Archive for September, 2022
28 Sep 2022
Nord Stream Pipeline leaking into the Baltic Sea.
CNBC:
Nord Stream AG, the operator of the two pipelines, said Tuesday that three known gas leaks caused “unprecedented” damage. The company added that it was not possible to determine when the gas network system’s capacity would be restored.
Seismologists on Monday reported explosions in the vicinity of the unusual Nord Stream gas leaks, prompting gas to spew into the Baltic Sea.
Denmark’s armed forces said video footage showed the largest gas leak created a surface disturbance of roughly 1 kilometer (0.62 miles) in diameter, while the smallest leak caused a circle of approximately 200 meters.
Danish and Swedish authorities declared a no-shipping zone around the location of the leak, which is situated in international waters but inside Denmark and Sweden’s exclusive economic zone.
The cause is not yet known. Some European leaders have suggested possible sabotage, particularly as the suspected attack comes amid a bitter energy standoff between Brussels and Moscow.
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BBC:
Ukraine has accused Russia of causing leaks in two major gas pipelines to Europe in what it described as a “terrorist attack”.
Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhaylo Podolyak said the damage to Nord Stream 1 and 2 was “an act of aggression” towards the EU.
He added that Russia wanted to cause pre-winter panic and urged the EU to increase military support for Ukraine.
Seismologists reported underwater blasts before the leaks emerged.
“There is no doubt that these were explosions,” said Bjorn Lund of Sweden’s National Seismology Centre, as quoted by local media.
The operators of Nord Stream 2 warned of a loss of pressure in the pipeline on Monday afternoon. That led to a warning from Danish authorities that ships should avoid the area near the island of Bornholm.
The operator of Nord Stream 1 said the undersea lines had simultaneously sustained “unprecedented” damage in one day.
Denmark’s Defence Command has released footage of the leaks which shows bubbles at the surface of the Baltic Sea near the island.
The largest patch of sea disturbance is 1km (0.6 miles) in diameter, it says.
“Gas leak from NS-1 [Nord Stream 1] is nothing more than a terrorist attack planned by Russia and an act of aggression towards the EU. Russia wants to destabilise the economic situation in Europe and cause pre-winter panic,” Ukraine’s Mr Podolyak tweeted in English.
He also called on European partners, particularly Germany, to increase military support for Ukraine.
“The best response and security investment are tanks for Ukraine. Especially German ones,” he said.
Other European leaders have raised the idea that the damage to the pipelines was deliberately inflicted.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki blamed it on sabotage and said it was probably linked to the war in Ukraine.
Denmark’s Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, said it was too early to come to conclusions, but that it was hard to imagine the multiple leaks could be a coincidence.
At the same time, unconfirmed reports in German media said authorities were not ruling out an attack on the undersea gas network.
A Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said he was “extremely concerned” about the incident, and the possibility of a deliberate attack could not be ruled out.
The EU has previously accused Russia of using a reduction in gas supplies as an economic weapon, in response to European sanctions imposed because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
However, Moscow denies this, saying the sanctions have made it impossible to maintain the gas infrastructure properly.
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Eugyppius suspects that we did it.
Radosław Sikorski, MEP, former Polish defence minister and husband of well-connected neoconservative intellectual Anne Appelbaum, has publicly thanked the United States for attacking the Nord Stream pipelines. (see above)
Jim Geraghty, senior political correspondent for the American political journal National Review, has also praised the attacks in a brief column under the headline “Who Will Rid Me of This Meddlesome Pipeline?” He’s been arguing about the importance of taking Nord Stream 2 offline since February, and suggests that the present attacks reflect his influence.
The biggest detail to break since I went to sleep yesterday, is this claim made by an anonymous intelligence source to Der Spiegel, that the CIA had warned Germany of Baltic pipeline attacks over the summer.
27 Sep 2022
Quora asks:
Will Putin resort to nuclear weapons now that it is becoming increasingly clear, from the many, many posts that I have read on Quora, that he has little or no chance of being victorious in Ukraine by means of conventional war?
and John Mark McDonald dispels the bunkum.
