Brown with a Touch of Green

Tuesday, January 11th, 2011

Joseph Fouché recently quipped that Fascism is the new hotness, and I followed up that brown with a touch of green is the new black.

Fouché runs with this idea — and keeps running:

The events of the last thirty years have only provided evidence for one truism of statecraft: capitalism provides better material incentives as a spur to individual initiative than central planning. The other supposed truism of the age, that the advance of liberal democracy is inevitable, has not been demonstrated to the same extent. Many populations overwhelmingly support some version of capitalism but shy away from democracy. Many more governing elites, including many in this country, would agree.

The hip new thing, whether you call it state capitalism, the China Model, corporatism, or, more accurately, Fascism, is sweeping the globe. It’s all the rage. Given Bueno De Mesquita’s choice of being Leopold II, constitutional king of the Belgians, or Leopold II, sole proprietor of the Congo Free State, most oligarchs choose to be Leopold II, sole proprietor of the Congo Free State.

Nations have a choice: why bow to the erratic dictates and hypocrisies of Washington when you can have a more profitable and less threatening relationship with a non-judgemental Moscow or Peiping? It’s even better when the change from Red to Brown is highlighted by a strategically placed touch of Green. When you hear Tom Friedman and others useful idiots come back from China breathless about their wind power, solar power, and other “green industries”, they’re two breaths away from saying, “I have seen the future and it works.” As Isegoria observed, “Brown with a touch of green is the new black.”

Rather than reaching out and touching our contemporary brownshirts, a better approach to Peiping is massive de-linkage.

Peiping, by the way, is one of the many names for China’s northern capital of Beijing, which many of us remember as Peking:

“Beijing” means “Northern Capital”, in line with the common East Asian tradition whereby capital cities are explicitly named as such. Other cities that are similarly named include Nanjing, China, meaning “southern capital”; Tokyo, Japan, and Dong Kinh, now Hanoi, Vietnam, both meaning “eastern capital”; as well as Kyoto, Japan, and Gyeongseong, now Seoul, Korea, both meaning simply “capital”.

Peking is the name of the city according to Chinese Postal Map Romanization, and the traditional customary name for Beijing in English. The term Peking originated with French missionaries four hundred years ago and corresponds to an older pronunciation predating a subsequent sound change in Mandarin from k to j. It is still used in many languages.

The pronunciation “Peking” is also closer to the Fujianese dialect of Amoy or Min Nan spoken in the city of Xiamen, a port where European traders first landed in the 16th century, while “Beijing” more closely approximates the Mandarin dialect’s pronunciation.

The city has been renamed several times. During the Jin Dynasty, the city was known as Zhongdu, and then later under the Mongol Yuan Dynasty as Dadu in Chinese and Daidu to Mongols (also recorded as Cambuluc by Marco Polo). Twice in the city’s history, the name of the city was changed from Beijing (Peking) to Beiping (Peiping), literally “Northern Peace”. This occurred first under the Hongwu Emperor of the Ming Dynasty, and again in 1928 with the Kuomintang (KMT) government of the Republic of China. On each occasion, the name change removed the element meaning “capital” to reflect the fact the national capital had changed to Nanjing, in Jiangsu Province. Such renaming was reverted twice; this occurred first under the Yongle Emperor of the Ming Dynasty, who moved the capital from Nanjing back to Beijing, and again in 1949, when the Communist Party of China restored Beijing as its capital after the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The abbreviation of the municipality is its second character and is used on licence plates, among other things.

Yanjing is and has been another popular informal name for Beijing, a reference to the ancient State of Yan that existed here during the Zhou Dynasty. This name is reflected in the locally brewed Yanjing Beer as well as Yenching University, an institution of higher learning that was merged into Peking University.

Posted in Policy | 1 Comment »

Are Chinese Mothers Superior?

Monday, January 10th, 2011

A few weeks ago, I mentioned Amy Chua’s new book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, about raising her children the way she was raised — with no time “wasted” on play dates or school plays:

Arming them with skills, strong work habits, and inner confidence all sounds good, but socially crippling them by never allowing them to have a play date does not seem the least bit productive. There are seriously diminishing returns to two or three more hours of piano practice per week.

Her scorn for drama takes on a sinister cast when we find out that her husband, Jed Rubenfeld, studied theater in the Drama Division of the Juilliard School from 1980 through 1982.

Her recent Wall Street Journal piece, Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior, has clearly succeeded in stirring up controversy. Some parts seem reasonable:

What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you’re good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist; things are always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend to give up. But if done properly, the Chinese strategy produces a virtuous circle. Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America. Once a child starts to excel at something — whether it’s math, piano, pitching or ballet — he or she gets praise, admiration and satisfaction. This builds confidence and makes the once not-fun activity fun. This in turn makes it easier for the parent to get the child to work even more.

