The Crash of Empires

Monday, February 11th, 2013

The fall of an empire may be agonizingly long, Jerry Pournelle writes (in 1989), or mercifully short:

Winston Churchill could protest that he had not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over liquidation of the British Empire, but in fact that is what he did; for better or worse, in less than a generation the British experiment in world order was history. During the same period the French Empire ceased to exist. Italy and Germany had already lost whatever imperial pretensions they may have had.

Of course the age of empire is hardly over: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is imperial in all but name. Perhaps it, too, will fall.

Paul Kennedy argues in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers that great powers fall because of the economic strain of their military burdens. The United States in particular faces the dilemma of hoarding resources for investment, or spending to keep present military power in order to meet immediate threats.

The dilemma is real, but there is another problem. The United States may not really have any choice, because any resources not spent on military power will not be saved and invested for the future, but immediately consumed. We all know this, and assume that it’s “just politics.” We also assume that politics is and will remain predominant.

Meanwhile, the United States is transforming itself into an odd form of oligarchy. The nation is, after all, ruled by a small elite elected in effect for life: 98% of all members of Congress were reelected in 1986, and there is no reason to suppose that figure will ever be different. As one observer put it, the two houses of Congress have become in effect the House of Lords twice over, with the only real national contest being for the Presidency.

Of course the President controls the military.

We are brought up on the view that economics and politics control human affairs. Perhaps so; but it is well to remember what is primary. John Keegan, one-time military historian at Sandhurst, says in his Mask of Command:

“Marx was able to argue for the primacy of ownership of the means of production as a determinant of social relationships largely because, at the time when he wrote, finance and investment overshadowed all other forces in society, and the military class — exhausted by the Napoleonic wars and dispirited by the defeat of its interests in Russia in 1825 and France in 1830 — was at an unnaturally low ebb of self-confidence. Yet military power, represented in its crudest form by the robber-baron principle, can, of course, at any time it chooses, make fools of the financier and investor, as the history of investment in unstable areas of the world makes unarguably evident. It can equally make fools of ‘historical’ laws. Marx, in his heart, recognized both truths, feared more than any other the temperament — and the military class is ultimately self-choosing by temperament rather than by material interest — that will seize arms simply for the pleasure that blood-letting gives, and constantly urged the politically conscious to learn the habits and discipline of the military class as the merest means of defending and furthering the revolution.”

It is self-evident that the nomenklatura, the real rulers of modern Russia, have forgotten Marx’s warnings. So have the politicians and economists in the United States.

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

The Adventurer, by C. M. Kornbluth

Sunday, February 10th, 2013

Certain men make history, men born to be mould-breakers. C. M. Kornbluth’s science-fiction story, The Adventurer explores this idea:

They are the Phillips of Macedon, the Napoleons, Stalins and Hitlers, the Suleimans — the adventurers. Again and again they flash across history, bringing down an ancient empire, turning ordinary soldiers of the line into unkillable demons of battle, uprooting cultures, breathing new life into moribund peoples.

There are common denominators among all the adventurers. Intelligence, of course. Other things are more mysterious but are always present. They are foreigners. Napoleon the Corsican. Hitler the Austrian. Stalin the Georgian. Phillip the Macedonian. Always there is an Oedipus complex. Always there is physical deficiency.

Those last couple elements date the story, I suppose.

Posted in Media, Policy, War | No Comments »

The Weather Underground

Thursday, February 7th, 2013

After watching Carlos and The Baader Meinhof Complex, I decided to watch The Weather Underground, about American left-wing terrorists of the same era.

A few things caught my attention:

  • The former head of the Students for a Democratic Society was clearly livid, to this day, that the violent faction within his organization took over and pushed him out. Quelle surprise!
  • The Left, in the West, linked sex and drugs and rock & roll with International Communism, despite the obvious lack of drop-out culture in Communist countries.  All of their violent acts are far out.
  • If you declare your solidarity with every oppressed group everywhere and assert that all oppressors everywhere are part of one oppressive class, you will never run out of outrages to serve as excuses for your crimes.
  • These white college kids wanted so desperately to represent the black underclass and the white working class, but neither group wanted them in that role.
  • After declaring a violent war on the US government and then committing violent acts against both the government and the people, they are shocked — shocked! — that government agents would follow them, break into their apartments, threaten them, etc.
  • The war in Vietnam is somehow the most violent and unjust war in human history, and the fact that the US government is prosecuting this war despite their protests is clear evidence that the government is ignoring the will of the People — despite the rather obvious fact that the protesters are a tiny minority.

