Jane’s Information Group launched last month a new intelligence service providing “Country Risk Ratings” evaluating the stability of 232 countries, non-contiguous territories and de facto independent political entities on the basis of two dozen security factors.

The London Times reports that the US failed to make the top cut, coming in as number 22. Vatican City was at the top of the list. And Labour Britain (7) beat out Switzerland (17).

Switzerland lost points for some sort of deficiency in “social achievements,” presumably meaning it didn’t have enough Socialism.

The US did so poorly because of “the proliferation of small arms owned by Americans” and “the threat posed by the flow of drugs across the Mexican border.”

What a bunch of Euro-wussies they’ve got at Jane’s! These are the guys assessing the merits of different weapons systems?

Americans are safer than Europeans precisely because we own guns, and can in an emergency shoot the criminal, repel the invasion, or overthrow the government. Sophisticated Americans, particularly those of us who were at Woodstock, look upon recreational drugs as “the doors of perception,” or an alternative form of weekend conviviality, not as a threat to national security. Those Jane’s analysts really need to go over to Amsterdam and undertake some first hand research.

They don’t like guns. They don’t like drugs. The list of “security factors” was hidden behind a subscription barrier, but I suspect that sex and Rock & Roll must have been in there, too.

Fjordman is back with a new, and characteristically pessimistic, essay.

We have seen videos on TV of Muslim Jihadis beheading infidel hostages. Less attention has been paid to the fact that Muslims are beheading entire nation states. Although this is happening in slow motion, it is no less dramatic. Historically, the major cities have constituted a country’s “head,” the seat of most of its political institutions and the largest concentration of its cultural brainpower. What happens when this “head” is cut off from the rest of the body?

In many countries across Western Europe, Muslim immigrants tend to settle in major cities, with the native population retreating to minor cities or into the countryside. Previously, Europeans or non-Europeans could travel between countries and visit new cities, each with its own, distinctive character and peculiarities. Soon, you will travel from London to Paris, Amsterdam or Stockholm and find that you have left one city dominated by burkas and sharia to find… yet another city dominated by burkas and sharia.

Read the whole thing.

Robert D. Kaplan delivers a thoughtful and illuminating essay making a number of valuable observations,

It is obvious that a military can only fight well on behalf of a society in which it believes, and that a society which believes little is worth fighting for cannot, in the end, field an effective military. Obvious as this is, we seem to have forgotten it.

Remembering will help us in several ways. First, it will show us that the greatest asymmetry in our struggle with radical Islam is not one of arms or organization or even of ideology in any simple sense, but one of morale in the deepest sense. Second, it will provide an insight into the state of civil-military relations in our own country, which is a growing problem many of us refuse to acknowledge. And third, it will show us why some kinds of wars—“in-between” wars, I call them—have become inherently difficult for the United States to fight and win.

He compares certain contemporary Americans to one of Joseph Conrad’s characters.

the Martin Decouds of this world, the brilliant sneerers who analyze everything into oblivion. Martin Decoud is a character in Nostromo, Conrad’s 1904 novel about an imaginary Latin American country, Costaguana, in the throes of upheaval. Decoud has studied law in Paris, dabbles in literature, writes political commentary and all-in-all, as Conrad explains, is an “idle boulevardier.” Decoud speaks much, but acts only when he is faced with a political crisis that impinges on his own welfare. Yet when he finds himself alone on an island off Costaguana, he gives in to despair, even though he has been assured of rescue. The “brilliant” journalist Decoud, the “spoiled darling” of his family, “was not fit to grapple with himself single-handed.” Despite Decoud’s virtuoso conversation and commentary, in a crisis, Conrad tells us, he “believed in nothing.” Decoud doesn’t represent any particular philosophical position or point of view; he is there to remind us that cleverness should not be confused with character.

Good essay. Read the whole thing.

Aaron Hanscom finds comedy in 21st century leftist Europe’s unwillingness to defend itself against apes or Islam.

To gauge the extent of the demise of Europe, look no further than the story of the male gorilla that escaped at a Rotterdam zoo last month. After managing to get over a moat, the 400-pound primate brutally attacked a woman who had been visiting the zoo regularly to see the animal. Because female gorillas establish prolonged eye contact when they want to mate, biologists concluded that the woman was responsible for the attack. Taking moral relativism to its illogical conclusion, the Antwerp Zoo in Belgium now has signs warning visitors not to stare at the apes.

