What comes around

As promised, some exploration of cycles in nature.

The point of cycles is that much of what we experience in the world is apparently periodic. Things repeat, although complex things have parts that repeat at different frequencies. This posting explains these terms - periodic, frequency, and related ideas. It starts a train of thought culminating in an attempt to define all natural motion as a combination of periodic motions, the failure of that attempt, and the consequences of that failure.

To start, any system you pick has to be broken down into its most basic parts. The elementary ways that the parts - molecules, atoms, rigid pieces that move as a unit - of such systems - a bouncing ball, a rolling car, air vibrating with sound - have to be identified. These elementary possible motions are called degrees of freedom and can represented as mathematical variables. When they move in time, these variables are functions of a master variable, time, as measured by a clock or some other time-keeper.

These degrees of freedom can move in lots of ways, depending on the forces acting on them. A powerful way to think of its motion is to start with the most basic of periodic motions, simple harmonic oscillation. The harmonic part is related to musical pitch or tone, a point we'll come back to. Simple harmonic motion is also the small-amplitude swinging of a pendulum, or the oscillation of a spring, if it's not deformed too much.

Harmonic oscillation is elegantly defined by projecting constant circular motion on to a line.

1. Start with a circle. Mark a point on its edge. Let the circle turn at a constant frequency f, with the mark returning back to its start every period T = 1/f. If the unit of T is the standard seconds, then the unit of f is hertz (Hz or inverse seconds).
   


2. We're used to measuring angles with degrees, with 360 degrees (360^o) for a full turn. This isn't the natural way to measure angle; the right way is radians, which is the arc length of the circle traced out by a circular radius R turning through the angle theta: θ = arc length swept out/radius. Then a full turn is θ = 2πR/R = 2π radians. Notice that, in this definition, the length scale of the circle (the radius) cancels out in the ratio, as it should. Angle is independent of size.
   
   
3. Now project the uniformly turning motion of the mark on the circle onto a line tangent to the circle. At any instant, the projected linear length is a trigonometric function of the angle swept out. The function is one of those you learned in high school, a sine or cosine, depending on how you do the projection. In this drawing, these functions are defined in the usual way, by the sides (a,b) of a right triangle in ratio to the triangle's hypotenuse (c). Because of the Pythogorean theorem, a² + b² = c², the trigonometric functions are not completely independent. For any angle θ, they satisfy sin²θ + cos²θ = 1.
   
   
4. Graphing functions of time, we get the standard sine and cosine waves. The combination ω = 2πf = 2π/T is called the angular frequency. The angle swept out is θ = 2πft. After one period t = T, the angle swept out is θ = 2πfT = 2π, a complete circle in one period. The elementary motion is the sine or cosine: sin(ωt) or cos(ωt). The thing in the parentheses (ωt) is the argument of the function.
   
   The shape of sine and cosine are identical, just shifted in argument by 90^o or π/2 radians. Such shifts in the argument are phase differences or phase shifts. We won't talk much about phase now, but it will come back when we talk about real cycles in climate. Phase is usually represented by φ; it's related to a time shift by dividing out by ω or 2πf. Unless phase is important, we'll just stick to one trigonometric function (say, sine).

All simple periodic motions need just three numbers for their complete definition:

• Frequency f (or angular frequency ω or period T),
• Phase φ (which we'll mostly ignore),
• Amplitude (the oscillation's maximum positive size, which also, by symmetry, gives its most negative size).

Multiperiodicity and commensurability. Can motions of different periodicity be combined? If they're two possible motions of the same degree of freedom, yes. The combined motion no longer oscillates at a single frequency. (If this is about sound, it's the combination of two pitches.) Peculiar properties of the trigonometric functions lead to an important conclusion: the combination of two harmonic oscillations is a third, different oscillation (at the average of frequencies, (f₁ + f₂)/2) whose amplitude is multiplied or modulated by an envelope of "ghost" oscillation (at the half-difference of frequencies, |f₁ - f₂|/2). The modulation envelope is often called the heterodyning or "beating" of two frequencies against one another.*

In music, "beating" is pleasing or grating to our nervous systems depending on whether there's a simple, low-order integer relationship between the frequencies - like 1:1 (exact consonance), 2:1 (octave), 3:2 (fifth interval, or dominant-tonic), etc. - or not. More dissonant combinations are higher-order integer pairs, like 9:7 or 13:11.

If we combine many "pure" frequencies f_i (with the index i labeling each frequency), the resulting motion no longer has any simple oscillatory interpretation. Even in the two-frequency case, the period of the summed frequencies (1/T = 1/T₁ + 1/T₂) is not a true period, because of the modulation at the difference or heterodyning frequency. It's not hard to see that the motion can repeat only if the two frequencies have a ratio of two integers (m,n) - that is, the ratio of frequencies has to be a rational number m/n (assuming common factors have been canceled - the two integers are mutually prime). If this is true,

f₁/f₂ = m/n = T₂/T₁, so that mT₁ = nT₂

In that time mT₁ = nT₂, m cycles of oscillation 1 = n cycles of oscillation 2, and the combined motion repeats. The two frequencies are said to be commensurate.

