“to help India become a major world power”

The United States has now declared that it is going “to help India become a major world power in the 21st century. We understand fully the implications, including military implications, of that statement.” The official spoke on condition of anonymity. (here. Read the whole thing.)

If this is true, it is a major, major step.

The alignment continues to shape up. Anglosphere (Australia, hopefully UK will stay in) + Japan + India + (Israel?) + others on one side. China, Iran, Hezbollah, NK, France, maybe Russia, on the other. I like our cards.

The Bush administration is remolding the world and building an alliance structure to keep the peace and preserve democratic capitalism for decades, maybe centuries. Bush the supposed dolt is a visionary on a breathtaking scale. His recent appointments show that he is absolutely serious about kicking the UN and the World Bank into being useful. Picking Karen Hughes, his most trusted consiglieri, to run the USA’s public diplomacy means that this is a top-rung priority. Everything he is doing is meant to achieve world-transforming results.

Meanwhile, what is Chirac doing? He is draining his bladder in his pants at the prospect of having to compete with Estonia, nickle-and-diming on the deal that would allow some competition in services. Some Union. It isn’t even a free trade zone. What a joke. Europeans have forgotten how to reproduce. They once overran the world and grabbed much of it at swordpoint, and ransacked it and kept the proceeds. You don’t have to like it, but they used to be players. They can’t even face the prospects of a fouled diaper anymore, let alone playing in a league that includes the mammoth world powers of the next Century, India and China. Stick a fork in Old Europe.

What are the Chinese doing? Everything wrong, politically. Scaring their neighbors into an alliance against them. Very much like Kaiserian Germany, another economic powerhouse but political retard. Ludwig Dehio said that a country which feels itself rising to the status of a world power is overcome by a demonic sense of its own energies and potential greatness, which leads it to act provocatively, cause an alliance to arise around it and against it, and then lunge for hegemony in defiance of the odds. But the European countries based on land could not grasp the nature of the offshore power, England, then America, and one after another went down to defeat — Imperial Spain, Bourbon France, Napoleonic France, Kaiserian Germany, Hitlerian Germany — then on a worldwide scale, Soviet Russia. Will China play this role next? What I hope will happen is that China will be confronted by such an array of power that it won’t roll the iron dice. Instead, it will get across the chasm of political and cultural reform needed to become a free and open society with legitimately elected government. All this will of course be “with Chinese Characteristics”, as they might put.

Keep your eye on this India business. It is perhaps the biggest thing going amidst a whole boatload of major initiatives.

Nature

The so-called “natural world” is characterized, from a civilized person’s point of view, by a distressing lack of metal and energy, and by an abundance of lifeforms that like to gobble up everything we find useful apart from metal and high-octane fuel.

This means, among other things, that modern civilization, which features lots of metal and really potent fuel and no microbes that like to have either of them for breakfast, looks really weird to creatures evolved in the environment we like to call “nature”. Some such creatures, while giving the appearance of being intelligent, conclude from this that modern civilization is a desecration of nature and that nature is a more desirable environment for human beings.

But the “natural world” is lacking in metal and high-octane fuel not because that’s the way God or Gaia or Whoever intended, but because these things were buried deep underground and out of reach while the denizens of the natural world were evolving. The real starting point of civilizational advance wasn’t the invention of the wheel, or of fire, or even agriculture. Civilization couldn’t really take off until our ancestors learned how to dig really deep holes and find all that buried treasure.

If lots of metal and lots of energy had been available at the surface for the last five billion years, not only would people think of them as “natural”, but all life on Earth would be adapted to use them “naturally”. Every animal would have a metal skeleton and a metal shell. Horses would be able to run at a hundred miles per hour or more, and birds would rival our jet planes in performance. Burning wood would yield as much power as burning oil – in fact, plants would synthesize petroleum or coal or something similarly potent rather than starches and sugars, and animals (including ourselves) and microbes would metabolize this high-octane fuel. Leave a lump of coal laying around, and it would rot like a corpse as microbes gobbled it up, and a cup of oil (which would be nice and tasty to us) would spoil like milk.

Nervous systems would tend to use wires, lending all animals (including ourselves) lightning-fast reflexes. Animals would tend to use some of that abundant energy and metal for offense and defense – projectile weapons and explosives might be seen in place of horns and teeth, and a nature hike might look like what we think of as a war zone.

