinism. She’s clear, well informed, and unmoved by any fear that someone may call her a “fundamentalist” for criticizing “Darwiniacs”:The level of ignorance and stupidity revealed here by both Coulter and her reviewer is mind-boggling. It's people like her that make me truly detest the leftists who have hijacked liberalism. At least in the world of politics, there is no home for people who value liberty and reason.Nice point.Darwiniacs love to cite…the [evolutionary] progress from the reptile’s multiboned jaw to the jaw of mammal-like reptiles with fewer bones, leading inexorably to the single-boned mammal jawbone with two bones moving to the ear. The jawbone metamorphosis didn’t prove evolution, but here at last was one small part of the fossil record that was not wildly inconsistent with the theory of evolution…. That’s ‘proof’ when it comes to the state religion [i.e. secularism]: For not disproving evolution, the vertebrate jawbone is said to prove evolution.
In the end, evolutionists’ only argument is contempt. The cultists know that if people were allowed to hear the arguments against evolution for just sixty seconds, all would be lost.
She exaggerates, but who cares? What is most valuable about Coulter is the trademarked contempt that she breathes forth. It’s why her books sell better than pretty much any other conservative’s do.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:41 PM
WEATHER SCRUB
Florida's summer weather -- with the late afternoon thunderclouds typical of the tropics -- has been a problem for NASA since the 1960s. Of course, it's a bigger problem when the launch window is very narrow, as it has to be for the shuttle to match the highly-inclined orbit of the International Space Station (something I complain about here on a regular basis). But this is compounded by the fact that the shuttle orbiter has very little maneuvering power once it's in orbit. So it can't change it's orbital plane by more than a degree or two (if that -- it's very slight, for sure).
So let's see -- lumbering, creaky spacecraft that has to make a precise launch window to rendezvous with a space station in the wrong orbit.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 2:43 PM
SPACE BABE
Surfing around on the (possible) shuttle flight today, I checked out Mission Specialist Stephanie Wilson's official biography site. I'm glad to see that she got her master's degree from a decent school. Reading this should make you feel like a real underachiever.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 9:20 AM
SHUTTLE LAUNCH
Every time one of the creaky old birds goes up, I feel like ... something terrible is going to happen. Anyway, here's the real-time missions status center at Spaceflight Now, so tune in and let's see if NASA can get get it up.
GB, THHoA
posted by Greg 6:39 AM
