Grant Meets Bismarck

Joseph Fouché shares a story from when Grant met Bismarck, harking back to when Sheridan met Bismarck:

One of the prince’s first questions was about General Sheridan.

“The general and I,” said the prince, ‘”were fellow campaigners in France, and we became great friends.”

General Grant said that he had had letters from Sheridan recently and he was quite well.

“Sheridan,” said the prince, “seemed to be a man of great ability.”

” Yes,” answered the General, “I regard Sheridan as not only one of the great soldiers of our war, but one of the great soldiers of the world—as a man who is fit for the highest commands. No better general ever lived than Sheridan.”

“I observed,” said the prince, ” that he had a wonderfully quick eye. On one occasion, I remember, the Emperor and his staff took up a position to observe a battle. The Emperor himself was never near enough to the front, was always impatient to be as near the fighting as possible. ‘ Well,’ said Sheridan to me, as we rode along, ‘ we shall never stay here, the enemy will in a short time make this so untenable that we shall all be leaving in a hurry. Then while the men are advancing they will see us retreating.’ Sure enough, in an hour or so the cannon shot began to plunge this way and that way, and we saw we must leave. It was difficult to move the Emperor, however; but we all had to go, and,” said the prince, with a hearty laugh, “we went rapidly. Sheridan had seen it from the beginning. I wish I had so quick an eye.”

When Grant met Bismarck, Wilhelm I had just been shot — and so conversation turned to the Global War on Anarchism, as Fouché wryly calls it:

The General answered that the influence which aimed at the Emperor’s life was an influence that would destroy all government, all order, all society, republics and empires.

“In America,” said General Grant, ” some of our people are, as I see from the papers, anxious about it. There is only one way to deal with it, and that is by the severest methods. I don’t see why a man who commits a crime like this, a crime that not only aims at an old man’s life, a ruler’s life, but shocks the world, should not meet with the severest punishment. In fact,” continued the General, “although at home there is a strong sentiment against the death penalty, and it is a sentiment which one naturally respects, I am not sure but it should be made more severe rather than less severe. Something is due to the offended as well as the offender, especially where the offended is slain.”

“That,” said the prince, ” is entirely my view. My convictions are so strong that I resigned the government of Alsace because I was required to commute sentences of capital nature. I could not do it in justice to my conscience. You see, this kind old gentleman, that Emperor whom these very people have tried to kill, is so gentle that he will never confirm a death sentence. Can you think of anything so strange that a sovereign whose tenderness of heart has practically abolished the death punishment should be the victim of assassination, or attempted assassination ? That is the fact. Well, I have never agreed with the Emperor on this point, and in Alsace, when I found that as chancellor I had to approve all commutations of the death sentence, I resigned. In Prussia that is the work of the Minister of Justice; in Alsace it devolved upon me. I felt, as the French say, that something was due to justice, and if crimes like these are rampant they must be severely punished.”

“All you can do with such people,” said the General quietly, “is to kill them.”

“Precisely so,” answered the prince.

Inside Afghanistan

Ben Anderson's look inside Afghanistan certainly demonstrates the "friction" of war — and makes neither the Afghan National Army nor its British mentors look particularly competent.



The first few minutes of part 2 explain the ANA incompetence.

Who Will Watch the Limited Watchmen?

Who will watch the limited watchmen?

Another way to see the problem is to examine that shibboleth of libertarians — limited government. Now, the frustrated English teacher in me notes an interesting fact about this phrase: it is in the passive voice. Who shall limit the government? And how can we assure that they continue to do so? And if some other party does this limiting, who shall limit them? This is, of course, the old quis custodiet problem. To which Rothbard has no better solution than Juvenal.

Libertarians can be classified according to their wrong answers to this question. If you are a democratic libertarian, you believe that government should be limited by popular sovereignty. You also probably haven't looked out the window in the last 200 years. If you are a judicial libertarian, you believe that government should be limited by judicial sovereignty — ie, by a judiciary committed to Constitutional principles and the Anglo-American common law. And you haven't looked out the window in the last 75.

The essential problem with both democratic and judicial libertarianism is that, while we see both these phenomena succeed in history, we see them — once again — succeed only on the left. English and American history is a rich trove, as Rothbard can show you, of both popular resistance to state authority, and judicial resistance to state authority. However, this resistance succeeds only when in the process of undermining some higher order, royal or aristocratic. Once the People themselves are in the saddle, they no longer listen to complaints of this form.

In the democratic system today, to ask either the electorate or the judiciary for libertarian government is to ask an empowered body to relinquish powers it has. The People have powers X, Y and Z; they use these powers to vote government services A, B, and C; if you remove these services, you must remove the powers; if you remove the powers, you disempower.

Similarly, we live in the golden age of government by judge. Most significant executive decisions in the modern system of government land, one way in another, in the lap of a judge. This is the direct result of New Deal Legal-Realist jurisprudence. And you're asking the judiciary, itself, out of mere goodness of heart, to relinquish this fat leg of ham? You and what army?

Whereas when the likes of Coke contended with the likes of Charles I, judicially-limited government was a no-brainer. Alas, judges are men. If we had angels on this planet, we would long ago have consigned these duties to them.

Thus, again: libertarianism works for the left and fails for the right. Both sovereign electorate and sovereign judiciary are perfectly happy to restrict the powers of others, ie, the King. Convincing them to restrict their own powers is quite a different problem. When democracy is competing against the remnants of the ancien regime, it is a force for limited government. Once it defeats and disempowers these remnants, it is a synonym for socialism.

War Plan Orange

Long before Pearl Harbor, the US Army and Navy drew up War Plan Orange, in case of war with Japan. It consisted of three phases:

1. Pull US Navy ships back to their home ports, and sacrifice outposts near Japan — the Philippines and Guam.


2. With superior force, advance toward Japan, seizing Japanese-occupied islands to establish supply routes and overseas bases. The US, with its superior production power, should be able to reclaim the Philippines within two or three years.


