We accept your compliments.

Like this guy’s.

Blog title from a cult of “Bones” villains (spelling doesn’t count). Val Kilmer–in his only award worthy performance–as Doc Holliday in the sidebar. Post art complimenting snark on a par with McGoo or Yours Egomaniacally. And, of course, insanity-riddled, five-by-fucking-five commentary. And the kicker–no comments. They don’t give a fuck what you think. Here’s a teaser for the rest of you with physics envy–or even metaphysics envy–from one author, The Czar’s, profile: I am become jackass, the destroyer of relationships. Go here for more.

We thank you, Soylent Greenie, and welcome you to the Blog Pimp Roll. We commend his combination of hard-core climate-change skepticism and soft-core salacious pictures (do not browse freely at work unless you work at Penthouse), as well as just plain funny stuff, to anyone to whom the intersection of those sets appeals.

Mitch H. at Blogfonte has been reading us, apparently. We approve of The Dead Zone, incidentally. We had to cancel it before they revealed our plan for the apocalypse, but still, solid show. Welcome to the Pimperdome, Mitch.

Re: The Czar Makes Another Prediction!

Hysteria? Nonsense. Don’t forget, Царь наш, that we’ve already scientifically documented that Global Warming causes a whole lotta stuff.

Via Jonah Goldberg.

The Czar Makes Another Prediction!

Ready for another easy prediction?

You will soon be seeing a helluva lot more of news, pseudo-news, and quasi-news reports like this.

Every flood, every hurricane, every rain possibility that jumps from 20% to 40%, will be written up to emphasize how the Earth is melting due to anthropogenic warming.

The Hadley CRU incident is, John Lott puts it, being ignored or quickly papered over by most media organizations. That isn’t surprising, but it isn’t going to work for long and the press knows it.

So expect every possible environmental news story to be released, amped up to describe our imminent end times, so that the average person will hear nothing but warming, warming, warming. Further, you can expect news pieces that have no related content re-written to overwhelm the Hadley CRU stories:

- Noah Pinyin has been out of work for eleven weeks, now, and is becoming frustrated. The 32-year-old former video store clerk has been unable to find employment with online movie distributors, college DVD rental outlets, or in the forestry service likely due to the slow death of trees caused by global warming.

- Arial Mapp is one of many Americans who have returned to gardening in her backyard. “Food prices are so high now,” she said, which is generally attributable to global warming.

- “Our foreign policy is a joke,” commented Rep. Rush Orter of Nebraska. “No one takes our country seriously anymore thanks to the egregious sycophancy of our current President, [Global Warming].”

Heed the Czar’s words. An active disinformation campaign triggered by the Hadley incident is already upon us.

Drinking + Physics = Waste

Now headlines are saying that the Large Hadron Collider is smashing records.

And they spent $4.6 billion on that thing? For that???? Pshaw, the stupid drunks.

The Czar can shatter records with a $200 shotgun. If you can hit a clay pigeon, you can easily pop a 12-inch vinyl LP.

Re: Here is Where AGW Really Takes It In the Crotch [edited]

Without wading into the philosophical weeds, Karl Popper’s famous principle that a theory, hypothesis, or principle is metaphysical, not scientific if it is not, in some way, falsifiable (i.e., testable), seems to apply here. Whether it’s a Kuhnian paradigm or a substitute religion, the AGW scientists and their popularizers, like the egregious Al Gore, seem to have gotten way ahead of the empirical data, much less any coherent underlying theory. The closet they seem to have gotten is: Datum: the planet has warmed a bit, and datum: we have increased carbon-dioxide emissions which can be “greenhouse gases.” Ergo, the warming is due to carbon emissions.

That’s a hypothesis—though not an easily testable one—but even on the grounds of existing evidence, it’s a pretty weak one. As any scientist worth his salt can tell you, correlation does not equal causation, and the correlation here is much more imprecise than you’d like it to be, if you’d like it to be meaningful—the Medieval Warm Period (when Greenland was, well, green) and the last decade of cooling in the face of accelerating Indian and Chinese emissions are just two very recent instances (geologically speaking) that should have sent these guys back to the drawing board to refine their hypothesis.

What effect does industrial carbon-dioxide emission have? Can we distinguish terragenic (or anthropogenic) causes for global temperature changes, or is the sun’s effect too overwhelmingly dominate? These are interesting questions. We have only weak guesses at our disposal, and the very people who should be able to have made this clear seem to have subordinated the process of discovery to one giant, monomaniacal case of confirmation bias.

[Grammar edited slightly for coherence.]

Here is Where AGW Really Takes It In the Crotch

The pro-AGW folks are in a tizzy trying to spin and explain the Hadley CRU incident. To their credit, they are making some fair and even good arguments; unfortunately, the anti-AGW crowd is making vastly better ones.

Sure, everybody jumped on “Hide the decline” with plenty of strong words on both sides. But then came another piece of damning evidence. And another, followed by another, with two more following those. The Czar believes he has already seen a good hundred cited references to the Hadley data that make reference to burying data, working around corrupt data, acknowledgment that key variables are dummies, and so on.

But let us review for the umpteenth time here what a Theory even is. In science, you know that a Law is absolutely certain, with no possibility of error...for example, the Laws of Thermodynamics. A Principle is pretty much always the case, but it is not difficult to find the odd variation or exception, as with Bernoulli’s principle. A Hypothesis is a darn good guess: basically, a “Here’s what I think might be the case” that you use to set up a series of experiments to see if you’re right. A Theorem is something that is generally true, in common cases, but could potentially be disproved later (and easily). For example, there is a Euclidian theorem that all the interior angles of a triangle add up to 180°. As you likely already know, that can be disproved easily by putting a triangle on a curved surface. The interior angles formed by the North Pole, where the Prime Meridian meets the equator and where 90° E meets the equator add up to 270°. But for your mundane measurements of triangles, the theorem holds.

A Theory is a framework of explanations that makes sense. To “make sense,” a theory must do two things:

1. It must incorporate new information with minimal modification. For example, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity does not specifically mention black holes; but all theories on black hole formation and function plug perfectly in without modification. Darwin did not know that tube worms living off poisonous chemical emissions from the Earth’s mantle could exist, but their evolutionary existence not only plugs into his Theory of Natural Selection but actually helps connect a lot of information on how life first appeared on earth.

2. It must predict future discoveries. A good theory results in informed scientists saying “If this is true, then we should expect to see....” For example, scientists reviewed Einstein’s work and realized that a transit of the planet Mercury would reveal some relativistic effects due to the Sun’s massive gravity distorting the space-time field around both; and indeed, it took many decades but the effect was witnessed. Quantum mechanical theory predicted quarks long before they were found.

So what is AGW? It is not a Law. It is not a Principle. It may not even be a Theory. Consider:

AGW does not do the best job of incorporating new evidence. Like Intelligent Designers, the pro-AGW researchers tend to grab every piece of evidence that does not contradict their premise and fly it up as “yet more proof.” Yet, there is no cohesion tying the data together. Look at the diversity of data sources producing information; so why the massive effort to produce different formulas, creation of software subroutines, and improper linking of databases to produce a single hockey stick chart? The Czar does not suggest that all data are universal and do not require analysis, normalization, regularization of format, and categorization based on the type of information it is. But if the science behind AGW were so settled and obvious, perfect evidence would be dripping out of everywhere, and we do not see it.

