Peter the Great would have Smiled…

at this major erection in St. Petersburg. It sounds like a prank his drunken synod might have played.

Nuclear Power: Sweden sees the Light

It’s been a long time coming, but the Swedish government has finally given the green light to construction of new nuclear power plants. The Guardian reported a ministerial decision to present a law to that effect to the Swedish parliament in February 2009. It’s taken a while for the legislative process to run its course, but Der Spiegel now reports that the new law has been approved. The restrictions on nuclear power in Sweden and several other European countries have never made much sense. They exist as a result of the now familiar efforts by “Greens” to evoke a fantasy world in which they are the noble saviors of humanity against the forces of evil, represented in this case by radioactive doom. Think “China Syndrome.” In the process of “saving” them, their environmental “gift” to the people of Europe has been to insure that any number of dirty coal-fired power plants would stay on line spewing massive amounts of cancer causing particulates and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, while at the same time representing a substantially greater radioactive risk than nuclear plants of similar capacity.

It is unclear whether the new Swedish law will have concrete results. The situation there is similar in many respects to that in the United States where, in spite of the pro-nuclear stance of the Obama Administration, the ineptitude of government and the legal system and the short-sightedness of industry have combined to make the construction of new nuclear capacity prohibitively expensive. The “green light” also comes with many caveats. As Spiegel puts it,

The majority in favor was extremely thin, and came with any number of “whens” and “buts.” New reactors can only be built to replace one of the ten already in existence at the three Swedish nuclear plants at Ringhals, Oskarshamn, or Forsmark, and only then if one of them is taken off the net permanently. Government subsidies for private power companies are forbidden, and any approval of new construction will require demonstration of an increase in demand for electric power.

It is hardly a sure thing that new nuclear power plants will ever be built on Swedish soil. Demand is on the decline, and the Swedes are getting a good look at everything that can go wrong thanks to their neighbors, the Finns. The new Finnish reactor at Olkiluoto, western Europe’s first new construction project since the Chernobyl catastrophe in 1986, is providing arguments for foes of nuclear power: a doubling of the original cost estimates, constant construction delays, and constant bickering between the government and the French consortium doing the work.

“Der Spiegel” Abandons Multiculturalism

Wiki defines multiculturalism as follows:

Multiculturalism is the acceptance or promotion of multiple ethnic cultures, applied to the demographic make-up of a specific place, usually at the organizational level, e.g. schools, businesses, neighborhoods, cities or nations. In this context, multiculturalists advocate extending equitable status to distinct ethnic and religious groups without promoting any specific ethnic, religious, and/or cultural community values as central.

The editors of “Der Spiegel” have now apparently abandoned the multicultural paradigm, and have reverted to defining some cultures as “good” and others as “barbarous.” And who, you might ask, are the barbarians? Silly question! We are, of course. According to an article by Spiegel hatemonger-in-chief Marc Pitzke about the upcoming execution of Ronnie Lee Gardner for murder,

Double murderer Ronnie Lee Gardner is to be executed tonight in the state of Utah. He chose the method himself: death by firing squad. That is barbaric, but, in this case, completely legal – in spite of international protests.

One would thing the Germans, of all people, would have learned the dangers of cultural chauvinism. Be that as it may, it would seem that the term “barbarian” has now returned to their lexicon. According to the definition now current in the United States, “barbarous” means,

1. Primitive in culture and customs; uncivilized.
2. Lacking refinement or culture; coarse.

It would be edifying to learn what other cultures besides that of the United States are currently considered coarse and uncivilized.  Be that as it may, it is encouraging that the Germans have so far recovered from the unfortunate events of 65 years ago that they once again feel confident in asserting their cultural superiority.

