Civil War in Europe, Londonistan, and Appeasing Barbarism

There is talk here and here, of civil war in Europe. This talk is at least partially inspired by this book review in Asia Times Online by Spengler. From Spengler's book review of Melanie Phillips Londonistan:

She [Phillips] warns that the West faces a religious war with Islam. I concur, and recommend Londonistan as indispensable background.

Britain, Phillips warns, is reaping what it has sown. A large minority of British Muslims are disaffected at best and seditious at worst. Phillips cites a 2004 Home Office survey finding that 26% of British Muslims felt no loyalty to Britain, 13% supported terrorism, and about 1% (up to 20,000 individuals) were "actively engaged" in terrorism or support for terrorism.

Another poll found that 32% of British Muslims agreed that "Western society is decadent and immoral and that Muslims should seek to bring it to an end". In the event of a violent collision between the West and Iran, for example, civil conflict might arise in Britain on a scale resembling that in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.

Phillips accuses British security services with complicity in the gestation of a terrorist apparatus in London. Her documentation of overt terrorist activity centered in London is exhaustive, and raises the question of why the open scandal was tolerated. Saudi, Algerian and Egyptian requests for extradition of suspected terrorists were refused, and Arab diplomats vented their frustration over British recalcitrance in public.

A cynically narrow concept of national interest guided this policy, she argues, charging that MI6 (Military Intelligence Section 6, now officially known as the Secret Intelligence Service) believed "that if the Islamists were being left undisturbed to conduct their activities on the assumption that they would not then attack Britain".

But that can explain only part of the story, and Phillips searches for deeper causes of Britain's cowardice. "Denial" is a recurrent theme. She cites an unnamed "foreign intelligence source" as follows:

During the 1990s, many attempts were made to enlighten the British about what was happening. But they refused to see this problem as having a religious character. If this was a religious problem, it became a religious confrontation - and the specter of a religious war was too horrendous. A religious war is different from any other war because you are dealing with absolute beliefs and the room for compromise is very limited. Religious wars are very protracted and bloody, and often end up with a very high toll of lives.

That is not denial, though, but revulsion. The British establishment may have recoiled in horror from the prospect of religious war precisely because it has sufficient institutional memory to know just what such wars entail. Religious war, however, is precisely what it will have, on the worst possible terms, and with an extensive fifth column in place.

.... In any case, Western liberalism, including the sexual habits of English curates, does not appeal to Muslims. On the contrary, Phillips says:

British Muslims are overwhelmingly horrified and disgusted by the louche and dissolute behavior of a Britain that has torn up the notion of respectability. They observe the alcoholism, drug abuse and pornography, the breakdown of family life and the encouragement of promiscuity, and find themselves there in opposition to their host society's guiding values. What they are recoiling from, of course, is the breakdown of Western values. After a visit to the United States in 1948, Sayed Qutb wrote: "Humanity today is living in a large brothel!"

Revulsion and contempt color Muslim attitudes toward the British leftists who most desire to appease them. That is not a recipe for co-existence but for escalation, as last year's subway bombings should have made clear. But the issue now is not terrorism but rather outright war.

The British authorities may have turned a blind eye to terrorism directed against others, and may even have dragged their feet at confronting the terrorist threat at home that erupted in the July 7, 2005, subway bombings. Terrorism is dreadful but, like many nasty things, one can develop a tolerance for it. Now it is not merely terrorism that the West confronts but a strategic debacle of intolerable proportions in the form of Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons.

In that sense Melanie Phillips' book comes too late, for it reports a set of circumstances shortly to be overthrown by events. She is writing about 1938, and we are entering 1939, when the West will have to respond to an external challenge in a way that it never could to an internal threat. Britain will have the religious war it sought to dodge.

Londonistan by Melanie Phillips. Encounter Books: New York 2006. ISBN: 1594031444. Price: US$25.95, 213 pages.

For more information by and about Melanie Phillips, read this interview, or this article by Ms. Phillips.

Here is a short excerpt from the excellent interview linked above:

FP: What is your perspective of the alliance of the Left and radical Islamism?

Phillips: It’s remarkable, to put it mildly, that the left – with its obsessions with issues like gay rights, equality for women and sexual licence – should have forged an alliance with radical Islamists who preach death to gays, the subjugation of women and the stoning of adulterers. It is an eye-opener to see, on the streets of London, so-called ‘progressives’ marching shoulder to shoulder with radical Islamists under the metaphorical banner of human rights and the literal banners of Hamas. Both the left and the radical Islamists have put aside their differences because they recognise the value of using each other in pursuit of their common objective, the destruction of western society.

In other, less topsy-turvy times, the rest of the country would have raised an eyebrow at such an alliance and at the noxious views it is spewing out, which in turn so closely reflect the views of neo-fascist groups and white supremacists: hatred of Israel, Judeophobic tropes about a global Jewish conspiracy that endangers the world, loathing of capitalism and America. But alas, such is the extent of Britain’s moral and cultural slide, and so poisonous has been the effect of the opposition to the war in Iraq, that far from being denounced such views are finding expression in mainstream society and public debate. Source.

She also comments in the interview about the link between political correctness, multiculturalism, and appeasement in the face of unspeakable barbarity.

Does Western Civilisation have a Multicultural Obligation to Commit Suicide?

The latest Fjordman Report is a hard hitting piece that looks at the political correctness and multiculturalism movements in the west, and traces their origins to the early part of the 20th century. Paragraph by paragraph, Fjordman exposes the ascendancy of this anti-western philosophy within key sectors of western societies, and the dangerous vulnerability it brings to the western world.

I have heard people who have grown up in former Communist countries say that we in the West are at least as brainwashed by Multiculturalism and Political Correctness as they ever were with Communism, perhaps more so. Even in the heyday of the East Bloc, there were active dissident groups in these countries. The scary thing is, I sometimes believe they are right.

....At the very least, the people living in the former Communist countries knew and admitted that they were taking part in a gigantic social experiment, and that the media and the authorities were serving them propaganda to shore up support for this project. Yet in the supposedly free West, we are taking part in a gigantic social experiment of Multiculturalism and Muslim immigration every bit as radical, utopian and potentially dangerous as Communism, seeking to transform our entire society from top to bottom, and still we refuse to even acknowledge that this is going on.

In Norway, a tiny Scandinavian nation that was until recently 99% white and Lutheran Christian, native Norwegians will soon be a minority in their own capital city, later in the whole country. And still, Norwegian politicians, journalists and University professors insist that there is nothing to worry about over this. Multiculturalism is nothing new, neither is immigration. In fact, our king a century ago was born in Denmark, so having a capital city dominated by Pakistanis, Kurds, Arabs and Somalis is just business as usual. The most massive transformation of the country in a thousand years, probably in recorded history, is thus treated as if it were the most natural thing in the world. To even hint that there might be something wrong about this has been immediately shouted down as “racism.”

....In Germany, Hans-Peter Raddatz in his book “Allahs Frauen” (Allah’s Women) dissects the destructive attitude of Multiculturalism that is shared by many civil servants, journalists, politicians and lawyers in Germany and the EU. In particular, he documents how the German Green Party has a program for dismantling and dissolving the Christian “Leitkultur,” or common culture, that so far has been the foundation of Germany and the West. Raddatz thinks that the decades of Muslim immigration are used as an instrument for breaking down the institutions, norms and ideas that the Left has earlier tried to break down through economics. From powerful positions in the media, public institutions and the system of education, these Multiculturalists are working on a larger project of renewing a Western civilization that, according to them, has failed.

....Much of the political Left is simply engaged in outing their opponents as evil, instead of rationally arguing against their ideas. Attaching labels such as “racist” or even “Fascist” to anyone criticizing massive immigration or Multiculturalism has become so common that Norwegian anti-Islamists have coined a new word for it: “Hitling,” which could be roughly translated to English as “to make like Hitler.” The logic behind “hitling” is a bit like this: “You have a beard. Adolf Hitler had facial hair, too, so you must be like Hitler. Adolf Hitler liked dogs. You have pets, too, you must be like Hitler. Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian. You like carrots, you are just like Hitler.”

Any “right-winger” can be slimed with such accusations. Curiously enough, the reverse is almost never true. Although Marxism may have killed 100 million people during the 20th century and failed in every single society in which it has ever been tried out, there seems to be little stigma attached to being a Leftist. The fact that Leftists can get away with this and claim to hold the moral high ground amply demonstrates that we didn’t win the Cold War. We let our guard down after the fall of the Berlin Wall and never properly denounced the ideology behind it. This is now coming back to haunt us.