Fred Reed looks at what has become of the American character.

Americans tend to regard their national character as comprising such things as freedom, independence, individualism, and self-reliance…

In fact we no longer have these qualities and probably never will again. Generally we now embody their opposites. Modern society has become a hive of largely conformist, closely regulated and generally helpless employees who depend on others for nearly everything. The cause is less anything particularly American than the technology that governs our lives. The United States just moves faster in the direction in which the civilized world moves.

Character springs from conditions. Consider a farmer in, say, North Carolina in 1850. He was free because there was little government, self-reliant because what he couldn’t do for himself didn’t get done, independent because, apart from a few tools, he made or grew all he needed, and an individualist because, there being little outside authority, he could do as he pleased.

All of that is gone, and will not return. Freedom has given way to an infinite array of laws, rules, regulations, licenses, forms, requirements. Many make sense, may even be desirable in a complex world, don’t necessarily make for a bad life, but they cannot be called freedom. Various governments determine what our children learn, whether we can paint the shutters, who we must sell our houses to, who we can hire, what we can say if we want to keep our jobs, where we can park, and whether and how we can build an outbuilding.

People who live infinitely controlled lives become accustomed to such control. Obedience becomes natural…

Individualism has withered under the pressure of the mass media and a distaste for eccentricity. Self-reliance died long ago. We depend on others to repair our cars, grow our food, fix the refrigerator, and write our operating systems. The habit of reliance on others has reached the point that even the right of self-defense has come to be regarded as wrong-minded…

Most poignantly, we are become a nation of employees, fearful of losing our jobs. Prisoners of the retirement system, afraid of transgressing against the various governing bodies before whom we are helpless, unable to feed ourselves, we are at least comfortable. We are not masters of our lives.

Dense populations and the complexity of machines and institutions lead inevitably to regulation, which leads to acceptance of regulation and therefore of authority, which becomes part of the national character. This we see. In my lifetime the change has been great. In rural Virginia in the Sixties, you could walk down the road with your rifle to shoot beer cans, swim in the creeks without supervision and life guards and “flotation devices” approved by the Coast Guard, and generally be left alone. Now, no. Regimentation has grown like kudzu. We obey. The new generation knows nothing else..

At the moment we see a great increase in regulation in the guise of preventing terrorism. Other pretexts could have been found and, I suspect, would have been: fighting crime or the war on drugs or something. The result might have been a drift rather than a headlong rush toward control. But sooner or later, technology determines politics. The computer, not the Constitution, is primary.

I suspect that the concern about terrorism is just a particular manifestation of a growing obsession with safety. Not too long ago, Americans were a hardy breed—foolhardy at times, but the one comes with the other. Now we see attempts to eliminate all risk everywhere. Cities fill in the deep ends of swimming pools and remove diving boards. We require that bicyclists wear helmets, fear second-hand smoke and the violence that is dodge ball. Warnings abound against going outside without sun block. To anyone who grew up in the Sixties or before, the new fearfulness is incomprehensible.

The explanation I think is the feminization of society, which seems to be inseparable from modernity. The nature of masculinity is to prize freedom over security; of femininity, security over freedom. Add that the American character of today powerfully favors regulation by the group in prefe4rence to individual choice. Note that we do not require that cars be equipped with seat belts and then let individuals decide whether to use them; we enforce their use. The result is compulsory Mommyism, very much a part of today’s America.

Does technological civilization inevitably lead to totalitarianism? Certainly the general fear, in combination with technology, makes a sort of soft Stalinism easy. Just now we move toward national ID cards, smuggled in by linking records of drivers’ licenses. Passports, scanned and linked to data bases, provide a record of our travels. Security cameras proliferate. Some of them read the license plates of all passing cars. Email can be monitored, phones easily and undetectably tapped. Now the government is experimenting with X-ray scanners for airports that provide near-pornographic images of passengers. Whether these will be used for dictatorial ends remains to be seen. Historians may one day note that surveillance, when possible, is inevitable.