“Hate Speech” and the Liquidation of Free Speech

Bruce Bawer comments on another of the “hate speech” laws that have recently been used so effectively to dismantle freedom of speech in Canada. Bruce describes the Norwegian version:

Then there’s Norway, where I live, and where the last few days have seen yet another dark development. By way of background, permit me to begin by quoting myself. On pages 230-31 of my book Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom I sum up the more alarming aspects of Norway’s Discrimination Law, passed in 2005:

It forbids “harassment on the grounds of ethnicity, national origin, ancestry, skin color, language, religion, or beliefs,” and, in turn, defines harassment as “actions, omissions, or utterances [my emphasis] that have the effect or are intended to have the effect of being insulting, intimidating, hostile, degrading, or humiliating.”

In other words, it’s illegal just to say certain things.

Defendants may be accused not only by the individuals whom they’ve supposedly offended but also by semiofficial organs such as the Anti-Racist Center and the Center against Ethnic Discrimination (both of which helped formulate the law, and both of which exist less to oppose real racism and discrimination than to oppose political incorrectness generally) or by the government’s Equality and Anti-Discrimination Ombud.

Which means that a handful of far-left organizations have been given enormous power to silence those they disagree with.

Violations of the law by individuals are punishable by fine; violations by individuals in concert with at least two other persons (such as a writer conspiring with an editor and publisher, perhaps?) can be punished by up to three years’ imprisonment — this in a country where murderers often get off with less. Moreover, the burden of proof is on the accused: you’re guilty until proven innocent.

And this in a supposedly free country.

One would think that the adherents of a religion who actually believe in it themselves would not fear criticism.  If they are convinced that what they believe is true, why would they not welcome challenges to that truth as opportunities to embarrass and confute unbelievers, and to enlighten others?  If, on the other hand, they fear that belief in a God who threatens to burn the majority of human beings in hell for millions and billions of years, and, in fact eternally, for the paltry sins they commit during their short stay on earth may not be quite rational, on can understand why they would be sensitive to criticism.   

Liberty is not a ground state. You have to keep fighting for it, or it disappears.

The LGF Pot Calls the Geller Kettle Black

Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs adds his two cents worth to the Pam Geller/PayPal kerfluffle:

The fact is that there are plenty of good reasons to make the judgment that Pamela Geller promotes crazy hate speech, racist groups, and conspiracy theories; her main targets are Muslims, but many of these reasons have nothing to do with Islam, radical or otherwise.

Far be it for him to promote “crazy hate speech” on his own blog. Some recent examples of his philosophical detachment and spirit of moderation:

Congratulations, Glenn (Beck). You’ve now succeeded in being even more of a gratuitous race-baiter than Rush Limbaugh.

Some days it seems as if the right wing blogosphere has become possessed by the Demons of Utter Stupidity.

In his feverish rush to smear LGF by any means possible, wingnut hateblogger Ace of Spades makes an accusation. (Amid a whole bunch of outright lies.)

This is the kind of person who represents the right wing blogosphere: a rank hypocrite, who accuses others of the unethical acts he performs himself.

World Net Daily’s source for their latest insane Birther article is James Edwards — an open white supremacist who runs the vile “Political Cesspool” radio show in Tennessee: Hawaii elections clerk: Obama not born here.

I haven’t been paying much attention to raving Birther kook Orly Taitz’s campaign for the GOP nomination for secretary of state, but amazingly, there’s actually a chance she might win today

Fox News Hitler pimp Glenn Beck has a new favorite author:

Nothing new about any of this, Blair, you freaking brain-dead right wing moron. Try harder next time.

Today’s disgusting right wing racist is South Carolina Republican Senator Jake Knotts.

It’s a good thing he doesn’t, you know, hate anybody. That could really get ugly.

