Yet another reason to Build The Wall

A more secure southern border isn't just needed to keep out illegal aliens:  it's also a very important crime prevention measure.  The Guardian reports:

Latin America has suffered more than 2.5m murders since the start of this century and is facing an acute public security crisis that demands urgent and innovative solutions, a new report warns.

“The sheer dimensions of homicidal violence are breathtaking,” says the report by the Igarapé Institute, a Brazil-based thinktank focused on security and development issues.

. . .

Latin America suffers 33% of the world’s homicides despite having only 8% of its population. One-quarter of all global homicides are concentrated in four countries – Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela – all of which are gearing up for presidential elections in which security is a dominant theme.

“The overall trend right now in Latin America is one of increasing homicides and deteriorating security,” said Robert Muggah, one of the report’s authors.

“Latin America is a large area and there are lots of variations. But as a region – including Mexico down to Central America and South America – the rate of homicide is set to continue increasing up until 2030. The only other places we are seeing similar kinds of increases are in parts of southern and central Africa and some war zones.”

There's more at the link.

This dismal forecast is supported by Mexico's appalling - and increasing - murder rate, up 27% in 2017 over the previous year, and up a further 20% during the first quarter of this year.

We can't keep such violence from washing up against our borders . . . but we should be doing everything possible to prevent it crossing our borders.  A border wall alone won't be sufficient, but it'll be a damned sight better than the mockery of border security that we have at present, with a recent surge in illegal crossings demonstrating its inadequacy in the clearest possible terms.

Peter

Why can't American auto manufacturers make a profit on cars?

I note that Ford has announced it'll stop production of all its cars except the Mustang, concentrating instead on a range of SUV's and pickup trucks.  This follows Chrysler's move in the same direction two years ago.

The question is, why can foreign manufacturers such as Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, etc. make a profit on their automobiles, while the Big Three can't?  I suspect that problem goes all the way back to the 1980's, when foreign imports savaged sales of US autos.  I don't know that the quality of US cars (as opposed to trucks and SUV's) ever caught up with the competition after that.  (Of course, I wasn't here for part of that period, but since I came to the US in the late 1990's, I've consistently experienced foreign-designed autos as being better made and equipped, and more comfortable, than most of their local equivalents.)

Ford argues, as did Chrysler a couple of years ago, that car buyers' tastes have changed.  That may be so . . . but why?  Are car buyers' tastes actually changing, or are US auto manufacturers deliberately trying to change those tastes?  Their advertising, marketing and promotions appear to suggest that.  Is that an attempt to undercut "foreign" competition (by now mostly made in the USA)?  Are the US manufacturers admitting, in so many words, that they can't produce cars as well, or make them as attractive, as foreign models, and therefore they're going to solve their problem by driving down the demand for cars, trying to make them less desirable overall?  I can't help but think that's part of it.

There's also regulation, of course.  Until very recently, the CAFE standards mandated a fuel economy "average" across a manufacturer's range that was growing more and more unrealistic.  It could only be achieved by producing a proportion of extraordinarily economical cars, to offset gas-guzzling SUV's and pickups - cars that were so focused on fuel economy that they skimped on other amenities, and were therefore less popular with the buying public.  Foreign manufacturers, making fewer SUV's and almost no big pickups, were not subject to the same disadvantage, and could therefore make their cars less economical, but more desirable to consumers.  (I suspect that a large element of the overproduction problem plaguing US car manufacturers is precisely this need to make large numbers of highly fuel-economical cars that were, frankly, not wanted by the buying public.)

Another very important element is that new vehicle prices are becoming unaffordable for ordinary Americans.  I wrote about that last month.  When a new car costs as much, or more than, the average annual income of a working-class family . . . something's got to give, and it'll be the sale of that vehicle, more often than not.  The Big Three will doubtless claim that their input costs are rising, therefore their prices are too:  but one of the claims made by both Chrysler and Ford is that they're turning away from cars, and towards SUV's and pickups, specifically because the latter are more profitable.  In other words, they can price them higher, because consumers find them more desirable.  In a free market, of course, one charges what the market will bear . . . but what if the Big Three become accustomed to living on those higher profit margins, and the market collapses due to other economic factors?  Will they be able to survive if they have no low-margin, low-profit offerings that people can still afford to buy?  IMHO, that's questionable.

All in all, when I look at the US auto industry (and the Big Three in particular), I see companies trying to force the market into what they want, rather than trying to respond to what the market really wants.  Until recently, the US government was trying to do the same thing.  In either or both case(s), I'm not sure that's sustainable.

Peter

New York in 1911 - history captured on film

I'm obliged to The Last Tradition for publishing the link to this footage of New York City in 1911, which has been very nicely restored.  For history buffs, it makes fascinating viewing.

It's sobering to think that everyone in those images is dead by now.  I wonder what they would have said if they could have foreseen World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, and so on?  Those storm clouds would not have been even a shadow on the horizon in 1911 . . .

I wonder whether, 107 years from now, someone will be viewing video (or the then-current technology) of us, walking around our streets in 2018, and ask a similar question?

Peter

Two perspectives on the prospects for societal breakdown in the USA

I've written a number of articles on various aspects of emergency preparedness.  I'm by no means an over-the-top zombie-apocalypse "prepper", but I believe that a certain amount of common-sense planning and basic preparations for an emergency should be part of everyone's lifestyle.  Nevertheless, I don't think most of us seriously expect the society within which we live to collapse, or even to suddenly degrade, to such an extent that it can be described as "the end of the world as we know it".

Two recent articles propose different, and rather more worrying, ways of looking at that possibility.  They certainly made me think twice - and I'm still thinking about them.  What's more, they appear to be from different areas of the ideological spectrum, yet come to alarmingly similar conclusions.  As an exercise in "WHAT IF?", I recommend them to you, too.