What then is the national character today? I think we are first an obedient people. We submit. We are comfortable with authority, and seem to be most comfortable when we are told what to do. We prize security, safety, and predictability. Increasingly we accept being treated like convicts at airports and elsewhere. We want to be taken care of. We can do few things for ourselves. We expect government to decide much that was once regarded as outside of government’s ambit. And we are to the marrow of our bones incapable of rising against the creeping tyranny.

Too bloody true, alas!

Hat tip to the News Junkie.

Henryk M. Broder has some choice comments on the contemporary European response to militant Islam, particularly in the case of the Danish cartoon crisis in which Europrean embassies were burned by Islamic mobs.

In 1972, more than three decades ago, Danish lawyer and part-time politician Mogens Glistrup had an idea that brought him instant fame. To save taxes, he proposed that the Danish army be disbanded and an answering machine be set up in the defense ministry that would play the following message: “We capitulate!” Not only would it save money, Glistrup argued, but it would also save lives in an emergency. On the strength of this “program,” Glistrup’s Progress Party managed to become the second-most powerful political party in the Danish parliament in the 1973 elections.

Glistrup had the right idea, but he was a number of years premature. Now would be the right time to set up his answering machine.

Read the whole thing.

Pascal Bruckner has harsh words for the multiculturalism of elites.

After Heidegger, a whole run of thinkers from Gadamer to Derrida have contested the claims of the Enlightenment to embody a new age of self-conscious history. On the contrary, they say, all the evils of our epoch were spawned by this philosophical and literary episode: capitalism, colonialism, totalitarianism. For them, criticism of prejudices is nothing but a prejudice itself, proving that humanity is incapable of self-reflection. For them, the chimeras of certain men of letters who were keen to make a clean slate of God and revelation, were responsible for plunging Europe into darkness. In an abominable dialectic, the dawn of reason gave birth to nothing but monsters (Horkheimer, Adorno)...

The Enlightenment belongs to the entire human race, not just to a few privileged individuals in Europe or North America who have taken it upon themselves to kick it to bits like spoiled brats, to prevent others from having a go…

It is astonishing that 62 years after the fall of the Third Reich and 16 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, an important segment Europe’s intelligentsia is engaged in slandering the friends of democracy. They maintain it is best to cede and retreat, and pay mere lip-service to the ideals of the Enlightenment. Yet we are a long way off the dramatic circumstances of the 1930s, when the best minds threw themselves into the arms of Berlin or Moscow in the name of race, class or the Revolution. Today the threat is more diffuse and fragmented. There is nothing that resembles the formidable peril of the Third Reich. Even the government of Mullahs in Tehran is a paper tiger that could be brought to its knees with a minimum dose of rigour. Nevertheless the preachers of panic abound. Kant defined the Enlightenment with the motto: Sapere aude – dare to know. A culture of courage is perhaps what is most lacking among today’s directors of conscience. They are the symptoms of a fatigued, self-doubting Europe, one that is only too ready to acquiesce at the slightest alarm. Yet their good-willed rhetorical molasses covers a different tune: that of capitulation!

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Karen Myers.

Another way of describing the problem with our contemporary elites would be to speak of excessive domestication. The modern elite world is preternaturally safe, materialistic and cooperative. Our educational system is designed to produce utterly non-violent, reliably subordinate and conforming persons skilled at the manipulation of words and symbols. Our intellectual system has become a variety of peculiar things, none of them serious. The academic world is, first of all, an elaborate baby-sitting and credentialing machine, which is allowed to operate as a wildlife refuge for cranks and mountebanks in charge of nothing more important than entertaining children. It is completely removed from reality. Education has become a perverse form of entertainment. Those who succeed best, like pop musicians, are the ones who strike the most colorful, bizarre, and hostile poses. The modern hyper-extended childhood of the elite represents the only opportunity future cogs will ever have to rebel, so rebellion is highly prized. But the rebellion is, of course, all in play. The revolution will always rise only to the level of putting Che Guevara on one’s t-shirt or dorm room wall, and following privileged and elite professors in demonstrating over the latest fashionable progressive cause, in ritualistically condemning one’s own society for failing to abolish history and reality, for failing to cause water to flow uphill.