3. Choke Japanese trade and bombard the Japanese home islands without invading them.

Of course, War Plan Orange wasn't the only war plan. There was also War Plan Red:

In Plan Red, the Atlantic Strategic War Plan, the strategists theorized that there would be a war with Great Britain. They did this because England was locked in a strategic alliance with Japan, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902, which was renewed and lasted until the Washington Conference of 1921-22. American planners thought that England’s imperial reach would bring it into conflict with the US.

Another contingency war plan they developed was the Red-Orange Plan, which hypothesized a two-theater war, seeking to win first in the Atlantic, against England, while fighting a holding battle in the Pacific, and then defeating Japan. When World War Two broke out, military and naval planners simply dusted off the old Red-Orange Plan and substituted Germany for England in the Atlantic Theater.

The broader strategy and the resources to carry it out, including defense construction and mobilization of reserves, was essentially the same. The main point to be learned here is that a theoretical planning construct does not make an enemy of a country. England made a strategic policy choice at the Washington Conference, deciding to cast its lot with the United States, and turned out to be a close ally by the late-1930s. But the Red-Orange Plan stayed on the US Joint Army-Navy Board’s agenda through 1939.

Early College Proves a Draw

Early college proves a draw — for at-risk students:

Until recently, most programs like this were aimed at affluent, overachieving students — a way to keep them challenged and give them a head start on college work. But the goal is quite different at SandHoke, which enrolls only students whose parents do not have college degrees.

Here, and at North Carolina’s other 70 early-college schools, the goal is to keep at-risk students in school by eliminating the divide between high school and college.
[...]
Results have been impressive. Not all students at North Carolina’s early-college high schools earn two full years of college credit before they graduate — but few drop out.

“Last year, half our early-college high schools had zero dropouts, and that’s just unprecedented for North Carolina, where only 62 percent of our high school students graduate after four years,” said Tony Habit, president of the North Carolina New Schools Project, the nonprofit group spearheading the state’s high school reform.

In addition, North Carolina’s early-college high school students are getting slightly better grades in their college courses than their older classmates.
[...]
A recent report from Jobs for the Future, a nonprofit group that is coordinating the Gates initiative, found that in 2008, the early-college schools that had been open for more than four years had a high school graduation rate of 92 percent — and 4 out of 10 graduates had earned at least a year of college credit.

With a careful sequence of courses, including ninth-grade algebra, and attention to skills like note-taking, the early-college high schools accelerate students so that they arrive in college needing less of the remedial work that stalls so many low-income and first-generation students. “When we put kids on a college campus, we see them change totally, because they’re integrated with college students, and they don’t want to look immature,” said Michael Webb, associate vice president of Jobs for the Future.

Americans aren't as idealistic as their media

Robert Kaplan supported intervention in Bosnia, for strategic and moral reasons, as did the media, presumably for moral reasons — but most Americans did not:

Andrew Kohut, the former president of the Gallup Organization, who is now the director of the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, told me recently that the polls on Bosnia have, however, been firm and undeniable: at no point in the 1990s, despite all the emotional media coverage and revelations of war crimes, have more than half of the American people thought that U.S. intervention there was warranted. Interventions in Vietnam, Korea, Panama, Grenada, and Iraq were all more popular than our limited and belated one in Bosnia, in late 1995; only the intervention in Haiti, supported mainly by liberal Democrats, was less popular.

Bogota's Bulletproof Tailor

Miguel Caballero is Bogota's bulletproof tailor — and business is good in Latin America.

Misesian classical liberalism is like Newtonian physics

The problem with taking Ludwig von Mises as a guru is not that he's wrong, but that Misesian classical liberalism is like Newtonian physics:

It is basically correct within its operating envelope. Under unusual conditions it breaks down, and a more general model is needed. [...] Just as Newtonian rules only make sense at low speeds, Misesian rules only make sense in a secure order.

Tyranny is one form of chaos, and freedom is one form of order. To a Carlylean, like Mencius Moldbug, the fatal error of libertarianism is confusing anarchy and freedom:

Not only are they not the same thing; they are opposite poles of the political spectrum. Freedom — spontaneous order — is the ultimate form of order. Anarchy is the ultimate form of disorder.

To a Carlylean, anarchy and tyranny are fundamentally and essentially allied and indivisible. And again: the apparent affinity between anarchy and freedom is wholly illusory. In fact: to maximize freedom, eradicate anarchy. To achieve spontaneous order: first, achieve ordinary, down-to-earth, nonspontaneous order. Then, wait a while. Then, start to relax.

Here is the Carlylean roadmap for the Misesian goal. Spontaneous order, also known as freedom, is the highest level of a political pyramid of needs. These needs are: peace, security, law, and freedom. To advance order, always work for the next step — without skipping steps. In a state of war, advance toward peace; in a state of insecurity, advance toward security; in a state of security, advance toward law; in a state of law, advance toward freedom.

The Newtonian envelope of libertarianism is the last of these stages. Once the state of lawful government is reached, that state can generally improve itself by minimizing its interventions and applying a policy of laissez-faire — advancing from enforced to spontaneous order. With the caveat, of course, that this policy not jeopardize the more important achievements of peace, security, and law.

When a state finds itself outside this Newtonian window, however, Mises and Rothbard are of no assistance whatsoever in helping it get back in. Worse: Rothbardian libertarianism can be a positive hindrance to the Carlylean roadmap.

Realists almost always run foreign policy

Our foreign-policy idealism is mainly confined to the media and academia, Robert Kaplan suspects:

Realists almost always run foreign policy; idealists, I have found, attend academic conferences and write books and articles from the sidelines.