If the ratio of frequencies is not a rational number, the frequencies are incommensurate, and the overall motion never repeats. This fact has profound consequences, as we shall see.

The ultimate goal of introducing periodicity is to see if all change can be analyzed into combined simple harmonic motions. The answer is no, but it's "almost" true. The power of such methods and the limitations imposed by the "almost" are critical for understanding cycles of climate and heavenly bodies - and any other sort of cycle.
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* This how AM radio works. The modulation frequency is a very small frequency in the audible range (few 100 Hz up to about 10,000 Hz) and comes from the difference of two very large and very close radio frequencies (millions of hertz, or megahertz, MHz).

So it seems

If it's just a question of the mere appearance of impropriety, shouldn't our candidates be above even the suspicion of the appearance of wrongdoing? Or is the New York Times just blowing smoke up someone's ... well, you know :)

Michael Kinsley explains.

Global cooling: In case you were wondering

Weather? Or climate? You decide: "Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming."

"Global warming"? Pfft.

Cold is more damaging than heat. The mean temperature of the planet is about 54 degrees. Humans -- and most of the crops and animals we depend on -- prefer a temperature closer to 70.

Historically, the warm periods such as the Medieval Climate Optimum [800-1300] were beneficial for civilization. Corresponding cooling events such as the Little Ice Age [1300-1600? 1800?], though, were uniformly bad news.

Can the media chatterboxes and enviro-fanatics move on to something real for once?

(Hat tip to Instapundit.)

A culture is a terrible thing to waste

Here's a lesson in cultural decline. Consider one of the greatest natural scientists ("natural philosophers") of the Arabic-Persian golden age, Alhacen of Basra, who lived in the later 900s (see here and here). Then contrast with this flat-earth theorist of present-day Iraq (video clip requires WMP).

What a difference a millennium makes.


This may seem like just shooting fish in a barrel. But here's a serious point: in the West, we're used to progress - the future is better than the past. In our conceited arrogance, we even think progress is automatic, like getting on an UP escalator.

In fact, progress is anything but automatic. It needs the right conditions. We've had those in the West since the late Middle Ages, with some occasional, if terrible, interruptions. The right conditions are always under threat from ideologues, fanatics, and people with obsessive fixed ideas.

Now imagine you live in a land of regress: the past is better than the future. The regress may have been going on for so long - say, seven or eight centuries - that it seems automatic. Of course, that's not right either. But in your land of regress, there are people - including some important and powerful people - with a vested interest in decline. Turning things around seems threatening to them. To make their point, they even get violent.

Greenspan: Not really all that?

A few postings ago, I attacked the Fed's post-1995 performance as helping to enable the two great asset bubbles of the last two economic expansions, the stock bubble of 1996-2000 and the 2002-2007 housing bubble, now deflating and taking subpar housing borrowers with it. In both cases, recession scares (only a scare in 1994-95; a real, if mild and short, recession in 2001) misled the Fed into keeping credit too cheap for too long. Cheap credit, among other things, then fed the asset bubbles.

An interesting book-length attack on Greenspan has appeared recently, William Fleckenstein and Fred Sheehan's Greenspan's Bubbles: The Age of Ignorance at the Federal Reserve. Their attack aims at essentially the same targets as we have here at Kavanna, points not original with either us or them. But they develop the thought at length and back it up with compelling evidence.

From just skimming the book, the attack seems somewhat overdone. Greenspan's performance from 1987 until about 1995 was quite good, including holding everyone's hands after the 1987 stock market crash and negotiating the savings and loan crisis of the early 90s. After 1994, however, Greenspan lost his fear of inflation - inflation in the conventional, everyday sense of consumer and producer prices - while becoming strikingly blind to asset inflation, as in stocks and real estate. He failed to fully grasp the growth of speculative forces in the economy and how certain governmental policies fed those forces.

We can only hope that Bernanke doesn't repeat these mistakes. Of course, he could make others: there is real risk now of conventional price inflation returning, with all those raw materials prices rising. This risk is more real than the risk of recession. But the Fed only controls a few things. Many unbalanced features of the world economy - especially Asia's tendency to oversave and underconsume and its inability to find adequate investment opportunities except here in America - result from long-standing policies and unforeseen twists in global economic evolution. The cheap loans we get here results from all those international savings being dumped on our credit markets. And far more than the Federal Reserve, those government-backed loan agencies (Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae et al.) and Congress have been pushing home buying hard for more than a decade, with scant regard for whether the borrowers could afford it.