Let us not forget that climatology is directly related to meteorology. And meteorology produces an incredible amount of data using only a handful of parameters: temperature, pressure, dew point, time, and so on. See, based on this, it should be easy to use dendrochronology to provide millions of data points rather than one Russian tree. And measurement of ice cores, while as different as possible from a tree ring, should nevertheless show similar patterns over the same time scales. So where is this stuff? It may very well be there, and fully published and properly reviewed—but where is the cohesive theory tying this all together. Everything should fit like a perfect puzzle, and we can safely conclude this is not the case.

So what is AGW? It is not a Law. It is not a Principle. It may not even be a Theory. And what of the future prediction? We all know how tough it is to predict the weather, so perhaps it is not fair to expect the pro-AGW crowd to say “the temperature on December 28, 2011, will be exactly 35° C in your area.” But two things: (a) that does not preclude a scientist saying that the average CO₂ ppm count for North America will be x by June of that year. Remember: AGW theory has been going on since the 1990s, allegedly, so we should be able to develop a test to say, for example, based on carbon dioxide levels in May of 1994, we should have seen it reach level y by April of 2007. And then we go to the 2007 data and look to see if corroborates. In a Theory, a good Theory, it should razor close. In a developing Theory, it may not be close but should reveal how the Theory should be adjusted. (b) Because you cannot easily tell us the temperature years in advance, maybe there is something dynamically and chaotically wrong with your model. And this is what we see: meteorologists use a variety of models to predict the weather days in advance, and they do not agree. That indeed is the exact problem with AGW Theory: the models are often contradictory, rather than independently supportive. For example, you already know that temperatures have been cooling a bit lately. AGW Theory should have been able to foresee that, account for it immediately and plug it right in as further evidence. That has not happened.

But Czar, they will say, we have good data that is resulting in good predictions. But a cardinal rule of Theory development could be summarized as “It is all too easy to solve a complex problem when you already know the answer.” If you know your data points, you can develop no shortage of forumas that will get you from one to the next. But each time new data is introduced, you have to create a new formula to bridge you over. And indeed, this exactly explains the Hadley CRU software models: a weird pastiche of different methods to synthesize normalized data. Your Theory, such as it is, is not great. One can give an algebra student the answers to every question in the book, and he can quickly solve the textbook questions using a variety of different means that may be unorthodox but still derive the correct answer. But throw a new question his way, with no cheat, and he fails the class. Trust the Czar on this last point without asking why or how he got the answers to the textbook.

We certainly do not require elegance. Yes, Einstein, like Newton, managed to get their Theories down to a single set of formulas. Darwin was able to define Natural Selection in only one sentence (albeit a lengthier one). Plate Tectonics Theory is also butt simple to define. But Quantum Mechanics takes a lot of work to describe and is not necessarily elegant. But it is symmetrical and internally consistent.

Anthropogenic Global Warming? Well, we get a mish-mash of explanations, pointers to a variety of data sets, internal disputes, and challenges to prove it wrong. And no matter how many times the pro-AGW crowd says you could disprove them if they were actually wrong, you still cannot prove a negative.

Proving the negative is not feasible when there is nothing to prove. Two common examples we see time and again from the pro-AGW folks: you can prove a negative...take a look at Intelligent Design or anti-vax claims. You can prove that Intelligent Design does not happen, and you can provide data that refutes anti-vax claims.

Except that is a false dichotomy.

Intelligent Design makes a claim that can be tested. Anti-vax followers do as well. But people skeptical of AGW do not make a claim that temperatures are falling or are staying the same: they simply want evidence and proof that ties the various claims together. They make no claim that it is impossible. They make no claim that other factors are producing warming. They merely want evidence that the world is positively warming at an accelerated rate due to specific actions caused by humans.

So this means the pro-AGW crowd must prove a positive, and thus far, the evidence has been sketchy at best. And thanks to the Hadley CRU incident, even the bottom has dropped out of that.

Mike Huckabee…

…meet Mike Dukakis.

Huckabee? Huckhasbeen.

Mailbag! The Czar Finds Something Nice

EC, a long-standing Gormogon operative in charge (this week) of our Australian, New Zealand, and Latvian region (the travel pattern is weird, yes, but makes sense in a way, and EC seems to be managing it quite well), writes in regarding the Czar’s treatment of recycling.

Actually, all he needed to say was:

Yes!!!!!

Excellent exposition, your czarness.

And of course, we agree. EC can expect some extra emu leftovers in his payoff envelope this week.

Ever study Egyptology?

You’ll have flashbacks.

The Core of the AGW Emails

I'm going to cut through the chaff and get right to the core of the issue with the East Anglia / Hadley CRU emails: the corruption of the scientific process. I'm not sure where these "scientists"* were in grade school, but it was heavily reinforced in my education. However, I'm not a scientist by trade - these "scientists" are (or maybe were) and therefore the scientific process should be first and foremost in their minds on a day to day basis. Instead we have a pattern of behavior, one might say a conspiracy, to subvert the process through the squelching of a valuable peer review process, ousting of dissenters of one's conclusions and a refusal to share methods and data in an open way to validate the hypothesis. However, maybe that last part is the real problem. Maybe the "scientists" in question don't have a hypothesis that they are trying to prove, but rather a belief that they are defending.
What we have now is all damage control and spin. Why? Because the people who believe in anthropogenic global warming are so invested (movies, books, Nobel prizes) in the theory that they need to defned it or lose all credibility.
The first line of defense is that the emails were illegaly obtained through "hacking". Irrelevant. While the act might be criminal (debatable if the "scientists" were intentionally hiding these emails from a FOIA request and depending on who hacked it), the fact remains that the emails and data exist.
The second line of defense is that the data and papers were peer reviewed revealing no flaws. That statement in itself is flawed. The peer review process doesn't necessarily identify flaws - it winnows out the papers and experiments that are worth publishing versus those that are not.Science works by one person making a claim, and backing it up with the data and methods that they used to make the claim. Other scientists then attack the claim by (among other things) trying to replicate the first scientist’s work. If they can’t replicate it, it doesn’t stand.
The third line of defense is one that defends individual excerpts from the emails like the "trick"ing of the data and the "hiding of the decline" with alternative explanations. One only needs to question the need for doing this and the defense unravels. The data we have on hand only covers a geologically short, maybe insignificant, period of time. So the "scientists" in question augmented the data with other data. One must question the accuracy and relevance of the augmented/added data as they were not obtained in the same manner as the rest of the data. We might be, and likely are, mixing apples and oranges here. Specifically, in this case, some of the supplemental data sets included a 12 tree set from North America and a single tree from Yamal, Siberia.
For your continued edification, I'll refer to two sites. First, this post has an excellent desconstruction of the events beginning with the inception of the FOIA requests. And then if you still remain skeptical of the statement made, go search the emails yourself here.

Confucius says, The Mandarin should stop bringing...

...these crappy bootlegs back to the Castle.





Oddly, we have two copies of this one, but upon inspection, the other one comes from Ghettoputer’s “special” collection, and the Gormogons aren’t about to risk prosecution in many countries (and civil suits for widespread nausea) in putting it up.



Via Gamma Squad. You should really check all of them out, especially to learn the real subtext of the Matrix films.

Czar Q&A: The Truth Of Recycling

Hey Czar, I want you to know that like a good American, I recycle. As a point of pride, I sort my recycling from trash, wash out my metal cans and glass bottles, and separate the plastics by their number. What do you think of the people who are too lazy to do that?

Actually, you are the idiot. Watch your trash guy some morning. He pulls up to your house, grabs your trash bins, and empties them into the compactor. Then he takes your recycling bins, with your nicely washed cans and bottles and perfectly sanitary and sorted plastics, and throws them right into the trash containers. Then he hurls your bins across your lawn, jumps into the truck, and repeats this miracle at your neighbor’s (although he is much nicer to your neighbor’s shit for some reason).

