I Hate California Nazis

I still find it hard to believe, somehow I hope it's an elaborate joke at the expense of the American Right... but I doubt, that would require too much intelligence and sense of strategy.

What am I talking about? Well, this filth: Foreskin Man, the aryan-blonde superhero fighting the evil, circumsizing Jewish monsters.

Is this the last idea from the remains of the KKK or Hitler wannabes? No; in fact it is propaganda material to support a proposal to outlaw male circumcision in the moonbat city of San Francisco.

What to say, thanks for showing where yu truly stay, folks. Better to have nazis out in the open than behind cover. Via the Rottweiler.

Like Snowflake in a Warming World

The Emperor wrote another rant regarding Al Gore:

He said, and we’re not making this up, that the reason for the heavy snowfall was the warmening of the atmosphere causing additional water vapor that then fell as snow.

Yes. Water vapor turns to snow because of warmening. Make a note, children. If you want to make popsicles, you just pick your favorite juice, pour it in a suitable container and heat the everloving fuck out of it. For quicker results use a blowtorch. It will freeze instantly. Hey, the Algore said so, and if one or both of your parents are fiddy2ers, there is no way in hell they’re going to gainsay their cult leader.

Now, Al Gore is very low on my list of Great People, but Misha here is wrong.

Warmer air can carry more water vapor than colder air, this can be verified with any psychrometric chart, and it also the basic principle of dehumidification operations.

So, the atmosphere of a warmer Earth will contain, on average, more water vapor. More water vapor means more intense precipitations when this vapor condensates.

Can this result in heavier snowfall? Yes, it can, because in some locations the temperature will be low enough to cause the water vapor to crystallize and precipitate as snow.

So, it is counterintuitive, but in a warmer world there can be heavier snowfall. Despite Al Gore and the band of climate catastrophists.

Tolerance and True Dedication to Diversity

Those seem to be the governing principles of today's climate science, really:

It doesn’t get much uglier than this. A stasi-esque master list of skeptical scientists and bloggers, with ratings put together by a “scientist” that rants against the very people he rates on his blog.

Well, maybe not. I suppose you know what a list of indesiderables is used for.
To make easier to kick down their doors at dawn.

Salvation Is Worth That

LabRat writes:

The more they bang the “they’re actually all RACISTS so you should hate and shun them!” drum, the more it comes off sounding like “We suspect everybody not of our social and economic class of being racists- including you. And we hate you, too. Vote for us!”

And this made me think. Why someone would vote for a party being so condenscing and sanctimonious? Nobody would.

Unless...

The party is bringing salvation. I suspect that many on the left see themselves as saviors of humanity and the Earth and whatever else. And showing a man his evil ways is not thep rettiest of business; it may take some harsh words and deeds. But once that man will see the light, he will be saved and he'll relize that the harsh treatment was only for his own salvation.

So they don't see that as being insulting or hateful, but as showing someone's evil ways in the hope they will abandon those. What a mass movement craves the most is new members, and converts from the enemies' ranks are the most delightful.

Saldatura Perfetta

Davanti a cose del genere che si può dire?

Tutti i Paesi industrializzati, soprattutto quelli grandi, sono responsabili per la crisi dell'effetto serra», ha denunciato il numero uno di Al Qaeda.

Soltanto che dimostrano che quello che io ed altri - sempre meno, però, temo - diciamo da anni sulla sconcertante vicinanza ideologica di tanti soggetti è vero.

Internet Groupies

Still pretty fresh, from LGF:

That we Lizards are somehow mindless rubes waiting for marching orders. I think what's really going on here is jealousy. LGF has one of the most intelligent comment sections of any blog. That LGF would appeal to the intelligent, and we would desire to comment here. It's not enough to smear Charles, they have to further it by smearing his audience, because if word got out LGF was the place for intelligent debate- people might come look and see for themselves, only to discover it's true.

Yes, so intelligent that you may see for yourself. Only to discover that in the very thread from where the comment is excerpted the two or three dissenters from Charles' party line the consensus received only snark, condenscending replies and massive negative ratings.