Some parts seem… less reasonable —  like “motivating” your children by calling them stupid, worthless, a disgrace, or garbage.

Shannon Love points out that Chua’s children’s activities are notably lacking in team activities:

The secret of American’s collective success as a people is our ability to self-organize ourselves on both the small and large scale into highly effective teams The relative inability to self-organize into teams is why China and some other cultures have lagged behind in the modern world. Americans have long relied on activities like sports, theater, marching band etc to teach that one critical American cultural skill. By excluding such activities from her children’s life, Chua is depriving them of one of the most crucial skills an American must have.

Dennis Mangan makes a smaller point — followed by a bigger one:

Even as an aficionado of classical music, I found Chua’s focus on music lessons in violin and piano absurd. The object lesson from this article is supposedly the Chinese mother’s relentless efforts to make her children excel and be successful in the world; yet the fraction of classical instrumentalists (or vocalists, for that matter) who have spent their entire lives studying and practicing, and then successfully enter the real world of classical music, is tiny. I once read somewhere that American conservatories graduate over 300 pianists a year, and I would guess that the fraction of them who go on to careers in classical music, other than giving lessons to the next generation who in turn won’t enter the field, must be very low. Chua is setting her kids up for failure; and if it’s argued that music lessons are a good in themselves, which they may be, why does Chua treat them like a matter of life or death, making her kids and herself miserable over them?

Chua’s treatment of her kids is an exercise in narcissism, focusing on them all her own ambitions and insisting that they turn out exactly like herself. In some instances, she treats them practically like her slaves. I’m all for parental discipline and a decent, even difficult education for children, but this is too much. She never lets the kids go on “play dates”; does she ever even let them outside to play?

I’m also wondering when the Wall Street Journal will be publishing the rebuttal, “Why White Mothers Are Superior”. Right. Only the celebration of the other is permitted.

Naturally, when I read Chua’s piece — particularly the “reasonable” passage I cited above — I wondered what our left-libertarian, John Taylor Gatto fan Aretae might have to say:

I personally am unwilling to teach obedience as a character trait, even if it buys the habit of persistence that will buy, more than anything else, success throughout life. I think persistence is an important trait, perhaps the most important trait, but obedience is a mortal sin.

I have to agree with Buckethead (Perfidy) that Aretae goes too far there:

Aretae, are you saying that as an adult, you never obey anyone? Do you go through some sort of analysis to determine whether or not any instruction you receive is acceptable before following it?

The ability to follow instructions is as important as the ability to give them.

For my kids, I must have obedience. But my kids range from seven to negative one week. The boy is the oldest — and he’s started questioning my instructions. Which is all good. I’ve told him that he can ask why I told him to do anything — after he’s done it. I’ve explained, and he understands, that I am managing a five (soon six) person household and things need to be done, and he has a role in the house. He can question any decision, afterwards, when I have time to discuss it with him. But in the meantime, just do it.

He has a seven year old’s perspective and breadth of knowledge. He’s bright, but he’s still seven. Still, he’s several times offered constructive suggestions on how things might be done better, which I’ve usually adopted, unless there was a larger reason not to. And he sees that.

Actually, the boy just came by my desk and I asked him what he thought. Interesting — I asked him why he obeys. His first answer was in “Because if I don’t, I get in trouble.” Fair enough. I probed deeper. I asked him why else he obeys. He said, “because you’re usually right.” That’s good. I asked him what happens if I’m wrong, and he points it out. He said, “you say, ‘thank you.’”

I asked him if I explain why I tell him to do things. He said yes, I do, but sometimes the explanations don’t make sense. But when they do make sense, he says they’re good explanations. I asked him if my good explanations for things are a reason for him to listen to me, and he said yes, and that’s why mostly he obeys. Except, he added, “Sometimes, I just feel crazy and I can’t listen.”

A seven year old needs to obey first, question later. But the questions are important. And that habit, I think, will be the needed counterpoint to blind obedience, which I do think is bad. And maybe we can get the persistence without breaking him.

I recently picked up a cheap used copy of James Marcus Bach’s Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar. I forgot who recommended it, but after I finished it — and before Amy Chua’s article and its various rebuttals came out — I decided the book read like a caricature of Aretae’s position — that obedience is a sin. Now I’m not so sure.

In his book, James Bach — son of Richard Bach, who wrote Jonathan Livingston Seagull — explains how he hated school, did none of the homework assignments, intentionally failed the tests, and then — despite his (well hidden) mastery of the material — failed his classes. Oh, the injustice!

He happened to come of age during the rise of the personal computer. So, by pursuing his passion — and aptitude — for technology, he managed, with no diploma, to find a lucrative place for himself.