Minnesota in 1854: An Account by a Remarkable Englishman

The easy availability of a vast library of books is not the least of the Internet’s many gifts. If you find a reference to some interesting volume published before 1922, you are more than likely to find it among the online collection at Google books. Recently, for example, I happened to see a reference to an account of the Earl of Elgin’s mission to China and Japan in the years 1857-59 by one Laurence Oliphant. It was mentioned in one of the great British literary reviews of the 19th century, and described in such favorable terms as to pique my interest. In searching the author’s name at Google Books, I found not only the work in question, but any number of others attributed to the same author, including descriptions of travel in the southern regions of Russia, describing conditions there in 1852, just before the onset of the Crimean War, Palestine, and of no small interest to myself, as I grew up in Wisconsin, an account of an expedition through Canada to our neighbor state of Minnesota by way of Lake Superior in 1854.

I was pleased to find the book as entertaining and skillfully written as the earlier work about the Far East described in the British review, and highly recommend it to the attention of the interested reader. There are many insightful comments about social, economic, and political conditions in the U.S. at the time. Midwesterners will enjoy the many details and anecdotes about the rough and ready life in Wisconsin and Minnesota at a time when the region was still considered the “far west.”

For example, when Oliphant and his three companions climbed off their steamer at Superior, Wisconsin, they discovered that the only hotel in town was a large barn, which doubled as a carpenter shop and land office. Guests were expected to bring their own shavings to sleep on, should they be lucky enough to find an unoccupied spot. The author gives an interesting account of an expedition with a local realtor to have a look at some promising building lots in the growing metropolis:

…we commenced cutting our way with billhooks through the dense forest, which he called Third Avenue, or the fashionable quarter, until we got to the bed of a rivulet, down which we turned through tangled underwood (by name West Street), until it lost itself in a bog, which was the principal square, upon the other side of which, covered with almost impenetrable bush, was the site of our lots.

Oliphant goes on to describe a harrowing journey with two Canadian voyageurs in a birch bark canoe through swamps and over rapids to the headwaters of the Mississippi, from which they descended to St. Paul, the up and coming capital of the Minnesota territory. They were pleased to find it a great deal more civilized than Superior, with a hotel that was passable, even by European standards. Oliphant recounts that the guests would rush through their evening meal in typical American fashion. The process of digestion, however, was another matter. The men would retire to the front porch, where they would lean back in chairs, criticize the passers-by, and pontificate on the politics of the day at their leisure.

Among the topics of conversation was the issue of slavery, and while latter day Marxists and sentimental writers about “southern heritage” have “proved” that the Civil War was not really about slavery using any number of facile and unconvincing arguments, there was no confusion about the matter at the time, whether among opponents or proponents of slavery or European observers. Oliphant described an exchange on the subject between an eastern Yankee and a scowling Texan, and observed,

Whatever may be the views of Americans upon the great question of slavery, which seems destined, before long, to split the Union, they do not scruple to avow themselves annexationists.

The great question of slavery will lead to an explosion which it is to be hoped will not terminate in a Kilkenny-cat process.

The author and his friends took a river steamboat to Galena, Illinois, a point which was already connected to the rest of the country by rail. Apropos railroads, he notes in passing,

…we have no business to question the engineering performances in a country in which there are already 21,310 miles of railway laid down, or about 2500 miles more than the whole of the rest of the world put together.

The story of Oliphant doesn’t end with travel stories. Strangely enough, this obviously intelligent and articulate writer later went completely off the deep end as an adherent of the then-fashionable “spiritualist” craze. Among the collection of his works available at Google Books, one will also find a remarkable production entitled, “Scientific Religion, or Higher Possibilities of Life and Practice through the Operation of Natural Forces.” Published in 1888, it is full of revelations about “dynaspheric forces, the vital atomic interactions between the living and the dead, the transmutation of material forces by conversion of moral particles, Magnetic Conditions in the Holy Land,” and any number of similar ravings, all of which have so far failed in their author’s evident intent of enlightening future generations.

Those who pique themselves on the supposedly high intelligence of humankind would do well to read such stuff occasionally. Oliphant was a man of no mean intellect, possessed of remarkable insight and powers of analysis in his description of life in the United States of his time, and the political affairs then current. He also published ravings about “spiritual forces” that even a child would laugh at today. Those who consider themselves infallible would do well to recall that they belong to the same species (starting, of course, with me).