No, the dissenters were not ranting white supremacists, but only people who respectfully disagreed with the label "racist" being applied to anyone not meeting Charles' standards of perfection. A comment was deleted and the user banned without appeal for narrating unpleasant experiences with black kids on the public transport of Washington DC.

Many call today's members of LGF sycophants, but I think they're even lower that that. Most of them today are no more than groupies.

Courts Against Liberty

From the current news:

A 13-year-old girl who hopes to become the youngest person to sail solo around the world has had her record attempt blocked by a Dutch court.

The most scary part is this tho:

Laura Dekker will be placed under the care of social services for two months and a child psychologist will assess whether she is ready to undertake the risky voyage.

Now, I happen to think that not 14 yet is indeed a too young age for sailing solo around the world* (solo except radio, phone, internet and the like of course), but her parents should make the decision; that ought to be their right and duty. Certainly not business of a court, an emanation of the government.

The more the government and their emantions can interfere with our lives, the less free we are. It does not matter if it is For Our Own Safety or anything else; it is a reduction of liberty.

I am reading just in these days the tales of the far north by Jack London, and I smile grimly thinking that such adventures would be impossible today - at the very least, illegal in a thousand of different ways from child protection violations to health & safety issues. And so merrily we go down the slippery slope to enslavement.

* On the other hand, many years ago a young Mongol of about that age murdered his half-brother so that he could become head of the family. Later, that man became known to the world as Genghis Khan.

And So It Came

What, Charles Johnson's ban hammer...

I'm so crushed, really, about being banned by a whiny, petulant, passive-aggressive and intellectually dishonest little blog tyrant.

More later, if I feel like it. Now I'll get ready to cure my sorrows at a babrbecue with my family.

Finally, I Know

Since the credit/economic crisis of 2008 began, I have been hearing an awful lot of words about "hedge funds" and what they did and what measures should be taken about them.

But no-one I have heard cared to explain what these beasts are.

Finally tonight I decided to do a bit of research, and I found this page about hedge funds, from a company specialized in hedge funds. I have also consulted a lecture that is part of the curriculum at New York University.

What strikes me is that hedge funds are very big, and subject to much less regulation than other investment funds. They are permitted to use aggressive instruments not allowed for other funds in fact.

I am wary of governmental regulation, but that does not mean I want no regulation at all. Put in a different way, a game needs rules to be played. Because without rules it's back to lying, cheating and stealing, and in the case of global finance on a scale that can influence the destiny of whole countries.

So I agree with the idea of more regulation for hedge funds. As with all regulation, tho, the never-answered question is "Who watches the watchmen?".

<---->

A discussion that pops up on the internet from time to time (latest example here) is whether the nuclear bombing of Japan in 1945 was a war crime or not (my opinion in condensed form: No, and don't bore me with asking the question).

But it led me to finally formalize a thought that has been around my head for some time: the Americans kinda shoot themselves in the foot with the Nuremberg Trials.

There were quite a few questionable aspects regarding the International Military Tribunal, but in my opnion the worst was the creation of a new set of crimes that nowadays are being used liberally to bash past and present conduct of war of Western countries*.

Of course, what I wrote about must not be misconstrued as simpathy for the Nazi leaders. In fact, I think the vile beings should have been executed summarily. Because the winners can do that, and nobody would have missed those executed. And even if some innocents had been killed... that would have been only a few more drops in the most horrible sea of blood.

* Not only western countries, I have to admit. But see how well the international organisms are working against the Sudanese regime for example.

The Return of Fascisms

Dennis the Peasant once wrote:

The bottom line is simple: Fascism never has been, and never was intended to be, a coherent political doctrine. Fascism has never been more than a resolute and unprincipled will to power. That Goldberg would not understand this - or choose to ignore this - puts his level of discourse and intellectualism about on par of that of Bill Maher's or George Carlin's. There is no such thing as "liberal fascism" - anymore than there is such a thing as "conservative fascism" - and there never has been, and Jonah Goldberg should know that.