Surreal Visit to North Korea

Shane Smith's surreal visit to North Korea is hard to explain:

Getting into North Korea was one of the hardest and weirdest processes VBS has ever dealt with. After we went back and forth with their representatives for months, they finally said they were going to allow 16 journalists into the country to cover the Arirang Mass Games in Pyongyang. Then, ten days before we were supposed to go, they said, “No, nobody can come.”

Then they said, “OK, OK, you can come. But only as tourists.” We had no idea what that was supposed to mean. They already knew we were journalists, and over there if you get caught being a journalist when you’re supposed to be a tourist you go to jail. We don’t like jail. And we’re willing to bet we’d hate jail in North Korea. But we went for it.

The first leg of the trip was a flight into northern China. At the airport, the North Korean consulate took our passports and all of our money, then brought us to a restaurant. We were sitting there with our tour group, and suddenly all the other diners left and these women came out and started singing North Korean nationalist songs. We were thinking, “Look, we were just on a plane for 20 hours. We’re jet-lagged. Can we just go to bed?” but this guy with our group who was from the LA Times told us, “Everyone in here besides us is secret police. If you don’t act excited then you’re not going to get your visa. So we got drunk and jumped up onstage and sang songs with the girls. The next day we got our visas. A lot of people we had gone with didn’t get theirs. That was our first hint at just what a freaky, freaky trip we were embarking on…

Don't miss parts 2 and 3.

Europe free-rides on America

Europe free-rides on America, when it comes to pharmaceuticals, because someone has to pay enough to cover the huge up-front costs of developing the drugs, even if they're cheap to produce:

To give a simple example: Albania has a life expectancy close to as Western Europe (77.6 years). They spend very little on health care. But even Albania can buy generic heart medicine — that is better than anything you could have had in 1995 — for almost free. Not in a hundred years could Albania have developed this on their own: They free ride on the rest of the world.

Western Europe does not free-ride quite as much as Albania, but certainly bear less of their full share of the costs. Even though Europe has a much larger population than the U.S, all of Europe accounted for a smaller share of global pharmaceutical sales than the U.S, which alone accounted for 41% of the world market in 2005, despite having only 4% of world population.

According to this study 57% of European pharmaceutical profits was made in the U.S market, whereas only 24% of American pharmaceutical profits were made in the European market.

The regulated European system pays for less of the cost of medicine, but gets get the same drugs. Drugs in the American free market system costs much more. Consumers in both places get the same quality drugs, but Americans pay much more, and bear the burden of development.

Does this mean the U.S should copy the same system? No. If America stops paying for innovation there is no one to free-ride on. Unfair but true.

The irony is that Europeans root for America to move towards socialized medicine, which would harm them massively. This suggests that ideology is stronger than self-interest, especially regarding abstract concepts.

Not a Superior Morality

Castlereagh's England and Metternich's Austria held opposing positions on the Greek struggle for independence, because England could afford to be idealistic and Austria could not:

Castlereagh's open-mindedness, Kissinger wrote, reflected not "a superior morality" but rather "the consciousness of safety conferred by an insular position." Because Castlereagh's England was surrounded by seas, it did not have to consider the implications of the breakup of Turkish rule in the Balkans — implications that a Continental power like Metternich's Austria had no choice but to consider.

Without America's insular position, guarded by two oceans and reinforced by plentiful natural resources, idealism might never have taken root here. Realism is in part the ability to see the truth behind moral pretensions. Our insular position also explains our failure to see war for what it is: an extension of politics.

On horses and history

The Offshore Balancer discusses horses and history:

Actually the horse was never ‘replaced’ so straightfowardly. In the mythologised ‘Blitzkrieg’ conquests in 1939–40, only a small part of the Wehrmacht was mechanised. In the invasion of Poland, many vehicles actually broke down on the plains, while most of the Wehrmacht moved on foot, and supplies were often transported in horsedrawn wagons. In fact, the Wehrmacht, probably the most lethal land force of the century, was heavily reliant upon horses.

Horses remain vital. Who could forget our own special forces in Afghanistan in 2001–2, on horseback with laptops? That photo above was taken at that time, and is a warning against glib historical assumptions. The horse is not a premodern relic, but in some contexts, a remarkably effective vehicle.

The historical view of the horse as an obsolete tool of direct battlefield offensive is simplistic. Competent medieval commanders knew that a direct cavalry charge on a well-prepared and dense enemy line could be disastrous. The value of cavalry never fully rested on their ability to make direct assaults on enemy lines. They did many other valuable things. In combat, they were a tool of exploitation, thrust into a disorganised or fleeing enemy to hammer home success. Outside it, they were used for reconnaisance and supply. The Wehrmacht relied upon them extensively on the Eastern Front of World War Two, where mechanised units ran into many enviromental problems of their own, like extreme weather, primitive roads and stretched supply lines.

Liddell Hart’s own intellectual record on the issue is murkier than Richards allows. He was a prophet of tanks, but his ambitious vision of armour as a single, self-sufficient instrument was very wrong. As more cautious interwar experts argued, tanks were only effective when used as part of a combined arms system.

Ironically, one of the reasons that the interwar British did not fully embrace armour to Liddell Hart and Richards’ satisfaction was not because of intellectual backwardness or a fetish for cavalry, but because there were simply too many competing demands on scarce resources, including the job of policing its empire. This meant that heavy tanks lost out to other things, such as light armoured vehicles and colonial constabularies. The task of fighting ‘wars amongst the people’ that Richards believes the UK must prioritise now came at the expense of preparing for armoured and mechanised warfare. Britain was under-prepared to fight a continental war partly because of its investment in small wars. I hope we never have to re-live that shortfall…

For every battleship admiral or cavalry general, there is a wild-eyed visionary who sees a revolution in military affairs:

Alfred Nobel thought dynamite was such a radical change from the past that it would render armed conflict impossibly costly and lead to the end of war. Ivan Bloch thought the same for the machine gun…navalists in France thought the development of torpedo-wielding light surface vehicles would sweep the capital ship from the waves in the 1880’s and lead to a whole new era of naval warfare. Prior to World War I, airpower visionaries looked at the new technology of the airplane and reasoned that this changed everything: land warfare would become impossible in the face of bomber fleets attacking attacking cities directly from the air…After the war, US Army and Air Force concluded that the atom bomb would revolutionize warfare and make traditional continental operations impossible; both organisations abandoned their conventional methods and restructured to fight the atomic wars of the future. For the Air Force, this cost lives in subsequent nonnuclear land wars in Korea and Vietnam; for the Army, it resulted in the ignominous abandonment of the atomic-optimised Pentomic Division structure by 1961.