Steamboats docked at St. Paul, 1858

Palestinian “Victims” – Bill Maher Gets It

The dead tree media and the rest of the vanilla left used to support Israel – before they cleaned their enemy’s clocks in 1967 and 1973. That made it difficult to strike pious poses as Israel’s “saviors.” After all, the Jews could defend themselves. Ergo, they switched sides to the Palestinians, who made much better “victims.” If your whole ideology is about ostentatious displays of superior righteousness, that’s all that matters. There’s no more intellectual depth to their hatred of Israel than that. Once the “victim” was identified, rational analysis of the conflict became superfluous. All that remained was to rationalize a forgone conclusion, and indulge in the usual orgy of self-righteousness.

Of the Naval Treaty of 1922 and Novel Trends in British America Bashing

The BP debacle has spawned some previously untapped new variants of America bashing in the UK. Not that the British were remarkably behindhand in piling on during the worst of the latest climax in European anti-Americanism that reached its peak several years ago. It was so much the more surprising to learn in an article by Peter Hitchens that appeared on the website of the Daily Mail that his countrymen have been “fawning” on the United States. Of course, the citizens of our mother country are noted for their reserve, but I have visited many British websites and forums in recent years, and never discovered anything that it would ever occur to me to describe as “fawning.” Be that as it may, the Brits, like most Europeans, have remarkably thin skins. They have been dishing out abuse to America with the best of them for years, but, as their response to criticism over the BP affair demonstrates, they can’t take it.

Hitchens’ whining piece complaining about our “hostility” because our President dares to criticize a British company for unleashing the greatest environmental disaster in our history is a case in point. The author wears his paranoia on his sleeve. For example,

Americans may say they love our accents (I have been accused of sounding like Princess Di’) but the more thoughtful ones resent and rather dislike us as a nation and a people, as friends of mine have found out by being on the edge of conversations where Americans assumed no Englishmen were listening.

Perhaps it’s just that the “thoughtful” among my fellow countrymen have been hiding their opinions from me as well all these years, but I can honestly say that I can’t recall a single conversation in which the English were singled out for resentment and dislike, unless Hitchens is referring to George III. On the contrary, other than the occasional Irish Catholic with romantic notions about the IRA, Americans who pay any attention to the English at all tend to be Anglophiles.

Other than that, the article is filled with the usual bitching and moaning about America that we have long been accustomed to. There is one novelty that I haven’t seen elsewhere, perhaps because it is too far-fetched even for most Europeans. Quoting Hitchens,

It was American pressure that forced us out of the first rank of naval powers in the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, which led to our defeat at Singapore 20 years later.

I had to laugh out loud when I read that bit. It assumes the reader is completely ignorant of the relevant history. In the first place, the treaty didn’t force Britain “out of the first rank of naval powers.” It established a ratio of 5-5-3 in fighting ships among the treaty powers England, the United States, and Japan, respectively. The British and U.S. navies were the most powerful in the world at the time. How, then, did the treaty force Britain “out of the first rank of naval powers?” In fact, the Naval Treaty of 1922 was one of the greatest triumphs of common sense over fear and hysteria in the annals of international relations. It ended a nascent arms race and was of great benefit to all the signatories, and not least to the British. At the time the Conference was called, the pound sterling was at its lowest point, British citizens were paying crippling taxes, and England was facing another period of naval expansion they could ill afford, forced on them by the building programs of the United States and Japan.

They owed the United States a massive debt, and every penny they paid would have directly benefited our building program. On paper, at least, we had already passed Britain in naval strength, and our superiority was only likely to increase. Recall that when countries such as Germany, France, the Netherlands, Spain, and even Denmark had challenged British sea power in the past, it had led to war with an England which felt her life menaced by rival naval powers. In fact, war with the United States was seriously contemplated at the time by many Englishmen as the only alternative to a ruined England and a disintegrated Empire.

