This is the Way the World Ends

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/magazine/how-ready-are-we-for-bioterrorism.html?pagewanted=1&ref=magazine&adxnnlx=1320145648-K5idnXUdyKqBqlIIQsGvhw

The Bio-Defense establishment’s official position seems to be that a smallpox outbreak would be the worst case scenario bioattack. The article mentions a simulation of such an attack done a few years ago, which concluded that a million Americans would die. Calling this the “worst case” might be right if the simulation were modified to “a genetically engineered smallpox outbreak”—the toll would be higher. No one knows by how much!

Diseases can be “improved” for virulence or communicability or survivability or vaccine resistance or treatment resistance—or, theoretically, any other imaginable traits—by means of genetic manipulations. This has been possible since the 70s. And, today, it’s not even difficult to modify diseases. It is difficult, however, to achieve genetic modifications that will produce desired results. That is, transposing genes within an organism’s DNA, as a mechanical operation, is cheap and easy. Finding out which modifications will “improve” the beast remains difficult and expensive because so many non-linear variables come into play, and precise calculation of their interactions is impossible—the Soviets had to do extensive animal testing to determine what effects various modifications would have when exposed to animal immune systems and the natural environment. So, the worst case might involve a more virulent, more communicable disease not susceptible to conventional treatment, a disease that might kill far more than a million Americans. Even back in the 60s, per the article, before genetic engineering was possible, America had achieved weaponized tularemia (presumably by means of rapid, selective, experimentally-guided evolution) to the point that 50 pounds of it, properly disseminated, would wipe out 60% of a megacity.  

Protection against crude attacks with unmodified agents may well provide a high probability of effective defense for a couple more decades (though something more than a black swan risk is present already). The Muslim world is unlikely to muster anything but amateur-hour efforts within this time frame. Attacks from other quarters are improbable. But, back to the lingering black swans. The thing is, there are multiple black swan risks out there. A sample of contingencies: an accidental release of a bio-agent from a government lab (dozens of governments work on dangerous pathogens, offensively or defensively, and America alone has dozens of such labs), a pathogen developed in an “entrepreneur’s” garage and released, a deliberate release into the environment that escapes intended limits (eg, a controlled test of pathogen characteristics), a government employee deliberately steals, then sells or releases a bio-agent.   

The article discusses the dilemma of whether to focus resources on vaccine defenses or therapeutic defenses. Yet it fails to mention one of the prime determinants of the relative efficacy of these two approaches: the impact of the threat of genetically modified disease agents. Do vaccines against the variola major strain of small pox, for example, have a high probability of success against a genetically modified variant of the disease? And how difficult, in the context of a bio-arms race, would it be to develop small pox variants that would resist a known, stockpiled vaccine? I suspect the answers to these questions, if they’ve been considered and if they’re knowable, are classified.

The article concludes with a hint at the clash between political decision-making processes and cost-benefit processes. What translates into political capital tends to starve ugly, obscure issues until the piper comes round at last. “How to balance the unlikely but catastrophic potential of bioterror with the steady advance of natural disease is one of the most puzzling challenges for biodefense policy going forward.” This is an unavoidable question, except I would say the “steady retreat of natural disease.” The only significant inroads natural disease has made in the last 100 years are those related to poor nutrition—consequent upon mere stupidity (including the stupidity or conspiracy of doctors) and torpor. Natheless, sichlike common health issues, never out of sight and never out of mind, exert great gravitational pull on the common politician.  

Another part of the problem seems to be a matter of bureaucratic influence on policy decisions—like this Fauci genius spending 70% of biodefense funding on common diseases afflicting public health. Fauci is a public health bureaucrat, not a defense bureaucrat—so he spends what he can on public health. Bureaucrats generally fit the mold of defective wind-up toys—little action, no thought. Also, moving up a notch to the political sphere, it’s lovely to discover that Obama has ended centralized direction of biodefense. What we have is a few part-timers in the White House overseeing the program and trying to coordinate multiple mutually antagonistic bureaucracies. Well, I suppose it’s over-optimistic to expect Obama to take an interest in something other than handouts and labor unions.   

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What’s not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

--Gerontion

The Muslim Revolts

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/sunday-review/the-arab-intellectuals-who-didnt-roar.html?pagewanted=1
The lack of ideology or even any plans strikes—but most revolutionaries past espoused notoriously unrealistic dogmas, and found a quick descent into self-protective pragmatics—that is, their “dogma” became “hold power at all costs.” More or less the same type of elites will retain power. They may approach management of the masses a bit differently.  