One member of an anti-immigration party in Britain stated that to be called racist in 21st-century Britain is “the same as being branded a witch in the Middle Ages.” He’s probably right, which means that anti-racism has quite literally become a modern witch-hunt. Source.

It is a very long piece, but copiously documented, packed with links to important sources of information.

Just a few minutes of listening to the debate on the Islamist threat between the blase far left, and the concerned middle to middle right, will tell you that Political Correctness and multiculturalism are weakening the spirit of western civilisation against the primitive would-be conquerors. With universities and newsrooms packed with anti-western multiculturalists, clearly the underlying idea is to train future generations to despise the west in schools, and current generations to despise the west in the mass media.

Although no civilisation has ever been perfect, the incredible superiority of western civilisation over every previous and other current civilisations should not be in doubt by anyone with a knowledge of history and current events. Unfortunately, students are not being taught history or current events, but rather a pablumized concoction of multicultural fiction that bears no relationship to the real world. Mainstream media cannot afford to be so blatant as college professors, given the real world experience of most consumers, but still manage to achieve the same effect with time.

What is Wrong with Arabs?

Arabs are lagging in education, economy, democracy and freedom of expression, and computers. 2003—In Arab countries, with a combined population of 284 million, a “best seller” may have a print run of just 5,000 copies, due to censorship and other constraints on independent publishers. Translations of foreign works into Arabic lag far behind figures in the rest of the world: five times more books are translated yearly into Greek, a language spoken by just 11 million people, than into Arabic. Just 53 newspapers per 1,000 citizens are published daily in the region, compared to 285 papers per 1,000 people in the developed nations, and there are only 18 computers per 1,000 people in the Arab world, as compared to the global average of 78 per 1,000.

The first Arab Human Development Report in 2002 was a bombshell dropped onto the entire arab world. The report notes that while oil income has transformed the landscapes of some Arab countries, the region remains "richer than it is developed." Per capita income growth has shrunk in the last 20 years to a level just above that of sub-Saharan Africa. Productivity is declining. Research and development are weak or nonexistent. Science and technology are dormant.

Intellectuals flee a stultifying -- if not repressive -- political and social environment, it says.

Arab women, the report found, are almost universally denied advancement. Half of them still cannot read or write. The maternal mortality rate is double that of Latin America and four times that of East Asia.

The followup report in 2003 showed the situation to be no better. A group of Arab intellectuals issued a report yesterday that found the Arab world lacking in three areas they deemed fundamental to development: freedom of expression, access to knowledge and women's rights.
The group, criticized by Arab officials for a similar report last year, said the challenges caused by the deficiencies "may have become even graver" since 2002.
After dismal reports in 2002, 2003, and 2004, the UN HDR appears to have given up on the arab world. Who can blame them? Since World War II, the Arab world has lagged the rest of the planet in economic growth. For example, 300 million Arabs, and all that oil, generate less economic activity than Spain, and its population of 40 million. The main problem has been bad government. Too many dictators, and too much government restrictions on the economy. Too much corruption and waste. Even higher oil prices don't help, as it simply provides more money to be wasted on consumption, rather than business investment.

An Economist article, titled "Self-Doomed to Failure," captures the pathetic state of the arab world. The barrier to better Arab performance is not a lack of resources, concludes the report, but the lamentable shortage of three essentials: freedom, knowledge and womanpower. Not having enough of these amounts to what the authors call the region's three “deficits”. It is these deficits, they argue, that hold the frustrated Arabs back from reaching their potential—and allow the rest of the world both to despise and to fear a deadly combination of wealth and backwardness.

•Freedom. This deficit, in the UNDP's interpretation, explains many of the fundamental things that are wrong with the Arab world: the survival of absolute autocracies; the holding of bogus elections; confusion between the executive and the judiciary (the report points out the close linguistic link between the two in Arabic); constraints on the media and on civil society; and a patriarchal, intolerant, sometimes suffocating social environment.

The area is rich in all the outward trappings of democracy. Elections are held and human-rights conventions are signed. But the great wave of democratisation that has opened up so much of the world over the past 15 years seems to have left the Arabs untouched. Democracy is occasionally offered, but as a concession, not as a right.


....•Knowledge. “If God were to humiliate a human being,” wrote Imam Ali bin abi Taleb in the sixth century, “He would deny him knowledge.” Although the Arabs spend a higher percentage of GDP on education than any other developing region, it is not, it seems, well spent. The quality of education has deteriorated pitifully, and there is a severe mismatch between the labour market and the education system. Adult illiteracy rates have declined but are still very high: 65m adults are illiterate, almost two-thirds of them women. Some 10m children still have no schooling at all.

One of the gravest results of their poor education is that the Arabs, who once led the world in science, are dropping ever further behind in scientific research and in information technology. Investment in research and development is less than one-seventh of the world average. Only 0.6% of the population uses the Internet, and 1.2% have personal computers.

....•Women's status. The one thing that every outsider knows about the Arab world is that it does not treat its women as full citizens. The report sees this as an awful waste: how can a society prosper when it stifles half its productive potential? After all, even though women's literacy rates have trebled in the past 30 years, one in every two Arab women still can neither read nor write. Their participation in their countries' political and economic life is the lowest in the world.

Governments and societies (and sometimes, as in Kuwait, societies and parliamentarians are more backward than their governments) vary in the degrees of bad treatment they mete out to women. But in nearly all Arab countries, women suffer from unequal citizenship and legal entitlements. The UNDP has a “gender-empowerment measure” which shows the Arabs near the bottom (according to this measure, sub-Saharan Africa ranks even worse). But the UN was able to measure only 14 of the 22 Arab states, since the necessary data were not available in the others. This, as the report says, speaks for itself, reflecting the general lack of concern in the region for women's desire to be allowed to get on.

...With so many paths closed to them, some are now turning their dangerous anger on the western world.

Meanwhile in an ethnically divided Iraq with sectarian divisions, the first tentative steps have been taken toward democracy, as the rest of the arab world looks on with a wary curiousity. A few cautious voices believe that, in time, the Iraqi elections will put pressure on neighboring countries to democratize.

In Cairo, Hisham Qassem, chairman of a human rights organization and chief executive officer of a new Arab daily newspaper, believes that both the Iraqi and Palestinian elections have given impetus to democratic reform.
"Once people feel there are positive effects from the democratic process, they will want the same. Especially countries like Egypt who felt they were ahead of Iraq but are now lagging behind,” he said. Many arabs must be wondering if it takes an emasculating invasion from abroad and low level civil war to bring democracy to an arab country.

It takes more than democracy to bring the arab world out of the stone age. It will take economic reform. Since Saddam was tossed out in 2003, the economy has been governed by Western rules. As a result, GDP per capita doubled by the end of 2005, and the GDP is expected to grow another 49 percent by 2008. All this despite continued attacks by Sunni Arab rebels on oil facilities and other economic targets. It's much easier to start a business in Iraq now, even though there's still a lot of corruption. The big change is that now the corruption is illegal, and there is even progress in prosecuting the government officials who take bribes or try to shake down businessmen. Lebanon is the only other Arab state to run its economy in a Western fashion, and they have thrived.

It takes education reform and freedom of expression and the press. It will take implementation of full freedoms for women. Finally, it will take religious reform. Stone aged customs, traditions, and religious restrictions virtually guarantee that arabs will remain backward, laggards of the world.

Update: Here is more from a recent World Bank report. Arabs living in the middle east and north africa are oddly resistant to modernisation and transitioning out of the stone age. Very strange, when you see how successful arabs can be when they migrate to a free environment. I suppose blaming the US and Israel will gain them at least another half century of stone age existence.

Is Europe Burning? Effect of Islam

A recent opinion poll in Germany points out a growing distrust between the native German population, and the muslim immigrants whose culture is so different, and in many ways, so violent. Given the growing feelings of antagonism between the modern indigenous people of Germany, and the growing numbers of mostly third world immigrants from primitive cultures, it appears inevitable that serious conflict looms in the future for Germany.

Germans' esteem for Islam has been falling since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, with 83 percent of the 1,076 Germans questioned in the survey agreeing with the statement that Islam is driven by fanaticism. That amount was 10 percent higher than two years ago. A majority, 71 percent, said they believed Islam to be "intolerant," up from 66 percent.

When asked what they associate with the word "Islam," 91 percent of respondents connected the religion to the discrimination of women, and 61 percent called Islam "undemocratic." Eight percent of Germans associated "peacefulness" with Islam.

It is not only Germany that is affected, of course. Everywhere modern European cultures are hosts to rapidly growing numbers of culturally primitive immigrants, conflict appears, and crime rates increase.