The Gun Markets of Pakistan

I was surprised to learn from some Pakistani colleagues, years ago, that gunsmiths in their home country routinely make "modern" guns by hand, forging the parts that are usually stamped and machined by industrial equipment elsewhere. These weapons then end up in the gun markets of Pakistan, which do brisk business:

Morality alone can never be a basis for foreign policy

A young Henry Kissinger allied himself with the foreign-policy realists of the time, who doubted that America could affect the internal evolution of many other societies at once:

Morgenthau wrote in Vietnam and the United States (1965) that because the resources of even a superpower are limited, morality alone can never be a basis for foreign policy. These men saw the missionary idealism of America's ruling elite as naive. Kissinger believed that idealism had clearly failed throughout America's diplomatic history — that it led to an inefficient cycle of intense hope and activity abroad followed by morose withdrawal once it became apparent that hope and activity were unlikely to remake the world. The clearest example is President Woodrow Wilson's failed attempt to advance democracy and self-determination in the Muslim Middle East after the First World War, and the isolationism that followed.

What Soviet Subversion?

I find it fascinating that a man who worked inside the Soviet propaganda machine can defect to the US and say, in the early 1980s, this is how we've been manipulating your media and your schools, and no one seems to notice or care:

Ideological subversion is the process which is legitimate and open. You can see it with your own eyes.... It has nothing to do with espionage.

I know that intelligence gathering looks more romantic.... That's probably why your Hollywood producers are so crazy about James Bond types of films. But in reality the main emphasis of the KGB is NOT in the area of intelligence at all. According to my opinion, and the opinions of many defectors of my caliber, only about 15% of time, money, and manpower is spent on espionage as such. The other 85% is a slow process which we call either ideological subversion, active measures, or psychological warfare. What it basically means is: to change the perception of reality of every American that despite of the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.

It's a great brainwashing process which goes very slow and is divided into four basic stages. The first one being "demoralization". It takes from 15 to 20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years required to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy exposed to the ideology of [their] enemy. In other words, Marxism-Leninism ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generation of American students without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism; American patriotism....

The result? The result you can see. The people who graduated in the 60's, dropouts or half-baked intellectuals, are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, and educational systems. You are stuck with them. You can't get through to them. They are contaminated. They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still can not change the basic perception and the logic of behavior.

In other words [for] these people the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible. To rid society of these people you need another 15 or 20 years to educate a new generation of patriotically minded and common sense people who would be acting in favor and in the interests of United States society.
[...]
The next stage is destabilization.... It only takes 2 to 5 years to destabilize a nation. This time what matters is essentials; economy, foreign relations, [and] defense systems. And you can see it quite clearly that in some... sensitive areas such as defense and [the] economy, the influence of Marxist-Leninist ideas in the United States is absolutely fantastic. I could never believe it 14 years ago when I landed in this part of the world that the process will go that fast.

(Hat tip to Aretae, who cites Soviet subversion as a pillar of Eric Raymond's thinking.)

There are many videos up on YouTube now of Yuri Bezmenov explaining the process of subversion.

If you don't find it often, you often don't find it

The prevalence effect is the tendency for people to miss rare things they're looking for:

In one experiment, Wolfe took 20 X-rayed images of luggage stuffed with guns and knives, and mixed those images into stacks of images of X-rayed luggage that didn't have guns and knives.

"If you stick those 20 bags into a stack of 40 bags, so on average there's a gun and knife in 50 percent of the bags," Wolfe says, "people missed about 7 percent of the bags."

But when he took the exact same 20 bags and stuck them in a stack of 2,000 bags so that the targets showed up only 2 percent of the time, people got significantly worse. "All of a sudden, people were missing about 30 percent of the bags," Wolfe says.

Liquid Glass

Nanopool's marketers call its liquid glass — or SiO₂ ultra-thin layering — the world’s most versatile new technology:

If you walk around Ataturk’s Mausoleum in Ankara you are walking on it; if you visit certain hospitals in the UK you are touching it. If you see an unusually clean train you are probably looking at it, and if you wonder how your white settee looks so clean, you may be sitting on it. All of these surfaces have been coated with invisible glass.

The flexible and breathable glass coating is approximately 100 nanometres thick (500 times thinner than a human hair), and so it is completely undetectable. It is food safe, environmentally friendly (winner of the Green Apple Award) and it can be applied to almost any surface within seconds. When coated, all surfaces become easy to clean and anti-microbially protected (Winner of the NHS Smart Solutions Award ). Houses, cars, ovens, wedding dress or any other protected surface become stain resistant and can be easily cleaned with water; no cleaning chemicals are required. Amazingly a 30 second DIY application to a sink unit will last for a year or years, depending on how often it is used.

But it does not stop there — the coatings are now also recognised as being suitable for agricultural and in-vivo application. Vines coated with SiO₂ don’t suffer from mildew, and coated seeds grow more rapidly without the need for anti-fungal chemicals. This will result in farmers in enjoying massively increased yields . Trials for in-vivo applications are subject to a degree of secrecy, but Neil McClelland, the UK Project Manager for Nanopool GmbH, describes the results as “stunning”.

“Items such as stents can be coated, and this will create anti-sticking features — catheters and sutures, which are a source of infection, will also cease to be problematic.”