Separating your trash from your recycling only makes sense if you have two separate pickups (one for each), like the Czar does. If your trash and recycling are picked up together, you can bet they get dumped together at a waste management center. Know why? Money!

Here is what you are led to believe. Your trash is sent to a landfill, where it gets buried and pollutes the world for 200,000 years. Your recycled goods go to a shiny, clean, and unicorn-smelling facility where smiling, gloved and goggled workers cheerfully place your cans into a big masher, your bottles into a magic machine that separates them by type and then sends them to their respective manufacturers for sterilization and reuse in third-world countries. Your plastics are placed into bins marked 1 through 7, where they are quickly softened with non-cancer-causing heat, pelletized, and sold back to plastic companies for reuse in life-saving products. These companies write big checks to the recycling plant, which in turn takes a modest service fee and turns the bulk of the profits over to your municipality, who buys audiovisual gear for your middle school with it.

You know what’s coming next, right? What really happens: the trash and recycling is taken to a processing facility, where it all gets dumped into a machine that rips open and rends the trash. All the nasty fluids drain out below to a cistern. The solids get chewed up and broken apart and flopped onto a conveyor belt. A handful of depressed and underpaid workers pick out the aluminum cans, copper wire, and the newspaper out of the foul-smelling slurry mixture of trash and recycling. Bigger, wealthier facilities use sophisticated scanners to find high density polyethylene products further down the conveyor belt and kick them out. The rest gets put into a landfill.

Less than 20% of your trash and recycling actually gets recycled. In fact, of that, only 80% of the newspaper and 70% of the corrugated carboard at the plant actually gets recycled. Less than 1% of plastic is recycled. Aluminum and copper, which are commodities that have higher value than the cost to sort them out, wind up getting recycled 99% of the time. All that glass, non-magnetic metal, copier paper, styrofoam, and other plastics? Pitched into a landfill.

But this actually makes sense. In a landfill, tightly packed trash tends to recycle itself into base compounds that are easier for companies to reprocess into new goods. Glass, for example, is cheaper to recycle once it has been in a landfill for years and accumulates. Paper products break down into a loamy kind of goo that actually results in good dirt. This dirt can be reprocessed into a variety of neat materials, from farming to industrial. Yes, there is even a dirt market to buy and sell the stuff. Landfills are a shockingly good way to handle trash.

And plastics? Well, this is the recycling industry’s biggest pain. It costs recycling companies a fortune to recycle plastics. You have three choices: you hire a ton of expensive union workers to sift through that joyous melange of filth to find useable plastic and sort them by type, you have expensive and error-prone machines do it, or you simply don’t bother. Guess which the industry usually chooses?

Here is a guide to your plastic recycling efforts:

	Polythylene Terephthalate	Generally only a third of PETE products get recycled; the majority winds up in landfills.
	High Density Polyethylene	Most HDPE is recycled; if your local recycling plant is not recycling HDPE, they probably will be soon. HDPE may in fact be the bulk of plastics that do get recycled.
	Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC)	Almost never recycled.
	Low Density Polyethylene	Almost never recycled.
	Polypropylene	Incredibly rare for a plant to recycle this; even if your plant accepts it, they just chuck it.
	Polystyrene	Rare. Most recycling actually takes place through reuse; that is, shipping companies will reuse packing peanuts and other chunks of styrofoam. Almost no one actually melts it down to make new polystyrene products, though.
	Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS) and others	Junk plastic, which is never recycled.

But Czar, my recycling company does take plastics 1 through 6! So you are dead wrong that they just pitch it!

Sadly my gullible chap, there is a world of difference between taking it and recycling it. In most communities, your recycling company is required by law to take certain plastics. In Muscovy, for example, they purport to take 1 through 4. But although they are required to take it (what the industry calls “acceptance”), they ain’t required to recycle it. In fact, you may recall above that many recycling companies will accept 1 and 2. But if they don’t have a buyer waiting for those plastics, those plastics just pile up and pile up until a buyer shows. If the buyers aren’t there, guess what happens? It gets pitched into a landfill. This is also very true of glass: bottles get piled up in a corner; if no buyer comes, the glass gets thrown out to make room for products that are selling.

Less than 20% of your trash and recycling actually gets recycled.So at the end of this process, the recycling company gets a small check from companies that purchase the good to melt them down or repelletize them or whatever. That vast majority of that check goes to pay the union workers. Another massive chunk goes to pay the leases on the scanning and automation equipment that the plant was required by your municipality to obtain. A small part of the remainder goes to overhead and profit, which is probably only about 5% of the total. And, if there is anything left at all, it goes to your municipality. If your municipality is a city, it winds up in some politician’s pocket (likely the guy who set up the contract between the city and the recycler). If your municipality is a small village or hamlet, the administrative staff uses that money to purchase a roll of tape to patch up the gaping hole in the safety fencing around the toddler swing set at Tetanus Park.

So Czar, are you saying you shouldn’t bother to recycle your trash?

Heck, you should absolutely recycle for two reasons: one, it is ultimately the right thing to do. Conservatives like yourself are good stewards for the environment. Let the liberals continue to pollute the air by forcing recyclers to melt down plastics no one is buying. Also, capitalism will win out, and as recycling becomes more economical to do, prices will drop for packaging. Second, recycling is a great way to break up the trash. The Czar puts out two full cans of trash and three full bins of recycling every week. If he did not recycle, he would have to pack all that stuff into two extremely heavy and overflowing cans. Nope...recycling is less work for the Czar.

But yeah, he mixes all his recycling together and does not bother to wash it out since it winds up in a slurry of nastiness anyway.

Note: the photographs are taken from a variety of sources. This is not imply or suggest that the actual companies shown in the photographs are doing anything improper or unsanitary. The Czar is frankly trying to defend the difficulties you all go through, so please don’t write in to condemn our use of your corporate images. Even if you do smell like unicorns.

R.I.P. Rule of Law

An attention-seeking New York trial court judge decided this week that the rule of law is for suckers. You know, like creditors seeking to recover obligations voluntarily entered into by borrowers.

It seems OneWest, a privately held bank, acquired a mortgage debt from failed bank IndyMac. The debtors, Mr. and Mrs. Horoski, borrowed more than $291,000 in a subprime refi, using a portion to pay off their original mortgage debt, and the remainder to finance Mr. Horoski's part time gig selling dolls. Really. (Mr. Horoski's day job is as a professor of English and cognitive reason, seemingly incompatible fields of study).

It appears the judge is upset because OneWest insisted on collecting the full amount of the debt, or liquidating the collateral, as is its right under mortgage documents and, more importantly, New York law. The judge ordered a settlement conference (a new pre-trial statutory requirement in New York), and OneWest refused to settle, insisting on resort to its collateral. The article unhelpfully states that the judge lambasted OneWest for repeatedly refusing to work out a deal, for misleading him about the dollar amounts at stake in the case, and for its treatment of the couple over months of hearings," without further elucidation. The judge in a fit of pique not only refuses to permit the bank to foreclose, but citing the fact that OneWest received federal bailout cash, discharged the borrowers' obligation altogether. WTF?!?

So, let's get this straight. Borrowers borrow money from bank, pledging their house as security for the loan. Borrowers default on the obligation. Bank sued to foreclose its mortgage pursuant to the terms of the voluntary, arms-length transaction between bank and borrowers. There is no dispute the debt has not been paid. There is no dispute that the mortgage is valid. A judge (probably citing the fact that mortgage foreclosure is an equitable proceeding) determined 200 some odd years of settled New York law should be ignored, because the bank is bad and mean and JUST DOESN'T UNDERSTAND AND THE BORROWERS ARE SICK AND ITS A RECESSION AND SUFFOLK COUNTY HAS BEEN SLAMMED AND ANYWAY THE BANK GOT BAILOUT MONEY AND IT'S ALL BUSH'S FAULT!!11!!1! ZOMG!11!