....While 65 percent of those charged with rape are classed as coming from a non-western background, this segment makes up only 14.3 percent of Oslo's population. Norwegian women were the victims in 80 percent of the cases, with 20 percent being women of foreign background.

...68% of all rapes committed this year the perpetrator was from an ethnic minority, leading Muslim organisations have now formed an alliance to fight the ever-growing problem of young second and third-generation immigrants involved in rape cases against young Danish girls.

....The number of rape charges in Sweden has tripled in just above twenty years. Rape cases involving children under the age of 15 are six - 6 - times as common today as they were a generation ago.

...in more cosmopolitan centers like Paris and Australia, the game is blossoming. It consists in the ritual gang rape of white women by non-white immigrants....The ritual is known as a “tournante,” meaning “Take your turn,” and it consists of a black male becoming “friendly with” (seducing) a white female, preferably a teenager. Once they’ve become chums, the male lures the girl to a location where his buddies in the gang “take their turns” with her. Look here for links to above stories.

There appears to be a pattern of sorts, where young immigrant muslim males are placed in close proximity to more liberated European young women. There is very little cultural common ground, for peaceful interaction. You may blame this group or that group, this nation or that nation, this politician or that politician--but in the end the tragedy continues growing. You have not solved anything, you have only dispensed your blame.

It would seem extremely prudent for immigration authorities to confront these patterns of growing distrust and violence between the two cultures, and to halt new immigration from these cultures that are proving incompatible with native European cultures. Any other course of action clearly leads to worsening conflict, and perhaps genocidal violence.

Academics, think tank authors, and government bureaucrats who study these issues can take all the time they wish to issue their "authoritative reports," so long as the underlying cause of this growing violence is curtailed. Some cultures cannot coexist in the same time and place. Face the fact. Admit it. Do something about it.

Dreams of Lost Arab Glory: Living the "Long War"

The US president Bush has chosen to make a stand in the desert country of Iraq. A curious choice perhaps? Afghanistan made more sense on the surface of things. Disrupting the jihadists' base of operations and training was logical. No more large scale jihadi terror attacks have taken place. The Madrid and London train bombings were much more modest in scale, more local in execution. The world jihad movement appears in disarray, under attack even in Saudi Arabia, the very heartland of jihad.

Iraq sits atop large oil reserves, but the oil production infrastructure is so decrepit in Iraq, that gearing up oil production there may take decades. Do Bush and his neo-con friends actually plan for decades in advance? In that period of time anything at all might happen. It is certainly more likely that their goals are more proximate.

Is Iraq truly part of the global jihad? Before Saddam's Baathist was toppled, what part did Iraq play in the global jihad? Was it truly necessary to invade and disrupt the center of the Arab world, the most powerful arab nation, the flagship nation of arab ambition?

Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya function as jihadist institutions of propaganda. These satellite networks appear to conflate jihadist ambitions with the goals of the arab world. It is as if much of the elite in the arab world have taken sides with the jihadists. When did this happen? Before Saddam's removal? Before September 11, 2001? Before the Gulf War of 1990/1991?

If one looks carefully at the history of the arabs, and the history of jihadist Islam, there appears to be a waxing and waning along parallel paths for the two entities. There is an unhealthy interdependency between arabs as a culture and jihadist Islam as a movement. The September 11 attacks were merely one more group of attacks in a long series of jihadist attacks dating back to the mid 20th century. Before that, there were other clusters of attacks going back millenia in time. A waxing and waning of the jihidast movement, along with arab cultural ambitions.

The glory days of the arabs was during the height of the jihadist wars, before the Mongols and the Turks subdued the arabs. After the Turks, the European colonials divided the arab lands. Arabs have been humiliated for centuries now. The tide appears to be turning, since the newfound oil wealth of the 20th century is finding its way to devout and fanatical believers in the oil rich societies. The wealth is being diverted to those who show an aptitude for indoctrinating the young to jihad, and supplying them with weapons of mass murder. Every nation in the world where a mosque is located is also the cradle of jihadist indoctrination. Infiltration, subterfuge, covert preparation for jihad.

Under the rule of law in developed nations, there is really no way to stop this process. Combining the stealth infiltration of jihadist indoctrination with the cultural decline of the west, and demographic trends of high birthrates among muslim immigrants and low birthrates among indigenous non-muslims, and one can see that Europe's days are rapidly slipping away. Europe is destined to come under Islamic subjugation within decades.

What about the Anglosphere? What about North America and Oceania? What about Japan, Korea, India, Thailand, and Singapore? There will be outposts of free thought, of rational activity, long after Europe surrenders.

The US and the UK have chosen to confront the jihadist in the heartland of Islam. Realizing perhaps that direct experience of war with the jihadist was the only way to toughen their troops enough for the long war ahead, the US and UK chose to take the war to the place that they knew the jihadists could not ignore, the center of the Sunni arab pride.

Some say the purpose was to bring democracy to the arab lands. That may have been a long shot gamble, a side purpose. Others say the purpose was access to oil. But we have seen how far in the future any meaningful oil production in Iraq will be. More likely the purpose was to bring a familiarity with the jihadist tactics to the military commanders, in preparation for the inevitable conflict to come. Europe's leaders had already decided on surrender long before September 11. There was no question of Europe preparing for the long war. The will to fight against oppression had been drained from Europeans half a century ago.

The post-modern concept of war is that all war is immoral. Any justification for war is mere obfuscation, excuses by the ruling classes to shed the blood of the underclasses for their own gain. This is the wisdom of the post-modernist in regard to war. There is no real post-modern wisdom regarding oppression originating from third world entities such as the jihadists. Such a thing is considered unlikely in the extreme and not worth analysing. That is the weakness of the post-modern. Ideological hatred for western civilisation to the point of denying the uniqueness and liberating aspects of western civilisation, while simultaneously denying the barbarism and mindless homicidal tendencies of virtually every other civilisation ever known to history.

Iraq is a target of opportunity. Iraq was invaded because Iraq was there, at a particular time and place and state of being. Iraq was chosen by Bush as a place to make a stand. It was a multitude of gambles thrown together in one large toss of the dice. A monumental disruption to the overall scheme of things, such a challenge as not to be ignored by the jihadist, or the arab supremacists who stand one hundred strong behind every single jihadist.

Western civilisation is the cradle of the next level. No other civilisation has approached to a fraction of the enlightenment of the west. All other civilisations have been based on slavery and arbitrary justice, and a far less favorable balance of power between groups and classes, than western civilisation.

Next level humans will be more intelligent. They will live ten times longer. They will balance their emotional brains with their rational brains. They will not fight wars because they will not have to. They will understand the underlying dynamics of power far better than primitive and between-levels humans.

The anti-jihadist wars may be the last wars that enlightened humans will be forced to fight. Forced to fight for the sake of the next civilisation to come. As they say, a war to end war. For that to be true, modern humans must forsake much of their leisure for the sake of learning and growth.

Link to original Al Fin article.

Arabs--Unworthy Guardians of Mecca?

Mecca has always been our locus. Islam was incomplete until Mecca embraced it. Muhammad willed himself to live only as long as Mecca was not his. For forteen hundred years we have gone to Mecca in search of God, in fulfillment of duty. We have assured that the pilgrim's path to Mecca be unimpeded. We have stepped in the footprints of Abraham in Mecca. We have kissed the black stone of Mecca. We have stoned the devil in Mecca. We have killed those like Hallaj who dared to make a Mecca in their backyard. We have told stories about the invincibility of Mecca - how no birds fly directly over the Kaba; how even an army of elephants were rent asunder on the plains outside Mecca; attempted to prove how Mecca is the center of the universe; how Adam first landed in Mecca (and not Sri Lanka); how Mecca is our everything. Source.

You can read here and here, where the Saudis are desecrating holy sites within Mecca and Medina. This problem is well known, and is one of many complaints that devout muslims have against the house of Saud, and its guardianship of the holy cities. It is not merely the house of Saud that is unworthy, however. It is actually the entire group of people known as "arabs."

Islam has outgrown the arabs, and is in need of a more cosmopolitan outlook. Wahabis and terrorists are all that arab muslims seems capable of producing. This gives Islam a bad name to the rest of the world, and induces antaqonism among the masses of unbelievers.

It is unlikely that the Qu'ran was dictated word for word in arabic to Muhammed. The Prophet was illiterate and incapable of writing or reading. It is more likely that over time the Prophet's spoken words were copied by scribes, with frequent transcription errors through the years. Recent German scholarship appears to substantiate this commonsense view.

