We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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Kevin Lafferty, a United States Geological Survey scientist at UC Santa Barbara has recently published a speculative article in ‘Proceedings of the Royal Society Biology’. Lafferty draws attention to a small parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, that reproduces in cats and alters the behaviour of small rodents as part of its life cycle.
The typical journey of the parasite involves a cat and its prey, starting as eggs shed in an infected cat’s feces, inadvertently eaten by a warm-blooded animal, such as a rat. The infected rat’s behavior alters so that it becomes more active, less cautious and more likely to be eaten by a cat, where the parasite completes its life cycle. Many other warm-blooded vertebrates may be infected by this pathogen. After producing usually mild flu-like symptoms in humans, the parasite tends to remain in a dormant state in the brain and other tissues.
Once the parasite has entered the human host, there could be a tendency towards mass neurosis if a large proportion of the population is infected. This is a fascinating theory, though one remains daunted by the experimental hurdles that the speculation would have to conquer, in shifting from observed psychological effect to becoming a statistical cause in cultural patterns across large population samples.
If this is true, then Freud may never have invented psychoanalysis, if the neurotics that he studied had not loved cats.
If you can’t annoy somebody, there’s little point in writing.
– Kingsley Amis.
Michael Totten’s latest on-the-spot bloggage from Northern Israel is up and ready to be devoured.
When poor countries catch up with rich countries, the actual absolute level of inequality between them can increase. Now that’s just wierd. My head hurts.
– Tony Stephenson responding to Brian Micklethwait
It seems that Beyoncé Knowles is as timid as she is talented. She has pulled out of a promotional tour of the UK because of the “continued threat to people flying across the Atlantic”. Never mind that large numbers of lesser mortals are making the trip across the puddle daily or that security has now been officially elevated to ‘Insane’.
Welcome to the Chickenshit Files, Beyoncé! You may be beautiful and talented but admirable? Not really.
It’s like deja vu all over again!
There is an interesting article on the Social Affairs Unit blog which discusses New Civilisation magazine. The magazine’s opening declaration was:
As a conflict between Islam and the West is engulfing the world in a cycle of violence, the walls between peoples are now being raised and fortified, yet the world is shrinking. I believe that New Civilisation is a unique attempt to break down the unreasonable barriers that are the tragic irony of modernity post 9/11.
Which all sounds promising. This publication has also sent me a few e-mails, though I must confess I never took any notice, though that was not because it did not sound interesting but rather due to the e-mail overload that I have to deal with from folks trying to interest Samizdata in new publications.
However Shiraz Maher does seem to have taken notice and he did not like what he found after a little digging. To see what he found take a look at his article at the Social Affairs Unit. It seems New Civilisation is a front Hizb ut-Tahrir, an organisation whose objective is a global totalitarian Islamo-fascist Caliphate.
The film Miami Vice has been panned by the critics here in Britain, but I thought it was OK. The critics said the dialogue was hard to follow and it is true that the actors (like so many Hollywood folk today) forget the basic rule of “project, dear boy, project”.
However, modern films tend to be designed for a young audience (they are the people who buy most of the tickets)not for middle aged people like me (or most critics). The young simply have better hearing, and (much though it hurts to admit it) pick up things faster, they will have worked out what is going on in a scene seconds before someone my age will.
So if you are middle aged and decide to go and see this film you are going to have to concentrate (or be confused like the critics) – even though the young person next to you can watch the film without concentrating and still know what is going on. There are plot holes in the film, but it is still an effective (and quite intelligent) action movie.
However, the little touches of political correctness in the film did irritate me.
For example, a white racist group is shown. One of the characters actually asks why they would be involved in a major international drug enterprise – and it never is explained why the major drug players have got these people involved (white racists do indeed deal drugs – but they are small players, major players would not cross the street to piss on them). It was just an excuse for the standard Hollywood “look, evil white racists” bit.
Also it is mentioned, at one point, that some of the drugs come from the “right wing AUC in Colombia”, the AUC does indeed supply drugs (one of the founders of the AUC was tortured to death only last year for objecting to this) – but the (Marxist) FARC supplies far more drugs – why were they not mentioned?
Then one of the characters (who is pretending to be a drug transporter) says that he should not visit Cuba because “the Cubans do not like my business”… as if the Castro family had not been massive players in the drug trade for several decades.
In the credits at the end of the film I noted that one company was called “Che Guevara” pictures (or something). I suppose “Che” might have been amused by people choosing to name a private company after him (although he would still have killed of them of course). But is not about time the Hollywood crowd grew up?
Roy Bacon has spotted a shocking and indecent source of ‘child pornography’ that our political masters seem to have left us completely unprotected from
The criminal law has apparently caught up with thoughtcrimes associated with digital manipulation of imagery; but if the legislators want real headlines, and more celebrated scalps, perhaps they should look at more traditional means of picture-making.
Today I visited a central London venue in which were publicly displayed dozens – perhaps hundreds – of indecent images of children, ranging in age from a few days old to puberty. One child in particular seemed to have a voyeuristic cult formed around him, frequently appearing with his breast-flaunting unmarried mother in the company of older men and (in the most barbarous scenes) farmyard animals.