The first article is titled "Why We’re Underestimating American Collapse:  The Strange New Pathologies of the World’s First Rich Failed State".  Here's an excerpt.  Bold print is my emphasis.

When we take a hard look at US collapse, we see a number of social pathologies on the rise. Not just any kind. Not even troubling, worrying, and dangerous ones. But strange and bizarre ones. Unique ones. Singular and gruesomely weird ones I’ve never really seen before, and outside of a dystopia written by Dickens and Orwell, nor have you, and neither has history. They suggest that whatever “numbers” we use to represent decline — shrinking real incomes, inequality, and so on —we are in fact grossly underestimating what pundits call the “human toll”, but which sensible human beings like you and I should simply think of as the overwhelming despair, rage, and anxiety of living in a collapsing society.

Let me give you just five examples of what I’ll call the social pathologies of collapse — strange, weird, and gruesome new diseases, not just ones we don’t usually see in healthy societies, but ones that we have never really seen before in any modern society.

America has had 11 school shootings in the last 23 days. That’s one every other day, more or less. That statistic is alarming enough — but it is just a number. Perspective asks us for comparison. So let me put that another way. America has had 11 school shootings in the last 23 days, which is more than anywhere else in the world, even Afghanistan or Iraq. In fact, the phenomenon of regular school shootings appears to be a unique feature of American collapse — it just doesn’t happen in any other country — and that is what I mean by “social pathologies of collapse”: a new, bizarre, terrible disease striking society.

Why are American kids killing each other? Why doesn’t their society care enough to intervene? Well, probably because those kids have given up on life — and their elders have given up on them. Or maybe you’re right — and it’s not that simple. Still, what do the kids who aren’t killing each other do? Well, a lot of them are busy killing themselves.

So there is of course also an “opioid epidemic”. We use that phrase too casually, but it much more troubling than it appears on first glance. Here is what is really curious about it. In many countries in the world — most of Asia and Africa — one can buy all the opioids one wants from any local pharmacy, without a prescription. You might suppose then that opioid abuse as a mass epidemic would be a global phenomenon. Yet we don’t see opioid epidemics anywhere but America — especially not ones so vicious and widespread they shrink life expectancy. So the “opioid epidemic” — mass self-medication with the hardest of hard drugs — is again a social pathology of collapse: unique to American life. It is not quite captured in the numbers, but only through comparison — and when we see it in global perspective, we get a sense of just how singularly troubled American life really is.

There's more at the link.

The second article, courtesy of a link sent to me by Old NFO, is titled "The Surprisingly Solid Mathematical Case of the Tin Foil Hat Gun Prepper".

While we don’t have any good sources of data on how often zombies take over the world, we definitely have good sources of data on when the group of people on the piece of dirt we currently call the USA attempt to overthrow the ruling government. It’s happened twice since colonization. The first one, the American Revolution, succeeded. The second one, the Civil War, failed. But they are both qualifying events.

. . .

Two instances in 340 years is not a great data pool to work with, I will grant, but if you take a grab sample of other countries around the world you’ll see this could be much worse. Since our 1678 benchmark, Russia has had a two world wars, a civil war, a revolution, and at least half a dozen uprisings, depending on how you want to count them. Depending on when you start the clock, France had a 30-year war, a seven-year war, a particularly nasty revolution, a counter-revolution, that Napoleon thing, and a couple of world wars tacked on the end. China, North Korea, Vietnam, and basically most of the Pacific Rim has had some flavor of violent revolution in the last 100 years, sometimes more than one. With Africa, it’s hard to even conceive where to start and end the data points. Most Central and South American countries have had significant qualifying events in the time span. And honestly, if we were to widen our analysis to not only include nationwide violent civil wars, but also instances of slavery, internment, and taking of native lands, our own numbers go way up.

Or we could look at a modern snapshot. Counting places like the Vatican, we have 195 countries on the planet today. Somalia is basically in perpetual war, Syria is a hot mess with no signs of mitigation any time soon, Iraq is sketchy, Afghanistan has been in some flavor of civil war or occupation my entire life outside the salad days of the Taliban, and Libya is in such deep throes of anarchy that they’ve reinvented the African slave trade. Venezuela. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict may be a qualifying event depending on how you define it. And again, Africa is ... hard to even conceive of where to start. Spitballing, perhaps 3% of the nations in the modern world are in some version of violent revolt against the ruling government, some worse than others. There’s at least some case to be made that our 0.5% annual chance estimate may be low, if we’re looking at comps.

Or we could look at a broader historical brush. Since the fall of Constantinople in 1453, there have been 465 sovereign nations which no longer exist, and that doesn’t even count colonies, secessionist states, or annexed countries. Even if we presume that half of these nation-state transitions were peaceful, which is probably a vast over-estimation, that’s still an average of one violent state transition every 2.43 years.

If we look at raw dialectic alone, we reach dismal conclusions. “Do you think the United States will exist forever and until the end of time?” Clearly any reasonable answer must be “no.” So at that point, we’re not talking “if,” but “when.”

. . .

Pretend you’re someone with your eyes on the horizon. What would you be looking for, exactly? Increasing partisanship. Civil disorder. Coup rhetoric. A widening wealth gap. A further entrenching oligarchy. Dysfunctional governance. The rise of violent extremist ideologies such as Nazism and Communism. Violent street protests. People marching with masks and dressing like the Italian Blackshirts. Attempts at large scale political assassination. Any one of those might not necessarily be the canary in the coal mine, but all of them in aggregate might be alarming to someone with their eyes on the horizon.

Again, more at the link.

I'm not a TEOTWAWKI alarmist - far from it, as regular readers will be aware.  Nevertheless, these two articles, particularly taken in combination, provide a different and very thought-provoking perspective on our American way of life.  What does the future hold in store for us?  No-one can be sure . . . but it's possible that it may be more "interesting", in the sense of the purported Chinese curse, than most of us would like it to be.