Given that arabs are laggards of the world, and desecrators of the holy places, is it not better for the torch to be passed to more civilised muslim people? Another language can be chosen as a standard for the Qu'ran, a language spoken by more civilised people than the arabs, by a more successful and enlightened people, such as the Turks.

Turkey was the home of the most recent world caliphate, and as the most modern muslim nation on earth, Turkey is still the logical guardian of the holy places Mecca and Medina. The house of Saud may keep its dwindling oil, such as is left, but what matters is that Islam is in stable and worthy hands.

Furthermore, Mecca and Medina should be guarded by international troops, to establish the global importance of these cities. There will be no more denying of entry to non-muslims to the holy sites. That is the type of bigotry and prejudice which creates antagonism against Islam in the hearts of otherwise peaceful unbelievers.

Arabs have had over a thousand years to prove themselves worthy guardians of holy places. They have failed miserably. It is time for the torch of guardianship to pass.

American Military Supremacy: Can it Last?

For many decades, hecklers have been predicting the end of american economic and military dominance. Several candidates have come forward to take the crown from the US, including the USSR, Japan, the EU, and now China. But the USSR fell apart, Japan is imploding from low birthrates, the EU has no military power to back up its bluster, and only China is still hanging in there--so the jury is still out. It is also true that Russia still has many hundreds of nuclear warheads that could be aimed at North American targets. What are the facts regarding current nuclear strategic balance in the world?

In a very recent issue of Foreign Affairs, Keir Lieber and Daryl Press presented the article "The Rise of US Nuclear Primacy," in which they claim that the US nuclear deterrent is overwhelmingly capable of destroying either China or Russia in an all out exchange, while suffering very little damage to the North American continent.

Since the Cold War's end, the U.S. nuclear arsenal has significantly improved. The United States has replaced the ballistic missiles on its submarines with the substantially more accurate Trident II D-5 missiles, many of which carry new, larger-yield warheads. The U.S. Navy has shifted a greater proportion of its SSBNs to the Pacific so that they can patrol near the Chinese coast or in the blind spot of Russia's early warning radar network. The U.S. Air Force has finished equipping its B-52 bombers with nuclear-armed cruise missiles, which are probably invisible to Russian and Chinese air-defense radar. And the air force has also enhanced the avionics on its B-2 stealth bombers to permit them to fly at extremely low altitudes in order to avoid even the most sophisticated radar. Finally, although the air force finished dismantling its highly lethal MX missiles in 2005 to comply with arms control agreements, it is significantly improving its remaining ICBMs by installing the MX's high-yield warheads and advanced reentry vehicles on Minuteman ICBMs, and it has upgraded the Minuteman's guidance systems to match the MX's accuracy.

...Even as the United States' nuclear forces have grown stronger since the end of the Cold War, Russia's strategic nuclear arsenal has sharply deteriorated. Russia has 39 percent fewer long-range bombers, 58 percent fewer ICBMs, and 80 percent fewer SSBNs than the Soviet Union fielded during its last days. The true extent of the Russian arsenal's decay, however, is much greater than these cuts suggest. What nuclear forces Russia retains are hardly ready for use. Russia's strategic bombers, now located at only two bases and thus vulnerable to a surprise attack, rarely conduct training exercises, and their warheads are stored off-base. Over 80 percent of Russia's silo-based ICBMs have exceeded their original service lives, and plans to replace them with new missiles have been stymied by failed tests and low rates of production. Russia's mobile ICBMs rarely patrol, and although they could fire their missiles from inside their bases if given sufficient warning of an attack, it appears unlikely that they would have the time to do so.

The third leg of Russia's nuclear triad has weakened the most. Since 2000, Russia's SSBNs have conducted approximately two patrols per year, down from 60 in 1990. (By contrast, the U.S. SSBN patrol rate today is about 40 per year.) Most of the time, all nine of Russia's ballistic missile submarines are sitting in port, where they make easy targets. Moreover, submarines require well-trained crews to be effective. Operating a ballistic missile submarine -- and silently coordinating its operations with surface ships and attack submarines to evade an enemy's forces -- is not simple. Without frequent patrols, the skills of Russian submariners, like the submarines themselves, are decaying. Revealingly, a 2004 test (attended by President Vladimir Putin) of several submarine-launched ballistic missiles was a total fiasco: all either failed to launch or veered off course. The fact that there were similar failures in the summer and fall of 2005 completes this unflattering picture of Russia's nuclear forces.

Compounding these problems, Russia's early warning system is a mess. Neither Soviet nor Russian satellites have ever been capable of reliably detecting missiles launched from U.S. submarines. (In a recent public statement, a top Russian general described his country's early warning satellite constellation as "hopelessly outdated.") Russian commanders instead rely on ground-based radar systems to detect incoming warheads from submarine-launched missiles. But the radar network has a gaping hole in its coverage that lies to the east of the country, toward the Pacific Ocean. If U.S. submarines were to fire missiles from areas in the Pacific, Russian leaders probably would not know of the attack until the warheads detonated. Russia's radar coverage of some areas in the North Atlantic is also spotty, providing only a few minutes of warning before the impact of submarine-launched warheads.

Moscow could try to reduce its vulnerability by finding the money to keep its submarines and mobile missiles dispersed. But that would be only a short-term fix. Russia has already extended the service life of its aging mobile ICBMs, something that it cannot do indefinitely, and its efforts to deploy new strategic weapons continue to flounder. The Russian navy's plan to launch a new class of ballistic missile submarines has fallen far behind schedule. It is now highly likely that not a single new submarine will be operational before 2008, and it is likely that none will be deployed until later.

Even as Russia's nuclear forces deteriorate, the United States is improving its ability to track submarines and mobile missiles, further eroding Russian military leaders' confidence in Russia's nuclear deterrent. (As early as 1998, these leaders publicly expressed doubts about the ability of Russia's ballistic missile submarines to evade U.S. detection.) Moreover, Moscow has announced plans to reduce its land-based ICBM force by another 35 percent by 2010; outside experts predict that the actual cuts will slice 50 to 75 percent off the current force, possibly leaving Russia with as few as 150 ICBMs by the end of the decade, down from its 1990 level of almost 1,300 missiles. The more Russia's nuclear arsenal shrinks, the easier it will become for the United States to carry out a first strike.

The authors similarly argue that China's nuclear forces are hopelessly outclassed by the US, and will remain so for "the next decade."

No doubt the authors stand in awe of that phrase "the next decade", although I doubt that Pentagon planners are at all reassured. In fact, as serious as the threat from North Korea, Islamic terror, and Iranian insanity may be, without the spectre of China in the background, the muslim and North Korean problems would be manageable for decades. If you toss China into the mix, nothing is certain.

The authors are correct that US nuclear (and conventional) technology is currently superior enough to that of US large power rivals, that for now they can not seriously consider a direct challenge to US peacekeeping anywhere in the world. That may not continue to be the case with US presidents of a different type than Bush.

We saw during the 1990s that the US allowed China very wide latitude in accessibility to advanced nuclear technology--which allowed China to make up decades of research in only a few years. With a new president possessing similarly soft attitudes toward China, and with at least another decade of the huge trade surpluses that China has maintained, and China could easily put itself into a position to challenge US hegemony--at least in East Asia. The true test of the new hegemony would be the conquest of Taiwan.

As impressive as the Lieber/Press article may be, it fails to address the true reality of the situation, given a change in political power in the US. It is only the energy and determination of the current US administration that has allowed the US to maintain the current technological gap in nucear weapons with China. When that gap is allowed to close by less vigilant administrations, the world will return to MAD--mutually assured destruction--and the nightmares of the 50s, 60s, and 70s.

Inequality, Communism, and Civilisation

Historian Will Durant addressed the origin of communism back in the dawn of human time. Communism was one of the original organising principles of human societies. From ancient North America to Peru to India to Borneo and the South Seas, primitive people held land and property in common, except for items of personal use. As long as living was precarious, and wealth scarce, communism proved a viable system for small and relatively isolated groups.

When trade between groupings and geographic regions became more prevalent, shock waves rushed through these placid islands of communist complacency. Trade brought currency and profit, emphasizing the concept of private belongings and properties. The natural inequality between people asserted itself in this new and uneasy economic environment. Some people and clans fell more easily into the role of trader and merchant. Thus the hated bourgeoise was born, and class warfare began. Agriculture likewise introduced the concept of surplus and profit, and different families and clans proved more efficient in the use of land than others--more illustration of natural inequality.

