When today’s Left bombards the capitalist system with demands that it obviously cannot fulfill (Full employment! Retain the welfare state! Full rights for immigrants!), it is basically playing a game of hysterical provocation, of addressing the Master with a demand which will be impossible for him to meet, and will thus expose his impotence. The problem with this strategy, however, is not only that the system cannot meet these demands, but that, in addition, those who voice them do not really want them to be realized.
For example, when ‘radical’ academics demand full rights for immigrants and opening of the borders, are they aware that the direct implementation of this demand would, for obvious reasons, inundate developed Western countries with millions of newcomers, thus provoking a violent working-class racist backlash which would then endanger the privileged position of these very academics? Of course they are, but they count on the fact that their demand will not be met – in this way, they can hypocritically retain their clear radical conscience while continuing to enjoy their privileged position
‘Let’s be realists: we, the academic Left, want to appear critical, while fully enjoying the privileges the system offers us. So let’s bombard the system with impossible demands: we all know that these demands won’t be met, so we can be sure that nothing will actually change, and we’ll maintain our privileged status!’
— Slavoj Žižek, “Happiness after September 11″, from Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 75-77.
German steel helmet Mod. 1916 from the collection of Ernst Jünger. Steel, leather | L 31 cm, W 24 cm, H 17.5 cm, G 1250 g | Wilflingen, Ernst Jünger Foundation.
“The steel helmet gives the soldier a desolate look,” noted front-line officer Ernst Jünger (1895-1998) in August 1916 as his unit, the 73rd Infantry Regiment became equipped with the new head protection of the Prussian troops. The engineer Friedrich Schwerd (1872-1953) had designed the helmet with an extended eyeshield and a deep neck guard in 1915 according to military medical specifications, after it had been shown that the spiked leather cap could not provide the soldiers in the trench fighting of the Western Front with sufficient protection. The new helmet was delivered to the troops beginning in the spring of 1916. In the course of the war, 7.5 million of them were produced.
In an infantry assault during the offensive in Flanders, December 1, 1917, Jünger was struck by shrapnel on the head. Although the projectile broke through the helmet, Jünger suffered only minor injuries. The helmet thus became the writer’s most important war trophy and was always kept within reach for life, along with a second steel helmet that Jünger had taken from a fallen English officer in the summer of 1917.
His detailed war diaries served Jünger as the basis for his war memoirs published as Storm of Steel, 1920, which made the writer famous and notorious. Jünger’s description of the murderous battles of the First World War is one of the most important literary sources for what George F. Kennan called “the catastrophe of the 20th century.”
Kyle Dickman was bitten in the ankle by a rattlesnake in Yosemite Park.
The impact of the snakebite and his rescue make for quite a story. As does the analysis of what the snake’s venom did, supplied by a biochemist expert from the University of Northern Colorado.
Snake venom contains a suite of proteins that dock perfectly with the cells and proteins humans use to regulate our respiratory, vascular, and digestive systems. Except that when the venom proteins dock, it’s sabotage. “Mammals operate within very narrow parameters,†Mackessy explains. “We don’t tolerate big swings to our heart rate, -temperature, or blood pressure. Venom is like a shotgun blast to the intricate inner workings of a watch.â€
Mackessy calls venom’s ability to affect so many different life functions a product of “evolutionary warfare.†He points to a dead fence lizard stuffed into a vial in his lab. This species of lizard, which came from a sky-island mountain range in Arizona, has developed resistance to the venom of the rattlesnakes that prey on it; however, over time and through evolution, the rattlesnakes are also adapting, developing proteins to sidestep the lizard’s defenses. This one-upmanship between predator and prey explains why venoms, and the actual mechanism they use to kill or harm, vary not only between species of rattlesnakes but also within populations of the same species. One example of this hyperspecialization can be seen in the southern Pacific rattlesnake, which claims the bottom half of California as its territory. One researcher recently discovered that a bite from a Pacific rattlesnake near sea level in San Bernadino County prevents a victim’s blood from clotting. But get bitten by the same species in the mountains of the same county and your blood will clot.
Snakes brew their venom in glands located behind the eyes. In a snake’s lifetime, these glands can weaponize—or attempt to weaponize—many proteins that have alternative functions in its own body. One that digests food may be tweaked to break down living prey. Or a protein that increases the snake’s blood pressure could be altered to decrease that of its meal. For a sense of just how sophisticated and varied venom is, consider that all 300 of the world’s venomous snake species have been fine-tuning their toxins for millennia. In the venom of the rattlesnake species that bit me, a northern Pacific, more than 75 proteins have been identified—and Mackessy thinks many more may yet be discovered.
We’re now in his office, where mason jars filled with rattlesnakes coiled in alcohol line the shelves. Mackessy says he’s hesitant to describe what any one venom protein did to my body, because it’s like describing the role a single note plays in a sonata. It tells an incomplete story. Proteins work in concert.