(If you haven't already read them, "Selco's" experiences during the Bosnian civil war of 1992-1995 are worth studying.  That's an extreme, admittedly . . . but even a year before it happened, I'm sure he and his family and friends would have absolutely refused to believe that such things were possible.  I've personally seen and lived through some similar circumstances in parts of Africa - and, right now, they're happening in Venezuela and other parts of Latin America.  Don't think, "They can't happen here!"  I agree they're very unlikely in the USA, on the face of it, but . . . I've been unpleasantly surprised before.  In particular, if you're among the more vulnerable sections of the population - e.g. older, less fit, less healthy, etc. [all of which descriptions apply to me] - then you need to be more prepared than those in better condition, who will have a better physical chance to make it through an emergency.  For people in such circumstances, the above articles are even more thought-provoking.)

Peter

Outta the way, human!

This made me laugh - a surf traffic incident off Australia.

"Coming through!" - or, Mother Nature always has the right of way!

Peter

Pizza gets complicated sometimes

Received via e-mail, origin unknown (clickit to biggit):

The Texas pizza illustration is a dead libel, I'll have you know.  There are a couple of pizzerias within striking distance of my home where the pizza is to die for.  I don't know about Boston, though . . . do they serve baked beans with their tacos?




Peter

Ballsy!

I suspect intelligence agencies all over the world are at present tipping their hats, metaphorically speaking, to Israel's Mossad.  If published accounts are to be believed (and it's never that simple), their most recent operation was a masterpiece, the kind of thing that'll be studied in training academies for decades to come.

Israeli spies reportedly broke into an Iranian nuclear archive in southern Tehran last year and hauled out half a tonne of documents in operation completed in a single night.

The raid is said to have provided the intelligence behind Benjamin Netanyahu’s public accusation that Iran lied to the world about its nuclear programme before and after the 2015 Iran deal.

The Israeli prime minister described the operation as one of Israel’s “biggest-ever intelligence achievements” but gave few details about how it came about during his speech at the Israeli defence ministry on Monday.

An Israeli official told the New York Times that the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, first learned of the facility in the Shorabad district of Tehran in February 2016 – just weeks after the nuclear agreement went into force.

The site was kept under surveillance for nearly two years. “Few Iranians knew where it was, very few, and also a few Israelis,” Mr Netanyahu said.

Mossad operatives broke into the unassuming warehouse and stole 55,000 pages of documents and 183 CDs worth of information, Israel said. Mr Netanyahu said the operation was completed “a few weeks ago”.

The vast haul was reportedly spirited out of Iran and back to Israel in a single night. There was no detail about how the Mossad agents managed to get such a large and physically heavy haul out of the country.

Donald Trump was reportedly briefed on the operation this January by Yossi Cohen, the head of the Mossad, during a trip to Washington.

The documents, which were almost all in Farsi, were shared with the US. “We assess that the documents we have reviewed are authentic,” said Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state.

There's more at the link.

If they got them all out in one night, that would have been a very precisely coordinated operation indeed, probably involving both ground and air transportation.  From an "informed amateur" perspective, I'd suspect it involved vehicles that could be driven to a secluded spot where a C-130 transport (or something similar) could land.  The vehicles would have been driven straight up the ramp into the cargo hold and strapped down, then the plane would have taken off again.  It could probably have been in and out of the country in no more than an hour or two.

Smart work, and very courageous indeed on the part of the operators involved.  Capture would undoubtedly have resulted in torture and an agonizing death.  Kudos to all involved.

As for Iranian security procedures . . . dare one say they were clearly Farsi-cal?




Peter

Playing politics with our children's lives

I'm obliged to Aaron at The Shekel for bringing to our attention the remarkable facts uncovered by a Broward County student investigating the Parkland school shooting.  He highlights Twitchy's coverage of the issue, which leads to other links.  In order, the articles are:

1. Aaron:  "Just When You Thought Broward County's Failures Concerning The Parkland Shooting Can't Get Any Worse, They Do".
2. Twitchy:  " 'My blood is boiling': Broward student journalist lays out his case against superintendent, school board".
3. The Hill:  "Exclusive: Broward County’s $100 million failure on school safety".

I strongly recommend taking the time to follow each of those links, and read the articles in question.  They're enough to make your blood boil.  In so many words, the murder of seventeen schoolchildren was entirely avoidable, if the authorities had acted as they should;  and, since the event, those same authorities have lied, obfuscated and dodged the question in an attempt to deny or avoid responsibility for their actions.  It's a sickening tale of official betrayal of trust.

Aaron sums up:

While the blame for these murders lies squarely with the killer, the errors of both omission and commission on the part of the Broward County School Board and The Broward County Sheriffs Office along with a fumble by the FBI and a push from the Obama administration set the stage for this event to happen.

. . .

The sheer amount of fail before, during, and after the shooting is rather staggering. Verily, it takes a village to mess this up this consistently over and over again. So of course, instead of blaming themselves for this causal chain of events a mile long and years in the making, they decided to blame the NRA.

This is as if the powers that be decided to ignore arsonists as it made their crime stats look bad, knew there was one around the area, and knew exactly who the local arsonist was who was setting a series of small fires. Knowing that, they then took a bunch of flammable material, piled it up in a building, soaked it in gasoline, and after being told the arsonist was going to come set it on fire did nothing. After the arsonist gets on social media and says he's coming to light the building on fire they still do nothing. Then, when the arsonist went ahead and in fact lit a match, tosses it onto the gas-soaked pile and burned the building down, they held a press conference to blame the National Match Association for advocating for law-abiding people to be allowed to own matches and preventing common sense match control and match bans.

There's more at the link.  Highly recommended reading.