Before trade and agriculture, there was nothing that could be called civilisation. With trade, cities formed, and people specialised into different trades and professions. Priesthoods and nobility arose from questionable foundations, as did the warfare class. Artists and proto-scientists and mathematicians began to fill inevitable needs introduced by trade, and to create new needs. Surplus and profit among one group will breed envy and greed in other groups. Generals and kings wanted to skim the profit to wage wars of conquest or defense. Priests wanted their share for "the gods." Bureaucrats and functionaries of the state needed money to feed their families. Finally, those not blessed with good position, trade skills, merchant skills, and farming skills, resented the growing inequality of wealth between themselves and the rulers, priests, merchants, and tradesmen.

If inequality grew too great, and the deprived peoples grew too large, there was rebellion, or revolution. Rulers promising a more equitable division of resources gained a following, and gained power where they could. The new rulers would attempt to placate the people however they could, but if the society was to survive and not be overrun by more prosperous and ambitious neighbor clans/tribes/societies, even the new populist rulers were eventually forced to allow private property for farmers, merchants, and tradesmen. At that point, natural inequality between people once again asserted itself, and wealth inequality once again grew as large as ever, if not greater.

This cycle has repeated itself many times over the millenia--it did not originate with Marx and Lenin. It will not end with fools such as Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales. It is a natural cycle, like the seasons, like the climate.

Wiser people who are not power grabbers will look into the deeper undercurrents of human action, as proven by history, and anticipate the actions of the opportunistic power grabbers such as Castro, Kim, Chavez and the like. Knowing that these greedy but crowd-flattering idiots only sow the seeds of future, greater hardship, sometimes wiser persons will be able to head off the more foolish of the masses. But this is sadly rare.

Communism and equality are compatible with each other, but not with civilisation. This is something the people of Eastern Europe discovered, as did enough of the people of Russia. The rulers of China were intelligent enough to open the doors to trade, allowing civilisation in China to return after the bloody cultural revolution. Their long range intentions are by no means understood by the outside, however.

If you want communism and equality, you had best find an isolated island without very much wealth, and outlaw trade. Your people may starve in bad years, as in politically oppressed regions of Africa, but that is the price to be paid for ideology, n'est pas?

Schools vs. Juvenile Detention: Is There a Difference?

I recently learned about a growing trend in western schools: attacks on teachers, called "happy slapping."

A female teacher from a high school in Porcheville was attacked by one of her students, while another one was recording the scene with the cam on his cell phone.

Suddenly, with no reasons, a "jeune" (= young man = criminal, usually with extra-european origins, not necessarily young - copyright political correctness) throws himself on the teacher, and attacks her violently. Another student doesn’t miss anything of the scene, and records it with his cell phone’s camera.

The video was instantly spread in the neighborhood’s cité (France’s Islam’s colonies) Val-Fourré, and caused an unhealthy excitation.

Recently, French teachers working in high immigration suburbs went on strike due to rising rates of attacks against teachers by immigrant children. The article is interesting, pointing to teacher's union complicity in maintaining an atmosphere conducive to attacks on teachers.

Violence against teachers is ongoing in the UK, the US, and even in Canada.

Government schools are less and less places of education, and more and more places for babysitting overgrown children with no useful skills or knowledge, or more explicitly--juvenile detention centers. Busy working parents need a place to plant their children while they work and commute, and if they feel they cannot afford to send them to a school to be educated, they "place" them in a government school, for "safekeeping". In the short term, this saves them money.

A family, like a society, gets back what they put in. In a world where North American graduates must compete with increasingly sophisticated graduates from India, China, Eastern Europe, and other countries, allowing the schools to continue on their present dysfunctional course does not seem wise. Realistically, though, the education system is completely entrenched--it cannot be reformed. The system is standing in the way of progress and will not be moved.

Dead Poets Society--School as Suicide Pact

One of the most stimulating and enlightening books on education is freely available online--"The Underground History of American Education." It has been praised by persons from almost every conceivable ideological viewpoint. It is uncomfortable to read, sometimes painful. Similar to childbirth, in a way.

Soon after I began teaching Moby Dick I realized the school edition wasn’t a real book but a kind of disguised indoctrination providing all the questions, a scientific addition to the original text designed to make the book teacher-proof and student-proof. If you even read those questions (let alone answered them) there would be no chance ever again for a private exchange between you and Melville; the invisible editor would have preempted it.

The editors of the school edition provided a package of prefabricated questions and more than a hundred chapter-by-chapter abstracts and interpretations of their own. Many teachers consider this a gift—it does the thinking for them. If I didn’t assign these questions, kids wanted to know why not. Their parents wanted to know why not. Unless everyone duly parroted the party line set down by the book editor, children used to getting high marks became scared and angry.

The school text of Moby Dick had been subtly denatured; worse than useless, it was actually dangerous. So I pitched it out and bought a set of undoctored books with my own money. The school edition of Moby Dick asked all the right questions, so I had to throw it away. Real books don’t do that. Real books demand people actively participate by asking their own questions. Source.

Those lines are similar to scenes from "Dead Poets Society," with the same rejection of standardisation and manipulation to conformity.

Part of the book is history of education--going back millenia--and part is autobiography of a rebellious teacher. Gatto displays the people who built the educational establishment into its present monument to fossilized conformist mediocrity, displays them in their own words.

If you have ever looked at the dysfunctionality and counterproductivity of schools and wondered, "why?", you should take a good look at this history of education.

Too Stupid to Know . . .

. . . when people are trying to kill you, part III.

The recently released movie "United 93" highlights the difference between people who know their lives are being threatened, and people who cling to denial all the way to their deaths. The passengers of United 93 were no more intelligent or courageous than the passengers of the other three doomed flights. But because their flight was delayed a half hour waiting for takeoff clearance, the passengers on United 93 were able to learn about the earlier suicide flights into the two WTC towers and the Pentagon.

Even so, there were apparently passengers on United 93 that wanted to prevent the other passengers from taking action to try to stop the hijackers. Those were the passengers too stupid to know someone was trying to kill them. They remind me of a lot of people I know, who turn a blind eye to dangerous trends in society, focused only on their own minor, narrow, myopic concerns.

United 93 is one of the best films I have ever seen. A lot of people are too blase to see it. They may consider what happened on 9/11 to have been a freak of nature, less important or relevant than a tsunami or a hurricane. Past history to them, it apparently has no significance to their present or future in their eyes. You can even find people so deeply into denial who do not even believe 9/11 happened at all, but was instead a US government plot. In other words, they are too stupid to know . . .

Too Stupid to Know . . . . .

.....when people are trying to kill you, part II.

The best description of modern western society, other than incredibly affluent, free, and intellectually fertile, is . . . . fat, dumb, and happy. The two descriptions are not mutually exclusive. A most salient quantity of people in a society may indeed be fat, dumb, and happy--while a relatively invisible group of people works to perpetuate the freedom, affluence, and inventiveness of the society.

An affluent society may very well be on the verge of disaster and not realize it, if the most prominent voices in the society declines to inform the society of its precarious position.

Part one of this series was inspired by the motion picture "A History of Violence," starring Viggo Mortensen. Part two, this installment, is inspired by Dan Simmons' recent "April message." I posted a link to Simmons' message at the Al Fin website, then surfed the web to find out what was being said about the "message" generally.

What I found should not have surprised me. People automatically sorted the ideas in the message according to their pre-existing political viewpoints, rather than critically examining it as a useful provocation to thought. Even science fiction readers (and writers) who enjoyed Simmons' work would heap scorn on Simmons reflexively, if their pre-existing viewpoint (on the threat that Simmons' wrote about) was different than their perception of Simmons' message.

Contrast that ready disregard of a well-written although fictional warning, with the massive world-view changing impact of an event such as the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks. It is easy to deny a threat if couched in fictional trappings. It was not so easy to deny the gaping hole in Manhattan's financial district, so it was necessary to invent massive conspiracy theories that were more absurd than the absurdest fiction. For the lumpenheads, the conspiracy theories took on all the aspects of reality, and became reality.

Regardless, the web reaction to Simmons' message suggested the reason why despite North American society being daily blasted with a (largely fictional) particular version of current events by the mainstream media (both news media and popular media), political opinions remain largely unchanged. Even the massive PC dominance of the universities for the past twenty years has failed to turn most graduates into the PC automatons that the professors so much had wished for, in imitation of themselves.

People subconsciously understand that the media worldview is fictional, just as students understand that a large part of the "officially sanctioned politically correct" viewpoints they are fed at university is likewise fictional. In a time of undeniable reality such as 9/11, it is as easy to shuck off such fictional viewpoints as it is to change jackets or slacks.