Posted in Crime, Media, Policy, War | 2 Comments »

The Baader Meinhof Complex

Sunday, February 3rd, 2013

I recently watched The Baader Meinhof Complex, about the Red Army Faction, Germany’s most famous left-wing terrorist organization.

It shared many qualities in common with Carlos:

  • Again, every time anyone handles a gun, they casually muzzle-sweep their friends, with their finger on the trigger. There’s even a negligent discharge. Handling guns, to these so-called revolutionaries, seems to revolve around breaking the taboo around them.
  • The movie has a lot of gratuitous nudity — more of it female than in Carlos. More of it involving children, too. The whole movie made me feel terribly bourgeois.
  • Being an effective terrorist is largely a matter of willingness to do terrible things, not competence at doing those terrible things. “If one sets a car on fire, that is a criminal offence. If one sets hundreds of cars on fire, that is political action.”
  • Angry youths are useful idiots. West Germany seems to have been especially useful to the Soviets. Stefan Aust, author of the book, had this to say:

    World War II was only twenty years earlier. Those in charge of the police, the schools, the government — they were the same people who’d been in charge under Nazism. The chancellor, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, had been a Nazi. People started discussing this only in the 60′s. We were the first generation since the war, and we were asking our parents questions. Due to the Nazi past, everything bad was compared to the Third Reich. If you heard about police brutality, that was said to be just like the SS. The moment you see your own country as the continuation of a fascist state, you give yourself permission to do almost anything against it. You see your action as the resistance that your parents did not put up.

    The movie makes no mention of Soviet or East-German support.

  • Palestinian “liberation” is a Marxist movement in the 1970s. The Baader-Meinhof gang goes to the Middle East for training — where they seem perplexed that their local hosts don’t approve of their Bohemian lifestyle. Or the young Germans are just being rude and provocative on purpose. That seems to be the point of most of their actions.
  • The terrorists of the 1970s seem like wannabe rock-stars.
  • I found the terrorists utterly unsympathetic, but young Germans at the time supported them:

    The Baader-Meinhof Gang drew a measure of support that violent leftists in the United States, like the Weather Underground, never enjoyed. A poll at the time showed that a quarter of West Germans under forty felt sympathy for the gang and one-tenth said they would hide a gang member from the police. Prominent intellectuals spoke up for the gang’s righteousness (as) Germany even into the 1970s was still a guilt-ridden society. When the gang started robbing banks, newscasts compared its members to Bonnie and Clyde. (Andreas) Baader, a charismatic, spoiled psychopath, indulged in the imagery, telling people that his favourite movies were Bonnie and Clyde, which had recently come out, and The Battle of Algiers. The pop poster of Che Guevara hung on his wall, (while) he paid a designer to make a Red Army Faction logo, a drawing of a machine gun against a red star.

  • As in Carlos, an airliner hijacking goes awry — but it seems like they could have continued a campaign of bombings and assassinations with impunity.

Posted in Crime, Media, Policy, War | 5 Comments »

Carlos the Jackal

Saturday, February 2nd, 2013

I recently watched Carlos, about Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the left-wing terrorist most infamous for storming OPEC headquarters in Vienna in 1975.

Some thoughts:

  • Every time anyone handles a gun in this movie, they casually muzzle-sweep their friends, with their finger on the trigger. This actually strikes me as authentic.
  • The movie has a lot of gratuitous nudity — some of it female.
  • Being an effective terrorist is largely a matter of willingness to do terrible things, not competence at doing those terrible things.
  • Angry youths are useful idiots. West Germany seems to have been especially useful to the Soviets.
  • Palestinian “liberation” is a Marxist movement in the 1970s.
  • The terrorists of the 1970s seem like wannabe rock-stars.
  • The real-life Sanchez is alive and living in a French prison. He objected to the OPEC scenes, which depicted his men as hysterically waving submachine-guns around.