Upsetting creditors' reasonable expectations that the rule of law will be followed is a one-way ticket to financial Armageddon. No lender is going to put capital at risk if he believes courts will arbitrarily apply the law. Here's hoping the Appellate Division will right this wrong, reinstate the debt, foreclose the mortgage and discipline Justice Jeffrey Spinner for overstepping his authority.

Because It Wasn't Working, Perhaps?

Jeremy Greenstock, whom you all remember—actually, no one remembers him. He was Britain’s ambassador to the UN back in 2003, so transfer this information only to your short-term memory because his irrelevence will resume after this post—continues to blame the Bush administration for the continuing slide of liberalism in Europe.

Specifically, he chides the speed at which the US went to war with Iraq in 2003. He would have preferred an additional six months of diplomacy.

Liberals have a ten-minute retention of history,* so let us back up. In August of 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. One of the largest international coalitions of forces in military history built up a massive army, including the first time the US and the still-then-USSR coordinated their militaries against a common threat (the USSR, you may recall, assisted the US logistically). It was a pretty big deal, if Greenstock recalls. In January of 1991, the coalition struck and crushed the Iraqi army within days. We were so overwhelming that Iraqi troops were surrendering to news crews.

Greenstock believes that another six months of diplomacy would have been better? What, something the previous 150 months of diplomacy had missed?Anyway, for the next twelve-and-a-half years, Hussein lived under a diplomatic umbrella, continuing to hurt and starve his people, pursue and develop NBC weapons (as reckoned by the UN itself, so none of this “there were no WMDs” nonsense), and pose a major threat to stability in the region. ‘Twas perhaps the most lavish and well-appointed house arrest in history.

And Greenstock decided that another six months would have been better? What, something the previous 150 months of diplomacy had missed? The US invaded Iraq in March, 2003, which by the Czar’s count accomplished more in the next 80-and-a-half months. Hmm, wait. It looks like the US invasion of Iraq was at least twice as effective at bringing democracy to Iraq. The Czar says “at least” because, as of early March 2003, diplomacy still had not brought any measure of change to Iraq. Greenstock admits that he wanted to give Hussein one last chance to disarm, because the previous several thousand warnings were ever-so-close to working.

Greenstock is a former ambassador for a very good reason.

* This is why liberal blog entries and magazine articles tend to be quite short. Anything more than a page, and the author can no longer recall what his original point was.

Buddy can you spare a Dirham

Global stock markets yesterday, and the U.S. stock market today plunged on the news that the Dubai state corporation was unable to meet its interest bill. This crisis has sparked even greater fears that investors owed money by other countries may see their investments wiped out.

This comes just days after the Chinese government posed serious questions to President Obama as to how exactly they were going to be repaid. The Chinese rightly have asked how increasing our debt on stimulus packages that haven’t created any jobs, trying to provide public insurance to 30 million people, and nationalizing the automotive industry is going to increase revenue to the U.S. government.

And now the Obama administration is announcing plans for another stimulus package. There comes a point in time when people have to realize that we are destroying the financial future of this country for the sake of “fairness” and no-debt left behind.

What would have happened if the government had not intervened in GM and Chrysler? They would have filed for bankruptcy, put together reorganization plans, closed down assembly plants, eliminated product lines, and sought investments from other companies. Well guess what, that is exactly what they did even thought the U.S. government invested billions of dollars into them, which the U.S. taxpayer will never see again.

The administration wants to have healthcare for all. Well the truth of the matter is that everyone in this country has access to healthcare. How people pay for that healthcare is the issue. Again, the government – that is the taxpayer – will now assume the burden of paying for healthcare for everyone. What this will do is equalize the healthcare that everyone receives. That sounds fair enough on the face of it, but the truth of the matter is in order to make it equal, the quality of that healthcare needs to be reduced. We are seeing the opening salvos in this campaign with the new mammography guidelines being proposed.

This may sound cruel, especially at the start of the holiday season, but in reality the needs of the many really do out-weigh the needs of the few. There are always going to be those individuals that will be at the bottom of the economic ladder, but it is not the responsibility of the government to bail them out and support them. To do so will only drag everyone else down and eventually lead to the economic collapse of this great nation.

Oh, well, maybe with a name like the Mandarin, our new Chinese overlords will give me an extra blanket when we are all shipped off to the re-education/labor camps.

Cap and Trade Ain't Dead Quite Yet

“Cap and Trade is dead,” this spake Sen Jim Inhofe (R-OK).

Not quite. The Wall Street Journal is concluding, quite prematurely (yet delightfully) that the Hadley CRU scandal is a death blow to global warming.

Yes, the GOP is launching an investigation into the veracity of the Hadley data (and woe be unto the Democrats for not launching one of their own). Yes, the evidence is coming back from all accounts that these books were cooked. Yes, the global warming world is either (a) blaming everyone and everything for the errors but the authors of the cooked data, (b) being remarkably silent, or (c) concluding that the results look really really bad for them.

But hold on a moment. The data are not at all a death blow. Not yet. Researchers are still poring through the information and finding all sorts of wormy meal there, but hasn’t all this been discussed before? The Hadley incident merely confirms what so many scientists have gradually been suspecting. This information is far from being the stake in the heart that the Cap and Trade or Copenhagen vampires would need.

However, its timing could not be more perfect. Just as Americans tipped the balance in skepticism, just as Copenhagen was starting to gnaw at its knots over the American recalcitrance, and just as Cap and Trade was stalling in the Senate... pow: confirmation of what most of us were already suspecting. And this could promote a slowly growing media frenzy of ACORN-like proportions. The Czar notes that a lot of liberal rags were quicker to pick up the story this time, albeit with different degrees of of depth; they may be holding back on saying what we all think, but at least they are acknowledging the event this time.

Even so, the Czar suspects that if he hooked the arm of any passerby and said, “Do you think the government needs to get involved to save the world from global warming?” the vast majority would nod their heads excitedly; if he were to ask “Are you aware that the original authors of the global warming crisis were exposed as frauds who attempted to hide and destroy data rather than admit their theory was badly flawed?” even more would express shock and surprise.

Until the majority of Americans hear what is happening at a level they understand—and there is no shortage of people who have written excellent summaries that can provide just that—we are a long way from turning our backs on Cap and Trade.

And with respect, Senator Inhofe, Copenhagen is the bigger devil by far.

Government Motors 1975

Friend of the Gormogons Claire Berlinski writes:

After the Second World War, the United Kingdom’s newly elected Labour government resolved to build of Britain a New Jerusalem. It nationalized the commanding heights of the economy and inaugurated the cradle-to-grave welfare state. By the 1970s, the UK faced an economic crisis unrivaled since the Great Depression. Shabby and hopeless, Britain had become, in Henry Kissinger’s words, a “tragedy” of a nation, reduced to “begging, borrowing, stealing.”

British Leyland, Britain’s largest automaker, faced bankruptcy in 1975. Fearing that its collapse would leave a million workers unemployed, the Labour government nationalized it. The company remained a ward of the state for 13 years. During that time, the British taxpayers invested 11 billion pounds—the inflation-adjusted equivalent of $22 billion today—in a company whose only sign of life was a willingness to spend that money. Though the British economy recovered, British Leyland did not.