On the other hand, until not long ago on LGF it was fashionable to say that Nazis were in reality socialists if not leftists, considering their stance on economics and environment etc. Then Charles changed his mind, and decided that right-wing extremists are Public Enemy Number One, so that position has suddenly become wrong, and moronic historical revisionism.

Both stances listed above are partly wrong, partly right. Despite what Dennis thinks, Fascism proper was a coherent political doctrine. As I pointed out already, there is a difference between Fascism as practiced by Mussolini's movement and what much of what is called fascism these days.

A good description of the characteristics of Fascism can be found in this article, I think*.

Despite what used to be common wisdom on LGF, fascists and nazis are not left-wingers either - in part by definition, because the "right-wing" label stuck, right or wrong.
Moreover, they share some foundations with the socialists - the primacy of the common good over individual freedom, and the cult of the leader's personality - but are also deeply different: ideologies of the fascist family are generally racist and nationalist, while those of the socialist family are more inclusive and transnational.

What is generally called the "extreme right-wing" in America is an extremely heterogeneous set made of Christian extremists, Nazis, anarco-capitalists and probably some other weirder group - in other words, "extreme right-wing" is little more than a label with no descriptive qualities.

The division between left and right was born at a specific point of the French revolution and it merely referred to the seating arrangement in some assembly, where the fervent revolutionaries sat on the left side and the royalists on the right. Trying to apply this scheme to other places and times results in failure.

In fact, one single axis is not sufficient to represent the entire political landscape and ends in paradox, such as fascist and socialist** militants campaigning for very similar economic policies but beating each other senseless when they come into contact on the streets (a not pretty but common sight in Italy).

Jerry Pournelle thinks that two axes are sufficient:

Some years ago I set out to replace the old model with one that made more sense. I studied a number of political philosophies and tried to see what underlying concepts separated them from their political enemies. Eventually I came up with two variables. I didn't then and don't now suggest these two are all there is to political theory. I'm certain there are other important ones. But my two have this property: they map every major political philosophy and movement onto one unique place.

The two I chose are "Attitude toward the State," and "Attitude toward planned social progress".

The first is easy to understand: what think you of government? Is it an object of idolatry, a positive good, necessary evil, or unmitigated evil? Obviously that forms a spectrum, with various anarchists at the left end and reactionary monarchists at the right. The American political parties tend to fall toward the middle.

Note also that both Communists and Fascists are out at the right-hand end of the line; while American Conservatism and US Welfare Liberalism are in about the same place, somewhere to the right of center, definitely "statists." (One should not let modern anti-bureaucratic rhetoric fool you into thinking the US Conservative has really become anti-statist; he may want to dismantle a good part of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, but he would strengthen the police and army.) The ideological libertarian is of course left of center, some all the way over to the left with the anarchists.

That variable works; but it doesn't pull all the political theories each into a unique place. They overlap. Which means we need another variable.

"Attitude toward planned social progress" can be translated "rationalism"; it is the belief that society has "problems," and these can be "solved"; we can take arms against a sea of troubles.

Once again we can order the major political philosophies. Fascism is irrationalist; it says so in its theoretical treatises. It appeals to "the greatness of the nation" or to the volk, and also to the fuhrer-prinzip, i.e., hero worship.

Call that end (irrationalism) the "bottom" of the spectrum and place the continuum at right angles to the previous "statism" variable. Call the "top" the attitude that all social problems have findable solutions. Obviously Communism belongs there. Not far below it you find a number of American Welfare Liberals: the sort of people who say that crime is caused by poverty, and thus when we end poverty we'll end crime. Now note that the top end of the scale, extreme rationalism, may not mark a very rational position: "knowing" that all human problems can be "solved" by rational actions is an act of faith akin to the anarchist's belief that if we can just chop away the government, man truly free will no longer have problems. Obviously I think both top and bottom positions are whacky; but then one mark of Conservatism has always been distrust of highly rationalist schemes. Burke advocated that we draw "from the general bank of the ages, because he suspected that any particular person or generation has a rather small stock of reason; thus where the radical argues "we don't understand the purpose of this social custom; let's dismantle it," the conservative says "since we don't understand it, we'd better leave it alone."