When invited to talk to kids on the verge of dropping out of high school, he told them that of course they should drop out, and — shock! — he was told that he wouldn’t be invited back to give that talk again.

I suppose I’ve drifted off into a bit of a rant, but I’d advise savants not to generalize from their own peculiar life experiences. Most people won’t succeed beyond their wildest dreams by following their own internal compass; they’ll play lots of video games and go out drinking with friends.

Posted in Education | 20 Comments »

The culture that is Texas

Monday, January 10th, 2011

Tyler Cowen cites a news story on the culture that is Texas — a story that takes on a darker tone right after a mad assassin has struck a political rally:

Some members of the Capitol press corps took a 10-hour concealed handgun safety and shooting class this week — an exercise less about getting a weapon than getting into the Capitol.

Visitors now must pass through metal detectors, virtually guaranteeing delays. But there’s an express lane for people with a concealed handgun permit.

The theory, apparently, is that people licensed to pack heat have undergone a thorough background check and can be waved right through.

So in the name of journalism, reporters covering the Legislature who must get into Capitol daily — sometimes several times a day — took the weapons course Thursday.

It took place outside of Austin at the hunting superstore Cabela’s, a sort of saturnalia of stuffed animals, food dehydrators and camo gear.

The logic is sound — those with licenses are more-or-less deputized — but the system is unavoidably imperfect. A 22-year-old paranoid schizophrenic who is known to be crazy — like Loughner — doesn’t necessarily have any legal record saying so.

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

Phonies

Monday, January 10th, 2011

Bryce Tierney was up late watching TV when the phone rang. He didn’t answer, but when he checked his voice-mail, it was an old friend from high school: “Hey man, it’s Jared. Me and you had good times. Peace out. Later.”

The next day, when Tierney heard about the Tuscon massacre, he had a bad feeling that his old friend, Jared Loughner, was responsible.

Nick Baumann of Mother Jones interviews Tierney about Loughner:

Tierney, who’s also 22, recalls Loughner complaining about a Giffords event he attended during that period [around August 25, 2007]. He’s unsure whether it was the same one mentioned in the charges — Loughner “might have gone to some other rallies,” he says — but Tierney notes it was a significant moment for Loughner: “He told me that she opened up the floor for questions and he asked a question. The question was, ‘What is government if words have no meaning?’”

Giffords’ answer, whatever it was, didn’t satisfy Loughner. “He said, ‘Can you believe it, they wouldn’t answer my question,’ and I told him, ‘Dude, no one’s going to answer that,’” Tierney recalls. “Ever since that, he thought she was fake, he had something against her.”

Tierney says he has “no clue” why Loughner might have “shot all those other people.” But, he notes, “when I heard Gabrielle Giffords has been shot, I was like ‘Oh my God…’ For some reason I felt like I knew… I felt like if anyone was going to shoot her, it would be Jared.”

Loughner would occasionally mention Giffords, according to Tierney: “It wasn’t a day-in, day-out thing, but maybe once in a while, if Giffords did something that was ridiculous or passed some stupid law or did something stupid, he related that to people. But the thing I remember most is just that question. I don’t remember him stalking her or anything.” Tierney notes that Loughner did not display any specific political or ideological bent: “It wasn’t like he was in a certain party or went to rallies…It’s not like he’d go on political rants.” But Loughner did, according to Tierney, believe that government is “fucking us over.” He never heard Loughner vent about about the perils of “currency,” as Loughner did on one YouTube video he created.

Tierney, who first met Loughner in middle school, recalls that Loughner started to act strange around his junior or senior year of high school. Before that, Loughner was just a “normal kid,” says Tierney.
[...]
After Loughner apparently gave up drugs and booze, “his theories got worse,” Tierney says. “After he quit, he was just off the wall.” And Loughner started to drift away from his group of friends about a year ago. By early 2010, dreaming had become Loughner’s “waking life, his reality,” Tierney says. “He sort of drifted off, didn’t really care about hanging out with friends. He’d be sleeping a lot.” Loughner’s alternate reality was attractive, Tierney says. “He figured out he could fly.” Loughner, according to Tierney, told his friends, “I’m so into it because I can create things and fly. I’m everything I’m not in this world.”

But in this world, Loughner seemed ticked off by what he believed to be a pervasive authoritarianism. “The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar,” he wrote in one YouTube video.

That certainly sounds like schizophrenia taking hold.

There seems to be no easy way for friends and family to say, he’s going insane; he shouldn’t be left to his own devices:

One of the last times Loughner and Tierney saw each other, a mutual friend had recently purchased a .22-caliber rifle. Until then, Loughner had never shown much interest in guns, Tierney says. “My friend had just gotten a .22, and Jared kept saying we should go shooting together.” But Tierney and the friend who had bought the .22 demurred. “We were sketched out,” Tierney says, “and we were like, ‘I don’t think Jared’s a good person to go shooting with.’” That was in February or March 2010. After that, Tierney didn’t hear much from Loughner.