When asked about how the technology works, Neil, said “In essence, we extract molecules of SiO₂ (the primary constituent of glass) from quartz sand, and then we add the molecules to water or ethanol. Unfortunately, as they say in the movies , if I told you any more …”

Frontsight on VBS.TV

VBS.TV takes a look at the famous Frontsight firearms training center in Nevada.

Dread of Revolutions

Kissinger lived through the Nazi rise to power, and he studied Napoleon in great depth, which led to his lasting dread of revolutions, Robert Kaplan explains:

Rapid social and political transformation leads to violence, whether throughout the Europe of the early 1800s, owing to Napoleon's aggression — itself a direct result of the French Revolution — or in the Germany of the 1930s. Although the word "revolution" is applied to the America of the 1770s and sometimes to the Zionist movement, the cultural and philosophical awakenings among English settlers in America and Jewish settlers in Palestine took place over decades and were, in truth, evolutions. Iran did experience a revolution in the late 1970s, as did Cambodia in 1975, China in the late 1940s, and Russia in 1917.

From this dread, Kissinger extracted the following principles:

• Disorder is worse than injustice. Injustice merely means the world is imperfect, but disorder implies that there is no justice for anyone, since it makes even the mundane details of daily existence (walking to school, for instance) risky.


• The most fundamental problem of politics is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness. The Nazis, the Jacobins, the ayatollahs, and the others who have made revolutions have all been self-righteous. Kissinger suggested that nothing is more dangerous than people convinced of their moral superiority, since they deny their political opponents that very attribute. Tyranny, a form of disorder posing as order, is the result.


• Because the real task of statesmen is to forestall revolutions, the real heroes of history are enlightened conservatives, such as Metternich and the eighteenth-century Briton Edmund Burke, who fought discrimination against Catholics and opposed the French Revolution for its immoderation. Burke hated revolutions, Kissinger explained, because they violate the average person's sense of morality and well-being; Metternich saw them as contrary to reason. "The true conservative," Kissinger wrote, "is not at home in social struggle. He will attempt to avoid unbridgeable schism, because he knows that a stable social structure thrives not on triumphs but on reconciliations." (The Republican majority in Congress and the "religious right" are thus not true conservatives.)

Krugman on Filibusters

Former-economist Paul Krugman recently lamented the rise of the filibuster:

The political scientist Barbara Sinclair has done the math. In the 1960s, she finds, “extended-debate-related problems” — threatened or actual filibusters — affected only 8 percent of major legislation. By the 1980s, that had risen to 27 percent. But after Democrats retook control of Congress in 2006 and Republicans found themselves in the minority, it soared to 70 percent.

Notice something?, Tino Sanandaji asks:

Krugman casually jumps over the period between 1980s and 2006. Krugman is the most dishonest economist I know; whenever he omits a fact one can be pretty sure he is deceiving his readers.

In fact, rather than Filibusters having “soared” from 27% to 70% when the Republicans found themselves in the minority, they gradually increased during the 80s and 90s, reaching 55% under the Democratic minority in 1997-1998 (before declining temporarily in the less partisan climate after 9/11).

In the 2005-2006 session, with a Democrat minority, there were 36 filibusters, more than double the number of the 1980s. Does anyone remember Krugman complaining? Of course not. When his party was in the minority, Krugman was busy worrying that the “religious right” and "extremists" were threatening the Filibuster: “the big step by extremists will be an attempt to eliminate the filibuster”.

It's Not Monolithic

Anyone who actually believes that the entire scientific community is embroiled in a monolithic AGW conspiracy is an idiot, Eric S. Raymond says — because it's not monolithic:

There are a lot of players in this dance. I’ll round up a few.

First, the scientists. Most are caught up in, or struggling against, an error cascade of humongous proportions. What’s an error cascade? Somebody gave one of the type examples upthread, over the mass of the electron. This is not conspiracy, it’s a result of a tendency to use seniority or authority as a shortcut when it’s technically difficult to evaluate evidence and socially difficult to be skeptical. All humans do this, even scientists.

Next, the Gaianists — term I made up for people in whom “Save the Earth!” has psychologically substituted for traditional religion (in more or less chiliastic forms). They mean well, they really do; they recycle as an act of virtue, they worry about composting and buying local produce — and they’re totally subject to being manipulated by the other players, which is important since most of the action is going on in democracies. They’re not usually manipulated directly by the scientists, except occasionally a very wealthy one (er, think dot.com millionaire) might get hit up for funding. The Gaianists aren’t a conspiracy; they’re not organized enough. There’s some overlap with the scientists at the non-chiliastic end of this group.

Next, the green-shirts. These are political hacks of all varieties who just love the ideas of more carbon taxes, more regulation, and the general expansion of state power, especially if they can posture as virtuous eco-saviors while they’re arranging this. They’re not a conspiracy either, just a bunch of careerists who compete for the Gaianists as a voting bloc. They sometimes behave a bit like a conspiracy, but only because their behavioral incentives tend to push them all in the same direction. Er, they’re not scientists. They’re Al Gore, or they’d like to be, only with political power too.
[...]
My model of what’s been going on is basically this: The hockey team starts an error cascade that sweeps up a lot of scientists. The AGW meme awakens chiliastic emotional responses in a lot of Gaianists. The zombies and the green-shirts grab onto that quasi-religious wave as a political strategem (the difference is that the zombies actively want to trash capitalism, while the green-shirts just want to hobble and milk it). Pro-AGW scientists get more funding from the green-shirts within governments, which reinforces the error cascade — it’s easier not to question when your grant money would be at risk for doing so. After a few times around this cycle, the hockey team notices it’s riding a tiger and starts on the criminal-conspiracy stuff so it will never have to risk getting off.

Overall, is this conspiracy? No. Mostly it’s just people responding to short-term incentives, unaware that they’re caught up in an error cascade and/or being politically fucked around. Nobody involved is what you could reasonably call evil…well, except for the zombies. It would be pretty evil if the hockey team had planned all this, but I’m not cynical enough to believe that. Not yet, anyway, but I haven’t read all the emails either.