As someone who has studied nuclear war for close to forty years now, I am going to give you an answer that will blow your mind. Even if the entire Russian nuclear arsenal were used against Ukraine, it wouldn’t substantially change the course of the war. How could I possibly say that? Because, the power of nuclear weapons has been used as a boogeyman for so long that the actual power of a nuclear detonation has almost no relation to their actual destructive power. No nuclear power can afford to actually use one in combat because it would expose the mythical nature of nuclear weapons.
Nuclear weapons are hyped to the point that no one contradicts it when a media outlet publishes a statement indicating that even a single nuclear device will destroy the world. This is a blatantly, stupidly, obviously untrue, but never corrected. After all, two were used in WWII. BUT that is just the tip of the iceburg. I thought there had been a couple of hundred nuclear test that prove this point. I was off by over an order of magnitude. There have been nearly THREE THOUSAND NUCLEAR DETONATIONS ALREADY, that are either known or suspected and this has not effected the survivability of life on Earth even slightly.
Well then, how dangerous are nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons, if they weren’t their own catagory, would be classified as incendiary weapons. They set stuff on fire. They set a lot of stuff on fire. In fact they can set things on fire as far as two miles away from the actual detonation. Besides this, nuclear detonation are very bright, capable of blinding people 20–30 miles away. This is only constrained by the curvature of the earth. They also create hurricane force winds as the air around the detonation expands and contracts. If you are outside and unshielded and within a mile of a nuclear detonation, you are going to die.
The problem here is that Ukraine is really big. I mean the size of Texas big. Cities there tend to be spread out in modern times and their larger ones cover over a hundred square miles. The average nuclear detonation are only burn 2–3 square miles of territory. A city the size of Kiev would take on the order of 200 warheads to cover the whole thing.
Which brings us to our next point. Modern cities are just not that vulnerable to incendiaries. Modern city centers and industrial areas are made of concrete and steel. Most of the damage in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was done because almost all the buildings were made of wood and paper. The initial blast set the city centers on fire which spread and ended up burning down most of the city. Modern cities are just not that vulnerable. In Ukraine, despite millions of rounds of being poured into their cities, not one of them caught fire and burned to the ground like the Great Chicago or Great London Fires in the 19th century or the fire storms of WWII. In the Japanese nuclear detonations, the brick buildings were still standing, despite being much less sturdy than modern buildings. This leads to the most surprising revelation about nuclear detonations: If you are not outside, you stand a good chance of surviving even within the blast zone. Nuclear blasts are mainly line of sight killers. The vast majority of “radiation” created by an nuclear detonation is infrared radiation, or heat the same as a gas stove or fireplace makes. Unless the building you are in is collapsed by the wind or you fail to leave if it catches on fire or you happen to be in front of a window with a direct line of sight to the detonation, you are probably going to be fine.
Thus we get to the real reason why Putin will not use nuclear weapons: they’re just not all that effective compared to the boogeyman that is in our collective imaginations. Were a nuclear missile to detonate over central Kiev, no one would believe that it was an actual nuclear blast because the city is still there and all the major buildings are still standing.
Secondly, he doesn’t have very many of them. The numbers given for the Russian nuclear arsenal are an outright farce. You get that number by taking of bombs that the USSR claimed to have built, and subtract the number used in their testing program. This leaves you with about 9,000 warheads. First of all, Russia doesn’t have nearly enough delivery systems to put those warheads on. The second problem here is that nuclear warheads have a very short shelf life. Nuclear warheads require a detonator made of conventional expolsives. These detonators are some of the most precision pieces of engineering in the history of mankind. A series of explosives has to go off in such a way that the core is hit by the same amount of pressure from all directions simultaneously. If any of those explosives are even slightly off, the nuclear warhead will not go off. You now have an extremely precise machine sitting around a core of material emiting hard radiation. Hard radiation is not friendly to machines. Nuclear warheads need to be rebuilt a least every five years and maintained a lot more often than that. Even with that, a twenty year old warhead is a piece of junk. It’s been more than twenty years since the Putin kleptocracy came to power. I’m sure that Russia has a number of Potemkin warheads that are kept in top shape for inspectors, but given the current Russian system, the Russian nuclear arsenal most likely resembles the Russian tank reserves: the bare minimum kept in service while the rest is a scrap pile.