(Hat tip to Reason’s Hit & Run.)

Posted in Crime, Policy | No Comments »

Loyalty to the Tribe

Sunday, January 9th, 2011

John Derbyshire ponders his loyalty to the tribe:

It’s been over six years since I last attended a church service. I maintain a proper humility toward large questions about the universe and human self-awareness, but I am a functional atheist. It seems highly improbable that my personality, known to undergo striking changes after four or five glasses of Old Crow, will pass intact through my physical annihilation’s more demanding rigors. So here I am: no gods, no afterlife.

The matter can be argued, but it’s been a decade or two since I heard an argument I hadn’t heard before, so I am not much interested in disputation. I am settled in my opinions and expect to make it through my dwindling supply of days without further changes.

I suppose people convert into faith or lapse out of it, but neither thing ever happened to me. Setting aside the usual experience and, one hopes, wisdom that come with a few decades of stumbling around in the world, I am as I was at twenty: skeptical, empirical, and self-sufficient.

My occasional churchgoing was esthetic, sentimental, and tribal. I loved my Anglican church’s liturgy and splendid old hymns. I got satisfaction contemplating the continuity, both personal and historical, I was plugged into at a service. These are the hymns I sang as a child. These are the verses my ancestors heard parsons read on frosty Jacobean mornings in the country churches of Lancashire and Staffordshire. This is the Creed that saw my civilization through the Dark Ages.

I never had any interest in theology. How many people do? Nor have I ever felt the least warmth toward Jesus of Nazareth. I identify with George Orwell’s remark that “I like the Church of England better than Our Lord.”

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

33.3 Art Show

Friday, January 7th, 2011

The 33.3 art show brings together a number of “re-imagined” album covers.

Andrew Kolb‘s Pet Sounds cover really worked for me:

So did Dana Lectenberg‘s cover for The Joshua Tree:

(Hat tip to Boing Boing.)

Posted in Media | 2 Comments »

Group IQ

Friday, January 7th, 2011

Group IQ, according to a study out of MIT’s Sloan school, has less to do with the group’s average IQ than you might expect:

In two studies, researchers divided 699 people into groups of two to five people. They measured each team member’s intelligence individually, but then gave the teams intelligence-testing tasks to solve — figuring out the next pattern in a sequence, brainstorming the different potential uses of a brick. Then, the group performed a more complex “criterion” task, such as playing checkers against a computer or completing a complicated architectural task with Legos, which was used to understand whether the collective intelligence researchers measured in the initial tasks correctly predicted the group’s abilities.

What the researchers found was that groups’ collective intelligence strongly predicted how well they did in the computer checkers game and on the Legos task — evidence that something called “collective intelligence” did in fact exist. What was more surprising, however, was that neither the average intelligence of the group members nor the person with the greatest intelligence strongly predicted how well the group did.

Other tenets of group success also seemed to fall by the wayside: A group’s motivation, satisfaction, and unity were unimportant. Instead, the researchers found that when a group had a high level of collective intelligence, the members tended to score well on a test that measured how good they were at reading other people’s emotions. They also found that groups with overbearing leaders who were reluctant to cede the floor and let the others talk did worse than those in which participation was better distributed and people took turns speaking. And they also found that the proportion of women in the group was a predictor of collective intelligence — a factor they believe was likely influenced by women’s generally superior social sensitivity.

Posted in Business, Science | 4 Comments »

An Answer to Green Energy Could Be in the Air

Thursday, January 6th, 2011

Wind power suffers from the fact that wind is capricious, but the higher you go, the more powerful and dependable the wind becomes, suggesting that an answer to green energy could be in the air:

“At 2,000 feet (610 m), there is two to three times the wind velocity compared to ground level,” Moore said. “The power goes up with the cube of that wind velocity, so it’s eight to 27 times the power production just by getting 2,000 feet (610 m) up, and the wind velocity is more consistent.”

Send turbines farther aloft, into the 150 mph (240 kph) jet stream at 30,000 feet (9,150 m), and “instead of 500 watts per meter (for ground-based wind turbines), you’re talking about 20,000, 40,000 watts per square meter,” Moore said. “That’s very high energy density and potentially lower cost wind energy because of the 50-plus fold increase in energy density.”

How do you harness that energy? With turbines on blimps tethered to the ground with strong, highly conductive nanotubes.

So, we may be waiting a while.