Venerable Steven instead thinks a multi-dimensional space is required, and he lists at least five political axes:

Michael (Totten, ed.) continues to make various deductions from what he thinks of as his basic insight, and the mistakes cascade. He says, In other pieces I’ve noted an annoying equivalence between the far-left and far-right. And he lists several. But when you look at it from the point of view of multiple political dimensions, what you discover is that the people he refers to as "far-left" and "far-right" actually land on the same point on a lot of these scales, as I described above for Falwell and Chomsky.

* That website has some quite moonbattish/black-helicopters sections, but the article cited makes sense in light of the available evidence.

** The distinction between Socialism and Communism, pretty much as the one between Fascism and Nazism, is more one of degree than of kind.

Fascisms

A discussion that pops up from time to time on the internet is whether Bush/Obama/the USA/any other country or government is fascist. This kind of thing sometimes is just idiotic, other times it leads to pretty well-reasoned arguments.

Anyway, my take is that the only real and true fascism was the regime and ideology that ruled Italy or parts thereof from 1922 to 1945 under the leadership of Benito Mussolini aka Duce.

With the defeat of the Salò Republic and the execution of Mussolini, fascism proper ended (and then more than just a few people switched sides at blinding speed, but that's another story). A few diehard fascists remain in Italy, but they are confined to the fringes and have no power.

So anything else cannot be fascism proper; it can only have more or less in common with Mussolini's movement. I do not want, and neither can in fact, make a list of the peculiar carachteristics of fascism proper, tho.

However, with time the meaning of fascism has morphed and now it seems to mean any sort of dictatorial or authoritarian regime, especially one that is not appreciated by the left.

To reiterate a concept I have expressed several times already, there can not be a meaningful discussion if those taking part in it do not agree on the meaning of the words being used. And in this case even the famous book Liberal Fascism is perpetuating the error. Yes, I think I know the reasoning and intentions behind the title, and I admit it's succesful as a polemics generator.

Now, I read in today's news that the agreement being forced by Obama between Chrysler and Fiat will see trade unions acquiring a significant fraction of the stock. Fasci e corporazioni?

Free Healthcare For Almost Everyone

This seems to be Obama's plan, according to some recent news.

But who is the Most Tanned President of the USA going to leave out of the scheme? Fat rich Republicans?

Not quite. Rather, the current administration is considering to make military veterans pay, through private insurance, for the treatment even of injuries related to their service.

I guess that's their way to support the troops.

In Which I Occasionally Embrace Political Activism

The Emperor says:

But other than that (breaking the law, ed.), every last bit of smearing, lying, finger-pointing etc. will be the order of the day, on top of all of the true claims against him I can find, and they’re already piling up deep and high. Nothing will be too low, every slightest rumor will be picked up and broadcast with a spin that would make David Axelrod blush, and it will be a relentless barrage from the day he takes office ’till the day he leaves it. And I will enjoy every second of it. I will willfully and gleefully sabotage every single thing that he tries to achieve in any way that I can and when he fails, I’ll put all of the blame on him.

Him and his leftist brownshirt goons will get a heaping helping of the same bullshit that they’ve been flinging at us for the last 8 years, and they will get it with interest and then some. See how he likes it.

See, I am seriously worried, even from this other side of the Atlantic, by certain facts about Barack Obama. He's seen as a saintly, almost messianic figure, he who'll change America into a better place, accepted as peer by the international community, where the power of the state will be used to redistribute wealth, and where all races - except those whites who don't repent for the sins of their race - will proportionally share power, and the government will be your friend and help you from cradle to grave, even saving the fools from the consequences of their folly.

It looks more like a nightmare than a dream to me, even more so if I consider that America is today the only place left where a man can be minimally free in the true sense of the word (there are other places where life is good, but not as free).

Alas, despite the facade of working for a better America, more just and humane and pacific, it's the hard left - those who most support Obama, rather than the Clinton wing - that indulges in murderous fantasies and falls prey of a rabid, unhinged rage against their opponents.