If I lived in Broward County, after reading those reports, I'd mobilize my friends.  We'd be demonstrating outside the offices of the county School Board and Sheriff's Office every single day, demanding the dismissal - without retirement or any other benefits - of any and all officials involved in this catastrophe, who played any part whatsoever in the events that inexorably led to the deaths of seventeen schoolchildren and the injuring of seventeen more.  I'd also be demanding that a full investigation be conducted, with at least civil, if not criminal charges resulting against as many of the guilty as possible.

I greatly fear that if the people of Broward County don't demand action like that, then sooner or later the same thing will happen there again.  It's as simple as that.  That's also a warning to the rest of us to examine our own local affairs, right now, to make sure the same mistakes are not being made closer to home.  If we don't . . . if we merely accept that the authorities in our area are doing all they can, without checking to make sure they are . . . then, when our children are murdered in the same way, we won't have a leg to stand on.  We'll be complicit in their murder, because we just didn't care.

Peter

So much for tolerance, civility and balance

It's been obvious to all of us for some time that people on the extremes of US politics, both left and right, are growing more and more intolerant of anyone who disagrees with their warped, twisted, monomaniacal perspectives.  Please note that I blame both sides equally.  You can't point a finger at a right-wing screed without finding one just as bad, if not worse, on the left, and vice versa.

That said, this diatribe by a far-left-wing commentator is so over-the-top as to be nauseating.

When I write that CNN politics writer Chris Cillizza is the rankest ***brain in the Western Hemisphere, I am not being nice to him. When I write that God clowned Chris Cillizza before he was born by making him Chris Cillizza instead of a ****-eating maggot, I am being unkind. When I say that Chris Cillizza himself is the punchline to the cruelest work of absurdist comedy in the history of the ****ing universe, and that the title of that work is On the Origin of Species, I am being mean. Likewise it probably is downright nasty for me to write that on the whole American society would benefit greatly by Chris Cillizza being fired out of a large cannon into an even larger cliff face. But I am not bullying Chris Cillizza. Categorically, I cannot do that.

“Wolf’s treatment of Sanders was bullying,” Cillizza wrote on CNN’s website yesterday, because he is an obsequious slimeball even more slovenly with language than his forebears were in the dispensation of their chromosomes. He’s referring to the standup set Michelle Wolf, a comedian, performed at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night, somewhat at the expense of White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a brazen, knowing, and hugely powerful enemy of the free press and deceiver of the public by trade. As you’ve surely read by now, Wolf joked that Sanders’s makeup—her “perfect smoky eye”—is made of the ashes of the facts she burns.

. . .

A frank and honest description of who she is and what she does would be much more harsh: Every day, Sarah Huckabee Sanders plants herself, by choice, between the public and the facts of what’s being done at the very highest levels of American executive power, and does her damnedest to break and delegitimize the means by which the two are brought together. She is one of the most visible and powerful people in American civic life, and she uses her visibility and power—she chooses to use her visibility and power—to confuse the public and degrade its grasp on the truth, rather than to inform or empower or serve it. Her willingness to do this on behalf of Donald Trump, day after day, and the unmistakable teeth-gnashing relish with which she does it, are the substance of her power, and the reason why anybody knows who the **** she is at all. What history will remember about Sanders is that she is the scum of the ****ing earth, and not the jokey means by which one comedian pointed out this inarguable fact—and that’s only if the senile rageaholic ****baby moron on whose behalf she shames herself on television every day doesn’t annihilate the human race, first.

There's more at the link . . . if you want to read it (which I don't recommend).

This obscene rant is precisely why I, and others like me, fear for the future of the American republic.  When the two extremes of political opinion are so far divided, so lost to facts and reality, so obsessed with their own (profoundly flawed) interpretation of current events, then the time can't be far away when some of them stop talking and start fighting.  Some would say that time has already arrived, given the antics of Antifa and their ilk (e.g. Berkeley) on one side, and the posturings of racial and far-right-wing extremists (e.g. Charlottesville) on the other.  There appears to be no middle ground whatsoever between such extremists:  no place where they might agree to differ, or exchange views in at least a semblance of civility.

Oh, well.  I suppose that means the rest of us, the civilized majority, will just have to deal with all such extremists, Left- or Right-wing, in the same way.  We'll have to regard all of them as a clear and present danger to our lives, safety and well-being, and respond accordingly.  I've done that before, in another country and another context.  So have many Americans in these troubled times.  We can always do so again closer to home, if that should become necessary.

Peter

So much for "white privilege"

Jordan Petersen puts "white privilege" in perspective, and demonstrates what a stupid concept it is.

Word.

Peter

Doofus Of The Day #1,008

I'm obliged to reader Snoggeramus for sending me a copy of this image (origin unknown):

Sometimes the jokes just write themselves, don't they?  Let's see, now:

• What can we take away from this?
• The misspelling subtracts something from the message.
• Errors are multiplied, it seems.
• Opinions about the effectiveness of the advertisement are divided.
• Math is clearly more tricky than meth.

Please feel free to add your own in Comments!




Peter

When false advertising becomes "Fake News"

Last week, it was revealed that an alleged "authority" on student loans, and what students do with them, was not only fake:  "he" was also steering students who approached "him" for advice towards a student loan refinancing service operated by "his" creators.  As far as I'm concerned, that's not only false advertising, but fraud by any other name.

Drew Cloud is everywhere. The self-described journalist who specializes in student-loan debt has been quoted in major news outlets, including The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and CNBC, and is a fixture in the smaller, specialized blogosphere of student debt.

. . .

Drew Cloud’s story was simple: He founded [The Student Loan Report], an "independent, authoritative news outlet" covering all things student loans, "after he had difficulty finding the most recent student loan news and information all in one place."

He became ubiquitous on that topic. But he’s a fiction, the invention of a student-loan refinancing company.