The Fed is a collective, collegial body, with regional boards as well. Concentrating on the Fed chief is misleading and overpersonalizing. Such bodies can be subject to herdthink, but they also allow important information into decision-making that might be otherwise blocked out.

POSTSCRIPT: Fleckenstein, it seems, is a busy man. He's got a blog over at MSN Money.

Lots of economist types, especially the followers of the laissez-faire Austrian school,* have been criticizing Greenspan for a long time on just this issue. Of course, it's the Fed itself they don't like. Just search on "greenspan fleckenstein".
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* Boasting two of the greatest economists of the last century, Hayek and his mentor, Mises: more refugees from the Hapsburg Austro-Hungarian collapse and final representatives of Europe's pre-1914 belle époque.

Total eclipse of the Moon

It's supposed to indicate the end of the world, the blood-red moon of a total lunar eclipse. But it's just the Sun, Earth, and Moon in a perfect line. It happened last night for many in the US and much of the northern hemisphere. It's the last one until December 2010.

And yes, it has to be a full moon: the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun have to line up just so for the lunar eclipse to happen. The Earth passes between the Moon and the Sun, leaving the Moon lit only by reddish sunlight refracted through the Earth's atmosphere. The Earth's shadow is, relatively speaking, much larger than the Moon's, so lunar eclipses are far more common and widely visible than solar eclipses, when the Moon passes between the Earth and the Sun. That case can happen only during a new moon.

There will be a total solar eclipse later this year, on August 1.

Uh-oh

Rand Simberg of Transterrestrial Musings has another case of "it must be global warming": a once-per-generation snowstorm in Greece. (See here as well.)

And keep up with the Democrats' coming electoral disaster at Rand's as well. Hillary is still hanging on with Ohio and Texas open. If she wins Texas, she still has a chance. If she loses both, she is finished.

And so are the Democrats in November. They will wake up by April at the latest in shock to discover what they've done to themselves and inquire after what exactly they were smoking. More on that in a bit.

It's still cold outside

Here's more detail on the post-1997 cooling trend: it really is cold out there, and this winter's snow and ice accumulation trends are sharply up. They've been inching up since the end of the 90s, but this winter's additional increment is the largest since the early 90s. (Hat tip to Instapundit.) Contrary to the ignorant hot air from Gore, it's the latitudinal coverage of the ice that is tied directly to "global warming" or "global cooling," not the ice thickness.

By itself, the thickness is just a sign of how much snow has fallen, itself a function of the humidity. Since colder air has lower water vapor content, colder winters and less snowfall will produce thinner ice sheets (remember, they melt a little every summer, regardless). Of course, this sort of effect needs several years before it takes hold. This is not science that's hard to understand - it just takes turning off the tube and thinking for a few minutes about things that everyone in northern climates sees every winter.

Something else has become clear: since the IPCC and other "global warming" hysterics have silently abandoned their case for the pre-late 70s climate, and they are ignoring or blocking the now-obvious post-1997 climate trends, the entire empirical case for "global warming" rests on the 20-year warming period (which no one disputes) from the late 70s to the mid-90s. All contrary data have been or soon will be "corrected" by being "recalibrated" to the bogus "hockey stick" extrapolations - all extrapolated from that limited period of warming.

Happy Presidents Day weekend

What is it with these dead white Presidents? :)

Kavanna is taking a break - back soon.

Plus: be chappy it's Adar (or, Adar I, at least).

I am vast and right-wing, hear me roar

PRE-POSTSCRIPT: Megan McArdle does it again: finally, an explanation for our campaigns.
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The agony and the ... well, no ecstasy yet. Conservatives are in a funk about McCain winning the Republican primaries and the smooth walk he apparently has ahead of him to the Republican nomination. Conservatives deserve a Valentine. So here's a belated one.

How did he do it? Independents, my dear. They can vote in most primaries, and they've recently been the fastest-growing group in American politics. McCain plays well among them. Conservatives are in conniptions, and rightly so, about some of McCain's politics - his support for restrictions on campaign donations and speech (which are unconstitutional, shut out challengers, and have done serious damage to our politics), and above all, his questionable views on illegal immigration, which, for state and local governments, has become a major welfare-state crisis that national politicians, who set the policies or lack thereof, pay no price for.

McCain, like Romney and Giuliani, is a liberal Republican. (Romney spent a lot of time and money unconvincingly presenting himself as a conservative - which is too bad, because he would have done himself and everyone else a favor by just being himself.) Liberal Republicans are the smallest of the three factions of the Republican party (liberals, conservatives, and populists). But they are critical: they are the closest to the center of gravity of American politics, somewhat to the right of center. They do not share conservatives' fatal ambivalence about modern government, but they are also free of faith-driven big-government populism - you know, where miracles are more important than math.