Of course, the really bright ones figured things out before 9/11, but that is a story for another time. The next big reality shaking event will knock even more people from the indoctrinated camp to the more thoughtful camp, but a lot of people decided not to wait, not to be too stupid to know . . . .

Europe: Dear Fat Old Girl, Who Can Save You Now?

The following post was "borrowed" from David's Medienkritic blog. It deals with the current state of Europe, and whether in denying this particular crisis, Europe is finally doomed. Or will the cavalry ride over the hill one last time to save the old girl?

Europe – Thy Name is Cowardice

Commentary by Mathias Döpfner

A few days ago Henryk M. Broder wrote in Welt am Sonntag, "Europe – your family name is appeasement." It’s a phrase you can’t get out of your head because it’s so terribly true.

Appeasement cost millions of Jews and non-Jews their lives as England and France, allies at the time, negotiated and hesitated too long before they noticed that Hitler had to be fought, not bound to agreements. Appeasement stabilized communism in the Soviet Union and East Germany in that part of Europe where inhuman, suppressive governments were glorified as the ideologically correct alternative to all other possibilities. Appeasement crippled Europe when genocide ran rampant in Kosovo and we Europeans debated and debated until the Americans came in and did our work for us. Rather than protecting democracy in the Middle East, European appeasement, camouflaged behind the fuzzy word "equidistance," now countenances suicide bombings in Israel by fundamentalist Palestinians. Appeasement generates a mentality that allows Europe to ignore 300,000 victims of Saddam’s torture and murder machinery and, motivated by the self-righteousness of the peace-movement, to issue bad grades to George Bush. A particularly grotesque form of appeasement is reacting to the escalating violence by Islamic fundamentalists in Holland and elsewhere by suggesting that we should really have a Muslim holiday in Germany.

What else has to happen before the European public and its political leadership get it? There is a sort of crusade underway, an especially perfidious crusade consisting of systematic attacks by fanatic Muslims, focused on civilians and directed against our free, open Western societies.
It is a conflict that will most likely last longer than the great military conflicts of the last century—a conflict conducted by an enemy that cannot be tamed by tolerance and accommodation but only spurred on by such gestures, which will be mistaken for signs of weakness.

Two recent American presidents had the courage needed for anti-appeasement: Reagan and Bush. Reagan ended the Cold War and Bush, supported only by the social democrat Blair acting on moral conviction, recognized the danger in the Islamic fight against democracy. His place in history will have to be evaluated after a number of years have passed.

In the meantime, Europe sits back with charismatic self-confidence in the multicultural corner instead of defending liberal society’s values and being an attractive center of power on the same playing field as the true great powers, America and China. On the contrary—we Europeans present ourselves, in contrast to the intolerant, as world champions in tolerance, which even (Germany's Interior Minister) Otto Schily justifiably criticizes. Why? Because we’re so moral? I fear it’s more because we’re so materialistic.

For his policies, Bush risks the fall of the dollar, huge amounts of additional national debt and a massive and persistent burden on the American economy—because everything is at stake.

While the alleged capitalistic robber barons in American know their priorities, we timidly defend our social welfare systems. Stay out of it! It could get expensive. We’d rather discuss the 35-hour workweek or our dental health plan coverage. Or listen to TV pastors preach about "reaching out to murderers." These days, Europe reminds me of an elderly aunt who hides her last pieces of jewelry with shaking hands when she notices a robber has broken into a neighbor’s house. Europe, thy name is cowardice. (emphasis added)

Matthias Döpfner has done it before - criticizing the spineless reaction of the European political elites to the dangers of Islamic terror.

He is by far the most powerful voice in the German media against the reappearance of the rotten European appeasement policies of the 20th century.

November 22, 2004 at 12:59 AM i

US Generals Demand Media Leaders Resign

Only rarely does a news story capture the pulse of the american military so completely, that it must be quoted in its entirety. In the space below, noted war correspondent Scott Ott reports on a heart-wrenching story of painful honesty--when the generals finally point out the real problem with Iraq.

April 19, 2006
U.S. Generals Call for Resignation of Media Leaders
by Scott Ott

(2006-04-19) — A growing movement of retired and active-duty U.S. military officers, angry at the mismanagement, arrogance and even deception that have hampered U.S. efforts to secure peace and democracy in Iraq, have begun quietly calling for the resignation of top leaders they blame for the difficulties.

“I believe that it’s time for them to step down,” said one unnamed retired three-star general. “The editors of The New York Times and Washington Post and the news producers at CNN, CBS, NBC and ABC should resign effective immediately.”

“They’ve formed a tight cabal that focuses only on news that reinforces their neo-journ ideology,” said another unnamed general. “Despite the urgent need for actual reporting from Iraq, they have failed to put enough boots on the ground in country.”

“As civilians, they make editorial decisions without any understanding of history or military strategy,” said another retired officer, “and they’re trying to run the war coverage from hotels in the cloister of the Green Zone, without consulting with our leaders and troops on the frontlines.”

The generals who all requested anonymity, in the words of one, “so I won’t be bothered by a bunch of calls from reporters writing redundant stories,” said the leading news media gatekeepers should be replaced by “more centrist voices” who will be honest with America, and not blindly devoted “advancing the neo-journ agenda.”

“We’d like to see leaders in there who will cover the Iraq story as Americans, or at least as those who believe in liberty,” said one active-duty general who has worked closely with reporters and editors.

Meanwhile, New York Times Publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. brushed off what he called “the incessant drumbeat of negativity” from opponents of his administration.

“You can’t relieve your top commanders while your side is winning,” Mr. Sulzberger said. “Frankly, the Pentagon doesn’t direct enough attention to the car bombings, sectarian strife and rumblings of civil war which show that we’re making progress in Iraq every day.”

Destroying Civilisation is Easy--Building it Again is Almost Impossible

Twelve million and counting? A massive influx of uneducated economic immigrants demanding full rights of citizenship without even a nod to legal compliance? Demanding it--seizing it in a quasi-larcenous yet unyielding grip--because they can? Is this the reconquista of North America? Tell me it is not so, amigo.

Look at the countries that produced these migrants. Look at their home societies. Is there anything in the source cultures of these illegals that suggests that they have learned to create a prosperous middle class civil society on their own? Could they create a North America as it is, on their own? Of course not. They come to North America because of what was already created here, by people of entirely different cultural backgrounds. The cultural background is of vital importance to the ability to create a working and prosperous civil society.

If the illegals were willing to watch and learn, had the patience to adopt the successful features of the North American culture--were willing to assimilate--there might be hope for them. But the faces of these immigrants are the faces of impatient demands for what they have not earned. They want the prosperity of North America--but they want it on their terms. It is an impossibility that they cannot comprehend, because they are unprepared, uneducated, unassimilated.

No one can doubt the ability of the illegal immigration movement to mass large and passionate crowds of protest. It is a movement full of its own importance, manned by minions of healthy marchers displaying vacuous, self-satisfied smiles of triumph. "I am carwash-hear me roar! I am grasscut, give me more! I am parts assembler, kiss the floor?"

This political movement is not a movement of economic accomplishment. It is a movement of economic parasitism, leaching off an already prospering society, performing many functions that robots will certainly do better, before long.

This is a movement--a massive movement--of social protest, backed up by twelve million illegals, and the threat of hundreds of millions more. This is not a threat of prosperity, it is a threat of destruction. It is a demand with a knife at the throat.

The fact that the illegals would cut their own prosperity out from under themselves if they were to get what they demand--that they themselves would be swamped by further and vaster human waves in the future--is beyond their own capacity to envision. The "reforms" they demand at gunpoint are actually terms of unconditional surrender which would guarantee the third-world-ification of North America--just as Europe is being third-world-ified by its welfare dependent muslim influx.

Civilisation has always had to fight against decay. When civilisation loses the will to fight--when civilisation is intimidated by the mere numbers of those who could not maintain civilisation on their own--civilisation falls. For every illegal in North America, there are hundreds more illegals watching for the opportunity to jump in.

Mexico is a wealthy country in comparison to most of the world. If Mexicans are willing to crash the gates for a fistful of dollars, you can be sure the far more impoverished of the world are waiting for a chance to crash the Mexican's party.

Reconquista? Perhaps. But only the first in a series, and the triumphant marchers and gate crashers of today will certainly be the overthrown gatekeepers of tomorrow.

Arabs--Laggards of the Modern World?