Most of the perpetrators of these images were, at least to judge from their surnames, foreign (Angelo, Velazquez, Rubens, etc.), and the vast majority are long dead and presumably burning in hell for their perversions. However, the guardian and curator of this squalid collection is alive and well and living under British jurisdiction. He is, of course, Charles Saumarez Smith, the Director of the National Gallery.
Who is going to inform the authorities?
Try painting this today and see how long you stay out of jail
When I grew up, “Buy low, Sell high” was a mantra you learned at your mothers knee. It was what any good proper American had ingrained into them. Somewhere along the line it seems to have become ‘suspicious activity’ to those in law enforcement. I am not alone in feeling that a couple Arab-American men in a truck full of cheap phones has much less to it than meets the law officer’s eye.
A terrorism expert interviewed on Fox News told them even a huge terrorist plot would only require a handful of phones. A thousand phones are likely to be exactly what the men (and their wives) say they are: a plot to make money. Making money is a good, patriotic American act.
I will require a hell of a lot more proof than I have heard so far to believe there is an enemy use for thousands of mobile phones. Maybe there is… but I am not even mildly convinced of it at the moment.
I can almost hear Del Boy laughing…
The indispensible Michael Totten is blogging from Northern Israel and has some great stuff to read. And while you are at it, consider dropping a dime in his tip-jar to support his first class reportage.
Muslim ‘moderates’ in Britain are calling for changes to British foreign policy as the only way to prevent Muslim ‘extremists’ in Britain from attacking the rest of us.
This is of course the same approach used by Sinn Fein and other Republicans in Northern Ireland, who held that only by political engagement and accommodation with ‘moderate’ political figures (i.e. Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness) could the wicked IRA be stopped from blowing people up. Of course the fact Sinn Fein and the IRA were actually inseparable parts of the same movement was something only a reader of the Guardian could have failed to notice.
And so a ‘moderate’ Muslim, a member of the Tory Party no less, tell us that ‘Muslim anger’ must be recognised (our old chum root causes). Is that so? Well I think increasingly it is being recognised. It is being recognised as an excuse used for getting a non-democratic Muslim veto over British foreign policies just as a majority of Muslims also appear to want a Muslim veto over freedom of expression in Britain.
If the solution to Muslim extremism in Britain being offered by ‘moderate’ Muslims is to give the extremists what they want (i.e. changes in British foreign policy), then the so-called ‘moderates’ are nothing more than the mouthpieces of the extremists they claim to reject. No doubt if given the changes they want, we will be told that only if yet more legal restrictions are placed on what we kuffir can say about Islam will we be able to to placate Muslim ‘anger’ and thereby prevent those wicked extremists from blowing us up. And homosexuals must be legislated against in order to placate those wicked extremists. And alcohol must be banned in order to…
I think it is well past time for some British anger and a great deal of it needs to be directed at the British establishment for allowing this to happen via a policy of appeasment towards domestic Islamists.
If Israel really does accept and implement a ceasefire on Monday, it will have accepted the worst of all possible worlds. If it agrees to an end to the fighting which does not disarm Hezbollah, or even push it behind the Litani River, and does not get a third party force capable of fighting Hezbollah into Southern Lebanon, it would be fair to say Israel has achieved none of its war aims whatsoever. In short, Hezbollah will have won and we will soon be seeing celebrations in the streets across the Islamic world to that effect.
The primary Israeli method of attack, a series of destructive operational level1 air strikes against Lebanon’s infrastructure, only made sense if it was intended to isolate the enemy and dislocate its logistics as an adjunct to a massive and robust attack on the ground with a significant portion of its formidable army, with the intention at crushing Hezbollah as military force.
Otherwise, what was the point of the non-tactical strikes? As Hezbollah already had large numbers of artillery rockets deployed as organic supply with its front line units (demonstrably so), the air interdiction only made sense if Israel was planning an extended campaign for as long as it took to destroy Hezbollah, which means preventing Hezbollah’s resupply. Why else blow power-stations, fuel depots, bridges, roads and runways deep into the country rather than just strike tactical targets where Hezbollah is deployed? Bringing the Lebanese transportation system to a standstill was surely done to stop movement of supply so that as Hezbollah formations expended their munitions (a process that would increase as more units were engaged directly by the Israeli army), they would quickly become much less effective due to logistic dislocation. This is ‘Air Interdiction 101’, the sort of thing military planners have understood since ‘Operation Strangle’ in Italy in 1944.
But what Israel has done so far is a robust air offensive in support of little more than a series of limited objective raids with only a small fraction of the army. This has not only failed (unsurprisingly) to destroy Hezbollah, it has failed to even displace them far enough back onto Lebanon to prevent them firing rockets into Haifa on an almost daily basis throughout this campaign.
And now, having killed a great many people but still leaving a large number of Hezbollah fighters very much alive and still in possession of both their Katyushas and the positions from which to fire them, the Israeli government plans to stop? Having weathered what Israel threw at them (but not what the Israelis inexplicably failed to throw at them), Hezbollah can, quite justifiably, claim victory and greatly enhance their stature simply by virtue of Israel failed to gain any of its publicly stated war aim.
Can anyone tell me what the hell the Israeli government is thinking?
1 = I would argue that the attacks against Lebanon’s infrastructure were ‘operational’ (i.e. above tactical but below strategic). A ‘strategic’ attack would need to be against the supply terminals, which is to say targets in Syria or Iran. I realise this is an arcane issue of military semantics
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