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

The Spy Novelist Who Knows Too Much

Friday, February 1st, 2013

Gérard de Villiers is the spy novelist who knows too much — because everyone talks to him:

Nearly a year ago he published a novel about the threat of Islamist groups in post-revolutionary Libya that focused on jihadis in Benghazi and on the role of the C.I.A. in fighting them. The novel, “Les Fous de Benghazi,” came out six months before the death of the American ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, and included descriptions of the C.I.A. command center in Benghazi (a closely held secret at that time), which was to become central in the controversy over Stevens’s death. Other de Villiers books have included even more striking auguries. In 1980, he wrote a novel in which militant Islamists murder the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, a year before the actual assassination took place. When I asked him about it, de Villiers responded with a Gallic shrug. “The Israelis knew it was going to happen,” he said, “and did nothing.”

Though he is almost unknown in the United States, de Villiers’s publishers estimate that the S.A.S. series has sold about 100 million copies worldwide, which would make it one of the top-selling series in history, on a par with Ian Fleming’s James Bond books. S.A.S. may be the longest-running fiction series ever written by a single author. The first book, “S.A.S. in Istanbul,” appeared in March 1965; de Villiers is now working on No. 197.

[...]

De Villiers created Malko, his hero, in 1964 by merging three real-life acquaintances: a high-ranking French intelligence official named Yvan de Lignières; an Austrian arms dealer; and a German baron named Dieter von Malsen-Ponickau. As is so often the case, though, his fiction proved prophetic. Five years after he began writing the series, de Villiers met Alexandre de Marenches, a man of immense charisma who led the French foreign-intelligence service for more than a decade and was a legend of cold-war spy craft. De Marenches was very rich and came from one of France’s oldest families; he fought heroically in World War II, and he later built his own castle on the Riviera. He also helped create a shadowy international network of intelligence operatives known as the Safari Club, which waged clandestine battles against Soviet operatives in Africa and the Middle East. “He was doing intelligence for fun,” de Villiers told me. “Sometimes he didn’t even pick up the phone when Giscard called him.” In short, de Marenches was very close to being the aristocratic master spy de Villiers had imagined, and as their friendship deepened in the 1970s, de Villiers’s relationship with French intelligence also deepened and lasts to this day.

[...]

When I asked whether it bothered him that no one took his books seriously, he did not seem at all defensive. “I don’t consider myself a literary man,” he said. “I’m a storyteller. I write fairy tales for adults. And I try to put some substance into it.”

I had no idea what kind of “substance” until a friend urged me to look at “La Liste Hariri,” one of de Villiers’s many books set in and around Lebanon. The book, published in early 2010, concerns the assassination of Rafiq Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister. I spent years looking into and writing about Hariri’s death, and I was curious to know what de Villiers made of it. I found the descriptions of Beirut and Damascus to be impressively accurate, as were the names of restaurants, the atmosphere of the neighborhoods and the descriptions of some of the security chiefs that I knew from my tenure as The Times’ Beirut bureau chief. But the real surprise came later. “La Liste Hariri” provides detailed information about the elaborate plot, ordered by Syria and carried out by Hezbollah, to kill Hariri. This plot is one of the great mysteries of the Middle East, and I found specific information that no journalists, to my knowledge, knew at the time of the book’s publication, including a complete list of the members of the assassination team and a description of the systematic elimination of potential witnesses by Hezbollah and its Syrian allies. I was even more impressed when I spoke to a former member of the U.N.-backed international tribunal, based in the Netherlands, that investigated Hariri’s death. “When ‘La Liste Hariri’ came out, everyone on the commission was amazed,” the former staff member said. “They were all literally wondering who on the team could have sold de Villiers this information — because it was very clear that someone had showed him the commission’s reports or the original Lebanese intelligence reports.”

When I put the question to de Villiers, a smile of discreet triumph flashed on his face. It turns out that he has been friends for years with one of Lebanon’s top intelligence officers, an austere-looking man who probably knows more about Lebanon’s unsolved murders than anyone else. It was he who handed de Villiers the list of Hariri’s killers. “He worked hard to get it, and he wanted people to know,” de Villiers said. “But he couldn’t trust journalists.” I was one of those he didn’t trust. I have interviewed the same intelligence chief multiple times on the subject of the Hariri killing, but he never told me about the list. De Villiers had also spoken with high-ranking Hezbollah officials, in meetings that he said were brokered by French intelligence. One assumes these men had not read his fiction.

Read the whole thing.