Posted in Technology | 1 Comment »

Ranchers, Animal-Welfare Groups Rethinking Horse Slaughterhouses

Thursday, January 6th, 2011

An unlikely coalition of ranchers, horse owners and animal-welfare groups is trying to bring back horse slaughterhouses:

Pressure from animal-rights groups and from undercover videos that circulated on the Internet and showed apparent cruelties in the horse-butchering process prompted Congress to shut off all funds for inspecting equine slaughterhouses in 2007. That dealt the industry a fatal blow, as federal inspections were required by law before the meat could be exported for human consumption. Most horse meat from the U.S. was sent to the lucrative markets of Europe and Asia, where the flesh is stewed, grilled or sliced thin and eaten raw.

Though horse lovers cheered when the last slaughterhouses were shuttered, some now say they may not have thought through the consequences.

The slaughterhouses disposed of the thousands of horses abandoned or relinquished each year by owners who find them too old or temperamental to be useful or who simply can no longer afford to care for them. Now, many of those horses are sold for $10 or $20 at low-end auctions and packed on crowded trailers to be slaughtered in Mexico. Animal-welfare experts say the horses often suffer greatly on the journey.

In 2006, just 11,080 U.S. horses were shipped to Mexico for slaughter. In 2008, after the American industry shut down, that number jumped to 57,017, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Animal-rights supporters have been lobbying Congress for a ban on exporting horses for slaughter. They’ve had no success—but even if a ban did pass, some activists say, it would do little to ease suffering, as owners desperate to shed responsibility for their animals might simply abandon them to starve. Hiring a veterinarian to euthanize and dispose of a horse can cost hundreds of dollars. Horse-rescue groups take in some unwanted animals, but they don’t have the resources to care for them all.

(Hat tip to Tyler Cowen, who titled his own post Equine ethics for a sub-Malthusian world carrying costs exceed liquidity premium.)

Posted in Animals, Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Private Schools ‘Counsel Out’ the Unsuccessful

Thursday, January 6th, 2011

Apparently it’s news to New York Times readers that the city’s exclusive private schools ‘counsel out’ the unsuccessful — which has created a market for a very different kind of private school:

Filling a role that reform or military schools used to perform, alternative schools like Smith, which has about 35 students in grades 7 through 12, tend to take a more nurturing approach. Some of these schools provide an educational rehab of sorts: the Stephen Gaynor School on the Upper West Side and the Windward School in White Plains specialize in getting students back into mainstream schools after a few years — sometimes the same schools they left.

But with their high staff member-to-student ratios, they are not cheap: Windward’s annual tuition is $43,000, about $10,000 more than at most Manhattan private schools. Smith’s upper-school tuition is $29,000 to $41,500, depending on the grade and the extent of extra help.

Posted in Business, Education | No Comments »

Should Western Civilization be saved?

Wednesday, January 5th, 2011

Should Western Civilization be saved?, Bruce Charlton asks — even if it could be saved:

It is purportedly the baseline belief of the Secular Right that the major goal of conservative or reactionary politics should be to ‘save’ Western Civilization.

Yet this is not a coherent belief, nor is it possible, nor is it desirable.
[...]
The big problem is that it is precisely Western Civilization which created Communism, Socialism, Liberalism, and Political Correctness; ‘modern art’; ‘human rights’; pacifism — it is Western Civilization which is destroying itself.

The counter currents have always been there — at least since the Great Schism of a millennium since — and the counter-current has now overwhelmed the main current.
[...]
Furthermore, all of those abstract attributes which the Secular Right wants to preserve in Western Civilization are complicit in the decline: freedom of choice/selfishness; democracy/mob rule; freedom of consciousness/secularism; philosophy-science/rational bureaucracy; art/subversion; freedom of lifestyle/moral inversion; kindness/cowardice; an open and accessible mass media/the primacy of virtual reality… the whole lot.
[...]
The Secular Right is, I am afraid, merely Saruman attempting to use Sauron’s Ring to fight Sauron; all its tactics to defend what it regards good are simultaneously (but in other places) strengthening the forces of destruction.

There is enough to suggest that the Left is indeed the main line of a Western Civilization which is pre-programmed to self-destruction; while the Right is merely imposing temporary corrections which save the West in the short term but only at the cost of entrenching its long-term and underlying errors.

The West cannot be saved.

His revisits these ideas in the second of his four tough questions for the secular right:

What are the mechanisms by which your ideal society would be maintained? Are they plausible? Are they strong enough?

Or are you just engaged in day-dreaming?

(Anyone can come up with their own ideal utopia — but in the real world, stable options are heavily constrained.)

That’s obviously not just a question for the secular right.

Foseti took a stab at answering Charlton’s questions, but I think he side-stepped the crux of that one:

Sure. Take Singapore. It’s a lot closer to my ideal than the current American form of government. It exists — it’s therefore possible to get a whole lot better.

As I said there, I don’t think Bruce Charlton would argue that Singapore can’t exist, but rather than it can’t last — not in its present form.