Savages would have many of the resources we do. They’d have fast horses, metal homes and metal tools; they’d probably have explosives and other nasty weapons, and so on. Unfortunately, they’d also have far more powerful predators than we do, they’d have microbes, worms, and insects eating up whatever fuel they tried to stash along with the walls of their homes, and they’d be constantly at war with other savages using similarly potent weapons. A “classical” civilization might be much like ours, with lots of energy and lots of metal and lots of interesting gizmos that are relatively easy to make (particularly with “manual laborers” doing work and building things at speeds rivaling our factories – of course that includes slaves, which would still be profitable to keep and feed at this point) and not nearly as much war. They wouldn’t bother with steam engines or internal combustion engines – they’d keep using animal power (those hundred-mile-per-hour horses, for instance) until they figured out how to dig up uranium and make nuclear reactors, at which point they’d build a “modern” civilization with homes of depleted uranium, supersonic jet planes in everyone’s garage, tools and fuel that didn’t rot, predators and most other animals no longer even a minor nuisance to most people, animals in general only kept around if they can be eaten or be accepted as companions/surrogate children/etc., and plenty of spacecraft, factories and machines far more productive than anything we have now and easily driving slaveowners into bankruptcy and eliminating that peculiar institution, and some apparently intelligent members of the species would complain about what a “desecration” all this was and how the race was sadly no longer in harmony with Nature.

What’s the point of all this speculation? First, to poke some holes in the theory that “nature” as we know it is something sacred, rather than a collection of lifeforms that happened to evolve in a low energy and low metal environment. Second, to point out that any kind of modern civilization must use a much better energy source than is available on the surface in order to live significantly better than animals or savages, who would have been using any good local source of energy they didn’t have to dig for since prehistoric times. If Mr. Kunstler is right about the global oil supply, we’ll have to switch to something else that is equally out of harmony with nature, or else return to a more primitive (i.e., nasty, brutish, and short) mode of existence. Adapting to a low-energy existence, like Mr. Kunstler suggests we do, means given up the noble dreams of rising from the jungle to the stars, and makes a mockery of all the sacrifices our ancestors made to further the realization of those dreams and to protect the laws, institutions, and societies that made it possible. Nuclear power may be scary, but so is coal mining, and doubly so is a world where most people rarely venture more than a few dozen miles from home (and have no means of escape from the place they were born), slavery is profitable, and a farmer working a low-productivity, labor intensive farm can only feed a handful of people instead of fifty or more (which means lots more farmers doing lots more manual labor). That’s the kind of world that needs to be desecrated as thoroughly as possible.

Late Easter Candy

My sister sent me a little box of candy from that greatest of all candy stores, Gowell’s, in Brockton, Massachusetts.

Brockton is a once-great town that has fallen on hard times. Half the boots worn by the Union Army were made in Brockton. It was once the shoe-making capital of America, maybe the world. It was always a tough town, but now it has gang problems and many other pathologies and seems to be heading downward.

But I find myself almost emotional with relief to see that Gowell’s lives on. Gowell’s home page says: “John Wayne was a customer of ours. He received our chocolates during his stay at a Boston hospital. He ordered candy monthly and his favorite was Dark Almond Bark.” It is probably 25 years since I set foot in the place, but I remember the picture of John Wayne. If business or pleasure should bring you to or through Brockton, stop in and get some candy. Buy whatever you think you want to bring home, and a few loose pieces in a bag to eat in the car.

UPDATE More Brockton trivia. The northwest border of Brockton is astride the boundary line between Plymouth and Norfolk counties. That is the oldest boundary-line in English-speaking America. It was the boundary-line between the Plymouth Bay Colony and the Massachusetts Bay Colony, way back in the 1600s.

Lancet Letters Part II

Courtesy of Amac comes letters just published in Lancet concerning the Iraqi Mortality Survey.

Stephen Apfelroth, Department of Pathology, Albert Einstein College of Medicine writes:


In their Article on mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq (Nov 20, p 1857),1 Les Roberts and colleagues use several questionable sampling techniques that should have been more thoroughly examined before publication.

Although sampling of 988 households randomly selected from a list of all households in a country would be routinely acceptable for a survey, this was far from the method actually used–a point basically lost in the news releases such a report inevitably engenders. The survey actually only included 33 randomised selections, with 30 households interviewed surrounding each selected cluster point. Again, this technique would be adequate for rough estimates of variables expected to be fairly homogeneous within a geographic region, such as political opinion or even natural mortality, but it is wholly inadequate for variables (such as violent death) that can be expected to show extreme local variation within each geographic region. In such a situation, multiple random sample points are required within each geographic region, not one per 739 000 individuals

So cluster sampling is inadequate for sampling heterogeneous phenomena! Wish I had thought to point that out. Oh, wait I did, 5 months ago.

” In my opinion, such a flaw by itself is fatal, and should have precluded publication in a peer-reviewed journal.”

Glad I’m not the only nut job out here.

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