A century ago, when England sent the youth of its urban clerical classes to fight the Boers, they were found generally to be unable to shoot a rifle, ride a horse, read a compass, make a fire, or survive in situations of deprivation in the out-of-doors. Baden-Powell created the Scouting Movement, and a host of late Victorians embraced “muscular Christianity,” in the hope of doing something to diminish the excessive impact of the domesticating impulses of modern urbanism and the modern bureaucratic corporate society. They obviously failed, disastrously.

Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival brings us the next cinematic breakthrough in defense of unpopular sexual minorities, following the example of Brokeback Mountain. This year’s cutting edge entry is titled: Zoo.

Zoo” is a documentary about what director Robinson Devor accurately characterizes as “the last taboo, on the boundary of something comprehensible.” But remarkably, an elegant, eerily lyrical film has resulted.

“Zoo,” premiering before a rapt audience Saturday night at Sundance, manages to be a poetic film about a forbidden subject, a perfect marriage between a cool and contemplative director (the little-seen “Police Beat”) and potentially incendiary subject matter: sex between men and animals. Not graphic in the least, this strange and strangely beautiful film combines audio interviews (two of the three men involved did not want to appear on camera) with elegiac visual re-creations intended to conjure up the mood and spirit of situations. The director himself puts it best: “I aestheticized the sleaze right out of it.”..

I was certainly asked many times, often with a wrinkled brow, ‘Why are you making this film?’ It was something I did resent; I thought artists had the opportunity to explore anything.”

In the end, Devor ended up agreeing with the Roman writer Terence, who said “I consider nothing human alien to me.”

“It happens,” the filmmaker said, “so it’s part of who we are.

Maybe of who you are, Devor.

As far as I’m concerned: “He may be a brother of Big Bill Taft, but he ain’t no brother of mine.”

Get ready for next year’s cinematic sensation, Funeral Parlor.

Mark Cuban (undoubtedly a resident of California) speaks out on behalf of the permanently infantilized.

When I started MicroSolutions I was 24 years old. I had just gotten fired from my job and was sleeping on the floor of a 3 bedroom apartment with 5 other guys living there. I didn’t have a closet or a bed, but I had 2 suits.

I bought both of those polyester wonders, one Grey pinstripe, the other blue pinstripe for a total of $99 dollars plus tax. To go with those fashion forward wonders, I had several white polo button downs that I had purchased used from a re-sale shop, and a couple ties that I had bought on sale or had gotten as hand me downs from friends.

I wore those babies when it was cold. I wore them when it was 100 degrees plus. I ironed them and when I could I got them dry cleaned…

Someone had once told me that you wear to work what your customers wear to work. That seemed to make sense to me, so I followed it, and expected those who worked for me to follow it as well.

After I sold MicroSolutions I decided that I never would wear a suit again…

With our new business, I decided that I would have to wear a suit, but would modify the rule so that I would only wear a suit when someone I was selling to was wearing a suit…

When Broadcast.com was sold, the suit went out the window completely.

The gentleman has obviously never owned a real suit, only hideous and inexpensive ersatz imitations thereof. Suits equal discomfort in his mind, because he has only worn cheap, ill-fitting articles of clothing made of intrinsically uncomfortable materials.

Beyond that, the gentleman fails to understand that dignity and formality are becoming to adults. And it is not simply a matter of convention and form; men wear suits fundamentally because any man looks better in a good suit.

T shirts and blue jeans or bermuda shorts have intrinsically limited capacities for both beauty and self expression. Adults wear adult clothing in order to express as fully as possible the possibilities of aesthetic expression in attire.

Suits have been de rigeur in business (outside the California playpen) since time immemorial, since it is impossible for most serious adults to imagine entering into a substantial relationship of trust or business with an individual too slovenly, too undignified, or too badly educated to know how to dress.

Obviously, people began making the rare exception for the eccentric scientific genius working in the most arcane outer reaches of technology, whose thoughts were so abstracted and unworldly that he couldn’t possibly understand how to live normally in the world, and the next thing you know every clod and lout in the Sunshine State of Self-Entitlement decides that he, too, is some kind of genius, operating at Olympian levels beyond normal civilization.

You Californians are wrong. You are operating far below the conventional levels of ordinary civilization, and you are not Einstein, you are Beavis and Butthead.