Currently, the spectre of the vast Russian nuclear arsenal is the last card he has in his hand. If he were to actually use it, it would expose that he never had anything but a junk hand and bluffing to back it up.
I can recall reading a scientific calculation that contended that if you took all the nuclear weapons in existence, put them into a great big pile and fired them off, you would not get a hole as large and deep as the Grand Canyon.
27 Sep 2022
Second Life Avatars.
Tennessee Star reports:
Yale University’s Computer Science Department recently announced a $1 million donation given to them from the Bungie Foundation for a research project that fights against racist hair graphics in video games.
“It is widely assumed that the algorithms used to generate virtual humans are based in biological underpinnings that accurately reflect all races and ethnicities,” the announcement reads. “In reality, however, these algorithms are deeply biased and based on predominantly European features.”
The project will be led by Theodore Kim, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Yale.
According to Kim, the project will “serve as an example of how to identify the products of systemic racism in computer graphics and demonstrate how to take concrete steps to ameliorate their harm.”
Kim believes that this racial bias in video game hair stems from Computer Graphics Researchers that have “historically favored the simulation and rendering of straight hair, which is racially coded as European or Caucasian hair.
RTWT
25 Sep 2022
Judith Schiff 1937-2022, Chief Research Archivist, Sterling Library, Yale University.
OK.
The latest Yale Alumni Magazine arrived yesterday. Its key feature article this issue is a tribute to Judith Schiff who had contributed a popular “Old Yale” column to the alumni mag since 1987.
There is nothing wrong with the eulogy to the late archivist in itself. But there were all those little infuriating details that get the blood pressure of an elderly alumn seething.
In the midst of noting the admirable contribution those 219 “Old Yale” columns constituted over the long decades, Alumni Mag editor-in-chief Kathrin Day Lassila ’81 (the ever reliable source of left-wing self gratulation and cant) clocks in to gloat over persuading Ms. Schiff not to omit a pious condemnation of the Pro-Slavery views of John C. Calhoun, Class of 1804, in a column actually discussing Calhoun’s role in leading the House of Representatives in the direction of a Declaration of War against Britain in 1812.
Representatives of the Woke Left, like Ms. Lassila, never overlook any opportunity to point fingers in condemnation at, and to preen in moral superiority over, the errors of persons long dead. How can one possibly say enough about the spiritual magnificence and boundless generosity of members of today’s Community of Fashion in refraining from owning and trafficking in any slaves and their bravery in forthrightly denouncing an institution extinct for over a century and a half and absolutely lacking any current defenders?
Personal Tribute No. 1 comes from a member of the Class of 1971, a transfer who became one of the first female graduates of Yale College, and who “received the Yale Medal for projects highlighting Women and Minorities.” IMHO, there ought to be a much bigger medal for persuading whiny minority identity groups to go away and shut up for a change.
The Schiff article includes several warm personal tributes from Yale functionaries and factotums who were personally acquainted with the lady which are in themselves perfectly fine. However, the faithful reader discovers that Personal Tribute No. 2 is the product of the collaboration of one chap (M.A. 89) who is a “New Haven-based cultural organizer” (a term that inevitably tempts any right-thinking alumn to start reaching for his revolver) and another guy (’87, ’93MDiv) who is the Beinecke Library’s “director of community engagement.” What in hell is a Rare Book Library doing throwing away an annual full-time salary on paying somebody to “engage” the inner-city welfare/criminal class of New Haven? Are gang-bangers, coke dealers, hip-hoppers, and the ever-dwindling actual working class of a ruined rust-bucket small city supposed to have some sort of healthy and legitimate interest in the Gutenberg Bible, Shakespeare’s First Folio, or some really cool manuscripts in Carolingian Miniscule?