In the upshot, the British delegates were delighted by the agreement, as well they should have been. A crippling arms race was avoided, and taxes were lowered. The treaty was of such obvious advantage to England that the prevailing sentiment in the US media was that we had been hoodwinked. They had good reason to feel that way. In 1920 the United States already had an advantage over England in tonnage of capital ships of 1,117, 850 to 808,200. Our advantage in battle guns was 340 to 284. As provided by the treaty, tonnages were reduced to 525,850, 558,950, and 301,320 for the United States, Great Britain and Japan, respectively, giving a slight advantage to the British. The very real and serious potential causes for war among the signatories were removed for many years into the future.

As for the treaty causing the British defeat at Singapore 20 years later, that claim has to take the cake for the most ludicrous of all the ludicrous charges directed against us from Europe in recent years. How, exactly, would crippling her economy by charging ahead with the building of a fleet of obsolete battleships have helped the British 20 years later? As anyone who knows anything about her situation in the years immediately preceding World War II is aware, the economic burden of rearmament in the face of the German threat was painful enough for her to bear as it was. The cost of maintaining a massive navy in an arms race with Japan and the United States for the preceding 20 years would have made it well nigh impossible. When war did come, Japanese airpower made short work of the HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse, the two battleships that actually were on hand to defend Singapore. In the fighting that followed, a superior British force was defeated by a Japanese army perilously short of supplies in one of the greatest stains on the proud tradition of British arms ever recorded. We Americans don’t blame the Bladensburg Races on anything but the cowardice of our troops and the ineptitude of our commanders. I suggest that the British consider the possibility that they may bear some responsibility for their own abject defeats as well.

Well, we did have a difficult adolescence, and perhaps one can’t blame our dear old mother country for occasionally being a bit testy with us. The next time Hitchens directs his poison pen our way, however, he would probably do well to pick a more convincing grievance than the Naval Treaty of 1922.

Mineral Wealth in Afghanistan: The Saudi Arabia of Lithium?

The Grey Lady seemed positively ecstatic about recent discoveries of mineral wealth in Afghanistan in an article that appeared yesterday. The finds include iron, copper, gold, and a host of other valuable materials valued at a cool $1 trillion. The most significant of them all may turn out to be lithium. Initial analysis indicates deposits at only one location as large as those of Bolivia, the country that now has the world’s largest known reserves.

Lithium has become increasingly important lately as a component of small but powerful batteries. It will become a lot more important if fusion energy ever becomes a reality. I don’t expect this to happen anytime soon. Even if the remaining scientific hurdles can be overcome, the engineering difficulties of maintaining the extreme conditions necessary for fusion reliably over the long periods necessary to extract useful electric power would be daunting. Fusion power would likely be too expensive to compete with alternative energy sources under the best of circumstances. However, that’s my opinion, and a good number of very intelligent scientists disagree with me. If they’re right, and the upcoming proof of principle experiments at the National Ignition Facility prove far more successful than I expect, or some scientific breakthrough enables us to tame fusion on much smaller and less costly machines, fusion power may yet become a reality.

In that case, lithium may play a far more substantial role in energy production than it ever could as a component of batteries. It could literally become the metallic “oil” of the future. The reason for that is the fact that the easiest fusion reaction to tame is that between two heavy isotopes of hydrogen; namely, deuterium and tritium.  The “cross section” for the fusion reaction between these two isotopes, meaning the probability that it will occur under given conditions, becomes significant at substantially lower temperatures and pressures than competing candidates.  The fly in the ointment is the availability of fuel material.  Deuterium is abundant in nature.  Tritium, however, is not.  It must be produced artificially.  The raw material is lithium.