Marco Evaristti, edgy Chilean artist, at his latest exhibit in Santiago has served up meatballs made from his own fat.

Foxnews.com:

“Ladies and gentleman, bon appetit and may god bless,” said Marco Evaristti, a glass in his hand, to his dining companions seated last Thursday night around a table in Santiago’s Animal Gallery.

On the plates in front of them was a serving of agnolotti pasta and in the middle a meatball made with oil Evaristti removed from his body in a liposuction procedure last year.

“The question of whether or not to eat human flesh is more important than the result,” he said, explaining the point of his creation.

“You are not a cannibal if you eat art,” he added.

Evaristti produced 48 meatballs with his own fat, some of which would be canned and sold for $US4000 dollars for 10.

A veteran at shock-art, in an earlier work Evaristti invited people to kill fish by pressing the button on a blender the fish were held in.

In April 2004 he dyed an enormous iceberg in Greenland with red paint.

Santiago Times:

Six years ago, artist Marco Evaristti scandalized the Chilean art world when he displayed live fish in working blenders. The opening of his new exhibit at the Animal Gallery in Vitacura is likely to cause just as much sensation, hype and criticism when visitors are invited to eat meatballs made with Evaristti’s own fat.

The Chilean-Danish artist, who underwent liposuction for the work, describes it as a criticism of the plastic surgery market. The meatballs are canned and available for purchase; two cans have already been sold to collectors for US$23,200 each. Evaristti claims that the meatballs are not only delicious, but contain less fat than supermarket meatballs.

President Bachelet and poet Nicanor Parra were invited to enjoy the dish at the opening. Neither has given a response so far. The artist assured that he, if no one else, would enjoy the meal.

Another controversial piece consists of six fake faeces covered in gold taken from the teeth of Jewish holocaust victims…

Exhibit details:
Galería Animal
Alonso de Cordova 3105
Vitacura
M-F 10:00-8:00
Saturday 10:30-2:00
Until January 27th.

One couldn’t make this stuff up.

The Washington Post thinks it’s really cool that Keith Ellison (formerly “Keith Hakim”) the ridiculous black poseur Muslim elected by an utterly irresponsible one-party district in Minneapolis is going to become the first Representative in United States history to take his oath of office on a copy of the Koran, and is planning to borrow a copy from the Library of Congress once owned by Thomas Jefferson.

African American conversions to Mohammedanism are, in reality, preposterous examples of flamboyant identity display, pitifully evidencing the historical illiteracy and downright bad taste of the conversos. Christianity, the European religion and cultural identity being rejected by the rebellious black man, twice abolished Slavery. Slavery has always been a fundamental institution in Islam, was spread everywhere that religion flourishes, and exists throughout the Islamic world (sometimes faintly terminologically concealed) today.

The most famous African American converso, the illustrious boxer, changed his name from that of a renowned American Abolitionist Cassius Marcellus Clay to Muhammad Ali, the name of more than one prominent slave-trader.

There is something which provokes distinct psychic unease at the very idea of the rise of the influence of Islam in the United States to the point where the first representative of that lamentable sect will be taking his place in the Congress of the United States, in the same house where Randolph, Webster, and Clay once sat. How can America’s culture and identity have grown so flaccid and deracinated that even a parasitical and malcontent urban welfare community would abandon its own identity and traditions in time of war, in order to elect a coreligionist of the 9/11 hijackers?

There’s a lot more which is illuminating and agreeable in the culture of Japan than in that of the True Believers, but it is difficult to imagine even the most delinquent and corrupt congressional district of the WWII era sending a Shinto-ist to Congress to take his oath on what? a sharp katana? or a bale of rice?

I find the image of an unsympathetic translation of the Alcoran, once perused with ironic skepticism by Mr. Jefferson, translated by time into the hands of a former Catholic convert to superstititous creed of the enemies of the West amusing, to say the least. Offering Jefferson’s Alcoran to Mr. Ellison-Hakim is rather in the character of inviting the newly elected Count Dracula to take his oath of office upon an early tract on vampire-hunting.

Local libraries today are commonly staffed by low-grade morons with professional degrees in “library science.” How the Dewey Decimal System can possibly be elevated into a field of academic study and a degree-program remains a mystery to some of us. Visions of courses titled “Advanced Book Stamping II” and “Alternatives to Alphabetical Shelving” dance through one’s head.

