Eldritch Crank's List: world

And yet informed observers have assumed for most of this century that American telephone metadata may well already be available to a foreign military-intelligence complex via hypothesized “backdoors” coded into complex commercial software.

As someone who has spent a lot of time studying multinational and multiethnic societies, I am skeptical that the New America built around “diversity” is going to have an easy time dealing with its huge fiscal problems. As social-civic cohesion frays – as even eminent liberal scholars admit is the outcome as a society becomes more diverse – to say nothing of subpar economic performance for years to come, I find it difficult to see how the country can overcome its rising challenges. When knotty issues of state finance representing truly hard choices are seen through a lens of ethno-racial identity and interest, they become even more difficult to address seriously in a democracy.

The Middle East appears to be undergoing a sectarian and tribal conflict not unlike our Thirty Years' War from 1618 to 1648. As they stayed out of our Thirty Years' War, let us get out of theirs.

If they will not protect our embassies from mobs who come to burn our flag, let us lower the flag ourselves and bring Old Glory home.

Up ahead, in the stream of black shapes, were the American soldiers I had come to fear. They were men who enjoyed demolishing Afghan houses, men who shot dogs in the face. The pair who had embraced like lovers, one tenderly drawing the blade of his knife along the pale, smooth skin of his friend’s throat. There was a guy who’d let the others tie his legs open and mock-rape him, and there were several men who had boasted of plans to murder their ex-wives and former girlfriends.

The Romans could not disperse their soldiers in hundreds of cities, thousands of towns, and countless hamlets to repress riot or rebellion; the troops were needed to guard the frontiers. Instead, they relied on deterrence, which was periodically reinforced by exemplary punishments. Most inhabitants of the empire never rebelled after their initial conquest. A few tribes and nations had to be reconquered after trying and failing to overthrow Roman rule. A few simply refused to become obedient, and so they were killed off: “They make a wasteland and call it peace” was the bitter complaint of a Scottish chieftain (as reported by Tacitus).

Q&A: Edward Luttwak

The military strategist talks about Israeli security, Henry Kissinger, the Arab Spring, and the death of Osama Bin Laden

So the stupid party got together with the evil party for a bit of bipartisanship:

UNITED NATIONS — The United Nations Security Council voted Thursday to authorize military action, including airstrikes against Libyan tanks and heavy artillery and a no-fly zone, a risky foreign intervention aimed at averting a bloody rout of rebels by forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

Gadhafi did not attack the West. He faced an uprising to dethrone him and rallied his troops to crush it, as any ruthless ruler would have done. We have no vital interest in who wins his civil war.

The amazing truth about PISA scores: USA beats Western Europe, ties with Asia.

PISA Scores Show Demography Is Destiny In Education Too—But Washington Doesn’t Want You To Know

Langer argues that no single Western intelligence agency had the skills to pull this off alone. The most likely answer, he says, is that a consortium of intelligence agencies worked together to build the cyber bomb. And he says the most likely confederates are the United States, because it has the technical skills to make the virus, Germany, because reverse-engineering Siemen’s product would have taken years without it, and Russia, because of its familiarity with both the Iranian nuclear plant and Siemen’s systems.

"Israel’s actions have generated shifts in public opinion and diplomacy regionally and globally. The Israelis are calculating that these actions will not generate a long-term shift in the strategic posture of the Arab world. If they are wrong about this, recent actions will have been a significant strategic error. If they are right, then this is simply another passing incident. In the end, the profound divisions in the Arab world both protect Israel and make diplomatic solutions to its challenge almost impossible — you don’t need to fight forces that are so divided, but it is very difficult to negotiate comprehensively with a group that lacks anything approaching a unified voice."

"Last year Wikileaks published a confidential list of websites that the Australian government is preparing to ban under a proposed internet filter -- which in turn caused the whistleblower site to be placed on that list."

"A 13-year-old Yemeni girl who was forced into marriage died five days after her wedding when she suffered a rupture in her sex organs and hemorrhaging, a local rights organisation says.

Ilham Mahdi al Assi died last Friday in a hospital in Yemen's Hajja province, the Shaqaeq Arab Forum for Human Rights said, quoting a medical report.

She was married the previous Monday in a traditional arrangement known as a "swap marriage", in which the brother of the bride also married the sister of the groom, it said."

"Westergaard told his employer, the Jyllands-Posten daily, that he had locked himself and the child in the bathroom as the assailant shouted "revenge" and "blood" and tried to smash his way into the house. "My grandchild did fine," he told the newspaper. "It was scary. It was close. Really close. But we did it.""

"That said, the Israelis believe there must be an additional assessment mechanism - apart from the essential pre-flight intelligence gathering - which acknowledges that not everyone is equally likely to carry out a terrorist attack. Some call it profiling, which has become a dirty word to those who think it conjures up notions of racial, religious, or ethnic targeting. In reality, it's more sophisticated than simplistic classification."

"In May, Sibat traveled from Lebanon to Saudi Arabia to make his pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, and after being spotted by the kingdom's religious police, was arrested on charges of committing sorcery. Officials convinced Sibat to confess to talking to spirits-on the promise that he would be freed-and then used his confession to convict him in court last month. He's now been sentenced to death."

"The last known execution for "sorcery" was that of Egyptian national Mustafa Ibrahim, on 2 November 2007. He had been arrested in May 2007 in the town of Arar, where he worked as a pharmacist, and accused of "apostasy" for having degraded a copy of the Qur'an.
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