OK, now it’s months later and I’ve read enough of the emails to be fairly sure that the “team” did not in fact plan all this. Nor, I’m pretty sure, did the green-shirts or the zombies; they merely exploited an opportunity to do what they wanted to do anyway. The key point — and the reason the AGW frauds need to be shamed and punished — is that the political background conditions favoring this kind of fraud are still in place.

Since the political background conditions favoring this kind of fraud are still in place, Raymond expects to see another fraud soon — endocrine disruptors are a good bet.

This is why Aretae thinks Raymond should appear in a Heinlein novel:

The most effective way to prevent a recurrence is for there to be real penalties — political, social, and criminal — attached to playing the environmental-panic con game. It’s not a good outcome for any of us if the scientists who committed criminal data fraud and denied FOIA requests get a soft landing to positions elsewhere in academia. And the green-shirts who used that fraud as cover for their ambitions should absolutely be hounded out of public life so that politics in future will be a bit less toxic.

As for the zombies — well, hanging them all from lamp-posts would be ideal, but distinguishing them from their more-or-less innocent dupes is difficult. At least, by destroying the reputations of everyone who promoted this fraud, we might impair the zombies’ past ability to operate Gaianist organizations like so many sock puppets.

The most optimistic take on the long-term outcome is that the collapse of the AGW fraud might at least partially immunize us against future attacks of environmental junk science. I wish I were in fact that optimistic, but I’m not. In any case, a round of public excruciations of the villains in this one is certainly called for, pour encourager les autres.

War is pretty much the same everywhere

After the War of the Rebellion, Lt. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan visited Europe to witness the war between Bismarck's Germany and Louis Napoleon's France, which demonstrated that war is pretty much the same everywhere — pretty much:

The methods pursued on the march were the same as we would employ, with one most important exception. Owing to the density of population throughout France it was always practicable for the Germans to quarter their troops in villages, requiring the inhabitants to subsist both officers and men. Hence there was no necessity for camp and garrison equipage, nor enormous provision trains, and the armies were unencumbered by these impedimenta, indispensable when operating in a poor and sparsely settled country. As I have said before, the only trains were those for ammunition, pontoon-boats, and the field telegraph, and all these were managed by special corps. If transportation was needed for other purposes, it was obtained by requisition from the invaded country, just as food and forage were secured. Great celerity of combination was therefore possible, the columns moving in compact order, and as all the roads were broad and macadamized, there was little or nothing to delay or obstruct the march of the Germans, except when their enemy offered resistance, but even this was generally slight and not very frequent, for the French were discouraged by disaster from the very outset of the campaign.

Van Riper On Leadership

Lt. General Van Riper describes three leadership styles — one too hard, one too soft, and one just right:

The calibration of destruction

The Economist reports on how smart bombs are changing warfare:

During the first Gulf war, in 1991, American warplanes had to drop an average of six 450kg satellite-guided bombs to destroy a tank or a small building. During the second war, 12 years later, a similar attack required bombs half that size, and fewer of them. Today 100kg bombs would suffice, because guidance systems are so good that individual rooms, as opposed to entire buildings, can be aimed at.
[...]
One defence contractor, Israel Military Industries, makes a 225kg bomb, the MPR-500, that can hammer through several storeys of a building and explode on a chosen floor. This feat means triggering the detonation about two milliseconds after the bomb hits the ceiling above the doomed storey. The bomb can be programmed to do this just seconds before it is dropped. Such precision means it is sold as a replacement for ordnance two or more times its size.

The CBU-105 is the kind of hardware war nerds love:

On April 2nd 2003, during the second Gulf war, a hundred or so Iraqi armoured vehicles approached a far smaller American reconnaissance unit south of Baghdad. Responding to a call for help, a B-52 bomber attacked the first 30 or so vehicles in the column with a single, historic pass. It dropped two new CBU-105 bombs, and the result shocked the soldiers of both sides — and, soon enough, military observers everywhere.

While falling, the CBU-105 bombs popped open, each releasing ten submunitions which were slowed by parachutes. Each of these used mini rockets to spin and eject outward four discs the size of ice-hockey pucks.

The 80 free-falling discs from the pair of bombs then scanned the ground with lasers and heat-detecting infra-red sensors to locate armoured vehicles. Those discs that identified a target exploded dozens of metres up. The blast propelled a tangerine-sized slug of copper down into the target, destroying it with the impact and the accompanying shrapnel. The soldiers in the 70 vehicles farther back in the column surrendered immediately.

The CBU-105, however frightening, may actually point the way toward less violent warfare. Cluster munitions — which release bomblets to cover a wide area — are banned or tightly restricted by an international convention. But the CBU-105 and its cousins, known as sensor-fused weapons, are considered legal because very few discs remain unexploded on the battlefield. Those that fail to detect a target are supposed to self-destruct in the air. The trigger batteries of those that do not will quickly die, so duds are unlikely to kill civilians later.

Crucially, the manufacturer of the CBU-105, Textron Defense Systems, of Wilmington, Massachusetts, is improving sensors to allow the weapon to distinguish the heat signatures of cars, buses and homes from those of military hardware. If there is such a thing as a humanitarian bomb, this might be it.

I'm not sure what role that plays in counter-insurgencency, but it sure is a whiz-bang gizmo. Emphasis on the bang, I suppose.

Pink Panthers

Matt McAllester of the GlobalPost claims that battle-hardened veterans of Yugoslavia's breakup have turned to crime full-time — as real-life Pink Panthers:

Each member of the gang did his or her job perfectly. The attractive young woman seduced the son of the jewelry store owner in Rome to find out where the safe was in the owner’s house. She also discovered that the owner needed builders for repairs. Some of the others secured the renovation contract and cased the house. The get-away driver spent weeks learning every one-way road and stop sign in downtown Rome. And eventually the safe-cracker, the smallest in the group, hid himself inside a false-bottomed chest that the others left on the balcony of a bedroom where the safe was located.