Since the 1960s, arab countries have lagged badly behind most other nations, except african nations. The Strategy Page recently offered a few comments on this issue:

Since World War II, the Arab world has lagged the rest of the planet in economic growth. For example, 300 million Arabs, and all that oil, generate less economic activity than Spain, and its population of 40 million. The main problem has been bad government. Too many dictators, and too much government restrictions on the economy. Too much corruption and waste. Even higher oil prices don't help, as it simply provides more money to be wasted on consumption, rather than business investment.

One of the things that has been changed in Iraq is the way the economy is regulated. Since Saddam was tossed out in 2003, the economy has been governed by Western rules. As a result, GDP per capita doubled by the end of 2005, and the GDP is expected to grow another 49 percent by 2008. All this despite continued attacks by Sunni Arab rebels on oil facilities and other economic targets. It's much easier to start a business in Iraq now, even though there's still a lot of corruption. The big change is that now the corruption is illegal, and there is even progress in prosecuting the government officials who take bribes or try to shake down businessmen. Lebanon is the only other Arab state to run its economy in a Western fashion, and they have thrived. However, Lebanon also interrupted their success story with a fifteen year (1975-90) civil war. Iraqis are well aware of that, and have no illusions about what happens if everyone does not get along. Another thing haunting Iraqis is the most successful economy in the region; Israel. This is also the country most like the economically successful Western states. Iraqis can't really talk about it openly, but the "Israeli Model" is discussed.

In spite of all that oil, something is holding arabs down, making them the laggards of the modern world. Humble little Spain is more an economic powerhouse than all the arabs. What is wrong with all of them?
Arabs are not adding value to their children--there is no added "human capital" in arab societies. Arabs have to import their professionals, engineers, and technicians. Measures of years of schooling in arab countries are pathetic, but do not accurately reflect the huge tragedy, since much of the schooling that does exist is counter-productive schooling in arab supremacy, religious fanaticism, and ethnic hatred. If arabs did not have dreams of bloody conquest of infidel lands, they would have only dreams of stolen glory.

When the oil does run out, the western infidel world will use other fuels besides arab oil. What do the arabs propose to do for economic output then? It seems that their oil only postponed the day of reckoning.

Idiots to the Left, Morons to the Right, Here I Am--Stuck in the Middle

Here is an example: "begging the question." Begging the question is a common logical fallacy that fewer people recognise every year. In general, the phrase is misused at least 90% of the time, in popular journalism and media discourse. But if people do not know what "begging the question" means, how will they catch people doing it when they need to? And that is just the tip of the iceberg, since far more logical fallacies escape detection than are caught. And that is in the world of supposedly professional wordsmiths, journalists, and intellectuals.

The lowest common denominator is good enough for television writers and news producers. Why aim for an intelligent audience, when that would simply guarantee no audience at all? It is a matter of economics. If the schools produce morons, then businesspeople must orient their products so that they will appeal to morons and be usable by morons.

What is the cure? Increasingly, it seems that government schools are beyond repair. The schools of education where teachers are trained for government teaching, are populated by the excremental remnants of a dysfunctional university digestive system. The trend for the entire system--professors, teachers, students--is ever downward. It is a stagnant swamp of lobotomised political correctness, with no outlet. It is a swamp that cannot be drained, due to its carefully self-propagating design.

Bypassing the swamp is the only hope--for as many of the next generation as can be salvaged. If only the swamp ended at the government school campus boundaries. Unfortunately, much of the popular culture has been swamped by the same lowest common denominator/low expectations/ braindead monotony that typifies government schools and government employees.

Bypass the swamp, and work for better technologies and approaches to learning. The cure is helping the young learn how the world works, and how they can best fit themselves into the world, to have the most beneficial effect on both themselves and the world around them as possible.

Cognitive Sex and Gender Differnces

While the scientific findings that male and female brains are anatomically and functionally different, statistically, is still quite controversial on a political level, on a purely scientific level it is becoming well established. Doreen Kimura is one of several prolific women cognitive scientists who are brave enough to buck the political storm in order to pursue scientific truth. Camilla Benbow is another.

In this article published in Sexualities, Evolution and Gender, Kimura plainly lays out the basic argument and evidence.

Many reliable anatomical brain differences have been found to differentiate men and women, from basic structures such as the hypothalamus, to differences in systems connecting the two hemispheres, such as the anterior commissure. Some of these have been reviewed in my book......We don’t yet know the significance of such differences for cognitive function, but to describe them as fiction is to deny the careful investigations of many respected scientists (e.g., Allen and Gorski 1990, 1991; Allen, Hines, Shryne and Gorski 1989; Allen, Richey, Chai and Gorski 1991). Although we now have a fair understanding of how brain systems work in mediating certain cognitive functions such as memory, language, and the like, we are still far from understanding how individual differences, the variation in such functions from one type of person to another, are mediated by the brain. However, it must follow that if two groups (such as males and females, left-handers and right-handers, or masculine and feminine gender types) differ reliably in some behaviour not simply dependent on physical differences, then their nervous systems must also differ in some way. Where else could the behavioural differences reside? This is just as true of learned as of unlearned behaviours. Brain differences underlying cognitive differences need not, however, be visible in simple structural features. They may take the form of differing organizational mechanisms not apparent by simply viewing the external brain.

This Scientific American article by Kimura presents the argument more methodically, and at greater length.

Men and women differ not only in their physical attributes and reproductive function but also in many other characteristics, including the way they solve intellectual problems. For the past few decades, it has been ideologically fashionable to insist that these behavioral differences are minimal and are the consequence of variations in experience during development before and after adolescence. Evidence accumulated more recently, however, suggests that the effects of sex hormones on brain organization occur so early in life that from the start the environment is acting on differently wired brains in boys and girls. Such effects make evaluating the role of experience, independent of physiological predisposition, a difficult if not dubious task. The biological bases of sex differences in brain and behavior have become much better known through increasing numbers of behavioral, neurological and endocrinological studies.

Read the entire article here, it is quite fascinating.

This is a brief list of scholarly research supporting the concept of "innate differences" in neuroanatomy and cognition in males and females. It is a very abbreviated list, but it serves to introduce the evidence. For a much longer list, consult this reference list from one of Kimura's articles. Scroll down to the list, and continue scrolling. There are 111 citations, and that list is far from complete.

I have posted on this topic before--here, here, and here.

The research continues, and the weight of research--new and old--points to significant cognitive sex differences, or if you prefer, gender differences or gender disparities.

Politically, this is not a popular topic, and politically inclined "scientists" will more easily cling to the political line. It is difficult to get funding for this type of research, and publishing in some mainstream journals is difficult. Even university presidents can fall from grace if they forget the politically correct stance, and deviate from it. This has not discouraged the very persistent women and men of cognitive science.

Neither men nor women are superior to the other as groups. Both groups have statistical strengths and weaknesses. A wise society will seek to understand its members, rather than try to sweep under the rug any scientific findings that are inconvenient to a dominant political viewpoint.

Addendum: This Guardian article by Simon Baron-Cohen contains a link to a test you can take to determine if you have a male brain or a female brain. Just looking at your genitalia or your chromosome map will not tell you that. Regardless of your chromosomes, your brain has a mind of its own, perhaps of a different gender than your body. Are you willing to find out?

Gender Difference: The Gap that Will Not Close

At the elite levels of sports and athletics, the gender gap is prominent and resists closure. There is an approximate 15 minutes difference in the best times of elite male marathoners, and elite female marathoners. Other sports show similar differences at the elite level.

Remember when it was predicted that intensive training for women in athletics would close the gender gap in performance? Some years ago, when the marathon was first becoming a competitive event for women, the rapid improvement in female times led some to predict that female performances would soon equal those of men in the marathon. This has not happened, and it won't. The current world record for women is 2:21, compared to 2:06:50 for the men, a difference in speed of about 10%. This same 10% gap is present across the distance running performance spectrum The reason for the performance gap is not that women don't train as hard as men. There are some important physiological differences between the sexes that can't be overlooked or overcome.

....The "typical" young untrained male will have an absolute VO2 max of 3.5 liters/min, while the typical same-age female will be about 2 liters/min. This is a 43% difference! Where does it come from? Well first, much of the difference is due to the fact that males are bigger, on average, than females. Us humans are all (sort of) geometrically similar, so heart size scales in proportion to lean body size . If we divide VO2 by bodyweight, the difference is diminished (45 ml/min/kg vs 38 ml/min/kg) to 15 to 20%, but not eliminated.

....It is important to make note of the fact that these differences are "on average". In reality, there are many women with significantly higher VO2max values than average men. However, if we look at the "best of the best", the differences persist. Using XC skiing as an example from here in Norway, the highest reliable values for VO2 max recorded in national team XC skiers are about 90 ml/min/kg. The very best Norwegian woman has been measured at 77 ml/min/kg, a 17% difference. So, while this woman will outperform 99.9% of all men, she will not out-perform the national team level males.