I was pleased to see Charlton himself respond to Foseti:

I’d like to emphasize that this is not really a matter of what I want, but of what we will get. And that I am thinking on a timescale of human generations (c. 25 year units), not of the next few years.

I was profoundly influenced by the analysis of Ernest Gellner who (in brief) divided all human societies into the 1. hunter-gatherer, 2. the agriculturally-based (dominated by warriors and priests, in various combinations), and 3. the post-industrial revolution modern societies — which depend on permanent growth (which means permanent increase in efficiency/productivity — largely by increasing functional specialization and coordination).

When (and not if) industrial civilization collapses (and this will happen sooner rather than later, not least because the politically correct ruling elites want to destroy The West and they are clearly succeeding); The West will (like it or not) revert to the agriculturally based societies run by combinations of warriors and priests which existed everywhere in the world (except among a handful of hunter gatherers) before the industrial revolution.

Our choices are between different balances of warriors and priests, and between different types of priests. The current default world religion is (obviously) Islam, not Christianity — due to its demographic growth and sustained assertive self-confidence.

Posted in Bruce Charlton, Policy | 3 Comments »

The Last Month of Peace

Wednesday, January 5th, 2011

Viktor Suvorov describes how the last month of peace might look:

The last month of peace, as in other wars, has an almost palpable air of crisis about it. Incidents, accidents, small disasters add to the tension. Two trains collide on a railway bridge in Cologne because the signalling system is out of order. The bridge is seriously damaged and there can be no traffic over it for the next two months.

In the port of Rotterdam a Polish supertanker bursts into flames. Because of an error by the captain the tanker is far too close to the oil storage tanks on the shore, and the burning oil spreads around the harbour. For two weeks fire brigades summoned from practically the whole country fight an heroic battle with the flames. The port suffers tremendous losses. The fire appears to have spread at a quite incredible speed, and some experts are of the opinion that the Polish tanker was not the only cause of the fire, that the fire broke out simultaneously in many places.

In the Panama Canal the Varna, a Bulgarian freighter loaded with heavy containers, rams the lock gates by mistake. Experts reckoned that the ship should have remained afloat, but for some reason she sinks there and then. To reopen the canal could well take many months. The Bulgarian government sends its apologies and declares itself ready to pay for all the work involved.

In Washington, as the President’s helicopter is taking off, several shots are fired at it from sniper’s rifles. The helicopter is only slightly damaged and the crew succeed in bringing it down again safely. No one in the craft is hurt. Responsibility for the attack is claimed by a previously unknown organisation calling itself ‘Revenge for Vietnam’.

There is a terrorist explosion at Vienna airport.

A group of unidentified men attack the territory of the British military base in Cyprus with mortars.

A serious accident takes place on the most important oil pipeline in Alaska. The pumping stations break down and the flow of oil falls to a trickle.

In West Germany there are several unsuccessful attempts on the lives of American generals.

In the North Sea the biggest of the British oil rigs tips over and sinks. The precise reason for this is not established, although experts believe that corrosion of main supports is the culprit.

In the United States an epidemic of some unidentified disease breaks out and spreads rapidly. It seems to affect port areas particularly, such as San Francisco, Boston, Charleston, Seattle, Norfolk and Philadelphia.

There are explosions practically every day in Paris. The main targets are the government districts, communication centres and military headquarters. At the same time terrible forest fires are raging in the South of France.

Viktor Suvorov is the pen name of Vladimir Bogdanovich Rezun, a Soviet spy who defected to the UK and wrote about how spetnaz (special forces) would be deployed against the West:

All these operations — because of course none of these events is an accident — and others like them are known officially in the GRU as the ‘preparatory period’, and unofficially as the ‘overture’. The overture is a series of large and small operations the purpose of which is, before actual military operations begin, to weaken the enemy’s morale, create an atmosphere of general suspicion, fear and uncertainty, and divert the attention of the enemy’s armies and police forces to a huge number of different targets, each of which may be the object of the next attack.

The overture is carried by agents of the secret services of the Soviet satellite countries and by mercenaries recruited by intermediaries. The principal method employed at this stage is ‘grey terror’, that is, a kind of terror which is not conducted in the name of the Soviet Union. The Soviet secret services do not at this stage leave their visiting cards, or leave other people’s cards. The terror is carried out in the name of already existing extremist groups not connected in any way with the Soviet Union, or in the name of fictitious organisations.

The GRU reckons that in this period its operations should be regarded as natural disasters, actions by forces beyond human control, mistakes committed by people, or as terrorist acts by organisations not connected with the Soviet Union.