Tribute No. 5 is from a member of the Class of 1979, ’84MD, and an adjunct psychiatry prof at Yale, who (inevitably) wrote a book about Yale and the Jewish Question, who tells us Ms. Schiff was a terrific help in researching one whiny identity group issue after another after another. That, of course, is what research universities and research university libraries are really for.
And it goes on and on. “When Judy Schiff went to work at Yale there were no senior women teaching at Yale College and no women undergraduates. There were no women officers in the university.” begins Tribute No. 6.
In Woke University-land and Woke-Alumni-Magazine-land, the entire universe, the entire corpus of human learning, and the whole focus of history is centered upon the amour propre, the grievances, and the glories of the triumphant elite establishment representatives of the sacred ressentiment-based Identity Groups.
It’s not that most articles are bad in themselves. It’s the fact that the rancid, worm’s-eye-view perspective of leftist grievance politics permeates everything and is accompanied by an inevitable associated tone of orthodoxy and dogmatism.
The great minds running Yale these days, and editing its publications, obviously never read John Ruskin:
Of all the insolent, all the foolish persuasions that by any chance could enter and hold your empty little heart, this is the proudest and foolishest,–that you have been so much the darling of the Heavens, and favourite of the Fates, as to be born in the very nick of time, and in the punctual place, when and where pure Divine truth had been sifted from the errors of the Nations; and that your papa had been providentially disposed to buy a house in the convenient neighbourhood of the steeple under which that Immaculate and final verity would be beautifully proclaimed. Do not think it, child; it is not so.
Bang! All over America, you can hear the sound of one more issue of the Yale Alumni Mag flung from the hand of an older male alumn hitting the circular file.
22 Sep 2022
And, as Jeffrey Carter notes, everywhere you look you can see Ayn Rand’s fictional vision of the future coming visibly to life.
If you look at Minneapolis, Chicago, and San Francisco, it is a race to see who can be Detroit first. NYC is terrible right now when it comes to crime and daily living. So is Los Angeles. New Orleans is the murder capital of the country. Memphis, St. Louis, Louisville? Please spare me the Chamber of Commerce pitch. No doubt, tourists are balking at going to those places due to fear of crime.
Name an urban area that is a delightful place to live, has great public schools, doesn’t have rising crime, and you can build wealth right now. The only ones I can think of are in the Old Confederacy.
John Galt is shrugging. He is moving places. It’s not the weather.
RTWT
21 Sep 2022
Capel Lofft fears that when Queen Elizabeth passed on, she took with her the traditional values and virtues that made Britain admired world-wide.
There has been much talk since the Queen’s death — and indeed during the Platinum Jubilee celebrations — about how the Queen embodied certain admirable, old-fashioned ideals: commitment to duty, stoicism, discretion and so forth. Underlying many of these (entirely correct) statements is an undertone of regret that such sterling qualities are in such short supply now. She stood out in such sharp relief because the background of our culture and society has become so clearly marked by the opposite qualities. Exhibitionism. Emotional incontinence. The elevation of outward appearances and tacky self-promotion over substance, character and service. Flakiness, fragility and self-pity. We have become a society of precious, whining narcissists talking at and past each other, all whilst congratulating ourselves on our “openness” and being so pleased at how “modern” we are.
That by and large is what most people have wanted, or at least it’s a culture they have acquiesced in and often enthusiastically embraced. The death of Diana gave many people an excuse for openly parading just those values. A profound cultural shift was taking place. It found its symbolic apotheosis and triumph in those days of September 1997, and in the cheap emotionalism that Tony Blair proved himself so fluent in when he reacted to her death with his “People’s Princess” speech. The Queen stood against them, and the majority of the public hated her for it.