Conservatives should not have been surprised by this. While waiting in vain for a viable conservative Presidential candidate this year, many conservatives are still mentally stuck in the 90s. Conservatism lives on as an ideology, as an intellectual movement, and as an attitude. But as a politics, it's been dead for almost a decade. Conservatives who thought there would be a conservative comeback this year were always deluded. Conservatism didn't die a natural death, of course. It was shunted aside, by the Republican party - it was in the way. The irony is that, the Republicans would be in far better shape now if they had stuck consistently to their earlier conservatism. Like Nixonism, the Bush-Rove-ism approach was too clever by half.

So conservatives are going through separation trauma. They once had enough confidence in themselves that, in the late 70s and the 80s, they were able to take over the Republican party. But the last 13 years have not been kind to them: the Republicans lost their ideological moorings. Conservatives overidentified with the party, which became less and less conservative while becoming more and more partisan. Now conservatives have to go back to where they were in the 1950s and 1960s: they need to disentangle themselves from the Republican party and revisit the basics. They can start by mending fences with libertarians. And they need to figure out what they have in common with the "good government" liberal Republicans. (Hint: nowadays, "good government" usually means "smaller government.") For electoral politics, they need to face what I wrote here last year:

Once Bush & Co. are gone, it will be springtime for Republicans, who are more likely than not to retake the Senate in 2008. But it will not be a new conservative era: the 20-year era of conservative ideological dominance, from the late 70s to the late 90s, will probably not return in our lifetimes. Everyone now loves big government ....

Will the liberal Republicans ride to the rescue? Maybe. Liberal Republicans like politics and don't suffer from the conservatives' fatal ambivalence about being in charge of modern government. And unlike Bush, they value competence above machine politics and loyalty. They also lack Bush's faith-based, blindfolded, trust-walk style, and are not tainted with [it]. Although liberal Republicans are the smallest faction of the Republican party, they sit the closest to the center of gravity of American politics - unlike the conservatives or the Bush fraternity house .... the future of the Republican party, if it belongs to anyone, belongs to them.

Conservatives need to grasp that the game this year is, not pick a viable conservative candidate, but pick an acceptable liberal Republican. Now the primary voters have done that for them and picked McCain. If conservatives don't like the result, they should have been stronger in the primaries for Romney or Giuliani. Instead they were twiddling around with Ron Paul or Fred Thompson.

Conservatives also need to rebuild at the state and Congressional level. They have always had a strong tendency towards ghettoizing their issues as "ideology." They need instead to do what conservatives before the mid-70s did, anticipate and understand what the big governmental crises are going to be, and then be ready when those crises appear. (Back then, they were out-of-control expectations, the post-1965 explosion of federal spending, stagflation, the dead-end of détente; today, they include the coming entitlements crisis, illegal immigration, the possible break-up of the Western alliance system, the rise of the "oil" axis). Conservatives need to disconnect completely from the conventional television media and encourage everyone else to do the same. The news media will do its utmost to obscure important issues and change the subject. Instead of arguing with them, everyone should be ignoring them. If voters do, then the politicians will eventually get it. Those who don't get it, will find themselves less and less relevant.

There is real upside for the Republicans: the cards are still stacked in their favor this year. Bush and Cheney are out of the picture. The negative referendum on them already happened, in 2006. As a proportion of voters, self-described liberals are still shrinking. The Congressional Democrats' poll ratings have been crawling on the bottom since they took over 13 months ago (teens or single-digits) and consistently well below Bush's. If the Republicans are smart, they'll run against Congress. The 2008 presidential race is the Republicans' to lose. The interesting question is whether they have a chance to regain one of the houses of Congress as well.

POSTSCRIPT: Speaking of which - is it all over for Hillary? Peggy Noonan considers. My answer is, obviously not. She's won most of the big states and will probably win Texas and Ohio. The Democratic race is far from over. And given the Democrats' weird superdelegate rules, we may end up with an old-fashioned brokered convention. Of course, it won't be totally old-fashioned: the back rooms will have women as well as men, and they'll be free of smoke.

Afghanistan, bin Laden, and all that

A mindworm has returned, one familiar from 2001 and 2002. Inspired by the book and recent movie, Charlie Wilson's War, and Pakistan's troubles, the worm says something like this: in the 80s, "the US supported bin Laden," or "bin Laden supported the US," or the 1980s anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan is somehow responsible for al Qa'eda. None of this is true. Those events and forces do have significance today, most of it not foreseen back then. But the Afghan anti-Soviet war (1978-1989) helped to delay the rise of al Qa'eda and Sunni radicalism directed at the US, rather than accelerate it. And Sunni radicalism needed certain prerequisites - the end of the Iran-Iraq war (1988), the end of the Cold War (1990), American troops stationed in the heart of the Muslim world (Arabia, 1990-2003), the rise of Arabic satellite television (after 1994) - that didn't start falling into place until the end of the 80s.