Confirmation of Global Warming

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204422404576594872796327348.html

The assessment done by this team looks thorough and convincing. They limited themselves to determining the degree and the certainty of warming over land. Given the complexities of the historical data, a careful methodology is necessary and was here applied. The results confirm the warming trend found by prior analyses. They did not look into the causes.

As I've said since at least 2005, we ought to get cracking on this. At a minimum, there is a significant probability that warming has primarily anthropogenic causes. The results of warming are potentially catastrophic. Therefore, as insurance against the possibility of catastrophe, we ought to make an effort to reduce likely causes of warming.

To do this requires, optimally, several steps for America:

First, persuade the public of the reality of climate risks and their probable causes.

Second, impose a tax regime on greenhouse gas emissions that provides for slowly increasing taxes over 20+ years--roughly to the point that the price of coal-based energy doubles and gasoline price rises $2-3/gal over market levels.

Third, greatly increase spending on basic scientific research that may be relevant to producing less polluting energy--$50+ billion a year. Probably the foci ought to be on nuclear power, solar power, electrification of transport, batteries for transport and the electric grid, building efficiency, offshore wind power, underground emissions sequestration, and perhaps methods of pulling CO2 from the atmosphere.

Fourth, take further measures to encourage the private development and deployment of clean energy systems, to include ensuring strategic clean energy industries remain onshore (without which presence innovation will diminish and public support decline).

Fifth, optimize and impose new regulations for houses and buildings to improve their energy efficiency--and incentivize retrofits of existing structures.

Sixth, pay nations to sustain their forests.

Seventh, come to an agreement with other climate change mitigating nations to phase in tariffs on imports from nations that do not attempt to control their emissions (exemptions possible for desperate nations).

Of these efforts, I consider the first, third and fourth the most important. They are the steps that can be leveraged to generate global impact--a sine qua non for success in climate change mitigation. Also, America has a comparative advantage over other nations in these areas--we are best in the world at basic science and, especially, innovation. The cheap solar, cheap-safe nuclear, cheap batteries that we invent and commercialize would benefit the rest of the world--whether we sell to them or they steal from us.

So far, through the eras of Clinton, Bush II, Obama--we have done about one tenth of what I recommend on steps 3 and 4. We have attempted no more. The major part of the political class, including the named Commanders, have evinced nought but cowardice before this challenge. This is a national security issue, as the Pentagon recognized formally years ago. Everyone agrees on the existence of at least one governmental obligation: the provision of security against internal and external threats. This is both types of threat, yet the government sits stupidly, watches it grow monstrous and risks letting it become unstoppable.

Islam and the West

http://www.tnr.com/book/review/citizen-islam-zeyno-baran

The link is to a review of a book, Citizen Islam: The Future of Muslim Integration in the West, by Zeyno Baran, on Muslim citizens in Western countries. It's a sharp, concise, excellent review, worth reading. The reviewer wrote a highly regarded book on this subject a couple of years past, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West. Both authors agree that the most essential question the rise of the Muslim population puts before us is what form of Islam these people will ascribe to. I agree with this assessment, though in those countries with relatively modest Muslim populations the issue of the magnitude of future Muslim immigration is almost as important. The politically correct view, of course, in America and Europe, is that mainstream Islam is distinct from "Islamism" (the interpretation that Islamic values and rules ought to prevail in the political sphere).

That the priests or imams should want mastery accords with the natural order of things. Why shouldn't the arbiters of the ultimate things requite their pious followers with the gift of effectual earthly guidance?

“Islamism shares the most fundamental aim of Islam and all religions,” Baran writes, “to bring the world closer to God.” In so saying, she removes us from the cocoon of cant that swaddles most public—and all governmental—discussion of Islam’s role in terrorism.

The motive force behind Islamic terrorism is thus conceived by its practitioners as transcending the civil laws of merely secular governments. And, since its inception, the Quran has seemed to certain numbers of its adherents interpretable in this direction. If confined to a few extremists or to marginal lands, this might be of minor consequence, and it has been little more than a nuisance through most of Islamic history. However, massive Muslim immigration into the West has changed things, and rendered this disease much more contagious, if not also more virulent.