But, consequently, for more than a decade now, a retail-inventory model of tailoring libraries’ holding to books frequently checked out has been supplanting the idea of the town library as cultural repository of the classics. Librarians have (for years) been busily purging infrequently-borrowed canonical classics in order to maximize shelf space for high demand choices, i.e., current best-sellers and career references.

The Washington Post just noticed.

You can’t find “Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings” at the Pohick Regional Library anymore. Or “The Education of Henry Adams” at Sherwood Regional. Want Emily Dickinson’s “Final Harvest”? Don’t look to the Kingstowne branch.

It’s not that the books are checked out. They’re just gone. No one was reading them, so librarians took them off the shelves and dumped them.

Along with those classics, thousands of novels and nonfiction works have been eliminated from the Fairfax County collection after a new computer software program showed that no one had checked them out in at least 24 months.

Public libraries have always weeded out old or unpopular books to make way for newer titles. But the region’s largest library system is taking turnover to a new level.

Like Borders and Barnes & Noble, Fairfax is responding aggressively to market preferences, calculating the system’s return on its investment by each foot of space on the library shelves—and figuring out which products will generate the biggest buzz. So books that people actually want are easy to find, but many books that no one is reading are gone—even if they are classics.

“We’re being very ruthless,” said Sam Clay, director of the 21-branch system since 1982. “A book is not forever. If you have 40 feet of shelf space taken up by books on tulips and you find that only one is checked out, that’s a cost.”

That is the new reality for the Fairfax system and the future for other libraries. As books on tape, DVDs, computers and other electronic equipment crowd into branches, there is less room for plain old books.

So librarians are making hard decisions and struggling with a new issue: whether the data-driven library of the future should cater to popular tastes or set a cultural standard, even as the demand for the classics wanes.

Library officials say they will always stock Shakespeare’s plays, “The Great Gatsby” and other venerable titles. And many of the books pulled from one Fairfax library can be found at another branch and delivered to a patron within a week.

But in the effort to stay relevant in an age in which reference materials and novels can be found on the Internet and Oprah’s Book Club helps set standards of popularity, libraries are not the cultural repositories they once were.

When American society allowed “professional” forms of credentialization to replace liberal education as the means of entry to a career as librarian (just as was the case with primary and secondary level teaching), educated people vanished from the profession, being replaced by the dimmest species of fonctionnaires and bureaucrats.

So, instead of serving as the place the poor kid can access the important books and educate himself for free (as so many American writers and intellectuals in the past have done), the modern local library has become a tax-funded way for cheapskates to get their hands on the latest Grisham or Stephen King, without actually paying for it. My former town library in Newtown, Connecticut, back in the 1990s, had already purged the English poets in order to make space available to offer popular movies on videotape, in active competition with Blockbuster.

Charles Johnson was stunned.

You think you’ve seen French appeasement at its worst. Then they go and do something like this.

Last year’s French riots were triggered by the deaths of two “youths,” who fled a police ID check, broke into an electrical substation to hide, and were electrocuted when they touched something they shouldn’t have.

Last Friday officials and residents of Clichy-sous-Bois, scene of some of the worst rioting, dedicated a monument to these two disenchanted fleeing criminals.

What would Godfrey of Bouillon have done?

It seems to me that I’ve already linked and quoted, or at the very least already read, Michael Bywater’s jeremiad, in today’s Telegraph, about the infantilization of modern Britons, but I know people who will like it, so here it is again.

My grandfather was born in 1888 and he didn’t have a lifestyle. He didn’t need one: he had a life.

He had a hat and a car and a wife and two sons and a housekeeper and a maid and a nanny for the children, and the housekeeper had a dog and the dog had a canker and lived in a kennel.

My grandfather read Charles Dickens mostly. Sometimes they went on holiday. His house was furnished with furniture…

Dr Chand didn’t have a lifestyle either. Nobody had a lifestyle then, because there was nobody to tell them to, and anyway they were too busy having lives.

They were grown-ups. They went about their business. In my grandfather’s case, it was seeing patients and making them better, where possible…

I suspect that my grandfather’s life was real in a sense that my father’s life hasn’t quite been, and my life is not at all.