Posted in Media, Policy, War | No Comments »

Car accidents and U.S. presidents

Tuesday, January 29th, 2013

Dr. Cynthia Wachtell notes that a hundred people die each day on our roads, and many US presidents have connections to deadly car accidents:

For example Bill Clinton’s father, William Jefferson Blythe Jr., died in a car accident in May 1946. He was headed to Hope, Arkansas to see his pregnant wife. The future president, Bill Clinton, was born three months after the car crash. As a result Bill Clinton was raised not by his biological father but by a stepfather who was abusive.

If you look at George Bush, his wife, whose maiden name is Laura Welsh, was in a car accident two days after she turned seventeen. This was in November of 1963. She ran a stop sign near Midland, Texas and the car that she struck was being driven by her high school classmate and close friend Michael Dutton Douglas. He died at the scene. Laura Bush herself was thrown from her car. She was driving a Chevy. The friend was driving a Corvair. (The Corvair is the car that Ralph Nader singled out as being not safe at any speed.)

Barack Obama’s father was in three car accidents in Kenya. After the first accident he spent nearly a year in the hospital. In the second accident, he lost both of his legs. In the third accident, which occurred in November 1982, he died. Barrack Obama was twenty-one.

And Obama’s famous book Dreams From My Father — well the title tells so much about his quest to connect with this absent father.

And there is also Al Gore — his son Albert Gore III ran into a busy street in 1989 and was hit by a car. He was thrown thirty feet and nearly died. And Al Gore in his book An Inconvenient Truth writes, “Some events stay with you always and change the way you look at everything no matter how many years go by. My son’s serious accident was that kind of event for me. It turned my life upside down and shook it until everything fell out.”

Even more horrific was the accident which touched Joe Biden in December of 1972. His wife, one-year-old daughter, and two sons were in a car accident while they were out Christmas shopping in Delaware. His wife’s car was hit by a tractor-trailer and she and his year-old daughter were killed and his two sons were critically injured. This is something that he actually mentioned during the vice presidential debate where he said, “My wife was in an accident that killed my daughter and my wife and my two sons survived.” He’s talked about the anger and the pain he felt afterwards. And I believe that even now years later on the anniversary of that accident, which is December 18th, he doesn’t work in remembrance of the loss of his wife and his daughter.

The list continues.

Mitt Romney was in a deadly accident when he was twenty-one years old. He was serving as a Mormon missionary in France and he was the driver of a car in a head-on collision. He was driving a Citroen VS which at that point may or may not have had seat belts in the front seat. They weren’t mandatory until that year. There were six people riding in a five-passenger car, which meant that the person in the middle of the front passenger seat definitely couldn’t have been wearing a seat belt, and that’s who died in the accident. Her name was Liona Anderson. And she was the wife of the head of the missionary, the mission’s president. The mission’s president was injured. Mitt Romney himself was injured. He suffered a broken arm, and broken ribs, and a concussion and some facial injuries.

John McCain who was the presidential nominee before Romney, his first wife was in a horrible car accident. When he was held prisoner in North Vietnam, she was home visiting her family and was in a car accident in Philadelphia on Christmas Eve of 1969. She skidded on an icy road, hit a telephone pole and was thrown from her car. I think she was hospitalized for six months and had something like twenty-three operations over the course of two years. McCain didn’t know about this until he returned from Vietnam. She didn’t want to cause him further distress while he was there.

Another fatal car accident involving one of our presidential candidates, John Edwards, who ran for the democratic nominee in 2008 — his son Wade Edwards died at the age of sixteen when a gust of wind blew his jeep off the highway and flipped it in North Carolina in 1996.

It’s just haunting how many accidents there were.

Posted in Policy | 2 Comments »

Fitness Crackdown

Thursday, January 24th, 2013

Reason.tv’s latest piece, Fitness Crackdown: Santa Monica Gets Tough On Trainers, points out that the city wants to start regulating personal trainers who use the public park to hold their classes:

This is exactly the kind of regulation you can make fun of on YouTube, because it seems so silly and counterproductive — but what is the proper libertarian answer to a group of people using public property to their own ends in a way that crowds out other people or makes that public property less valuable?

Should the 90 percent of the town that celebrates Christmas be allowed to put up their Christmas displays on public property?

Should you be allowed to walk around naked on a public beach? On public roads?

Should we all be allowed to graze our sheep on public lands?