Few people in the Western world in the 1960s and 70s foresaw the rise of radical Islam. Superficially, at least, the Middle East was dominated by ideologies familiar in a Western context: nationalism, and various types of socialism. Not understanding that the Middle East is really a distinct civilization with a history very different from the West or Asia, most pundits and experts projected the future as more of the same. Most people unthinkingly believed in an automatic secularization, modernization, and so on. The Middle East was mentally lumped into an artificial construct, the "Third World," made up of non-white peoples either patronized as "noble savages" or feared as simply "savages."

The Islamic revival of the late 1970s came as a shock to the West, the communist bloc, and Westernized elites in the Middle East. Several events marked turning points and milestones in the return of political Islam. The failure of modernization and the Arab defeats in 1967 and 1973 helped to discredit secular regimes. At the same time, Saudi Arabia's successful orchestrating of the 1973-74 oil embargo - taking the industrialized world's economy hostage, in effect - marked a power shift away from secular governments like Egypt's and Syria's, once the centers of the Arab world. The Saudis already enjoyed a unique prestige from their position as keepers of the Muslim holy cities (Mecca and Medina) and as the strictest Muslims. There and elsewhere in the Middle East, Muslim radicals began to argue that Islamic purism was an authentic identity Muslims should return to and reject alien imports like nationalism, secularism, and socialism. The 1977 and 1979 hostage crises, one in Washington DC, the other in Mecca, were both carried out by Sunni radicals enraged by the gap between the Saudi regime's purist rhetoric and its modernizing, semi-cosmopolitan, and often corrupt reality. These marked the first of what would, later in the 1990s, become a familiar stream of events. At the same time, a double opposition to the Shah's regime of autocratic modernization in Shi'ite Iran put the region's secular autocrats on notice. Most Western observers expected the liberal, secular opposition to win and were stunned when the 1979 Iranian revolution turned Islamic.

In those days, everyone in the West viewed the Cold War as far more important and failed to take Islamic radicalism seriously. The war between North and South Vietnam had just ended (in 1975) with a communist victory. Only in the Iranian case was Islamic revolutionary politics viewed as genuine and threatening: by the US, because of the Iranian hostage crisis (1979-81),* and by the conservative Gulf monarchies, who rule over significant Shi'ite populations and live next door to Iran. In fact, the Gulf governments were thrown into a panic, one that led them in 1980 to prod Iraq into launching the Iran-Iraq war.** Few could see how Muslims from the ultra-conservative Gulf states would experience a growing and intolerable tension between the supposed purity of Islam in Arabia (its home) and the reality of the Gulf kingdoms, then being showered in oil wealth.

The 1978 communist coup in and December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan brought this budding Sunni radicalism to a stop, or rather temporarily transformed and redirected it. Suddenly the region was under a genuine threat, not from the US, but from the Soviets. After the 1978 coup, the US began to support Afghan groups directly. The most important was the Northern Alliance of Ahmad Shah Massoud, an ethnic Tajik and not a member of Afghanistan's Pashtun majority. The US continued to support Massoud, but later in the 80s, found itself shut out of the more important channels for helping the Afghans, controlled by Pakistan and its military intelligence service (the ISI). (This is the part where Charlie Wilson came in.) The US, which has always had a rocky relationship with Pakistan, upgraded its ties and kept them there until 1990, when they were downgraded again, because of Pakistan's nuclear program.

Here truly a devil's bargain was made, but it has nothing to do with the Afghans. (No Afghan has been involved in terrorist attacks on the US.) The problem is Pakistan and the later involvement of Saudi religious institutions in Pakistan and Afghanistan, which began after the anti-Soviet war was over, in the 1990s. After the Soviet withdrawal in 1988-89, the US made a terrible (if familiar) mistake of just walking away from Afghanistan. It entered into a vicious, three-way civil war pitting against each other the remains of the pro-Soviet regime, Massoud's forces and allies, and radical Islamic groups sponsored by Pakistan. From the Saudi seeds and Pakistan's continued attempts to take over Afghanistan sprang the Taliban, whose core were madrassa (religious school) students determined to turn Afghanistan into an Islamic utopia.† After coalescing in 1994 and obtaining widespread popular support for bringing the civil war to an end, the Taliban (with massive Pakistani aid) took over most of the country by 1996. Popular support evaporated, once Afghans got to see the Islamic utopia close up (as in The Kite Runner), but by that point, popular Afghan sentiment meant little. Poor and isolated, Afghanistan had been unwillingly and unwittingly turned into a "jihad theme park," with Islamic radicals implementing the vision they could not in their home countries.