I don’t wish to comment on the character of Diana — no doubt in many ways she was a kindly woman with good motivations. But a sort of caricature of the worst elements that could be extracted from her life, or perhaps more accurately her public image — making a spectacle of oneself, ostentatious virtue-signalling, a lack of emotional self-control — has become the model for our culture for 25 years now. One reason why the death of the Queen is so painful and seems to herald such uncertain and disquieting times is because, in our heart of hearts, we’ve all become sick of it. We saw in the Queen one last outpost of the old values that most of us endorse but struggle to emulate because they are counter-cultural and unpopular and difficult to stick to. We embraced a Diana culture whilst deep down we knew that the Elizabeth morality we were leaving behind was superior.
Here are a few phenomena we’re probably all familiar with: The dead look behind the eyes of the Instagram influencer as they parade the latest shiny, fake incarnation of their carefully crafted “personal brand”. The hollow ring of the LinkedIn drone as they post their latest screed on wellbeing or diversity, or how they manage their “executive schedule”. The grotesque voyeurism of the Reality TV show peopled by walking advertisements for brands of fake tan who demean themselves by participating in a series of staged emotional “dramas” and tawdry public sexual acts in order to kickstart a 15 minute career as a professional strumpet. The blue-haired Twitter progressive activist who claims to be “literally shaking” or traumatised by some opinion they don’t agree with.
All of these things and a million more besides are a product of the society that we have created in defiance of all those old-fashioned values the Queen stood for, values that our institutions and, sadly, most of the public have spent decades spitting on, sniggering at and ignoring. Our elites routinely smear a predilection for tradition as “fustiness”, a dedication to duty as being “uptight”, stoicism as being “uncaring”, and a desire for privacy as being “out of touch” or “stiff”. Too many of us have bought into this narrative.
It seems to me to be more than a coincidence that this cultural shift, which was so sharply symbolised by the reactions to the death of Diana, came at a time of accelerating globalisation and the consolidation of an intensified, deregulated form of capitalism. The guiding principle of that new economic settlement was that anything and anyone can be commodified, ranging from individuals’ appearance and sexuality to a country’s history and aesthetics: think of “cool Britannia” and the emergence of Britain as a sort of marketing brand in the eyes of Blair and his successors. Emotional “openness”, self-obsession and vanity, perpetual and self-conscious public assertions of one’s fragility, vulnerability and need for the appropriate forms of therapy in response, the temper tantrums and grievances of self-righteous progressive identity politics: all are new cultural fissures that can be mined for profit.
There isn’t money to be made out of restraint, quiet commitment to duty and self-control. A political economy that has become so heavily dependent on monetising our personal vanity, exhibitionism and the crises of self-perception and emotional insecurity that inevitably result, despises those who are private, self-contained and resilient. Other than tourist tat and Corgi soft toys, the monarchy is one thing that cannot be commodified, strip-mined for its cultural assets. It’s an institution that depends for its success on cultivating those qualities that have become radically counter-cultural in a world of hyper-capitalism built upon the commodification of the spectacle: those qualities which our late Queen personified with such dignity and common sense.
RTWT
21 Sep 2022
E. Donnall Thomas Jr. boasts of eating the mountain lions he hunts and speaks well of the experience. I find that surprising. I’ve eaten the meat of several carnivores at annual game dinners at the Yale Club of NYC, including African lion which I’d say tasted fishy mattress. None struck me as palatable at all. But he has tried moutain lion, and I have not.
Interestingly, he took Dave Quammen, a Yale classmate of mine whose made a prominent career as a Nature write, hunting. I read a terrific story by Quammen in the Yale Lit Freshman Year. He could write even back then.
[N]on-hunters—who make up around 80% of the general population—consistently show more favorable attitudes toward hunting when we eat what we shoot. One reason why lion hunting has proven such fertile ground for anti-hunting activists is the perception that cougars are hunted exclusively for their value as trophies. Unfortunately, there is some truth to this charge, and there shouldn’t be. In fact, as those who can overcome deep-seated but basically groundless cultural biases against eating cats are usually quick to discover, mountain lion meat is excellent.