Caveats aside, Mackessy starts with my first symptom: fainting. The body regulates blood pressure through proteins that cause veins and arteries to expand or contract. Northern Pacific rattlesnake venom contains a protein that functions identically. Within moments of getting struck, Mackessy explains, the venom “rapidly and inappropriately†relaxed the vessels that regulate blood flow. “Blood pressure went like this,†Mackessy says, whistling and sliding his hand down an imaginary slope.
My body tried to correct this by flooding my vasculature with a protein that constricts blood vessels. And here’s where venom gets particularly nasty. The same venom protein that caused my blood pressure to drop also destroyed my body’s tools for increasing it. “That’s just one thing—one component in one venom,†Mackessy says.
While I was passed out, he goes on, an enzyme called metalloproteinase broke down my leg veins’ walls until I began to hemorrhage internally. Meanwhile another venom protein, disintegrin, acted as a magnet to my platelets and fibrinogen, molecular components that help blood clot. As my body sent them racing to plug the puncture wounds, the snake protein destroyed them, like a host who throws a house party and clubs guests the moment they arrive. Welcome!
Mackessy describes a toxin that made my smooth muscles—those in my digestive tract—convulse, pushing my stomach’s contents out both ends. Another liquefied the cellular architecture in my leg, releasing fluid that led to elephantine swelling while simultaneously quickening the venom’s spread upward by turning flesh, as he describes it, into “diluted Jell-O.†Still another digested my muscle tissue. He shows me a picture of an untreated snakebite case taken nine days after the strike. The victim’s foot is a mess of exposed bones.
In my case, all these processes happened almost instantaneously because the rattlesnake’s fang hit a vein.
I was looking through the archives of my blog, looking for a book reference I’d forgotten, when I found this old column from Fred on Everything which demands republishing.
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 preference 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.
Campus Reform shares the latest breakthrough in thought from today’s Academy.
In a chapter for a new textbook, University of Exeter professor Paul Ernest warns that mathematics education can cause “collateral damage” to society by training students in “ethics-free thought.”
He even argues that since money involves mathematics, math is “implicated in the global disparities of wealth” because math students are taught to value “detached” and “calculative” reasoning.
Wendy Kaminer, in the Wall Street Journal, also reveals that the ACLU is now accepting the Hard Left notion that mere speech can inflict harm, even if one does not call someone pigeon pie and eat him up.
The American Civil Liberties Union has explicitly endorsed the view that free speech can harm “marginalized†groups by undermining their civil rights. “Speech that denigrates such groups can inflict serious harms and is intended to and often will impede progress toward equality,†the ACLU declares in new guidelines governing case selection and “Conflicts Between Competing Values or Priorities.â€
This is presented as an explanation rather than a change of policy, and free-speech advocates know the ACLU has already lost its zeal for vigorously defending the speech it hates. ACLU leaders previously avoided acknowledging that retreat, however, in the apparent hope of preserving its reputation as the nation’s premier champion of the First Amendment.
But traditional free-speech values do not appeal to the ACLU’s increasingly partisan progressive constituency—especially after the 2017 white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville. The Virginia ACLU affiliate rightly represented the rally’s organizers when the city attempted to deny them a permit to assemble. Responding to intense post-Charlottesville criticism, last year the ACLU reconsidered its obligation to represent white-supremacist protesters.
The 2018 guidelines claim that “the ACLU is committed to defending speech rights without regard to whether the views expressed are consistent with or opposed to the ACLU’s core values, priorities and goals.†But directly contradicting that assertion, they also cite as a reason to decline taking a free-speech case “the extent to which the speech may assist in advancing the goals of white supremacists or others whose views are contrary to our values.â€
In selecting speech cases to defend, the ACLU will now balance the “impact of the proposed speech and the impact of its suppression.†Factors like the potential effect of the speech on “marginalized communities†and even on “the ACLU’s credibility†could militate against taking a case. Fundraising and communications officials helped formulate the new guidelines.
The people we call Anglo-Saxons were actually immigrants from northern Germany and southern Scandinavia. Bede, a monk from Northumbria writing some centuries later, says that they were from some of the most powerful and warlike tribes in Germany.
Bede names three of these tribes: the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. There were probably many other peoples who set out for Britain in the early fifth century, however. Batavians, Franks and Frisians are known to have made the sea crossing to the stricken province of ‘Britannia’.
The collapse of the Roman empire was one of the greatest catastrophes in history. Britain, or ‘Britannia’, had never been entirely subdued by the Romans. In the far north – what they called Caledonia (modern Scotland) – there were tribes who defied the Romans, especially the Picts. The Romans built a great barrier, Hadrian’s Wall, to keep them out of the civilised and prosperous part of Britain.