I only wish death - or would like to deliver it myself - to a small number of truly barbarous and irredeemeable evildoers; to even my bitter political adversaries I wish no ill (well, I admit that a stubborn case of prostathitis is tempting, tho). And I surely am not of the peace-and-love kind.

I hoped the derangement was going to end with the Bush administration, and initially McCain didn't have to face it. But Sarah Palin became the new target of an even more furious and vile form of hatred - all because she's a gender apostate.

In any case, Michelle Malkin has a not pretty but instructive display of leftist rage - and these are not quotes susceptible of a "I say, you say" situation. No, it's actual videos and stickers and posters and all that.

In the meanwhile, Jeff Goldstein is simply fuming. Apart the (not so) occasional lies and distortions and hypocrisy of some Obama supporters, he is afraid that President Obama would mark the success of the grand plan, started by Gramsci, to take power by infiltration, slow erosion and indoctrination rather than armed revolution. And there's a good chance he is right.

Even many in the Italian media have accepted unquestioningly the Obama narrative, thus abdicating from their supposed role of suppliers of facts and informations, becoming accomplices in the struggle for control of the narrative, and ultimately of thought. And that has me fuming too.

The scariest part of 1984 is not the so popular telescreens, but Newspeak - control of the narrative on the biggest scale.

On the Finnish School Killing

A Finnish high school student ran amok and killed 10 other students of his college before committing suicide, all with the assistance of a Walther P22 semi-automatic pistol.

Leaving aside the human interest side of the story, let's crunch some numbers first. The CIA Worl Fact Book gives Finland's population as 5 245 000 people in July 2008; BBC gives the number of legally-owned firearms as 1 600 000 - making for around 0.3 guns per capita (nice ratio), or a firearms for every 3 people.

The number of gun owners can only be estimated, but I suppose that some people will own more than one firearm, so a reasonable estimate is of one million (legal) gun owners, or something like 15-20% of the populacetion.

Considered that two people freaked out and committed mass-murder within the last year, it can be concluded that Finnish gun owners are quite well-behaved, with only one in roughly 500 000 at risk of committing mass-murder. On the other hand, try to suggest that if 1 out 1000 people belonging to any non-white ethnic group are mass-murderers, there may be a problem with that group's culture, and see how the liberals sharpen their knives.

How easy (or difficult) is to legally own a firearm in Finland? I don't know the language so I cannot read the original laws, but the Global Peace Index* website has a scale of "Ease of access to weapons of minor destruction": on a scale of increasing ease, Finland is rated 2, while the USA is rated 3 (Italy is rated 3 too... on what kind of basis?). Firearms in Finland thus seem to be under pretty tight control.

In a follow-up BBC piece, it is stated that:

Police admit they interviewed Saari on Monday in connection with three videos that were posted on the YouTube website last week.

One of the videos shows a young man firing a pistol before pointing the weapon at the camera and declaring in English "you will die next".

But no action was taken by the authorities to confiscate Saari's legally held pistol or to hold him into custody.

Probably because in Finland the cops cannot take someone into custody or confiscate his belongings if he has not committed a crime. I know that it can be shocking for Brits, accustomed to a system where one can be arrested for only uttering politically incorrect words, but that's how it is supposed to be in free countries.

The revelation that should make many - the BBC folks in the first place - think hard, comes at the end of the same article:

Young people can own and use a firearm in Finland at 15 years of age if they have parental consent.

There are around 1.6 million guns registered in the country, making per-capita gun ownership among the highest in the world.

Gun crime is rare in Finland although shooting is very popular - mainly due to widespread hunting in the country's extensive forests and sub-Arctic wilderness.

So in three pragraphs it is said that Finnish can start using guns at young age; the population is quite heavily armed and sport shooting and hunting are very popular... yet gun crime is rare. If it were true that a high number of guns and exposition to "gun culture" increases gun crime, Finland ought to be a very violent place. Instead, it is classified as one of the most 10 peaceful countries in the world (again, the GPI sets the level of violent crime for Finland at 1; it's 1 also for the USA but 3 for Italy).