Islamists are, by definition, politicized Muslims. They are better at politics than their apolitical coreligionists. European officials made a mistake in the 1980s and ’90s, when they “granted asylum to many immigrants who presented far more of a threat to democratic rule than the regimes they had fled.” The core of Baran’s book is her description of the tactics by which Islamists co-opted, infiltrated, bamboozled, and overwhelmed Muslim institutions of long standing. Islamists generally preferred subverting existing bodies to setting up their own, Baran writes, because it “required less effort and offered greater recruitment possibilities.” Her account of such subversion will remind readers of the history of Communists in the trade-union movement. As Baran shows, boards of directors staffed with doddering old-country patriarchs do not stand a chance against young, modern, Internet- and media-savvy “professional Muslims.”

One might also analogize Islamists to a special interest group in politics. Though constituting a small number, they care about their monomania more than the great mass of the polity, and often use their focus to achieve goals against the interest of the nation. This looks to be something of a vicious circle. Revolutions, though, tend to burn themselves out as the youthful vanguard becomes less youthful and settles heavily into power. But, by a similar process of energetic youth overcoming apathetic age, the nonpolitical version of Islam is losing power also in many Muslim nations. Turkey is cited as a clear case of this. It has proceeded in Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran--and the Arab Spring may yet prove another step in furtherance of this trend.

The threat of Islamism in the near and medium term arises from its manifest terrorist tendencies. Any irrational belief system, including any religion, may become dangerous. "The problem is that religion itself is a conveyor belt to radicalism in this way." The remedy for this, the action Western governments ought to undertake, according to Baran, is this:

  They should “shift their current focus from countering extremist violence to preventing extremism from taking hold in the first place.” The strategy she suggests might indeed be a better one. But there are two reasons it cannot be carried out. One is that Americans are too frightened of being disciplined and punished for breaches of political correctness to discuss honestly any aspect of any policy touching on Islam. Even this term—“political correctness”—does not do justice to the Zhdanovite lockdown that the government enforces when it comes to discussing Islam.

Apparently, even the Ft. Hood massacre of American soldiers by a radicalized Islamist soldier was dismissed by DOD as unrelated to Islamism.

Secondly, Americans don’t know Islam well enough. The distinction between “Islamists who renounce violence” (the people we are empowering now) and the “moderate Muslims who reject Islamism” (the people Baran would like us to empower)—these distinctions might be meaningful for a literary Turk with a good Koranic education. They will be lost on a galoot congressman from the mountain West who has never met a Muslim. And to draw such distinctions in the first place would reveal what a big, intransigent problem traditionalist Islam poses for Western societies. It is a problem that already has a long record of forcing those societies to weigh their commitment to diversity against their commitment to freedom.

We observe all this with a complacency born of the amateurism and incompetence of our domestic Islamic foes. In many Western nations, including America, their numbers are too small still to present a great danger. And the problem may well, by a variety of possible mechanisms, be self-correcting. The two most likely forms of this are the senescence of the revolutionaries or a change in attitude in Western nations should the threat become grave. That said, I see no benefit for the West from continued large scale Muslim immigration. Also, the radicals ought to be deported. We do not need the distraction and the drain on our powers political Islam involves--certes we do not benefit this way. Proliferation of WMDs, China's rise, and socialism-induced internal decay are quite a sufficient platefull of problems.

The Unfreedom of the Oversexed

http://www.tnr.com/book/review/sex-provided

The whole piece is worth reading, for Milosz is brilliant and knows whereof he speaks, but this is the conclusion:

The antiutopians of our century (Zamiatin, Huxley, Orwell) depicted societies under total control where the absence of freedom is called freedom. In such societies the rulers take care to supply the ruled with suitable diversions to prevent mental anxiety. Sexual games best fulfill that function. It is a credit to the intuition of the authors of those books that they depict Eros acting as a subversive force, which is no secret to the authorities: sex is antierotic and not only poses no threat, but effectively prevents the appearance of the passions, which draw persons, not bodies, together and engage them both as flesh and spirit. The hero enters upon a dangerous path when he is awakened by love. Only then is the slavery disguised and accepted by everyone revealed to him as slavery.

Since 1982, when this was written, the sexualization of social and commercial discourse has obviously intensified. A pacified populace invites tyranny.