If this story sounds troublingly familiar to you, you appear to be nearly alone. Few of the policymakers currently nationalizing the American auto industry seem to remember the British experience, and fewer still seem to have learned anything from it.

Read on.

Happy Thanksgiving

...from the Gormogons!



(from left to right, the Mandarin, GorTechie, the Œcumenical Volgi (id est, 孔夫子, The Notorious ŒV), the Czar of Muscovy, and Ghettoputer Gormogon. Taking the photo, and not in the picture, is Sleestak (one of the few things the idiot did right, although ‘Puter beat him mercilessly anyway); the house assistant Dat Ho is inside manning the Mandarin’s superlaser on the top of the castle. Click to enlarge.)

A short list of items each of us is thankful for:

The Mandarin is thankful for weather control, proto-dimensional quantal variance, marmosets (the cute little bastards), his new Robinson Armament XCR carbine in 7.62mm (not sure why he needs three of them), and Arizona Green Tea.

GorT is thankful for Ubuntu v295.2 (which now supports Flash), Macintosh System 6, the hidden joke within Stonehenge (you had to be there when they built it to get it), ripping open human skulls to check the patch version, foxy boxing, do-it-yourself thermite, and in-ground swimming pools.

Volgi is thankful for vampires, winning the first round of his sorcery battle although there is still so much to do, the Barrett M82A1 he has in his minivan, his pet yeti, havarti cheese, and his lockpick set.

The Czar is thankful for giraffes, the elimination of the pesky Etruscans, the Springfield XD-40, heights, blackbody radiation, and the forgiveness of Dat Ho for some of the many terrible things the Czar said to him last Thursday. And bourbon. Which we drank a lot of last Thursday.

‘Puter is thankful for peppermint Oreos, the 20% off all items at the Liquor Locker, his mouse guns which easily fit in most leisure suit pockets, Sleestak keeping his goddamn mitts off his stuff, the ongoing collapse of unions in this country, piranhas, anti-socialism, and the whole Andre the Giant meme. Although ‘Puter will likely forget about that by Saturday.

We hope your Thanksgiving is indeed wonderful, and remind you to give real thanks for all the good things you have received, all the bad things your family did not experience, and all the great things that were not yet taken away.

First Security Incident at White House

The Czar heard complaints, which he will not cite for obvious reasons, that the Obama-era Secret Service is poorly run and handled, often with “upstairs” getting in the way and ignoring their recommendations. Great agents, all, but processes are a little wonky right now.

Anyway, the first reported security incident has happened, in which a couple of party crashers got into the President’s state dinner—something even the Republicans could not manage.

Fortunately, these two morons were never a threat to begin with, and did not bypass any official screening process...they simply posed as two other people.

But the fact it happened at all does not refute the Czar’s original information. And obviously the Obama camp is quite embarrassed about this, with it being released to the press on Thanksgiving and all in hopes you miss coverage.

Liberal Double Standard

'Puter's a little late to the party, as he's been making Thanksgiving preparations around Castle Gormogon. You know, hanging festive garlands of severed ears, brining the emu, preparing the hearts of palm and pig intesting casserole. The usual stuff. But 'Puter did find time to keep up on his reading, and here's a little item in yesterday's WSJ that piqued his interest.

'Puter cannot immediately locate a link to the article, but the quote in question is on page A14, fourth column, last paragraph in case the reader wants to verify it for himself. President Obama states:

Obviously there are historic conflicts between India and Pakistan. It is not the place of the United States to try to, from the outside, resolve all those conflicts.

President Obama, please explain why Israelis and Palestinians should be treated differently than Indians and Pakistanis.

“I hired a podiatrist to rewire my house.”

“He keeps calling the junction boxes ‘bunions’ and icing them down. I’m beginning to have my doubts.”

Or so might we be entitled to think when the government keeps telling us they’re creating (“or,” they add hilariously, “saving”) jobs and yet unemployment keeps going up—and it turns out that no one at the highest level of the executive knows a damn thing about creating jobs first-hand. Well, except for Geithner’s full-employment program for criminal-tax lawyers, and doubtless many illegal nannies.

Friend of the Gormogons Nick Schulz points out this jaw-dropping chart:


WHOO! TECHNOCRACY AHOY!

Can we say we’re doomed yet?

Spotlight on: Bolivia

At first, they all laughed at what was called the world’s worst police sketch ever. Shown to the right, this is the actual sketch drawn by a police sketch artist in an unnamed Bolivian city.

Really funny.

Gormogons Spotlight On: BoliviaExcept, they freaking caught the guy. And although the alleged murderer’s actual mug has not been revealed to the press (some are using the above-right gag), everyone agrees he actually does look quite a bit like this.

Advertisement

Courtesy who else? The amazing Dr. Boli.

Eppur rinfresca.

Says Jules Crittenden. Great article. Grazie, Borepatch.

Anti-“Fed” lynching a hoax

You read it here first. I know, contain your astonishment that libertarians aren’t out hanging census workers from trees:

A U.S. Census worker found dead in a secluded Clay County cemetery killed himself but tried to make the death look like a homicide, authorities have concluded.
Bill Sparkman, 51, of London, might have tried to cover the manner of his death to preserve payments under life-insurance polices that he had taken out. The policies wouldn’t pay off if Sparkman committed suicide, state police Capt. Lisa Rudzinski said.
“We believe it was an intentional act on his part to take his own life,” said Rudzinski, who helped lead the investigation.

That along with more here on the indecent, contemptible leftist onanism over the man’s corpse.

Freddie Mercury died eighteen years ago today.

And here’s the best tribute you’ll see all year.

Because they’re really, really slow learners

LONDON -- Nuclear power -- long considered environmentally hazardous -- is emerging as perhaps the world's most unlikely weapon against climate change, with the backing of even some green activists who once campaigned against it.

Says the WaPo.

Considered by whom? Scare-mongering ideologues? Anti-human maniacs who want to reduce us all to subsistence agriculture? Idiotic dupes in the press?

(D) All of the above.

Well, I guess they’re both hippies.

Think you’re having a bad day? Not as bad as this guy’s.

Hadley Update

Lawmakers in US, law enforcement in UK, looking at Hadley CRU issue.

Fortunately, on our side of the Atlantic, it’s the GOP starting an investigation into the impact of the emails. Hooray—in addition to harming Copenhagen, this could also be a decisive blow to Cap and Trade.

And fortunately, on the other side of Atlantic, British law enforcement is focusing on whether this was a conspiracy to sidestep FoI requirements, which would be quite serious.

Blog Comment Full of Win

Here's an actual comment from Filmdrunk concerning the eminently lame New Moon film. (Sorry to crush your illusions, Tweeny Boppers).

"ChinoMoreno says: If you are seeking to be bitten by Edward Cullen, you had better dress up as a pillow."

Win. How much more win could there be? None. None more win.

Everybody Act Surprised!

President Obama announced today that we will be a surprise attack across Afghanistan next week.

“I want to be very clear to our enemies...that we are really going to surprise them,” the President said on the 11th hole at Chantilly National. “If they thought we were formidable before, wait until they see us next week.”

The President explained that the United States would be sending 25,000 additional troops, lightly armed, and with little Afghanistan experience. “Of course, we are going to need about five days to get them acclimated and up to fighting strength; I sure would hope the Taliban would avoid attacking them at the modestly defended Mukhair outpost they’ll all be stationed at, over on Highway H and Ezkhazi Road...particularly around 1000 hours when the sentries change shifts and might not be attentive.”