The left-libertarian position seems to be that once you declare something public, putting any limits on behavior involving it — besides the usual no force or fraud laws — is tyranny, with some weird edge cases, of course.

The right-libertarian position seems to be that you shouldn’t declare anything truly public. Someone, or some entity, should own any asset worth fighting over, so they can set the ground rules — and we need to package property rights up cleverly enough that the people who benefit from something are the ones who pay the costs, etc.

If this park existed within a corporate park, a condo complex, or a shopping mall, it wouldn’t appear on the libertarian radar.

Posted in Economics, Policy | 1 Comment »

Hobbit budgets

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2013

Eric Crampton discusses hobbit budgets:

I do not know how much NZ central and local governments spent on Lord of the Rings and on The Hobbit. There are conflicting reports, and nobody seems particularly clear on how much was subsidy in the sense of “they paid less in tax than they would have if they were some other business, but they might not have come here without it, so we don’t know if the net effect on total taxes paid was positive or negative, but we’re going to assume a counterfactual of that it would have been done here and assess on that basis” and how much was a straight-up grant. Gordon Campbell reports that, for LOTR, it was done as tax rebate and that it’s now a grant. I’ve seen other sources counting a GST concession as a Hobbit tax break, but all products and services produced for export are GST exempt so inputs for that export product would always get a GST rebate. I’d love to see an authoritative figure.

But it can be useful to put the figure purported for The Hobbit into a bit of context. The most commonly cited figure for government support for The Hobbit is $67 million. I do not know whether this was a cash grant based on a proportion of their domestic expenditures, a tax concession, or something else. But I do know that for the 2012/2013 budget year, Vote.Tourism allocated $83.9 million for marketing New Zealand as an international tourist destination.

Imagine that the only benefit we get from the whole LOTR/Hobbit franchise is as tourism marketing campaign.

For 2012/2013, which did more to market NZ as an international tourist destination: The Hobbit, or everything else the government might have done in tourism promotion? Which seems more likely to inspire travel to New Zealand: 100% Pure, or Middle Earth?

Read the whole thing for the marginalia, including his idea for a film.

Posted in Economics, Media, Policy | 1 Comment »

How Do We Know an “Assault Weapon” Ban Would Not Have Stopped the Sandy Hook Massacre

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2013

How do we know an “assault weapon” ban would not have stopped the Sandy Hook massacre? Because it didn’t:

The rifle he used, a .223-caliber Bushmaster M4 carbine, was legal under Connecticut’s “assault weapon” ban, which is similar to the federal law that expired in 2004. Both laws, in addition to listing specifically prohibited models, cover semiautomatic rifles that accept detachable magazines and have at least two out of five features:

  1. a folding or telescoping stock,
  2. a pistol grip,
  3. a bayonet mount,
  4. a grenade launcher, and
  5. a flash suppressor or threaded barrel designed to accommodate a flash suppressor.

The configuration of the rifle used by [the killer], which his mother legally purchased and possessed in Connecticut, evidently was not covered by that definition.

[...]

But the term assault weapon was invented by the anti-gun lobby as a way of blurring the distinction between military-style semiautomatics, which fire once per trigger pull, and selective-fire assault rifles, which can be set to fire continuously (a distinction that President Obama, who wants to bring back the “assault weapon” ban, either does not grasp or deliberately obscures). Since that neologism has no meaning independent of the laws that define it, there is little sense in saying the laws should be changed to cover more “assault weapons.” Guns are not “assault weapons” until legislators arbitrarily decide they are.

The term assault rifle, on the other hand, has some history. It’s a literal translation of Sturmgewehr, which can also be translated into English as storm rifle — as in, “Have fun storming the castle!” That kind of assault, not criminal assault.

The defining features of a Sturmgewehr were that it was capable of fully automatic fire, like a submachine-gun — the then-standard weapon for storming a position — but that it used an intermediate-power cartridge — more powerful than the pistol cartridges used in submachine-guns, but less powerful than the rifle cartridges used in “real” rifles and machine-guns.

American analysts weren’t impressed with this early machine-carbine, and later analysts considered the AK-47 just another submachine-gun, lacking the accuracy and power of American rifles.