The Left and Illegal Immigration

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/04/opinion/alabamas-shame.html
In response to this editorial, typical of the NY Times, I offered a comment which they did not post:
The socialist "humanitarians" who run the NY Times unthinkingly support Illegal Aliens at every opportunity and confidently adopt a holier-than-thou tone. Mexico, however, the source of most Illegals, is a middle-income country. Mexicans are not driven to America by desperation, but by the common human motive of aspiration. The "humanitarian" course of action would be to license truly desperate people from truly poor nations to enter America. I have seen little interest from socialists in this prospect.
But the primary interest of the NY Times in this issue is not "humanitarian", it is political. More Mexicans reliably means more Democratic voters. They are merely a means to an end for socialists, including the socialist hypocrites who run this paper. The fact that business owners, especially big business owners, also conceive illegals as a means to the end of increased profits only makes matters worse. Both parties have effectively (that is, in practice) supported illegal immigration for decades. But, at the core of both parties' "open immigration" policies lie hypocrisy and cynicism. "Humanitarianism" is a red herring.

Socialism in Education

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/10/02/are-top-students-getting-short-shrift

Public education in this country borders on a Stalinist mentality, a top-down penal state that prioritizes uniformity and conformity over achievement. This policy is justified by referring to the need to socialize students in a way that prepares them for a "multicultural" world. But, America has always been multicultural and there is no evidence that those schools which emphasize achievement first of all things--that such schools produce less multiculturally adapted students. It stands to reason that better education would, ipso facto, induce more adaptability to life itself.

Tyrone the janitor, Shaqweesha the cashier, Billy Bob the handyman, Francisco the yard man--these low IQ types will never make the world a better place. They are labor. The best we can hope from them is labor and that they will avoid the welfare rolls and prison. Those with sufficient wit to win a Nobel Prize or to invent a new technology or to found a business or reinvent one--these highly capable types, who necessarily possess high IQs, ought not to be burdened by an academic environment that includes the left side of the IQ distribution. They slow the process of education, distract the teacher, and are much more prone to bad conduct. And does the presence of 10th percentile IQs in the same room as 95th percentile IQs really bolster the confidence and effort level of the weaker students? The gap is large and consistent, and they eventually get the message. This jumbling together of disparate types eliminates equality of opportunity, while failing to produce the socialist dream (and my nightmare) of equality of result.

The capable figures represent the possibility of progress, from which historically all tend to benefit. Indeed, the poor have benefitted, in terms of quality of life, considerably more than the rich from the last century of progress. And their most important disability in America today is the dependency psychology foisted upon them, perhaps unknowingly, by the welfare state. Using our education system to confer upon the underclass a heightened aptitude for discovering new welfare programs to enroll in--this function may be less beneficial to the American people than a focus on identifying and encouraging the high achievers who form the forefront of societal evolution.

Another Education Success--

--for black America: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/06/education/06atlanta.html I love that even the NY Times could not resist mentioning that the ringleader of this dystopian fiasco is currently on vacation in Hawaii--though, of course, the top to bottom blackness of those involved was blacked out. The Times' philosophy on race is that it is only mentioned to make whites look bad or minorities look good--otherwise it is racist to mention race. Orwell concisely termed this "doublethink"--an effective element of tyranny. And all this devolves, no doubt, from the religion of egalitarianism and the pressure on the shepherds of the lower orders to live up to it. Overmatched by nature and circumstance, they succumb to the temptation of mendacity--but, how clumsily they fashion their deceptions! Thus we have a natural hierarchy also in the art of lying and a correspondent division of labor. The socialists must tighten their discipline hereafter. Such grotesqueries are painful to all and may even undermine the brilliant, almost self-consistent line of lies dreamed up by the priests of political correctness.

One of My Favorite Laws--

Properly demolished in a law review article by a UPenn law professor (and formerly a practicing neurologist with a Harvard MD--which ought to indicate a still more comprehensive knowledge and authority on this subject): http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1795443 This is the only law review article I've ever seen that is both substantively consequential in its argument and a demonstration of moral courage. The vast majority manifest neither quality. I'm betting we won't hear tell of this in the NY Times. To them disparate impact rules are a talismanic solution to the overwhelming racism that explains all black and mexican social pathologies. Considering what happened to Larry Summers and Thomas Watson for similar arguments, this lady ought to prepare for a return to neurology.

The Israeli Method, Improved Version

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/11/world/europe/11russia.html

One man, one gun, one target, one corpse. A proper hit the Chechen way. Soldiers everywhere and all too frequently have gotten away with too much. It's good to see one of the flagrant psychopaths among them grounded permanently and ostentatiously. It's always open season on war criminals and not only on criminals.