Asked if the President was concerned about a sneak attack, he added, “Well, have you seen that place? You could totally sneak in from the South-Southwest, where those low hills are, because we still don’t have that last guard tower up yet. Total blind spot. Forty or fifty insurgents could easily walk across and get right up to the wire, get in with small arms, and set us back twenty years over there.”

The President finished 18 holes with only seven over par, took a late lunch of watercress salad, and then flew to New York for an appearance on Late Night.

Home At Last!

Lost Family of Three Found After Night In Forest.

We celebrate their safe return from their routine expedition.

Their little monkey friends did not make the journey.

We’ll be screening this at the Castle. Stop by.

The Day the Earth Stood Left

Regular readers here will not be surprised that The Day the Earth Stood Still is a popular Friday night popcorn throwing event here at the Castle. GorT even stars in it, and his knowledge of time travel allows us to know when it’s on Turner Classic Movies often a decade in advance. Note: not at all certain why in the year 2034 TCM adds Mother, May I Sleep With Danger? to the playlist, but life is sometimes like that.

Of course, whippersnappers, we are talking about the 1951 Robert Wise classic, not the 2008 Keanu Reeves travesty.

That said, the Czar actually caught a good chunk of the newer film late last night, and realized with horror why it tanked and why the original holds up all these years. Yep, it’s a liberal versus conservative thing.

1951’s film was a conservative message: people of earth need to pull together, end internecine fighting, and take responsibility for our own actions. No one else is going to do it for us. Failure to do so would be disastrous for us all, as consequences beyond our control would ensure our total destruction. The inept Democratic presidency (mentioned specifically in the film) is unable and unwilling to listen to Klaatu’s message, and shoots the messenger twice trying to keep him from the people. Gort is able to revive Klaatu, who finally delivers the stern advice about self-responsibility and reducing governments out of control.

2008’s film is a liberal message: the conservatives have ignored warnings about the environment, and Klaatu has come to earth to destroy us because of it. However, with his guidance and takeover of governmental systems, he can provide us our salvation. It is up to Klaatu, not us. We live or die by his whim, and the Republican presidency (evidently led by a bitchy Secretary of Defense) is unable to do anything except attempt to smuggle him away and torture him. Eventually, Gort is discovered to be made up of little black bugs who destroy most of the Earth, but it takes Klaatu to kill himself (instead of the Democrats doing it) so that we can see the error of our ways—which eventually sends us back to the much-desired Dark Ages when all power and technology is cut.

It’s almost as if the producers of 2008’s film decided to update the story from Cold War paranoia to 21st Century global warming hysteria, and then decided to make the entire film George Bush’s fault. Why, that crazy Texan nearly got us all kil’t by a robot that turns to bees.

By the way, the new Gort is quite a bit larger than our beloved GorT, but his total cubic volume is not nearly big enough to contain the cloud of bees that begins to destroy the earth. At that rate, it would take months, at least, and be massively inefficient. What was better about the original is that the manner of our destruction was left unimaginably epic in scale; we never found out what would reduce us to a burned-out cinder. But the Czar quibbles.

One last bit of evidence that 2008’s is a liberal creation: a conservative would know that the US Army does not use jet-powered Reapers with Sidewinders. And never would.

President Making Good on Promise?

One of the things we Gormogons are most proud of is that we aren’t all just griping and accusations. Sometimes, when someone does something sensible, we point it out.

For example, President Obama seems to finally be making good on his promised push for more emphasis on science, technology, engineering, and math. In a country as diverse and large as ours, it is a bit unrealistic to think that America would rate #1 in STEM, but—seriously—21st?

So the President is drumming up support to re-emphasize STEM in a multilateral hit: schools, television, labs, and more. And here’s the best part: the money is coming from private sources.

That’s great for two reasons: one, it ain’t the taxpayers who need to cough up the $260 million bucks for this, and two, it keeps any progressivist revisionist science out of the kids’s heads. The private donations are from sources diverse enough to provide a good, balanced approach to learning different topics, not just alegebra and Microsoft Excel.

The contrast here is so shocking that the Czar is tempted to ask why we can’t do this more across the board, but he is really trying to leave criticism out of this.

Here is a sobering thought, too, from our President: in South Korea, he found a “hunger for knowledge, an insistence on excellence, a reverence for science and math and technology and learning...That used to be what we were about.” True enough.

Must-read of the day

Reuel Gerecht on Hasan, the FBI, the Muslim world, and foreign policy. (Gerecht is a former CIA agent who worked on Iran. He knows this stuff much more deeply than your average “expert,” even if he’s occasionally a tad biased by his Persophone sources.)

While you might think...

...that this is just a commercial, they got the idea from spending some time up at the field behind Castle Gormogon.


h/t Borepatch

Wilhelm Theodor Friedrich?!

Are you kidding me? A German company has built a .50 BMG “pistol.” It apparently weighs as much as a B.A.R. This is not a joke.

正 H. 名! Once again, the Gormogons’ operational security has been breached. The .50 pistol is Ghetto P’s preferred method of dealing with the three-foot rats in Castle Gormogon’s subbasements and dungeons.

由紀夫 vs オバマ

And the hits just keep on coming.

The Japanese were, to say the least, unimpressed with President Obama’s supplicating bow. Want to know why protocol requires the President to offer a handshake in lieu of a bow? Subtleties, dammit. Instead of appearing respectful and gracious, the depth of the bow was interpreted by the Japanese as the type done by an supplicating toady. It came off as weak and annoying.

You can believe your Czar. Or not. Try the Shukan Bunshun Weekly’s assessment of it: “To tell you the truth, it had to have been the worst US-Japan Summit Meeting in history,” said a member of the Japanese Foreign Ministry, who no doubt includes MacArthur’s visit in 1945. (Translations courtesy of...)

The Japanese were insulted by Obama’s late arrival (his second to the Japanese, counting the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh), and as a result the President was made to wait sitting in a motorcade outside the entrance of the PM’s residence.

Further, the Japanese felt the small group of Americans, whom they called “Team Obama,” was unprofessionally small and therefore concluded that the visit was a stunt that would waste everyone’s time. Know what else didn’t help? The Americans nodding off and yawning throughout the meeting.

Like a host going to bed early to indicate the guests needed to leave now, PM Hatoyama abandoned the President and left the country well ahead of him.

Conservatives argue that the President never bows to another power under God. Liberals will say that we’re dumbasses, and that when in Japan, you bow. Whatever. But it seems that Japan is taking our side of the interpretation. The President screwed it up, in their own words.

Japan would like to know if Russia is finished with the “overload” button; other countries would very much like to use it.

And That About Says It All

Dallas News reports that Democratic candidate Tom Schieffer is dropping out of the governor’s race due to lack of support.

His departure would leave humorist Kinky Friedman, hair-care magnate Farouk Shami, schoolteacher Felix Alvarado and rancher Hank Gilbert as announced gubernatorial candidates on the Democratic side.

Do not doubt our influence. That last paragraph sounds totally like something the Czar would write.

Scientific American Roundup (Part 2)

Two items from the current issue of Scientific American caught the Czar’s attention this weekend.

The second is Michael Shermer’s discussion of the conservative mind and the liberal mind. The first is here.

UV psychologist Jonathan Haidt identified five universal aspects to developed human morality: (1) the harming of others is wrong, (2) that there should be equality and justice for all, (3) that loyalty to your group is essential to survival, (4) that tradition, faith, and law are good things, and (5) that balanced, temperate living is a good thing.

In a survey of 23,000 people worldwide, Haidt found that self-defined liberals tend to identify only with the first two; self-defined conservatives score highly in all five areas.