The government of Finland appears intentioned to tighten gun control, but it's yet another case of closing the barn door after the horses have escaped. The school shooter apparently has been planning the massacre since 2002: tighter gun control can really stop someone with such a determination to cause death and mayhem? But as usual, it will make life harder for the many law-abiding gun owners (if most of them took up political activism, at some 20% that fraction of the population there's a good chance tighter gun control laws would not pass).

* I have criticized the GPI in the past, but it's more about the interpretation of the various indexes than the numbers themselves. In any case, numbers obtained with a consistent methodology are suitable for comparative purposes.

Update: There is a point I want to clarify. The police officers who questioned Saari probably did everything according to laws and procedures (but it's not impossible that they were lazy or incompetent, in fact); it is also obvious that they failed to notice the young man's disturbed mental state. And taking guns away from mad people is completely legitimate. Also, the article has been slightly modified after initial publication.

How Does That Tree Grow

Tree rings width is a widely-used temperature proxy, but it also suffers from a number of problems. Ring width is the result of a number of factors, and trauma is one of those. It is not even sure that tree rings width is a good proxy for temperature, given the number of factors involved - in fact, it's not completely wrong to say that ring widhts are believed to be related to temperature.

In most cases, researchers calculate the correlation between ring widths of a specified tree (or trees) and the instrumental record of the nearest weather station - if there is no suitable station, gridded* temperature data are used. If the correlation coefficient is deemed statistically significant, no matter how low r² can be, the proxy is said to be calibrated and regarded as a good indicator of temperature ouside of the calibration period. Keep in mind that this is a short and simplified version of the procedure.

This approach has a number of wekanesses. An easy one to spot is the fact that only seldom an instrumental record for the exact tree location is available; the nearest station may not represent well the actual climate in which the tree has grown. Moreover, a researcher can fudge with confidence intervals, gridcell and proxy selection, and algorithms basically at will until the desired result is achieved.

I am not aware of any laboratory/field research that tried to grow trees in strictly controlled conditions in order to examine the relationship between mean temperature and ring widths. Studies and experiments have been performed for the effect of CO₂ concentration, exposure to pollutants and other issues, but no temperature.

Of course, the experiment would be long and costly. The outline of the setup goes like this: 2 or better 3 greenhouses fitted with sytems to control light exposure, precipitation, fertilization, humidity, air composition and finally temperature. Hydroponic colture would make some things easier to control compared to soil, at least in a first version of the experiment. One population of plants would be exposed to a certain annual mean temperature, another to higher temperature and the third group to lower temperature. What form the temperature cycle should take has to be defined: it can be a regular wave produced superimposing high and low frequency components, or a random walk centered around a specified mean.

An alternative is to use only one group of plants and subject it to different temperature regimes at different times, but those results would be harder to analyze - and the experiment would need to run for much longer.

Plants of temperate climates need seasonal temperature cycles, and that adds a considerable degree of difficulty to the experiment. Light exposure times must be adjusted to the seasonal variations too. Also daily temperature cycles can be important, and there can be a problem of system response times. It would be hard to simulate frost conditions in a hydroponic system.

Also baseline conditions - what mean temperature, humidity, precipitation amount and regime (in non-hydroponic systems) and light exposure would have to be chosen, together with exact species and variety of plant to study.

Even if most proxyes come from temperate regions, for semplicity the experiment can start with tropical plants, which are accustomed to a nearly-constant temperature and a nearly constant 12-hours light cycle all year long.

The experiment would have to run for at least 10 years at least, in my opinion (so plans must be made so that maintenance and eventual repairs of the equipment will not disrupt the experiment). 5 years may be enough to collect useful data, but I doubt.

Now do not act penurious, I will accept research grant offers with tempered joy.

* Temperature is recorded by a number of station irregularly distributed around the world. Data are then interpolated and published for the coordinates of the intersections of a regular grid (say, 0.5°xo.5°) covering the whole globe.

Protecting Your Password

The story of how Sarah Palin's Yahoo mail account was hacked and her private corrispondence revealed is all over the web; I have nothing political to add except for the fact that the hacker who materially broke into the account may be a hyperactive teenager, but the individuals in more "respected" media who republished the private material are slimy bottom-feeders who deliberately wallow in filth.