The terrorist acts carried out in the course of the ‘overture’ require very few people, very few weapons and little equipment. In some cases all that may be needed is one man who has as a weapon nothing more than a screwdriver, a box of matches or a glass ampoule. Some of the operations can have catastrophic consequences. For example, an epidemic of an infectious disease at seven of the most important naval bases in the West could have the effect of halving the combined naval might of the Soviet Union’s enemies.

The ‘overture’ could last from several weeks to several months, gradually gathering force and embracing fresh regions. At the same time the GUSM would become involved. Photographs compromising a NATO chief appear on the front pages of Western newspapers. A scandal explodes. It appears that some of the NATO people have been having meetings with high-ranking Soviet diplomats and handing over top secret papers. All efforts to refute the story only fuel the fire. The public demands the immediate dismissal of NATO’S chiefs and a detailed enquiry. Fresh details about the affair are published in the papers and the scandal increases in scope.

At that moment the KGB and GRU can take out and dust off a tremendous quantity of material and put it into circulation. The main victims now are the people whom the Soviets had tried to recruit but failed. Now carefully edited and annotated materials get into the hands of the press. Soviet Intelligence has tried to recruit thousands, even tens of thousands, of people in its time. They include young lieutenants who have now become generals and third secretaries who have now become ambassadors. All of them rejected Soviet efforts to recruit them, and now Soviet Intelligence avenges their refusal.

The number of scandalous affairs increases. The nations discover to their surprise that there are very few people to be trusted. The Soviet intelligence service has nothing to lose if the press gets hold of material showing that it tried to recruit a French general, without saying how the attempt ended. It has even less to lose on the eve of war. That is why the newspapers are full of demands for investigations and reports of resignations, dismissals and suicides. The best way of killing a general is to kill him with his own hands.

There is a marked increase in the strength of the peace movement. In many countries there are continual demands to make the country neutral and not to support American foreign policy, which has been discredited. At this point the ‘grey terror’ gathers scope and strength and in the last days of peace reaches its peak.

From the first moment of the first day of war the main forces of spetsnaz go into action. From then on the terror is conducted in the name of the Soviet Union and of the Communist leadership: ‘red terror’.

This description, from 1987, sounds remarkably similar to what North Korea has been planning to do to South Korea.

Posted in Viktor Suvorov, War | No Comments »

McCarthy, the Wilsonite

Tuesday, January 4th, 2011

Ralph Raico’s ironically titled Great Wars & Great Leaders compares Woodrow Wilson to Joseph McCarthy — unfavorably:

We have all been made very familiar with the episode known as “McCarthyism,” which, however, affected relatively few persons, many of whom were, in fact, Stalinists. Still, this alleged time of terror is endlessly rehashed in schools and media. In contrast, few even among educated Americans have ever heard of the shredding of civil liberties under Wilson’s regime, which was far more intense and affected tens of thousands.

When swine flu was recently in the news, I decided to read about the 1918 flu, and I was amazed by just how fascist the country seemed at the time. Here’s Raico’s take on the war-time regime:

Wilson sounded the keynote for the ruthless suppression of anyone who interfered with his war effort: “Woe be to the man or group of men that seeks to stand in our way in this day of high resolution.” His Attorney General Thomas W. Gregory seconded the President, stating, of opponents of the war: “May God have mercy on them, for they need expect none from an outraged people and an avenging government.”

The Espionage Act of 1917, amended the next year by the addition of the Sedition Act, went far beyond punishing spies. Its real target was opinion. It was deployed particularly against socialists and critics of conscription. People were jailed for questioning the constitutionality of the draft and arrested for criticizing the Red Cross. A woman was prosecuted and convicted for telling a women’s group that “the government is for the profiteers.” A movie producer was sentenced to three years in prison for a film, The Spirit of ’76, which was deemed anti-British. Eugene V. Debs, who had polled 900,000 votes in 1912 as presidential candidate of the Socialist Party, was sentenced to ten years in prison for criticizing the war at a rally of his party.

Posted in Policy, War | 2 Comments »

The Floor Is Not a Weapon

Tuesday, January 4th, 2011

In news important to all grapplers, the Washington State Supreme Court has ruled that the floor is not a weapon:

The court Thursday reversed the assault conviction of James Michael Marohl, who was accused of forcing a drunken man onto the floor of the Little Creek Casino in Shelton, causing minor injuries and breaking the man’s prosthetic arm.

At his trial, the prosecutor argued that an arm lock and taking the man to the floor met the law’s requirement of using objects likely to produce bodily harm.

But the unanimous high court ruling says that definition doesn’t include a bare arm or a floor — unless a victim is repeatedly slammed against it — and that didn’t happen in this case.