Shermer admits he tends to lean a bit left, but since September 11, he has been thinking along more libertarian lines...and finds support in this study in the rightness of his decision.

The Czar also finds this interesting, but wonders: is it that liberals put more emphasis on the first two items, or is that they do not understand the other three? If the first case, there could be an argument that these five factors should be weighted; if the latter, it gives rise to the Czar’s oft-stated opinion that liberals have a childish view of the world.

So the Czar naturally takes the latter opinion, since it supports his own hypothesis in a bad case of confirmation bias. But if anyone has evidence for the first interpretation, we are listening.

Scientific American Roundup (Part 1)

Two items from the current issue of Scientific American caught the Czar’s attention this weekend.

The first is Lawrence M. Krauss’s opinion piece that the Internet has given voice to no shortage of lunatic nonsense. The second is here.

Krauss of course is a theoretical physicist with a wide background in scientific skepticism (and a definite authority therein); however, a theoretical phycist is no more qualified to discuss political debate on the Web any more than the Czar is qualified to give a lecture on spin vector bosons.

The Czar will guess that Krauss skews to the left, given his third paragraph: “As I listen to the manifest nonsense that has been promulgated by the likes of right-wing fanatic radio hosts and moronic ex-governors in response to the effort to bring the U.S. into alignment with other industrial countries in providing reasonable and affordable health care for all its citizens, it seems that things have only gotten worse...”

Cowardly, he fails to come out and say that he dislikes Limbaugh and Palin. He also labors under the not-very-widespread fantasy that (a) other European countries have a better healthcare system than we do, and that (b) current Democratic proposals will make everything better. If he were given to math, he would be welcome to revisit both the CBO’s analysis and the Republican proposal to see which one is better suited to lowering healthcare costs.

Krauss also quotes Orwell liberally, failing to realize that Orwell’s visions in 1984 were commenting on a liberal government, not a right-wing one. He betrays that he is unfamiliar with the healthcare bill as well as Orwell. It pays to read your primary sources, especially if you intend on relying on them for examples.

More from Krauss: “Now fabrications about ‘death panels’ and oxymoronic claims that ‘government needs to keep its hands off of Medicare’ flow freely on the Internet, driving thousands of zombielike protesters to Washington to argue that access to health care will undermine their fundamental freedom to have their insurance canceled if they get sick. And 24-hour news channels, desperate to provide ‘breaking’ coverage at all hours, end up serving as public relations vehicles for any celebrity who happens to make an outrageous claim or, worse, decide that the competition for ratings requires them to be anything but ‘fair and balanced‘ in their reporting.”

Snark is something else to leave to experts, Krauss. The Czar, unlike most people, has read the healthcare bill in its entirety, the one that Governor Palin objected to, and indeed, there are provisions in there for non-medical review panels and commissions to verify the effectiveness of healthcare treatments and said panels have the final authority on whether or not a given treatment shall continue. In other words, people you do not know who have no specific medical authority would have retained the ability to cancel treatment for you if the treatment would not have a short-term “quality” payback in terms of real dollars saved. Most Americans, polls show, object to this concept.

Krauss should look at this concept in an analog. Would he be willing to submit controversial theoretical physics papers before a government board who had no specific training in physics or even science to ensure that his findings met expectations for easy-to-understand science? Krauss would doubtless object to this, recognizing that a non-scientific panel would be a potential death blow to theoretical physics. Ah, a death panel.

Secondly, ridiculing one initially confused elderly woman’s statement that the government should have no involvement in Medicare belies the reality that the current proposal intends to reduce Medicare coverage for millions of elderly people who depend on it, simply to exaggerate potential cost savings. She was humorously wrong in what she said—and conservatives laughed as much as liberls did—but it turns out she has reason to be concerned.

Krauss is right to condemn the media’s imaginary need to give equal weight to all opinions, but he is clearly singling out Fox News, which is another liberal banner to fly. Krauss does not have the fiber to announce his political viewpoint that clouds his judgment, but he manages to hit all the key pop-culture progressive talking points in those directions.

And here is where his progressivism slips into clichéd, elitist, snobbish view: he concludes his piece by asking whether free press and government leaders can ever hope to “weed out nonsense” in the manner that science does. The Czar hopes not—because weeding out thought and opinion (however misguided, incorrect, or just plain goofy it is to you) is not what America does. Rather, we want to hear all ideas, concerns, and opinions...and then use our own intellect to keep or reject ideas accordingly. What works in science is tantamount to censorship outside it, and that is an indefensible position for an opinion writer to take.

“One doesn’t need to debate about whether the earth is flat or 6,000 years old. These claims can safely be discarded, and have been, by the scientific method.”

True—and that shows the weakness in using tired, disproven, or outmoded arguments in an opinion piece.

What Up With That?

Once the Mandarin and GorT get the satellite uplinks working and we can start directly controlling TV programming, the Gormogons will have whole channels devoted to the BET issues program What Up With That? You will either be baffled and confused, or love it unreservedly. Confucius* suspects that he knows which way his brother Li Bai will go. (Apologies in advance for NBC’s ads.)





*For those who came in late: Confucius is the Gormogons’ Œcumenical Volgi.

Re: Prattle

The Czar is correct in pointing to Bob Wright's fatuity.

Wright errs profoundly in pointing to U.S. foreign policy as the malign demiurge that made Nidal Hasan a murderer. His argument is a textbook example of the fallacy of foreign-policy egocentrism.

Hasan became an Islamist. Islamists are to Muslims as bomb-throwing anarchists are to libertarians suspicious of state power. Islamism is a variation of the twentieth-century ideology that traveled under the name fascism, Nazism, or communism (among others). It substitutes the umma for the nation, Volk, or proletariat; sharî‘a for a political program; and the Islamic eschaton for the pure justice of communism or the Sieg des Volksgeistes or whatever. It's much more intelligible if you think Lenin or Fanon than delving into the corpus of ḥadîth.

Playing Wright’s game of “who's to blame?” leaves you with two options as you go back and back and back in a roundelay of “who struck John”—the West (here conveniently called “the right” for Wright and the New York Times’ readership) or the Prophet Muḥammad. Neither of those is satisfactory—or correct. The late Laurent Murawiec did as good a job as has been done in laying out the recent and politicial-philosophical roots of Islamism in The Mind of Jihad. If you want to understand the actual project of “radical Islam” or “political Islam” or Islamism—Muraviec’s book is illuminating.

The way to defeat do-it-yourself Islamism is to convince all the losers and psychos attracted to it that they can't win. Wright then steals a base, claiming that absent Iraq and Afghanistan, we know that Nidal wouldn't have become a jihadi. What about the Beltway sniper? The guy who shot up LAX? The major who fragged his fellow officers? The guy who shot up the recruiting station he mentions? There’s a much more obvious uniting thread to these guys than Wright says, and it’s an argument he dismisses summarily with an denial of Islam’s inherent belligerency. While, true, Islam isn’t essentially belligerent (although a legitimate caliph can, in fact, proclaim a jihâd, the last having been the spectacularly unsuccessful Ottoman attempt to rally the world’s Muslims against the British in World War I), it does contain an unusual wealth of resources to draw on if you want to commit violence in its name. Muslims have interpreted their religion in a variety of fashions, from irenic to just to oppressive to fanatic and murderous. All those options remain on the table, and most of the world’s Muslims seem to have opted for a silent resignation—not entirely for, not entirely against—during the current struggle between Islamism and its Western and “insufficiently Muslim” targets.