As for the rest of the myth, it's almost all fabricated, largely in retrospect by al Qa'eda, its supporters, and credulous Western journalists. The "Afghan Arabs" who supposedly fought against the Soviets actually did no fighting, confining their support of the Afghans to monetary donations. The religious motives for Sunni radicalism are rooted in Arabia, the home of Islam, and fundamentally result from the large contradiction between its dominant Wahhabi (Salafi) type of Islam and the materially modern life made possible by all that oil wealth. Pakistan, an artificial country lacking a national identity, finds promoting Islamic radicalism an almost irresistible temptation. It's a practical good as well, since it helps the ISI run an insurgency next door in the Indian province of Kashmir (claimed by Pakistan) and promote Pakistani control of Afghanistan, its geographic "rear," through the dominant Pashtuns who live on both sides of the Pakistani-Afghani border. To come full circle, when the US invaded Afghanistan in late 2001, its local allies were made up of - you guessed it - the same Northern Alliance we started supporting in 1978, but then abandoned in 1989. Massoud had visited the US in the summer of 2001 to warn Americans about the Taliban and its al Qa'eda allies. After his return to Afghanistan, he was assassinated, two days before the 9/11 attacks, by an al Qa'eda suicide bomber posing as a journalist. The Taliban and al Qa'eda guessed correctly that their upcoming attacks on the US would lead to a US invasion. Killing Massoud, in advance, deprived the US of an important local ally, one we had supported in the past.

The radical Islamic project remains today, among Sunnis, a violent cult inspired and funded by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states and largely hosted by Pakistan. That these are supposedly American "allies" just adds what history will view as a cruel twist. From this perspective, the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq are, not diversions, but sideshows, chasing around and killing or capturing terrorists whose beliefs and activities are the result of the policies and religious proclivities of countries we dare not touch. A year-and-a-half after invading Afghanistan to overthrow a government made possible and supported by Pakistan, we failed to logically take the struggle home to the countries that hatched the crisis and instead invaded Iraq.

There are some important lessons here, but they have little do with lachrymose theories of "blowback" and other "radical" claptrap.†† The most important is the damaging American habit of walking away from a foreign involvement after a period of intense engagement, abandoning hard-won friends in the process. The US has always had, and probably will always have, a strong isolationist streak, reinforced by our attention-challenged media and short election cycles. But foreign policy is not about one-night stands and can't be built on dubious "allies" and so-called "friends." And the other lessons are familiar to readers of this blog: the sinister roles played by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in the rise of radical Sunni Islam and our strange relationship with Saudi Arabia. Even an enormity like the 9/11 attacks was not enough to shake that relationship, in the end. Our descendants will stare at this fact in wonder.

POSTSCRIPT: There's another angle to Afghanistan, besides the fact that its security problems are all baked next door in Pakistan. We've heard over and over in the last few years how much the US needs to be multilateral and follow the NATO model of Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, and not the Iraq model of largely unilateral action. But there's trouble on the horizon for NATO. It's an organization that was founded to cope with the Cold War, which it did, with great success. But in the 1990s, it was pressed into service in new ways not part of its original mandate and which are now proving more difficult, costly, and unpopular than originally anticipated. Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, supposedly models of multilateralism, may instead prove its graveyard. US military action in the future will probably look a lot more like Iraq than people think.

Another important development that our wonderfully unbiased and objective news media are all over - right?
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* Notice how often the word "hostage" comes up in this posting.

** Here's a place to lay to rest another myth, that the US supported Iraq and Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war. While the US did quietly grant security guarantees to the Gulf kingdoms, it was officially neutral in the conflict ("it's too bad both sides can't lose," was Kissinger's famous quip). It was the Gulf kingdoms themselves that directly supported Iraq with money. Using that and his own oil money, Saddam bought weapons mainly from the Soviets and, to a smaller extent, from France. (The French had their own reasons to back Iraq against the Iranian revolutionary mullahs.) Iraq didn't fight Iran with American weapons, but with Soviet ones: AK-47s, not M-16s; T-55s and T-62s, not M1s; MiGs, not F-16s. But the price of oil collapsed in the later 1980s, and Saddam's income dried up. Unable to pay off his loans from the Gulf states, he invaded one of them and threatened to invade the others.

† In Farsi (Persian) and related languages, taliban just means "students."

†† As for "blowback," the ultimate in tragic backfiring is the death of Benazir Bhutto. It was during her terms as Pakistani prime minister (1988-90 and 1993-96) that the ISI turned into a dedicated machine for promoting radical Islamic groups in Afghanistan and in Pakistan itself. And of course, it is just those groups who were responsible for her assassination.

Again, these developments started after the end of the anti-Soviet war. Only once Pakistan was no longer an object of superpower interest did it unabashedly and recklessly go full-time into the Islamo-radicalism business, picking up the thread dropped in 1980.

It's cold outside

In keeping with a trend already evident since the late 90s, this winter's temperatures are running 0.6-0.7 ^oC below the recent historical average. For those of us living in the northern hemisphere, at least, these numbers come as no surprise. Nor should any sentient adult be surprised by the conventional news media's complete silence on the subject.