However, what common people will probably want to know, is how to mount a defense against this kind of attack.

In this case, the hacker used Yahoo's password retrieval facility and obtained the required information with Internet searches, induction and a little of trial-and-error.

A simplistic solution would be to provide false personal data (birthdate, name, address) at the registration stage, but this is a breach of the terms of service and possibly an actual felony. So I cannot recommend that.

Usually the password retrieval process asks one or more "security" question, such as mother's maiden name. If the provider allows a personalized security question, do not use a trivial one, but be creative: put in there a drunken exchange with your best friend, or a citation from a weird conversation you once had with a random nutcase and remained in your mind. Avoid quotes from movies/songs/books because those are in the public domain.

If the website only allows a choice of stock questions, do not insert the real answer. Use instead code words, anagrams (weak method), any easy to remember word or (best of all) random words. Write them down if you're afraid you would forget.

Of course, the less information about yourself are in the public domain, the harder will be for a social engineer hacker to succeed.

A strong password - containing upper and lower case letters and numbers in a non-obvious sequence - is the necessary requisite for security. However, no password will help if an user leaves his computer unlocked at lunch time, or he does not log off his e-mail account before other users access the machine. Awareness is, always, the key.

Different From Birth

What makes Europe and America so different in culture and politics? It's ridiculous to think that genetic makeup may have something to do with it.

One reason, in my opinion, has to do with geography and other rather incidental facts.

The settlers in the USA wanted to build a society different from the ones they left (generally, they only wanted to be left alone and live as free, indipendent men), but the main point here is that they could.

The territory of the USA (and parts of Canada) was vast, rich of water, fertile land, natural resources and so on. And most important, it was rather empty: the population density of the American Indians was low and many of them were more or less nomads. They tried to resist colonization, but ultimately the technological gap was too wide and the native society too fractitious to mount a significant resistance. American Indians were ruthlessly wiped out and the settlers remained the sole dominators of a huge and rich stretch of land - where they could build the society they preferred free of costraints. It took a lot of hard work, but they succeeded.

In Europe instead things were very different: population density had always been relatively high since the Roman age at least, with power (and weapons) strictly in the hands of the ruling classes. Every attempt at revolution or reformation had to go against deeply entrenched customs and social equilibria; there was nowhere to go (except America, after a certain time) for the dissenters. While in America new ideas and social models could simply expand, in Europe they had to compete, and very hard, against existing ones.

Those are important factors to explain the differences we can see today.
Of course, some American don't even bother to think about these issues but insted keep chanting "America the best, Fuck the rest".

Chemicals Better Left Untouched

In the vast world of chemistry, there are many chamicals that can ruin your day - or your whole life.

But not all chemicals are nasty in the same way: some are toxic, others corrosive. There are chemicals that can detonate more or less on a whim, and others that ignite very easily.

So it's difficult to say what is the Nastiest Substance in the World; the competition should at least be broken into categories. I won't enter into the topic of how easy or difficult it is to achieve protection from the various chemicals, or how likely exposition is, because it would be too long a discussion.

Acute toxicity: Ricin, nerve agents and other toxins are at the top of the list. These cause an array of unpleasant effects that culminate in death, which is rather rapid but not painless. Another piece of work is dimethyl sulphate: it causes blisters on skin and necrosis of eyes and respiratory tract.

Chronic toxicity: Asbestos is pretty bad, in the vicinity of aromatic amines and azoic dyes. They cause various ilnesses, among them types of cancer which are hard to treat. Anything with an aromatic ring has at least the potential to bind to DNA and screw it up; there is a pretty long list of other reactive groups that can possibly cause cancer.

Flammability: Carbon disulphide, with its autoignition temperature of 90 - 100 °C. It presents other reactive hazards and it's toxic, too. Many low molecular weight ethers are extremely flammable as well. Vapors behave as gases, which means that they can travel quite a distance before they reach a remote source of ignition.