Posted in Martial Arts | No Comments »

A Physicist Turns the City Into an Equation

Tuesday, January 4th, 2011

Jonah Lehrer describes the work of Geoffrey West, a physicist who has turned his analytical eye to other fields. First he looked at biology:

In 1997, less than five years after he transitioned away from high-energy physics, he published one of the most contentious and influential papers in modern biology. (The research, which appeared in Science, has been cited more than 1,500 times.) The last line of the paper summarizes the sweep of its ambition, as West and his co-authors assert that they have just solved “the single most pervasive theme underlying all biological diversity,” showing how the most vital facts about animals — heart rate, size, caloric needs — are interrelated in unexpected ways.

The mathematical equations that West and his colleagues devised were inspired by the earlier findings of Max Kleiber. In the early 1930s, when Kleiber was a biologist working in the animal-husbandry department at the University of California, Davis, he noticed that the sprawlingly diverse animal kingdom could be characterized by a simple mathematical relationship, in which the metabolic rate of a creature is equal to its mass taken to the three-fourths power. This ubiquitous principle had some significant implications, because it showed that larger species need less energy per pound of flesh than smaller ones. For instance, while an elephant is 10,000 times the size of a guinea pig, it needs only 1,000 times as much energy. Other scientists soon found more than 70 such related laws, defined by what are known as “sublinear” equations. It doesn’t matter what the animal looks like or where it lives or how it evolved — the math almost always works.

Then he turned his eye to the city:

The correspondence was obvious to West: he saw the metropolis as a sprawling organism, similarly defined by its infrastructure. (The boulevard was like a blood vessel, the back alley a capillary.) This implied that the real purpose of cities, and the reason cities keep on growing, is their ability to create massive economies of scale, just as big animals do. After analyzing the first sets of city data — the physicists began with infrastructure and consumption statistics — they concluded that cities looked a lot like elephants. In city after city, the indicators of urban “metabolism,” like the number of gas stations or the total surface area of roads, showed that when a city doubles in size, it requires an increase in resources of only 85 percent.

This straightforward observation has some surprising implications. It suggests, for instance, that modern cities are the real centers of sustainability. According to the data, people who live in densely populated places require less heat in the winter and need fewer miles of asphalt per capita. (A recent analysis by economists at Harvard and U.C.L.A. demonstrated that the average Manhattanite emits 14,127 fewer pounds of carbon dioxide annually than someone living in the New York suburbs.) Small communities might look green, but they consume a disproportionate amount of everything. As a result, West argues, creating a more sustainable society will require our big cities to get even bigger. We need more megalopolises.

Somehow West initially missed the real reason for cities:

The first data set they analyzed was on the economic productivity of American cities, and it quickly became clear that their working hypothesis — like elephants, cities become more efficient as they get bigger — was profoundly incomplete. According to the data, whenever a city doubles in size, every measure of economic activity, from construction spending to the amount of bank deposits, increases by approximately 15 percent per capita. It doesn’t matter how big the city is; the law remains the same. “This remarkable equation is why people move to the big city,” West says. “Because you can take the same person, and if you just move them to a city that’s twice as big, then all of a sudden they’ll do 15 percent more of everything that we can measure.”

Perhaps I’m being pedantic, but it really rubs me the wrong way that Lehrer writes, It doesn’t matter how big the city is; the law remains the same, when the law’s one parameter is size.

Anyway, it’s not just nice things that scale up:

After a city doubles in size, it also experiences a 15 percent per capita increase in violent crimes, traffic and AIDS cases.

West seems terribly excited to confirm long-understood patterns:

After buying data on more than 23,000 publicly traded companies, Bettencourt and West discovered that corporate productivity, unlike urban productivity, was entirely sublinear. As the number of employees grows, the amount of profit per employee shrinks. West gets giddy when he shows me the linear regression charts.

This derisive description doesn’t point to a deep understanding:

“Look at this bloody plot,” he says. “It’s ridiculous how well the points line up.” The graph reflects the bleak reality of corporate growth, in which efficiencies of scale are almost always outweighed by the burdens of bureaucracy. “When a company starts out, it’s all about the new idea,” West says. “And then, if the company gets lucky, the idea takes off. Everybody is happy and rich. But then management starts worrying about the bottom line, and so all these people are hired to keep track of the paper clips. This is the beginning of the end.”

It’s not like we have the choice to allocate all our resources into big gambles that will certainly pay off. Plenty of new ideas die quickly, while others continue to receive financing until they’re no longer profitable.

The more insightful passage describes operational leverage without using the term:

The danger, West says, is that the inevitable decline in profit per employee makes large companies increasingly vulnerable to market volatility. Since the company now has to support an expensive staff — overhead costs increase with size — even a minor disturbance can lead to significant losses. As West puts it, “Companies are killed by their need to keep on getting bigger.”

West concludes that cities can’t be managed, and that’s what keeps them so vibrant — like Detroit, I suppose.

Posted in Economics, Science, Urbanism | No Comments »

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