It happens that the fusion reaction between deuterium and tritium results in the production of a helium nucleus and a very energetic neutron.  This neutron can cause reactions in either of the two most common naturally occurring isotopes of lithium, Li-6 and Li-7, that produce tritium.  Thus, the fusion reactions that may one day produce energy for electric power could also be leveraged to breed tritium if the reaction were made to take place in the vicinity of lithium, either in a surrounding blanket or one of several other more fanciful proposed arrangements.   

As noted above, I don’t think that day is coming anytime soon.  If it when it does, Afghanistan may well become the Saudi Arabia of a new technological era of energy production.

The Amity/Enmity Complex: Science Finally Catching Up?

This is encouraging. According to an article at LiveScience, researchers are finally starting to notice a phenomenon that’s been blindingly obvious for the last 150 years; the Amity-Enmity Complex.   Apparently a team led by Carsten De Dreu at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands has discovered that oxycontin, the so-called “love hormone,” plays a role in regulating intergroup conflict as well.  The text of the article should have a familiar ring to it if you’ve been reading this blog.  For example,

De Dreu took special interest in parochial altruism, in which people self-sacrifice for the sake of their group or defensively hurt competing groups. He and his colleagues have now fingered oxytocin as a likely neurobiological mechanism that drives how humans regulate intergroup conflict.

Some animal studies had shown that oxytocin encourages protectionist behavior, but this marks the first study to illustrate a similar effect in humans. De Dreu and his colleagues had reasoned that this “dark side” of cooperation makes sense from an adaptive, evolutionary perspective of competing groups.

“We were interested in seeing where oxytocin’s ‘niceness’ breaks down,” De Dreu told LiveScience.

In three experiments involving competing three-person groups in a variation of the prisoner’s dilemma, De Dreu and his associates found that males given a whiff of oxycontin via nasal spray tended to act in the interests of their own group, and that they were affected similarly by oxycontin regardless of their natural tendencies to cooperate.  However, quoting from the article,

But the real twist came during the third experiment involving 79 males, who took either oxytocin or a placebo. Rather than having a certain amount of money to spend, the group decision-makers simply chose whether to cooperate or not cooperate with an outsider group.

That choice led to four possible outcomes, depending on what the outsider group also chose. The two groups received a moderate reward if they both cooperated and a lesser reward if they both chose to not cooperate. But if an outsider group chose to not cooperate, the in-group was better off also not cooperating. Cooperating with outsiders who had chosen not to cooperate led to the worst-case scenario.

Decision-makers under the influence of oxytocin acted protectively by not cooperating with an opposing group, as researchers had predicted. Such noncooperation in the third experiment was considered a preemptive strike or defensive aggression, because the group acted to protect itself against possible harm from the outsiders.

The third experiment also showed that oxytocin encouraged defensive aggression against outsider groups when there was greater fear of such groups, De Dreu explained. Researchers manipulated the fear factor by increasing the financial hurt that outsiders could inflict upon a group.

The article continues,

…the results may have relevance to understanding male-dominated conflicts, ranging from prehistoric hunter-gatherer skirmishes to (modern warfare).

Gee, ya think?  In fact, the existence of the Complex is as obvious as the influence of innate predispositions hard-wired in the brain on human moral behavior in general.  It is also just as uncomfortable a truth to secular and religious ideologues who prefer a version of morality with more legitimacy than an evolved behavioral trait.  As a result, psychologists and a host of other researchers who should know better have managed to studiously ignore its existence for many years.  They were finally forced to begin accepting fundamental truths about the real nature of morality by a rapid series of recent revelations about the brain emanating from neuroscience and related disciplines.  It was only a matter of time before the other shoe would drop. 

One hopes many other researchers will join De Dreu in studying the human behavioral traits associated with hostility and agression directed at “out-groups.”  No aspect of our nature has played a more decisive role in our history, and if we continue to ignore it, we will do so at an ever increasing risk.  Once we finally recognize the existence of these phenomena, perhaps we will also realize that the highly dubious value of attempts to promote the welfare of mankind by finding a “higher morality.”