The DIY jihadis are not representative of Muslims, as some would have you believe, or of Muslims displeased with American foreign policy, as Wright argues. If they were the first, Islam would have to be eradicated—Anne Coulter’s black joke about “invading their countries and converting them to Christianity” is a brutally simple encapsulation of the kind of mindset one would have to adapt if one really believed that “Islam is the problem.” Wright offers a more seductive temptation—repent and change our evil ways, and these scourges of God shall disappear. Of course, if we did, say, pull out of the Middle East, let Afghanistan fall to the Taliban, leave Iraq and Israel to the tender mercies of Iran and its cat's-paws, Syria and Hezbollah, who’s to say our politicians, soldiers, and bureaucrats wouldn’t find themselves on the end of psycho shooters with different criticisms of our policy—Jews enraged by Israel’s annihilation, Maronite Christians enraged at a Hezbollah policy of annihilation, the very Iraqis who are our allies today?

What Wright fails to realize is that there‘s no particular policy that makes madmen. The gleefully murderous nobody is a phenomenon not reducable to foreign-policy disputes. There's a certain loser personality type drawn to grandiose violent ideologies which give their life drama and meaning they can't find elsewhere. If it's not one thing, it may well be another. (“It was all Lenin in here last year.”) We can't know. Indeed, one could equally credibly argue the opposite of Wright’s case: that without a vigorous U.S. response, more marginal Muslim (and especially convert) psychos would be drawn to the apparently victorious march of political Islam, committing more acts of terror, drunk with the prospect of imminent victory and their exalted place in the new order, when “a real rain will come and wash the scum off the streets,” as a noted political commentator once contended.

Contemporary Islamism combines ostensibly religious missionary “da‘wa” with the classic Leninist appeal to ideology and call to join the vanguard morally permitted to commit atrocities to throw off the oppressor class keeping you down (perhaps even unbeknownst to poor benighted, falsely-conscious you).

The way to defeat do-it-yourself Islamism is to convince all the losers and psychos attracted to it that they can't win. That the movement’s millennial promise is false. They must be demoralized—and unfortunately the major way to do so is relentlessly kill a whole lot of their armed confrères, with all the awfulness that that grim duty entails. Going on the offensive against utopian radicals is not only an act of self-defense, but a step towards defanging the appeal of their ideology which, like every other version we’ve seen come and go since the French Revolution, derives a ton of its appeal from the promise of being on the inevitably victorious side of the Good. You have to smash that delusion—through military success and constant propaganda on behalf of the truth.

Indeed this approach of defeating those who would attack us (with violence when necessary) and continually presenting the case to the broader Muslim world through public diplomacy that we are not—as we are in fact not—enemies of Islam. Our carrot, if you will, is the goodwill and unique benefits of friendship with a superpower—e.g., liberating the Muslim lands of Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq. Free trade. Economic assistance. Advice on democratization. Etc.

Our stick is destroying those who attack us and our allies. You’ll notice that this is our counter-insurgency strategy writ large: cultivate working relationships with those who want peace and crush those who want war. This approach has the added benefit of making peace attractive and war deeply unattractive. Those who “love death” don’t love it as much when it’s a meaningless, hopeless, squalid thing, rather something they can characterize as part of a world-changing conquest of Evil on the part of Good. They must be denied that hope.

Mr. Wright chooses to believe that by our reorienting our foreign policy in some unspecified fashion (doubtless congenial to his political tastes), Nidal’s ilk can be appeased. One hopes he finds psychological consolation in this comforting delusion, but in retreating to it, he abandons all claim to seriousness.

Update: Ron Radosh agrees.

Christmas Lights

Given the good weather here in the DC area, GorT and family decided it was time to hang up the Christmas lights.  Mind you, we're not turning them on until after Thanksgiving (a family rule - 1 holiday at a time) but I've pretty much had it climbing the roof and hanging lights in sub-freezing temperatures.  Stores and local municipalities have decorated themselves all up with lights and bows.  Christmas lights and other decorations became available at our local hardware store near Halloween.  I know that the current administration is having trouble dealing with the economy but starting the Christmas push almost three months before the holiday is a bit ridiculous.

Next project - the decoration of Castle Gormogon.  Details and pictures will be coming soon.

This Morning in the Castle

Somewhere in the distant past, the breakfast committee decided they needed a way to make breakfast sausage more dangerous. Someone in the back nervously coughed, and a tentative hand rose. “Yes?” Another cough. “Well...we could crumble up the sausage into a pork gravy and slather that on some buttermilk biscuits in great heaping clumps.”

A cardiac breakfast.

And thus was biscuits and gravy born. Which the Czar had for breakfast. With a massive side order of grits—thick to perfection, which indeed they poured more pork sausage gravy all over.

Heaven.

Prattle

Robert Wright, in the New York Times, writes that conservative writers like Charles Krauthammer and Jonah Goldberg are right that the liberal media are trying to cover up Hasan’s crimes by dismissing them as a mere medical issue.

An important admonition, and the only one that explains the lunatic concepts of pre-traumatic stress disorder or second hand flashbacks.

But then Wright concludes that the whole thing is conservativism’s fault, because the right’s pro-military approach to fighting terrorism is what brought us to this.

Re-writing history that would be obviously corrected by the simple act of Googling, Wright says “The American right and left reacted to 9/11 differently. Their respective responses were, to oversimplify a bit: ‘kill the terrorists’ and ‘kill the terrorism meme.’” Perhaps that was the oversimplified bit among his circle of friends, but the Czar recollects that President Bush had a record-high approval rating of 90+ percent when he advocating killing the terrorists...and not their “meme” (a word used by people who are trying to sound hip, and really do not understand what a meme is).

He more than oversimplifies, if his Latin is good enough to translate reductio ad absurdum.

Wright is obviously a liberal—defined not by his position on terrorism, but on his fantasy notion that Hasan must have been created by someone or something. A monster like Hasan cannot come from nowhere: he must be a reaction to something. For liberals, there must be meaning, closure, and feeling.

A monster like Hasan cannot come from nowhere: he must be a reaction to something. For liberals, there must be meaning, closure, and feeling.Wright cannot conceive that a thing like Hasan can simply occur of his own accord and free will; Hasan, in fact, could just happen. A man could wake up one morning and decide that he wanted to follow a dangerous, violent path, and that he could easily select a soft target to carry out a murderous rampage. This cannot be for a liberal: he must have been influenced by the seductive talk of war, of guns, or violence. There must be a root cause for senselessness, and perhaps we could find it if we just think hard enough. No matter how stretched the theory is, the theory is better than the alternative.

Another revealing pot shot: “Contrary to right-wing stereotype, Islam isn’t an intrinsically belligerent religion.” And a delicious left-wing stereotype that right wingers would have such a stereotype. As they might say in Wikipedia...cite? Wright adds that the more right-wingers view Islam as violent, the more Islam turns violent. This backwards post hoc ergo propter hoc fair farting shows how unstable and weak Wright’s position is.

Wright concludes that bin Laden would have viewed September 11th as a minor victory: maybe bin Laden feels the real victory is in drawing Americans into Iraq and Afghanistan.

Why not just ask him what his feelings are. Bin Laden made it quite clear in a series of video and audio recordings: he wants all non-muslims and non-radical followers dead, and he has empowered armies of people to do it...people that our military is now killing before they kill us. Wright can fantasize all he wants about treating terrorists peacefully—which is ultimately what he is unwittingly arguing for—but he is ultimately begging to be spared when it is his turn.

And it makes no difference if the killer is a Muslim or not. He could simply be committing an act of war under orders of someone else, which is how Hasan is being assessed, how he was taken down, and how we will continue to face future threats. Wright needs to mature quite a bit in his assessment of what makes people do violent tasks.