Read more here.

A number of studies have demonstrated that boys inherit a performance advantage in athletics, for both pre-puberty, and even more so in post-puberty.
The stopwatch does not lie, and whether in swimming, running, weightlifting, shot put, bicycling etc. the superior VO2 max and muscle mass of males prevents the gender gap in athletics from closing. The only way to narrow the gap is to train the elite athlete girls and confine the elite athlete boys in restraints to encourage muscle atrophy and loss of VO2 max.

In the cognitive realm, you see a similar phenomenon in the measures of spatial ability and mathematical ability at the elite levels. Although hope springs eternal that training will narrow the gap, as in athletics, sometimes it seems that the only way to narrow the gap is to train the elite girls and prevent the elite boys from training somehow.

One can be excused for wondering why all the excitement about male superiority in a small area of elite cognitive performance? The number of jobs involved is minimal. Certainly an intelligent businesswoman, female physician, or female lawyer, can make much more money than an elite mathematician, physicist, or engineer. What is all the near-hysteria about?

Average intelligence levels of men and women test virtually identical. A 1995 study examined the performance of more than 100,000 American adolescents on various mental tests. The study found that on average, females performed slightly better than males on tests of reading comprehension, writing, perceptual speed, and certain memory tasks. Males tended to perform slightly better than girls on tests of mathematics, science, and social studies. In almost all cases, the average sex differences were small.

And here is how developmental psychologist David C. Geary puts it:

There was no sex difference on the IQ test, but males showed significantly higher mean scores on the arithmetical computations, arithmetical reasoning, and spatial cognition measures. A series of structural equation models indicated that individual differences in arithmetical reasoning were related to individual differences in IQ, spatial abilities, and computational fluency. Moreover, the results suggested that the male advantage in arithmetical reasoning is mediated by the male advantages in both computational fluency and spatial cognition.

Women are graduating from schools of higher education at a rate of 6 to 4 vs. men. Women have achieved virtual parity in schools of medicine and law, and make up about 70% of graduate psychologists. Women are achieving phenomenally in the modern world, and if any gender should be worried about current trends, it is the males. A few men are holding on under siege, to a small sliver of cognitive excellence, and all that many psychologists can think of doing is to try to eliminate the small gap within that tiny sliver of cognitive performance.

It is a fascinating study in academic frustration--the data will simply not behave in a politically correct fashion. Many more research studies and outreach programs will be mandated, however, to erase that gap. But I can tell the gender psy-sers exactly how to erase the gap, and I will not charge for the valuable information. Simply prescribe pro-androgenic drugs that cross the placental barrier, to pregnant women in their second trimester, who are carrying female fetuses. Some additional androgenic supplementation may be necessary at different time periods after birth--and there will be potentially unpleasant side effects. Hirsutism, deep voice, skin blemishes, a certain manly aggressiveness, etc. But all of that would be a small price to pay to erase the gender gap in this one small remaining area of academics, no?

Just as there are elite women athletes who can defeat 99% of males in their sport, there are women mathematicians and physicists who are better at their trade than 99% of males. But they are not competing against those 99%. They are competing against the elite males, a very small number, but a significantly greater number than the number of elite females in those vocations. That is the hump that the gender Procrusteans are incapable of leveling. The relatively tiny number of male elites in a relatively tiny number of fields who will simply not go away.

Lawrence Summers paidwith his job, for making a very timid suggestion about possible biological gender or sex differences in that very small, elite sliver of academic professorship in a few top rank schools. The politics of this subject are absolutely deadly to anyone in a public position who lets down his guard for even a moment.

But why? I will deal with the real reasons for the excitement in a later posting.

DNA Surprises: Genetic Research in High Gear

Thanks to Snowcrash for pointing to this CIT newsrelease that details new discoveries in "gene interaction."

The difficulty lies in the fact that two genes can pair up in a gigantic number of ways. If an organism has a genome of 20,000 genes, for example, the total number of pairwise combinations is a staggering total of 200 million possible interactions.

Researchers can indeed perform experiments to see what happens when the two genes interact, but 200 million is an enormous number of experiments, says Weiwei Zhong, a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology. "The question is whether we can prioritize which experiments we should do in order to save a lot of time."

....a genetic-interaction network provides a faster and better way at determining how certain genes interact. Such a network also provides information about whether anyone has ever done an experiment to determine the interaction of two particular genes in one of several species.

"This process works like a matchmaking service for the genes," says Zhong. "It provides you with candidate matches that most likely will be interacting genes, based upon a number of specified features."

The benefit, she adds, is that biologists do not need to do a huge number of random experiments to verify if two genes indeed interact. Therefore, instead of the experimenter having to run 20,000 experiments to see if two genes randomly chosen from the genome of a 20,000-gene organism interact, they might get by with 10 to 50 experiments.

"The beneft is that you can be through in a month instead of years," says Sternberg Read the entire report here. Hat tip Biosingularity Blog.

The next story deals with advances in developing transgenic plants--getting plants to make proteins from other species--in this instance getting tobacco plants to make human albumin. This is from a Bio.com newsrelease:

Agricultural engineer, Alicia Fernández San Millán, has developed a novel technique in Spain - plastidial transformation, in order to produce, in a recombinant form, human albumin from tobacco plants. According to her PhD thesis, plastidial transformation is an economically viable alternative, as it enables increasing the levels of HSA by between 10 and a 100 times, compared to levels obtained by nuclear transformation. Read the entire newfeature for more information.

The following story deals with "junk DNA", the 98% of all human DNA that does not code for protein. Buried within the junk DNA is hidden treasure--epigenetic control sequences that influence the gene expression of the 2% of coding DNA.

The notion that mutations in enhancers play a role in human disease progression has been difficult to confirm because usually enhancers are located in the 98 percent of the human genome that does not code for protein, termed non-coding DNA. Unlike DNA sequences that code for protein, non-coding DNA, sometimes referred to as "junk" DNA, follows few rules for organization and sequence patterns and therefore is more difficult to study.

"The difficulty with human genetic approaches to common disease is that we lack the power to precisely localize DNA sequences that are associated with disease, often leaving us immense stretches of DNA to look at," says one of the study's corresponding authors, Andy McCallion, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the McKusick-Nathans Institute. Most often one is limited to looking in the most obvious places, which may not yield the best results. "Until now," he says, "we've only been able to look under the lamplights for the car keys."

....The system is a significant advance over current methods in this model species, allowing researchers to study more sequences in a shorter period of time. Read the entire news report here.

This report discusses a discovery of a gene variant--always think "hapmap" when hearing the term "gene variant"--that affects the onset of cancer.

Normally our genes have to be divided into two perfectly identical copies when a cell divides. The unfortunate variant causes a defect in the division of the genetic material (mitosis), which means that a daughter cell may get too few or too many genes.

If a daughter cell does not receive a gene that prevents cancer, a so-called tumour suppressor gene, then a cancer can grow. One defence mechanism against cancer is for a cell that gets faulty genes to commit suicide (apoptosis).

The defect caused by the unfortunate variant when it divides the genes is so tiny that the suicide mechanism does not detect the fault, which allows the cell to continue its growth into a cancer. Read the rest here.

Finally, here is a glimpse into the distant past, toward the possible origin of life on earth. This Eurekalert newsrelease discusses experiments attempting to delve into possible origins of the DNA-RNA encoding system that supports all known life.

This "evolutionary conversion" provides a modern-day snapshot of how life as we understand it may have first evolved out of the earliest primordial mix of RNA-like molecules-sometimes referred to as the "pre-RNA world"-into a more complex form of RNA-based life (or the "RNA world") and eventually to cellular life based on DNA and proteins. Nucleic acids are large complex molecules that store and convey genetic information, but can also function as enzymes.

While the transfer of sequence information between two different classes of nucleic acid-like molecules-between RNA and DNA, for example-is straightforward because it relies on the one-to-one correspondence of the double helix pairing, transferring catalytic function is significantly more difficult because function cannot be conveyed sequentially. The present study demonstrates that the "evolutionary conversion" of an RNA enzyme to a DNA enzyme with the same function is possible, however, through the acquisition of a few critical mutations.

The study was released in an advance online version of the journal Chemistry & Biology. Read more here.

This posting covers only a small cross section of ongoing genetic research. Al Fin has covered several of these topics previously. All of those past postings are available via the archives on the sidebar. Most people would feel overwhelmed if they had attempted to look deeply into any of these reports. No one is expected to know everything about everything, after all.