When considering such facts, everyone should always keep in mind that spatial averaging of temperatures is, strictly speaking, meaningless. Temporal averaging is meaningful, if the same averaging rule is maintained across time. The evolution of spatially averaged temperature might be suggestive of trends. But a far sounder way to get a handle on such trends globally is to compare temperature trends at different spatial points. Then a truly global trend stands out against strictly local developments.

Then check out the pure gold of Kerry comedy ("weather due to global warming - no human CO2 emissions, no weather!"), showing again what an awful politician he is. Kerry still gets the booby prize as the worst presidential candidate in our lifetimes.

The "global warming" hysteria has taken on a life of its own. It is now free of the plainest common sense, never mind deep scientific thinking.

(Hat tip to Instapundit and TigerHawk.)

POSTSCRIPT: How many blog postings do you read that reference both "Kerry" and "thermodynamics"? - except perhaps in the context of "entropy" and "degeneration" :*)

Solomonic wisdom

There are others of us here in Beantown. Do not miss Martin Solomon's Solomonia blog.

Plus, it's updated more often than this one! :)

(Hat tip to Charles Jacobs and the David Project, another fine Boston institution.)

Good czar, bad czar

Something very bad has happened in Russia in the last eight years: the rise of Vladimir Putin and the new Russian mafia state. Contrary to myths still repeated in the West, this period has not seen Russia become more stable or a nicer place: on the contrary. The Russian state has prospered, because it's seized control of Russia's oil and gas wealth. It's now become another petro-dictatorship. The decline of Russian society, arrested in the 90s, is accelerating.

But there's also a whole army of bagmen (consultants, lobbyists, etc.) out there who've clouded the issue both here and especially in Europe. The West lacks the clarity on the issue that it had during the Cold War, even though Russia is causing problems in Iran and is about to in Kosovo. This is not the 90s "holiday from history" any more. And there's no good czar - Yeltsin - to deal with.

Bad - bad - czar - bad - bad.

O the humanity ...

Wasn't there supposed to be some kind of victory parade today in Boston, or something ... oh, yeah ... hmm ....

It's raining cold and hard.

The end of Europe? IV

Utopias appear to be more easily realized than anyone had previously believed. And we find ourselves today before an otherwise harrowing question: How to evade their definitive realization? ... Utopias are realizable. History is marching towards utopias. Perhaps a new century is beginning, a century in which intellectuals and the educated class will dream of the means of escaping utopia and returning to a non-utopian society, less "perfect," and more free.

- Nikolai Berdyaev (1923)

Surveying the future of Europe one last time, we also need to keep in mind that, for all their importance, deep philosophical, spiritual, and existential questions rarely furrow the brows and agitate the minds of most people. (Good thing, too.) Most of their decisions, most of the time, are shaped by straightforward political realities and economic incentives. Europe's welfare states were not born from a vision of continuing progress, but from the socialist vision of heavenly stasis and permanent leisure. More importantly, they were born from the social upheavals and civilizational emergencies of the century-and-a-half ending in 1945. But history never stops: even if you're not interested in it, history is very interested in you. Europe's welfare states embody long-outdated responses to civilizational crisis. They have made it difficult for productive people, between the ages of studenthood and retirement, to sustain themselves economically, much less expand and improve their economic activity, and to raise families. While providing lavishly for the young, old, and sick (they're receiving free benefits no one ever got before - and no one ever will again), welfare state systems of subsidy and taxation penalize responsible adult behavior to an unprecedented degree - often seeing the only way to cushion the burden of high unemployment and low growth in pulling even productive, educated people in their working prime into the welfare state net. This is immoral, crazy, and won't last even another generation: it makes permanent adolescence universal, but drains away all of its benefits. While immediate success is rewarded, continued failure is subsidized, even glorified. Instead of marking an intermediate destination on the way to better things, the prolonged adolescence of welfare state culture is a cul-de-sac, a deadend.* The pervasive underlying principle is the powerful tendency to treat adults of sound mind and body as children, no matter their age - as the prophetic thinkers of the nineteenth century foresaw.

The evidence for such simple reasoning is straightforward: when Europeans emigrate - mainly to the US, but elsewhere too - they respond to lower taxes and less stifling economic conditions by working harder, saving more, and having more children. We can muse, as do Bawer, Weigel, and Berlinski, on hard questions of national identity, Europe's catastrophic modern century, or its spiritual deadness - but let's not lose sight of the obvious. The books of Steyn and Laqueur, in particular, are buckets of common-sense cold water poured on what might otherwise become woozy and interminable Weltschmerz (world-weariness).