Explosion: Organic perchlorate esters are prone to explode if the chemists in the lab have the wrong haircut, but someone embarked on a project to test the limits of divine benevolence and prepared fluorine perchlorate. The stuff is so unstable that it detonates upon crystallization. Ethers, if stored in contact with oxygen, produce unstable peroxydes which have caused many accidents - especially when the young chmistry student applies excessive force to remove a ground glass stopper from a bottle buried for years in the depts of some laboratory cabinet. The infamous explosive TATP belongs to the same category. Though not explosive in themselves, strong oxydizers will easily produce explosions and fires if they come into contact with combustible substances. Liquid oxygen is well-known for that behaviour, and treated with due respect (and those who don't show respect don't live for long). But if liquid oxygen is bad, liquid fluorine is devilish: it is an even stronger oxydizer, and corrodes everything except some fluorinated polymers and some metals, because passivation protects them. It is hypergolic with hydrocarbon fuels and many other substances. But even fluorine can be topped by...

The Nastiest of Them All: Chlorine Trifluoride. Even less domesticated than fluorine, it is extremely reactive and corrosive. It causes everything except passivated metals to ignite and burn - yes, concrete does burn in contact with ClF3, as does flesh. It was investigated as a rocket fuel, but it proved to be too reactive even for that. Its only practical use nowadays is as cleaning agent in chemical vapor deposition chambers for semiconductor production - making it the most extreme cleaning process I'm aware of.
Ah, the stuff is also higly toxic. But it does not cause cancer, hooray!

CJ's Freedom of Speech

"You can say anything you like, but leave the Jews alone or else." In the long form:

Laws against free speech are bad, we can all agree on that. But Le Pen is no poster boy for free speech; he's being prosecuted for this stuff because he has
a lot of influence.

Later another commenter calls Charles on his statement, but the mighty CJ initially refuses to give any satisfying answer, then bans the commenter for the sin of dissent.

Notorious Jewish extremist ploome hineni shows up to repeat that yes, being anti-semitic is reason enough to be jailed, while the others fool around cracking jokes. Typical LGF shit; I see nothing has changed.

Another dishonorable mention goes to this:

Europe is done for.

That has nothing to do with a sober appraisal, but it's only a feel-good motto. It's something a Yank can repeat to himself until he's completely sure of his intellectual superiority, and can look down upon those brutes inhabiting this side of the Pond.

Update 11/02: If you think that I am obsessed with Little Green Footballs, this other guy beats me 100 to 1. But if you assumed a considerable amount of timewastotoxin, his blog deserves a visit.

Agricultural Free-riding

In the last few years there has been a proliferation of organic farms - refusing to use synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides; the latest trend seems to be going local, using only products available in a relatively short (some say 100 km, others 100 miles) radius.

All nice and good; I've always had an orchard and I know that well-tended and vine-ripened vegetables are much better than the mass-produced ones. And free-range livestock has superior meat. However, I think that the supporters of organic and local productions have failed to ponder long-term and wide-range effects.

Organic and local productions are more subject to loss of crop due to parasite and insect infestations and natural events. I don't know whether the organic production protocols allow the use of synthetic chemicals in an emergency, but when the infestation reaches the point of emergency, it may be too late to treat it succesfully.

It is machines, fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides that made possible to produce all the food required to feed a large part of Earth's population - and the possibility of transporting food from where it's convenient to produce it, to where the consumers are.

At this point, if local/organic supplies fail it is still possible to acquire food from mass-production sources, sometimes located halfway around the globe. Yes, prices will go up, but there won't be any real shortage of products.

However, consider a world which has gone vastly organic and local (or regional). The agrochemical industry will be reduced to a minuscule size, and the logistical organization required for long-distance transport agricultural products will be vastly downsized. There may not be enough agrochemicals available to counter an emergency - or not available in time. So, if crops are lost in a certain region, other regions may not have excess products to export - worse, the very means needed to transport food may not be there. At this point, in the disgraced region a food shortage if not famine becomes a real possibility.

It's free-riding because we can afford to go local/organic as long as someone else continues with mass production; we have the benefits while others bear the costs. But free-riding is not sustainable for long.