As luck would have it, he didn’t even have to break into the safe, which was hidden behind a painting. The jeweller’s other son left it open for 15 minutes, plenty of time for the diminutive safe-cracker to remove the diamonds and make his escape to the street, where the driver was waiting for him. Back in their rented apartment in Ostia, near the Fiumicino airport outside Rome, the gang met up and celebrated.

“That was one of the most beautiful jobs I’ve ever done,” the get-away driver said, smiling at the memory in an interview with GlobalPost at a seaside fish restaurant in the former Yugoslav republic of Montenegro late last year.

It sounds like a plot from Ocean’s Eleven. But the October 2001 robbery, described in detail by the driver — a rakish, multilingual career diamond thief — is exactly the sort of daring heist that a loosely affiliated group of 200 thieves from the former Yugoslavia has been pulling off with such frequency that Interpol has dubbed them the Pink Panthers. Since 1999, the criminals have stolen $340 million worth of jewelry in more than 160 robberies in at least 26 countries.

The Panthers have choreographed some spectacular jobs: In 2007, a group of men drove two cars through windows and into the forecourt of a mall in Dubai, racing out to rob a jewelry store of $3.4 million worth of jewels; in 2004 two men and two women raided a jewelry store in Tokyo, smashing a display cabinet and escaping into the bustling crowds with $30 million in jewels, in what was the biggest grossing robbery in Japan’s history; in 2003 two men stole £37 million in jewels from a diamond store in London. Only a fraction of those jewels have been recovered but police did find a 2.32 carat blue diamond ring hidden in a jar of face cream belonging to the girlfriend of one of the thieves, echoing a scene from the first Pink Panther movie starring Peter Sellers. A name — and something of a legend — was born.

Permanent, Orderly, and Legitimate

In perceiving the Soviet Union as permanent, orderly, and legitimate, Robert Kaplan says, Kissinger shared a failure of analysis with the rest of the foreign-policy elite — notably excepting a few insightful individuals:

• the scholar and former head of the State Department's policy-planning staff George Kennan,
• the Harvard historian Richard Pipes,
• the British scholar and journalist Bernard Levin, and
• the Eureka College graduate Ronald Reagan.

SHOT Show Technology

The Shooting Hunting and Outdoor Trade (SHOT) Show featured a number of new technologies.

Armatix, for instance, is offering a pistol that only shoots if it's near its matching wristwatch. I can't imagine too many people will pay €7,000 for a .22 pistol that lights up green (or red) though.

More practically, Glock has updated its pistols:

Each one has a fiercely textured grip, a larger magazine release and interchangeable backstraps. There’s something new under the hood too. Each gun has a set of three springs to dampen recoil. When we shot the .40-caliber Glock 22, its kick was surprisingly soft.

This Burns scope sounds like technology I expected to see much earlier:

It has a laser rangefinder that can automatically adjust your sights to compensate for the fall of each bullet over long distances. Just point the crosshairs at the target, push a button on the side of the scope, and a bright red dot will show you exactly where the bullet will fall. We were able to easily hit targets at 400 and 700 meters without any experience at long-range rifle shooting.

The semi-auto civilian version of H&K's 416, the MR556, should be out soon — but by then everyone will already have an assault rifle, right?

Threatening home invaders with apparently deadly force and then shooting them with tiny koosh balls does not strike me as "the most intelligent way to defend your family" — but that's what Lightfield is selling:

Later this year, you will be able to buy rubber bullets for home defense. Lightfield has been selling these projectiles to law enforcement agencies and wildlife officials for years. Each round is filled with a soft projectile that resembles a koosh ball. They look like toys, because they’re made by a Chinese toy factory. The best thing about them is that they aren’t likely to kill someone even if they are fired at point blank range. They’re so soft that they’re almost incapable of penetrating the body.

‘Forced Features’ Drive Up Hybrid Prices

The Union of Concerned Scientists — with all the credibility of the Super Friends — has released a Hybrid Scorecard that faults automakers for selling their fuel-efficient cars with forced features that drive up prices:

These features [DVD players, keyless entry systems, heated power mirrors and other pricey gadgets] are standard equipment, not options, and add an average of $3,000 to the bottom line. That’s on top of the “hybrid premium” that typically adds three to four grand to cover the cost of the electric motor and battery pack.

“Consumers shouldn’t be forced to take features on the hybrids and pay thousands of dollars more because manufacturers don’t want to offer them a choice,” said Don Anair, a senior analyst in the vehicles program at the union. “People are looking for fuel-efficient vehicles, and they shouldn’t be forced to pay thousands more for them.”

The automakers can only make so many hybrids, which use new technologies and exotic raw materials, so they can't make up low margins with volume. If they took out all those "unnecessary" high-margin add-ons, they couldn't, and wouldn't, sell the cars for thousands less.

In Command, But Out Of Control

Lt. General Paul Van Riper (retired) is a fascinating character. Here he discusses being in command, but out of control:

The Junior Meritocracy

Jennifer Senior argues that kindergarten-admission tests are worthless. Or morally wrong. It's not quite clear:

The beauty of a meritocracy is that it is not, at least in theory, a closed system. With the right amount of pluck and hard work, a person should be able to become whoever he or she is supposed to be. Only in an aristocracy is a child’s fate determined before it is born.

Yet in New York, it turns out that an awful lot is still determined by a child’s 5th birthday. Nearly every selective elementary school in the city, whether it’s public or private, requires standardized exams for kindergarten admission, some giving them so much weight they won’t even consider applicants who score below the top 3 percent. If a child scores below this threshold, it hardly spells doom. But if a child manages to vault over it, and in turn gets into one of these selective schools, it can set him or her on a successful glide path for life.