After The Chronicle spent more than a week trying to verify Cloud’s existence, the company that owns The Student Loan Report confirmed that Cloud was fake. "Drew Cloud is a pseudonym that a diverse group of authors at Student Loan Report, LLC use to share experiences and information related to the challenges college students face with funding their education," wrote Nate Matherson, CEO of LendEDU.

. . .

Cloud was not the only facade. The website’s affiliation with LendEDU was also not previously disclosed.

There's more at the link.  Recommended reading.

My attitude towards this sort of thing is very simple.  Mr. Matherson is, by his own admission, a liar.  By using a fake personality to steer inquiries towards his own business interests, he is, in my opinion, defrauding those who sought genuine advice.  In case you think I'm going too far with that, please consider this dictionary definition of "fraud":

noun
1. deceit, trickery, sharp practice, or breach of confidence, perpetrated for profit or to gain some unfair or dishonest advantage.
2. a particular instance of such deceit or trickery: mail fraud; election frauds.
3. any deception, trickery, or humbug: That diet book is a fraud and a waste of time.
4. a person who makes deceitful pretenses; sham; poseur.

If that doesn't adequately describe Mr. Matherson's conduct, I don't know what does.

I wish I could be sure that the authorities will investigate Mr. Matherson's conduct, and his company, with a view to prosecution for this fraud.  Unfortunately, this sort of thing has become so widespread that they probably won't, because they can't possibly police every business, every Web site, and every alleged "authority" or "expert" plying their trade.  There are many other "sharp practices" that may not amount to actual dishonesty, but are nevertheless an attempt to manipulate our perception of reality, or deceive us as to the true nature of a business.  (For example, some years ago I pointed to the example of a group of online ammunition vendors.  I still refuse to do business with any of them, and continue to recommend that approach to my friends.)

In the absence of official action, it's up to us, the users of the Internet, to pass on the word about such practices, and see to it that at least our circle of friends and acquaintances are warned about them.  At least, in that way, we can protect our own.  Needless to say, I shall be strongly recommending to my friends that they avoid doing business of any kind with Mr. Matherson and/or his colleagues and/or any of his companies, organizations or activities, current or future.  I trust my readers will draw their own conclusions.

Peter

Sunday morning music

In the first Sunday Morning Music post of 2018, I brought you a number of Gordon Lightfoot's nautical-themed songs.  This remarkable musician has produced an immense body of work.  Today I'd like to look at some of his more meditative songs, music that makes you think - meditations in poetic form, set to music, if you will.  They're haunting melodies that stay with you.

To start, here's one of his most popular songs, "If You Could Read My Mind".

This next song, "Circle Of Steel", is particularly poignant to me, because as a pastor and prison chaplain I've worked with people like the woman he describes.  It's a grim, gritty world for them, and there's often only cold comfort to be had.  This song hurts to hear, sometimes.

One of Gordon Lightfoot's most popular songs is "Minstrel Of The Dawn".  Here's a live performance from a BBC concert in England in 1972.

Forty years later, in 2012, Gordon gave this live performance of another of his great songs, "Don Quixote", in Reno, Nevada.  I prefer the earlier versions of this song, because I remember his younger voice and style, but I'm including this one to show that even in old age, he still has the magic touch.  It's remarkable for any singer's voice to last this long and this well.

Let's close with one of Gordon's songs that's particularly close to my heart:  "Cherokee Bend".  It tells of racial conflict, hatred and bitterness in the "bad old days" of conflict between white settlers and Native American tribes.  The theme is of enduring meaning to me, thanks to my own experience of such racial conflict in Africa, which has shaped and formed my life like no other influence.  I used to play this song to some of my friends (of all races) in South Africa, to try to show them that our clashes were merely another aspect of a struggle that's been fought all over the world from time immemorial.  Some found that helpful;  others, merely depressing.  Nevertheless, I think Gordon captured the essence of what such conflict means to the innocent (particularly children) who are caught up in it, and how it scars them.

We'll return to Gordon Lightfoot's music later in the year.

Peter

California's "War on Ammo" is lost before it's even begun

I was struck by a comment from an anti-gun spokesperson over the NRA's lawsuit against California over its new restrictions on ammunition.  The relevant bit is in bold, underlined text.

The lawsuit challenges specific restrictions like a requirement that ammunition sales be conducted face to face, and a mandatory background checks for those purchases – a component that many still don’t know how the state would implement.

. . .

In the lawsuit the NRA claims the ammunition sale restrictions violate the second amendment and the commerce clause of The Constitution.

Butchko, though an NRA member, has yet to make his first firearm purchase.

“What I don't understand is why I need one permit to buy a firearm and another to buy ammunition. I just worry that the state is going to keep going to the point where they make it inconvenient to buy a gun,” he said.

Wendy Wheatcroft with Mom’s Demand Action for Gun Sense in America said responsible gun owners should not fear ammunition restrictions.

“Clearly being able to accumulate large stores of ammo is not beneficial to the general public,” she said.

There's more at the link.

A few questions for Ms. Wheatcroft:

1. Why should "responsible gun owners" not fear ammunition restrictions?  Every other restriction on firearms ownership has been intensified, strengthened or made more onerous over time.  We're pretty sure these ammo restrictions will be, too.
2. Why is "being able to accumulate large stores of ammo ... not beneficial to the general public"?  As far as I can see, it's certainly not actively harmful to the public.  In fact, it's got nothing to do with the public.  It's the choice of the individual ammo owner.  Furthermore, ammo in and of itself can do nothing whatsoever to harm or benefit the public.  It's morally neutral, like a motor vehicle, or a hammer, or a calculator, or a gun.  Any and/or all of those things can be used for good, or for evil, or for nothing at all - but it's always and everywhere the person who uses them who makes the choice of how and for what to use them.