Posted in Crime, Policy, War, Weapons | No Comments »

Contradictions and Overstimulation

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2013

The state hospital where the Assistant Village Idiot works has had contradictory attitudes over time to the idea of “blowing off steam” versus more strenuously containing behavior:

In the 1980’s there were heavy punching bags on the units which patients could use. We found over time that some patients got even more worked up using them, and had to be pulled back, screaming, threatening, and hands now bleeding. There seemed no balance on the other side of anyone actually benefiting. We have a gym, and for those who can already contain themselves, it seems helpful to jog on the machines, play basketball, or lift weights. But we don’t actually have measures to show that these things do help. They just seem like normalised behaviors, so we encourage them. Others rapidly get overstimulated with even minor activity.

Or, they can get overstimulated and get assaultive when members of the opposite sex heave into view. By the way, it was always considered so ignorant and old-fashioned to declare how sexualised dancing is since the 60’s, but it becomes startlingly clear in an environment where people are locked up in a small space and impulsive behaviors can get out of control quickly. “Maria was dancing provocatively, so of course all the males had to come down to the day area” is said at morning report. But Maria’s dancing is sometimes a pretty mild version of what you’d see at any wedding, so at one level it’s not provocative. Except it is, and everyone can tell instantly.

Playing the TV or music too loud can be overstimulating. I don’t know that particular styles are worse. Some styles are more likely to be played loudly, but we’ve got folks who will crank up anything and get worked up.

Young males hanging around and woofing together is overstimulating, and we put a lid on that quickly. For females with a trauma history even hearing about other trauma is overstimulating. Personality disorders activate when they see someone else getting attention, as it threatens to them that they will be cast out of the family into the darkness.

We have been less encouraging of sexual behavior or the use of pornography, though even here there has been controversy. Psychology especially used to teach that these were normal expressions which we shouldn’t stand in the way of, however much church ladies objected. Then women with feminist leanings objected on other grounds, of exploitation and advantage-taking, muddying the waters further. Gay rights advocates became adamant that sexual expression was part of their humanity, and that started to bleed into mental health because most practitioners were liberals who wanted to keep up. So the issue of whether to give out condoms became a complicated medical, moral, clinical, legal risk-set of issues that is still unresolved. If people really press for it, their right to have pornography is upheld, but we make it so difficult that only the determined find it worth pursuing. I don’t think we notice anything other than whether someone is getting — you guessed it — overstimulated.

We don’t show horror movies or very violent or sexual ones, but we don’t have any data to support that. We just figure it’s probably a bad idea, and why take the risk? There are video games as well, some of which are a bit violent, but never the highest category of that. Some of the line staff play those games or watch those movies, but they are considered declasse. Not that we egalitarians would ever say that.

We let people cross-dress, even flamboyantly if they choose, because we are very modern and it’s their right. We only mention in whispers that this seems to occur more often when the patient is sicker, because then people might think that we think that… oh dear. Couldn’t people just get better and go home where we didn’t have to see them and do whatever they like? Because when they’re right here in front of us, and our professional judgment that they are much sicker on other grounds, but our politics tells us that we can’t say that, not even in front of our own staff, it creates a conflict we don’t like.

Oh, and by the way, the cross-dressers get overstimulated as well.

Posted in Crime, Policy | 1 Comment »

Is democracy in crisis?

Monday, January 21st, 2013

Is democracy in crisis?

All around the globe, people are feeling increasingly skeptical and mistrustful of their leaders. According to one global trust barometer, only 52% of survey respondents said that they trusted their government to do the right thing in 2011 and, in 2012, the number plummeted to 43%. As recent surveys reveal, only 18% of Italians believe their vote matters, just 15% of Greeks says that pulling a lever makes a difference and a scant 20% of Americans agree that their government makes good decisions. Meanwhile, Japan and South Korea suffered 26- and 17-point declines in government trust ratings this year, respectively.

These are all democracies. Which means that citizens do not trust the very people they voted into office.

[...]

Our societies are more democratic than ever but our public institutions are less trusted; the citizens in the West are freer than ever before but voters feel less powerful than yesterday.

It’s hardly clear that the citizens in the West are freer than ever before — or that voter power leads to freedom.

Ivan Krastev explains how he became interested in democracy:

It’s very personal. I was 24-years-old when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. And on one level, of course, democracy was extremely important for our generation. But on the other hand, we learned in 1989 how fragile the world is. For a long time, in my youth, we had been told that the problems of socialism could be cured with more socialism. So when I hear people talking about their problem with democracy, but we’re curing the problems of democracies with more democracy, I decided that I needed to look at what we’re talking about.