As soon as Roman power began to wane, these defences were degraded, and in AD 367 the Picts smashed through them. Gildas, a British historian, says that Saxon war-bands were hired to defend Britain when the Roman army had left. So the Anglo-Saxons were invited immigrants, according to this theory, a bit like the immigrants from the former colonies of the British empire in the period after 1945.
Bombings increased significantly in 2015, with Swedish police investigating around 100-150 explosions. There were over 30 explosions reported in the Swedish city of Malmö alone by August 2015, up from a total of 25 in all of 2014. Malmö police have consequently warned about undetonated grenades in the city. According to Swedish police, the use of hand grenades in crime is unprecedented in all comparable European and non-European countries, and the only countries with similar characteristics are those with warlike conditions.
The devices are easily obtained, says Reine Bergland of Stockholm police. They can be bought from gangs for just a couple of hundred Swedish kroner (about £20).
“Sometimes when they buy weapons they get grenades as part of the deal. They throw in a couple of hand grenades, so to speak.”
The rise in possession of hand grenades – mainly unused stock from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s – has come to symbolise Sweden’s heated debate about violent crime as it heads towards an election in September.
The rate of violent crime in the suburbs of Sweden’s big cities has worsened in recent years, in what officials blame on rising gang-related crime.
There were 306 shootings last year, which left 41 people dead. In 2011, there were 17 fatalities.
The violence has turned some parts of Stockholm into “no-go zones” for paramedics, says Henrik Johansson, former head of Sweden’s paramedics union.
“People who live in these areas are very scared to call the police or get help from ambulances. They are scared about consequences for them and their families.”
Police have acknowledged 60 or so “vulnerable areas” but reject the description of “no-go zones”, a highly loaded term in Sweden.
After all, violent crime in Sweden and who is to blame for it has become an ideological battlefield.
In February 2017 US President Donald Trump controversially linked the problem to the influx of migrants to Sweden.
“Sweden. They took in large numbers. They’re having problems like they never thought possible,” he said.
A self-proclaimed humanitarian superpower, Sweden took in the highest number of asylum seekers per capita during the migrant crisis of 2015. Many were refugees fleeing war and abuses in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Eritrea. …
Sweden’s government denies it is immigrants who are causing the rise in crime. (! — DZ)
“The people who are causing problems for us today, the vast majority of them are born in Sweden, and that’s not a notion of migration. That’s an issue of integration and an issue of social inclusion,” said Justice Minister Morgan Johansson, a centre-left Social Democrat.
Robert Stacy McCain received an anonymous letter pointing out that other issues besides simple negligence were involved in the USS Fitzgerald’s collision.
Hi, Stacy.
During the early weeks after the USS Fitzgerald was speared by a lumbering Philippine container ship, it was noteworthy that the captain and a couple of admirals were publically named, but not the actual officer in charge, the officer of the deck. (OOD) The other person who should have kept the Fitz out of trouble is the person in charge of the combat information center, the Tactical Action Officer. That individual is supposed to be monitoring the combat radar, which can detect a swimmer at a distance of two miles.
Not until a year later, when the final reports are made public and the guilty parties have been court-martialed, does the truth come out. The OOD was named Sarah, and the Tactical Action Officer was named Natalie, and they weren’t speaking to each other!!! The Tactical Action Officer would normally be in near constant communication with the OOD, but there is no record of any communication between them that entire shift!
Another fun fact: In the Navy that won WWII, the damage control officers were usually some of the biggest and strongest men aboard, able to close hatches, shore up damaged areas with timbers, etc. The Fitz’s damage control officer was also a woman, and she never left the bridge. She handled the aftermath of the accident remotely, without lifting a finger herself!
Look it up: The OOD was Sarah Coppock, Tactical Action Officer was Natalie Combs. . . .
When I noticed last year that they were doing all they could to keep the OOD’s name out of the headlines, I speculated to my son that it was a she. Turns out all the key people (except one officer in the CIC) were female!
In an 11-hour hearing, prosecutors painted a picture of Lt. Irian Woodley, the ship’s surface warfare coordinator, and Lt. Natalie Combs, the tactical action officer, as failing at their jobs, not using the tools at their disposal properly and not communicating adequately. They became complacent with faulty equipment and did not seek to get it fixed, and they failed to communicate with the bridge, the prosecution argued. Had they done those things, the government contended, they would have been able to avert the collision.
That two of the officers — Coppock and Combs — involved in this fatal incident were female suggests that discipline and training standards have been lowered for the sake of “gender integration,†which was a major policy push at the Pentagon during the Obama administration. It could be that senior officers, knowing their promotions may hinge on enthusiastic support for “gender integration,†are reluctant to enforce standards for the women under their command.