Consider, for instance, Hunter College Elementary School, perhaps the most competitive publicly funded school in the city. (This year, there were 36 applicants for each slot.) Four-year-olds won’t even be considered for admission unless their scores begin in the upper range of the 98th percentile of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, which costs $275 to take. But if they’re accepted and successfully complete third grade (few don’t), they’ll be offered admission to Hunter College High School. And since 2002, at least 25 percent of Hunter’s graduating classes have been admitted to Ivy League schools. (In 2006 and 2007, that number climbed as high as 40.) Or take, as another example, Trinity School. In 2008, 36 percent of its graduates went to Ivy League schools. More than a third of those classes started there in kindergarten. Thirty percent of Dalton’s graduates went to Ivies between 2005 and 2009, as did 39 percent of Collegiate’s, and 34 percent of Horace Mann’s. Many of these lucky graduates wouldn’t have been able to go to these Ivy League feeders to begin with, if they hadn’t aced an exam just before kindergarten. And of course these advantages reverberate into the world beyond.

First, the beauty of a meritocracy is not openness for its own sake; it's openness to talent, so that the best individual for the job gets the job. An inherited aristocracy would be a meritocracy if wisdom were perfectly heritable. It's not, of course, but the Founding Fathers did expect a natural aristocracy to replace the artificial aristocracy in their new republic.

More importantly, Senior's confusing cause and effect if she thinks that four-year-olds who score in the 98th percentile only go on to earn degrees from Ivy League schools because of their elite elementary and secondary schooling. She makes the same mistake later, after discussing expensive prep courses:

The practice of prepping can run families into the thousands of dollars, posing a clear disadvantage to those who can’t afford it. But the truth is, even without coaching, children coming from economically and culturally rich backgrounds do far better on these tests. And that’s a far more urgent reason to challenge the widespread reliance on them.

It's the darnedest thing. The sons and daughters of wealthy doctors, lawyers, and MBAs keep outperforming "underprivileged" kids.

A Policy of Unlimited Objectives

Kissinger's A World Restored, ostensibly about the end of the Napoleonic era, indirectly confronts the 1938 debacle at Munich, Robert Kaplan says, in which Chamberlain allowed Hitler to seize the Sudetenland. Here is what Kissinger wrote:

Those ages which in retrospect seem most peaceful were least in search of peace.... Whenever peace — conceived as the avoidance of war — has been the primary objective of a power or a group of powers, the international system has been at the mercy of the most ruthless member of the international community.

Kaplan continues:

Kissinger declared, "It is a mistake to assume that diplomacy can always settle international disputes if there is 'good faith' and 'willingness to come to an agreement'"; in a revolutionary situation "each power will seem to its opponent to lack precisely these qualities." In such circumstances many will see the early demands of a revolutionary power as "merely tactical" and will delude themselves that the revolutionary power would actually accept the status quo with a few modifications. Meanwhile, "Those who warn against the danger in time are considered alarmists."

"'Appeasement,'" Kissinger concluded, "is the result of an inability to come to grips with a policy of unlimited objectives."

Leonardo da Vinci's Resume

Leonardo da Vinci's resume, written to Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan, in 1482, describes what the 30-year-old weapons-engineer could do:

Most Illustrious Lord, Having now sufficiently considered the specimens of all those who proclaim themselves skilled contrivers of instruments of war, and that the invention and operation of the said instruments are nothing different from those in common use: I shall endeavor, without prejudice to any one else, to explain myself to your Excellency, showing your Lordship my secret, and then offering them to your best pleasure and approbation to work with effect at opportune moments on all those things which, in part, shall be briefly noted below.

1. I have a sort of extremely light and strong bridges, adapted to be most easily carried, and with them you may pursue, and at any time flee from the enemy; and others, secure and indestructible by fire and battle, easy and convenient to lift and place. Also methods of burning and destroying those of the enemy.
   


2. I know how, when a place is besieged, to take the water out of the trenches, and make endless variety of bridges, and covered ways and ladders, and other machines pertaining to such expeditions.
   


3. If, by reason of the height of the banks, or the strength of the place and its position, it is impossible, when besieging a place, to avail oneself of the plan of bombardment, I have methods for destroying every rock or other fortress, even if it were founded on a rock, etc.
   


4. Again, I have kinds of mortars; most convenient and easy to carry; and with these I can fling small stones almost resembling a storm; and with the smoke of these cause great terror to the enemy, to his great detriment and confusion.
   


5. And if the fight should be at sea I have kinds of many machines most efficient for offense and defense; and vessels which will resist the attack of the largest guns and powder and fumes.
   


6. I have means by secret and tortuous mines and ways, made without noise, to reach a designated spot, even if it were needed to pass under a trench or a river.
   


7. I will make covered chariots, safe and unattackable, which, entering among the enemy with their artillery, there is no body of men so great but they would break them. And behind these, infantry could follow quite unhurt and without any hindrance.
   


8. In case of need I will make big guns, mortars, and light ordnance of fine and useful forms, out of the common type.
   


9. Where the operation of bombardment might fail, I would contrive catapults, mangonels, trabocchi, and other machines of marvellous efficacy and not in common use. And in short, according to the variety of cases, I can contrive various and endless means of offense and defense.
   


10. In times of peace I believe I can give perfect satisfaction and to the equal of any other in architecture and the composition of buildings public and private; and in guiding water from one place to another.
    


11. I can carry out sculpture in marble, bronze, or clay, and also I can do in painting whatever may be done, as well as any other, be he who he may.

Again, the bronze horse may be taken in hand, which is to be to the immortal glory and eternal honor of the prince your father of happy memory, and of the illustrious house of Sforza.

And if any of the above-named things seem to anyone to be impossible or not feasible, I am most ready to make the experiment in your park, or in whatever place may please your Excellency — to whom I comment myself with the utmost humility, etc.