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

A Word About Peace

Sunday, January 20th, 2013

The Assistant Village Idiot offers a word about peace — noting that people see what they want in Scripture:

Again, I ran across the idea that the Scripture about beating the swords into plowshares means that God is telling us to do that now (and you, you naughty children, are ignoring that Scripture and disobeying God’s plan for humanity).  That’s from Isaiah 2, describing what the world will be like under the reign of Christ.  It is echoed in Micah, with the same predictive, not commanding intent.  In Isaiah 11 there is a similar passage describing how lions will lie down with lambs, and young children will safely put their hands in snake’s dens.  I’m pretty sure God isn’t commanding that we bring the lambs and children to such places now.

Just for good measure, the prophet Joel also tells of a time when people will beat their plowshares into swords, in preparation for the final battles of the world.

Posted in Policy | 2 Comments »

Ahmed Dogan Assassination Attempt

Saturday, January 19th, 2013

Ahmed Dogan, the ethnically Turkish leader of Bulgaria’s Movement for Rights and Freedoms, just survived an assassination attempt:

It would appear that the assassin’s (tiny) pistol malfunctioned. Then Dogan (inexpertly) deflected the gun away from his face. The assassin gave up without much of a fight — and then took a beating from just about everyone present.

On the one hand, he was already subdued. On the other hand, it’s human nature to kick an attempted murderer when he’s down. It just is.

(Hat tip to Michael Yon.)

Posted in Crime, Martial Arts, Policy, War | 1 Comment »

Who “needs” more than 10 rounds?

Friday, January 18th, 2013

Who “needs” more than 10 rounds? Ordinary people defending themselves:

Defending oneself against criminal violence is a very different phenomenon from an active shooter situation. Any review of security cam footage or dashcam footage that shows gunfights will make this abundantly clear, but just for the sake of clarity let’s look at this video.

In the video we see two attackers attempting to rob a jewelry store. One is armed with a handgun, the other with a crowbar. The intended victim was also armed, apparently with a handgun. In the thirty one seconds of video you see a firefight from beginning to end. Despite the fact that the jewelry store owner was armed and actually fired at the bad guys multiple times, they both stuck around and fought! They didn’t wet their pants and run away immediately like bad guys are rumored to do when presented with a gun, instead they hung around for as long as the robber armed with a handgun had bullets. (Also note how many times the handgun-armed robber actually pointed his gun at his accomplice in the process of trying to murder the good guy) In the video you can clearly see the robber armed with a handgun fire his revolver until it’s empty in the effort to kill his victim.

The intended victim fires his weapon at the robber… how many times is hard to tell from the video footage. It’s important to note how the robber responds to the shots fired at him. Watch his movement. Watch how the robbers duck and move and try to avoid the incoming fire using obstacles for whatever cover they will provide. This is not trained behavior, either; it’s instinctual. If you were ten feet from me and I started throwing rocks at your face, you’d instinctively begin to dodge and weave to avoid getting hit. Surprise, surprise, people do the same thing when bullets are being fired.

Facing multiple determined attackers who were moving and using cover to try and kill him, the owner of this jewelry store needed to outlast the bad guy’s ability to shoot to have a hope of surviving. If you’re the first one to run out of ammo in a gunfight against multiple armed opponents, it’s generally not good for your health. Even if the good guy here was an exceptionally good shot with clear lanes of fire, the number of documented instances of police having to shoot someone multiple times to get them to cease threatening actions is legion. In real life, bad guys do not fall down and die if they are hit once, and as you can see from the video, hitting a threat even in a tight enclosed space is not the easy task some believe it to be. I could post any one of hundreds of videos online that demonstrate these same principles or break down any one of literally thousands of lethal force incidents that have the same lessons in them. The chosen video is literally the first one I clicked on when I searched for “gunfight” and “camera” on youtube.

Now all of those statements concern a gunfight. Gunfights bear exactly zero resemblance to a slaughter of innocents. The key factor is that in your typical active shooter scenario the victims cannot shoot back. This renders capacity meaningless. The key predictor of body count in every active shooter scenario we’ve seen is how long it took for a good guy to show up with a gun. This isn’t really surprising when you think about how active shooters work.

Posted in Policy, Weapons | 2 Comments »

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