Ms. Wheatcroft's attitude appears to be yet another version of the age-old conundrum:  "We'll tell you what's good for you, and you'll damn well like it - or else!"  Facts, logic and rationality are nowhere to be found in her argument.  Frankly, she's on the side of those who say that "Unless it's permitted, it is forbidden" - and they want to deny permission whenever and wherever they can.  The rest of us take the view that "Unless it's forbidden, it is permitted".  We don't need Big Brother to boss us around any more than is absolutely necessary.

We are citizens, not subjects.  Early American historian David Ramsay said of that distinction:

The difference is immense. Subject is derived from the Latin words, sub and jacio, and means one who is under the power of another; but a citizen is an unit of a mass of free people, who, collectively, possess sovereignty.

Subjects look up to a master, but citizens are so far equal, that none have hereditary rights superior to others. Each citizen of a free state contains, within himself, by nature and the constitution, as much of the common sovereignty as another.

The state of California appears determined to force its residents to be subjects, not citizens.  I think most of my readers will have a ready (and none too polite) rejoinder to any such attempt.

An individual's ammo supplies, or those of anyone of sound mind, have got damn all to do with Ms. Wheatcroft, despite her all-too-nosy interest in them, and they certainly offer no threat to the public.  If she believes otherwise, let her go to court, and provide evidence sufficient to persuade a judge and a jury of that person's peers that he/she is unfit to possess that ammunition, or the guns in which to shoot it.  That would be constitutional - but it would also be impossible, because in almost every case, no such evidence will exist.  That's why she and her ilk are choosing to ignore the rights of citizens and trample on the constitution, seeking to force citizens into subjection, denying their freedom.  That's why she's in favor of draconian, dictatorial "one-size-fits-all" measures that won't solve the so-called "gun violence" problem at all, because they limit the tool rather than the person wielding it.

As we all know, if a tool-wielder can't find one tool, he'll adopt another.  In this case, he won't even have to do that.  Ammunition will be freely available by crossing a state line, picking up a few boxes, and going back.  I won't be surprised to see a thriving ammunition smuggling business before long - perhaps exchanging grown-in-California marijuana for ammunition from the rest of the USA.  Given the success (NOT!) of federal, state and local authorities in the so-called "War on Drugs", I predict California's authorities will be no more successful in the "War on Ammo" that they appear to be hell-bent on starting.

Peter

Losers by any other name . . . are still losers

I must have lived a sheltered existence.  I had no idea that the so-called 'incel subculture' was a thing, until this week's terror attack in Toronto, and this article.

Hours before Alek Minassian drove a rented van onto a crowd in Toronto and killed 10 people, police say, a Facebook account linked to him announced, “The Incel Rebellion has already begun!” It praised “Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger,” a 22-year-old who killed six people in a stabbing-and-shooting spree in 2014.

“Incel,” or “involuntarily celibate,” isn’t so much a movement as a label used by a group of people drawn together by the same frustration — the inability to attract sexual partners — who blame their lack of conquests on the women who deny them sex and the men supposedly cornering the market.

Most people never heard the term before the Toronto attack, but it has been used for years in online forums. And it flags a culture we should take very seriously because of its potential for violence.

. . .

Toronto Sexuality Centre Director James Cantor says incel is not “some organization that is joined by some common principles” but rather “a group of people who usually lack sufficient social skills and they usually find themselves very frustrated.” This frustration is voiced on online forums, such as 4Chan and Incels.me, where angry men convince other angry men that their collective inability to land dates is a vast, unjust conspiracy.

“And when they’re surrounded by other people with similar frustrations, they kind of lose track of what typical discourse is, and they drive themselves into more and more extreme beliefs,” says Cantor.

Those beliefs include encouraging acid attacks, rape and murder in retribution for society’s failure to make sex easy for them.

There's more at the link.

That seems so warped and weird that I find it hard to wrap my mind around it . . . but it makes a certain weird kind of sense.  Most of us have a hard time admitting our own faults and failings.  I suppose someone who hasn't had much luck finding a girlfriend, much less losing his virginity, might prefer to blame women, or society, or the faceless, nameless "them", rather than himself - even if that makes no logical sense whatsoever.  Logic isn't the thing here, after all.  When men start thinking with their "other brain", the drives are anything but logical!

My biggest concern about that approach is that it removes humanity from the equation.  The person isn't important - only the act of sex.  To me, that's crazy.  I was brought up in a more old-fashioned family, to be sure, but I've always been attracted more to the person inside the body than to the shape or proportions of that body.  The most physically beautiful woman in the world would hold no charms for me if she turned out to be a foul-mouthed harridan.  I know a lot of men regard sexual access to a woman's body - "what" she is - as more important than appreciating and understanding "who" she is.  Perhaps "incel" is merely that attitude, taken to a deprivation-induced extreme.

One wonders whether there might not be a common root between men convinced that "incel" is a thing, and those who become fanatical Muslim terrorists.  After all, the latter culture also makes it very difficult, to the point of impossibility, to meet women and - in particular - to have sexual relations with them.  Some societies, including some versions of Islam, have developed work-arounds (e.g. the custom of "temporary marriage"), but many others haven't.  Is sexual frustration at the root of both varieties of violence?  Are the same kind of men attracted to both, for that reason?  I'm no expert, but that seems like a working hypothesis from where I sit.

Is there a female version of "incel" - i.e. women who get frustrated because they can't get men to have sexual relations with them?  If so, I've never heard of it.

Peter

Our police had a wild time yesterday

As I was filling our vehicle with gas before we left for our road trip yesterday, Miss D. and I witnessed an absolute flood of police vehicles charging through surface streets in our area, all ending up on Highway 287 heading east.  I personally counted no less than 15 cars and SUV's, all with lights and sirens, from the Texas Department of Public Safety, Wichita County Sheriff, a couple of local police departments, and a few unmarked units for good measure, all tearing up the tarmac.