When I prepared the backstraps from the first lion I shot and served them to family and friends, I did so out of a sense of obligation. I was raised to shoot what you eat and eat what you shoot. Since I wasn’t sure how deeply committed to that principle our dinner guests that night would be, I didn’t say much about the meat at the heart of the parmigiana until someone came right out and asked. By then it was too late for second thoughts, for everyone at the table had already declared it delicious.
Lion meat is lean, light, fine-grained and delicate, and can be prepared in any manner suitable for pork or veal. It has proven to be a consistent hit at our table, even when served to initially skeptical guests who knew full well what they were eating. It really is that good. Most states have specific meat salvage regulations on the books for big game, and a number of them, including my home states of Montana and Alaska, have expanded them to include non-traditional meat sources such as bear. There is no reason in the world not to extend these principles to include mountain lion. Doing so could well keep other states from following California’s unfortunate, biologically unjustified precedent.
Years ago, the nationally prominent writer David Quammen wrote a piece about mountain lions in the changing West for a wildlife publication to which we both occasionally contributed. The text included some mildly disparaging remarks about lion hunting which set me off even though they were neither totally unreasonable nor particularly vitriolic. I wrote a letter to the editor questioning the writer’s knowledge base and qualifications to write about the subject.
To his great credit, David contacted me, acknowledged that I had a point, and asked if I would take him mountain lion hunting. I replied that I would be delighted to do so and told him that if killing a cat would make him uncomfortable, I would be glad to provide a “catch-and-release” hunting experience, since I did a lot of that anyway. He bravely told me that if the goal was to inform him about lion hunting, that killing any cat we might tree should at least be an option.
He drove up from Bozeman one winter weekend, and we went hunting. The weather was brutal, but we covered a lot of ground by vehicle, skis, and foot. Even though we never cut a track, we learned that we had a remarkable amount in common. The high point of the experience for him was a mountain lion dinner prepared from a cat a friend had shot while hunting with me earlier in the month. We have remained good friends ever since, and he acknowledges that the experience changed his once skeptical attitude toward hunting.
So, if you are going to shoot a cougar, pack the meat off the mountain and eat it. You will enjoy the dining experience and be helping to secure the future of hunting with every bite.
RTWT
20 Sep 2022
Britons are proud of the performance of Queen Elizabeth’s Grenadier Guards pallbearers, and cries are going up that they should be awarded the British Empire Medal for their impeccable service, as were the members of the same regiment who carried Winston Churchill’s coffin in 1965. Daily Mail:
The steady-shouldered pallbearers who safely carried the Queen’s coffin during her state funeral have won the hearts of the nation amid growing calls for the soldiers to be honoured with medals.
With the eyes of the world on them, the eight soldiers from the 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards raised and put down the Queen’s 500lb lead-lined coffin no less than 10 times on her journey from Westminster Hall to St George’s Chapel in Windsor.
The team, each of whom is required to over 6ft tall, did not put a foot wrong all day as first they shouldered her coffin, with each soldier wearing rubber-soled boots to avoid slipping on the highly polished stone floors.
The unenviable task appeared more difficult as the Queen’s crown, orb and sceptre were balanced on top of her coffin.
But as the soldiers held the coffin’s brass handles, they walked in the knowledge that the lid had fittings to fix the jewels in place.
At one point, it appeared the flowers placed on the wreath atop the coffin began to wobble, but the pallbearers masterfully tilted it just enough to secure the foliage without drawing any attention.
Having faultlessly carried the coffin into Westminster Abbey as 2,000 esteemed guests from around the world watched, the eight soldiers were called upon again as Her Majesty was transported by State Hearse to Windsor Castle.
The task of lifting the coffin up the steep stairs of the 450-year-old St George’s Chapel was nerve-wracking enough alone, but their unblemished performance throughout the emotional day has earned the praise of the nation with admirers across Britain declaring: ‘They have done our nation and Her Majesty proud.’
RTWT
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