Turns out they were involved in a very nasty incident involving a man and woman from Oklahoma.  This news report gives more details.  Briefly, the man kidnapped the woman, whom a local cop told me was his former girlfriend, allegedly on the principle that if he couldn't have her, no-one else would.  He forced her to drive with him from Norman, OK to Burkburnett, TX, where he had some sort of family connection.  Local cops were alerted, spotted his car, and the chase was on.  It ended five miles east of Vernon, TX, with the young lady stabbed several times, and the suspect deceased.

The young lady was reported (by the cop I spoke to) to be in very serious condition, but it appears her condition has been upgraded from critical to serious.  That's progress of a sort, I guess.  The man who kidnapped her won't be doing that again - or anything else, for that matter.  The local cops don't mess around.  If you pull a gun, you've just made yourself a target.  I can't disapprove of that attitude.

Please say a prayer for the young lady, and for the families involved, if you're so inclined.  This is the sort of trauma that some of them may never live down.

Peter

Yes, our civilization can fall, too

Borepatch embedded a very short, but very interesting analysis by Kenneth Clark on why Rome fell.  It's only two and a half minutes long, and well worth that much of your time to watch it.

Our modern civilization can fall, too, and in a surprisingly short time.  It's happened right before our eyes multiple times over the past half-century.  Think of the Soviet Union in the late 1980's, or Venezuela over the past five years.  It could happen even to the USA or Western Europe, if enough of the storm clouds gathering over either economy were to let loose.  (Think of what would happen if the US government, due to economic circumstances, were to stop providing Social Security and/or Medicaid to its citizens:  or, alternatively, if we did not act to stop illegal alien infiltration, and they did to the whole of the US economy what they've already done to California.  What would either and/or both of those events do to a very large part of our population?  And what would that imply for our society as a whole?)

Food for thought.

Peter

Back from the road

Miss D. and I headed down to Fort Worth today for a little official business, plus some "us"-time.  It's two-plus hours from here to there, so it's no trouble to go down and back in a day.

The official business didn't take long, so we looked for something interesting to see when we were done.  We ended up at the Texas Civil War Museum.  It has a large number of exhibits about the lives and equipment of regular soldiers on both sides, with emphasis on the (named) individuals who owned many of the items on display, including a surprising number of general officers.  Among their most prized exhibits are a cigar stub dropped by General U. S. Grant, the uniform jacket that he wore at Appomattox during the surrender discussions with Confederate General Robert E. Lee, and a very ornate presentation sword given to him by the state of Kentucky upon his selection as Commander-in-Chief of the Union armies.  I was surprised to see such important Union exhibits in a museum in what was a Confederate state, but there you are.  (There were a lot of Union exhibits, actually - as many as there were Confederate; a very balanced display.)

I was interested to find many variations on service rifles and muskets.  The most common rifled musket of the Civil War was the Springfield model of 1861, of which close to a million were produced for the Union Army before and during the conflict (many being captured and used by the Confederacy as well).  However, there were hundreds of thousands more of very similar models produced by other companies, plus imported rifles from England, plus limited production runs from small companies (on both sides) that have vanished into the gloom of history with little or nothing known about them.  Handguns, too, were produced in large numbers and bewildering variety.  The Texas Civil War Museum has examples of a lot of them, including some I'd never heard of.  To the naked, uninformed eye they look pretty similar, but to a gun nut firearms enthusiast, they're a treasure trove of detail and surprises.  (I was very pleased to find examples of just about every firearm I researched for, and mentioned in, my first Western novel, "Brings The Lightning".  I put a lot of effort into that, so it was a warm, comfortable sensation to see them all at first hand.)  There's also an artillery exhibit, including a 100-pounder smoothbore Dahlgren-type cannon manufactured by Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond in about 1863.  It was recovered from a shipwreck a few years ago.  If you're interested in the field, I recommend a visit to the Museum.

Heading home, we stopped in Decatur for a late lunch at Rooster's Roadhouse, on the square opposite the courthouse.  It describes itself as "Red Neck, White Trash, Blue Collar", and looks the part - but the menu was extensive, and the food delicious.  The "Big A" grilled cheese double burger proved irresistible:  two grilled cheese sandwiches, with a double cheeseburger in between.  Carb alarm!  We started with the intriguingly-named "Red Neck Sushi";  grilled BBQ pork and cheese, rolled into a sort of long tortilla-looking thing, sliced like a sushi roll, then served with BBQ sauce, a red onion marmalade, and a horseradish or Wasabi dipping sauce (we couldn't decide which it was, but it certainly had a bite to it!).  We were planning to finish with coffee and dessert from one of our favorite coffee shops, a few yards along the square, but we were so full we decided to leave that for another day.

We're back home, being informed by the cats in no uncertain terms that they didn't appreciate being abandoned for the day.  We'll get back to our normal routine tomorrow.

Peter

Road trip

Miss D. and I will be making a quick road trip today, so blogging will be sparse.  It's kinda hard to juggle the steering wheel and a smartphone when writing blog posts - or, as a passenger, writing posts while using the phone's navigation function!

Please enjoy the bloggers listed in the sidebar.  They write good stuff too!  I may put up an article later this afternoon or this evening, if we get back in time.  Otherwise, blogging will resume tomorrow.

Peter

America as naval superpower - are we putting our eggs in the wrong baskets?

I read an article in the National Interest with some skepticism. It's titled 'How to Make the U.S. Navy Great Again', and harks back to the attitudes of the Cold War, IMHO.  Here's an excerpt.

The United States has critical national interests in eighteen maritime zones identified by warfighting commanders. These maritime regions range in size from the small Gulf of Guinea to the vast northern Pacific and from the northern Arctic Sea to the Indian Ocean.

Each zone requires a naval presence to uphold American interests. Some of these zones, like the Baltic Sea, require only a single American ship to protect and promote our interests, while others, like the Arabian Gulf, have a standing requirement for an aircraft carrier strike group comprised of six to eight ships, as well as permanently stationed coastal patrol boats. Because of ship maintenance, crew training and transit times, providing a naval presence requires three to four ships to keep one forward deployed. All told, the Navy needs a minimum of 355 ships to keep a naval presence on a credible and persistent basis, if the United States wants to maintain freedom of navigation, protect resources and undersea critical infrastructure, and uphold its alliance agreements. The Navy certified the 355-ship requirement in its 2016 Force Structure Assessment (FSA). According to the FSA, the true number of ships required by military commanders exceeds 650 ships. Importantly, achieving the 355-ship fleet is not just a Navy requirement; it is a matter of complying with U.S. law. Signed by President Trump in December 2017, the defense authorization bill for fiscal year 2018 includes the SHIPS Act, legislation establishing the 355-ship requirement as the national policy of the United States.

. . .

America cannot retreat from the seas. Its maritime interests are enduring and growing. Great wealth in the form of food stocks, minerals and energy resources lies beneath the waves that find their way to our shores. Additionally, access to lines of communication via the swiftest and most efficient routes across international waters, as well as maritime linkages to forty-nine transoceanic treaty partners, are of critical interest to the United States.

The threat to those interests is growing. Despite a brief post–Cold War respite of calm seas, the maritime domain is once again seeing rough waters as an arena of economic, diplomatic and military competition. China, Russia and Iran have invested heavily in ways to keep the U.S. Navy out of critical maritime regions. They are increasingly challenging American maritime interests and finding no response. The inability to respond is driven by a collapse in the size of U.S. naval forces over the past quarter century. Our adversaries and potential opponents see all of this as an indicator of overall national decline and an invitation to assume a larger role upon the world’s oceans. They have just begun what ultimately could become a financially and strategically disastrous naval arms race in an attempt to overmatch U.S. forces in their regions.

There's much more at the link.  It makes interesting reading.

I see many problems with this approach.  They include (but are not limited to) the following.


1. The USA simply cannot afford to play global naval policeman as it did in the past.  Modern high-tech warships are very expensive, and their operating costs very high (particularly when maintenance is deferred to keep them at sea because there aren't enough ships, and there isn't enough money to maintain those we have).  Many of the geographical areas identified in the article should be patrolled by our allies and friends.  In effect, by spending far too little on their own defense, they're sponging off the US defense budget, and the US Navy's ships and personnel, to do their work for them.  This has to stop.  If they won't carry their share of the load, why should we?  Do we really want to dispute control of the South China Sea?  Why?  What compelling US national interest is involved there?  If the countries in the region want to dispute control of its natural resources with China, why are we doing so for them?  Why are we patrolling it instead of them?  Why should US ships and sailors be placed in harms way when they won't do so themselves?


2.  The US Navy has to get over its obsession with high-tech everything.  I accept that modern, high-tech offensive weapons can only be stopped by modern, high-tech defenses.  However, when the cost of that high tech becomes ruinous, it also becomes unsustainable (witness, for example, the debacle over the new Zumwalt class destroyers and their ammunition).  Nuclear submarines cost multiple billions of dollars each.  Destroyers approach $2 billion each.  Rail guns and laser beams are promising technology, but upgrading our ships' electrical generating capacity to use them will cost a fortune.  By spending so much on relatively few ships and advanced weapons, we're losing the numbers battle.  As the National Interest article observed:

From a naval perspective, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) is pursuing a mix of high-end and low-end ships and submarines. This strategy would allow the PLAN to spread out across the vast Pacific Ocean in sufficient numbers to locate and interdict U.S. ships. At the high end, China is investing in aircraft carriers, nuclear-powered fast-attack submarines and large surface combatants equipped with advanced radars, surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and surface-to-surface missiles. While China’s high-end ships are designed to go toe to toe with their American counterparts in battle, Beijing is unlikely to close the United States’ technological head start. Therefore, China is aiming to close the capability gap by fielding mass quantities of low-end ships.

While the United States will not start buying frigates until the 2020s, China is building a new frigate every six weeks. Vast numbers of these low-end ships will increasingly patrol China’s expanding front lines in the western Pacific and Indian Ocean regions. Backed by a growing arsenal of longer-range and more sophisticated air and missile weapons, the Chinese navy will have a highly capable and numerically larger maritime force by the middle of the next decade. If this situation comes to fruition, it could make the projection of U.S. naval power cost prohibitive in the western Pacific, undermining the credibility of our alliance commitments. Indeed, China currently calculates that western Pacific nations—South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and perhaps even Australia—may ultimately align with the Middle Kingdom.

Again, more at the link.

As Joseph Stalin is alleged to have observed, "Quantity has a quality all its own".  A 2002 war game proved that in the context of the Middle East.  Why has this lesson not been remembered by the US Navy?  For example, why is it so adamantly opposed to conventional, as opposed to nuclear-powered submarines?  The former are just as high-tech these days, and can be bought for a fraction of the cost of their atomic big brothers.  Why not buy three modern conventional subs (which are also more stealthy and harder to detect) instead of one nuke?


3.  The US government has to redefine the mission of the Navy in a post-Cold War era.  At present, too many overseas bases, deployments, etc. are based on the realities of opposing Communism and the Soviet threat.  If that threat is no longer what it was before, then should we not reconsider the requirements we place on our armed forces?  It may be that, if force projection into disputed areas was primarily an anti-Soviet measure, we don't need it as badly now that the Soviet Union is no longer around.


I'm not at all convinced by the arguments advanced in this article.  I'd rather see a hard reset on US Navy plans, construction, etc. until its mission has been more clearly defined and/or redefined, the ships it needs for that mission have been agreed, and its budget has been devoted to vessels and weapons and systems that will do the job, rather than gold-plated jobs lobbied for by special interests.

Peter