All of these authors ask what are the possible and likely futures for Europe. Steyn and Weigel attempt some systematic answers, as does Laqueur, in a more jumbled fashion. None is sanguine. All foresee large parts of urban central and western Europe ceasing to be European in any meaningful way. Some parts will become Islamic, although it's a mistake to view these immigrant communities as monolithic. All of them point to the fact that the big changes have only just started. The biggest will happen in the next couple decades, and Europe is likely to be unrecognizable afterwards. Tourists receive a seriously distorted view by getting such a surfeit of Europe's past - while the ex-pat set (students, temporary and visiting workers) see only the slowly shrinking island of the pampered welfare state lifestyle that is already unaffordable.

The future of the American relationship with Europe. In keeping with our starting principles, this is another subject that requires steady concentration on long-term fundamentals, ignoring immediate episodes of European anti-Americanism, like the most recent one that started in the late 90s and now dissipating.

Until 1917, the US did not interest itself directly in European affairs. European countries were major world powers in their own right, while the US was a new and largely untested power. Almost all of its energy was focused inwards on economic development and political integration. Back then, if they thought about foreign countries at all, many Americans often viewed Latin America and Asia as more important. They were wrong back then - Europe remained a center, if not the center, of the twentieth century's great conflicts. But those Americans then, and their misnamed isolationist cousins of the 1930s, saw a deeper truth. Europe was destroying itself, and the future - for the US - had to be more about Latin America and Asia. That was already evident by the 1980s, but it became central after the Cold War. American intervention in Europe - in four distinct episodes (1917-1919, 1940-1945, 1945-1990, and 1995-1999) - has been founded on the perception that Europe was both important and, at the same time, in so much trouble, that it couldn't straighten itself out.

As Steyn and Laqueur point out - in very different tones - both the US and Europe have, since the late 90s, been focusing on a meaningless rivalry between them, while the heated public rhetoric has ignored the real issues. America's main economic competitors are Asian. Its major, everyday pressing social problem is illegal immigration from Latin America. Its major political problems are internal. Europe's major economic competitors are Asian. Its largest strategic problems are with Russia and the Islamic world. Its major social problems are internal (demographics, welfare state) and externally to the east and south. Europe is in a weaker position to deal with its problems than we are to deal with our problems. For the foreseeable future, Europe will need us more than we need them - just as it has been since 1945. The real change is not Europe's objective condition - in trouble and needing outside help - but in American perceptions of whether it's worthwhile to help Europe. While Europe still needs outside help, Europe is no longer as important as it once was. This fact will be the source of a considerable friction in the years to come. Many Americans don't understand it, especially liberals, who have spent the last 90+ years selling the centrality of Europe as a core principle of US foreign policy. This view will be harder and harder to defend in the coming decades and is another sign of modern liberalism's decline. Certainly, nothing has brought out American liberalism's backward-looking nature the way its colonial-inferiority complex vis-à-vis Europe has. Bawer's book exhibits a strong, lingering whiff of this thinking, although Bawer has spent most of the last decade apparently arguing himself out of his once-firm liberal views on this and other topics. It's even more bizarre given the fact that, until recently, the US was much more firmly committed to liberal political values than was Europe - Europe's continent-wide conversion to these is recent and untested, no matter what the Eurocrats say.**

As we look further and further out beyond the current generation, we must admit that all bets are off. Demographers cannot predict accurately much beyond two generations. It is clear that Europe's native populations will shrink dramatically during that time. In particular, Europe's southern tier and eastern ex-Communist bloc of countries have reached low birth rates that no society, outside of wars and plagues, has ever recovered from. But what comes after is less clear. Right now, the immigrant communities filling in Europe's hollowing-out demographics form compact societies-within-societies, especially the Islamic ones. (This is also true of the Africans, but much less true of Hindus and Sikhs in Britain, whose success is more "American" in nature.) These compact mini-societies might become sovereignties in all but name, just as the western Roman empire fragmented in its last few decades. Or something else entirely might happen - the modern world is not the ancient. These immigrant communities might open up and become far more culturally integrated into their host societies than they are now. Then expect to see a significant decline in traditional religious identities and automatic political solidarity. Although they will remain different for a long time to come, in this scenario, they might become more like the "hyphenated Americans" of 50-100 years ago - on their way to cultural assimilation into Europe, while changing Europe at the same time. This American-style "happy ending" is possible, although I would say now, not terribly likely.

Only time will tell and, as it it always has, holds surprises in store.
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* The American version is familiar - from the birth of the teenager in the 1940s, captured perfectly in Lolita (the movie, not the novel), to the "death of the grown-up" in Diana West's new book, reviewed here by John O'Sullivan.

** Or perhaps, in their nervous political correctness, they know in their bones better than they know in their heads.

Reading and digging

Occasionally serious investigation of the Bible, archeology, and the ancient world get some serious attention from the world of journalism. Who knew? :)

David Plotz of Slate has spent much of the last two years reading, digging, and blogging the Bible. Check out his blogging, both the reading and the digging (archeology in Israel and Jordan), over at Slate. The archeology postings feature some nice picture shows too.

He bills himself as an ignoramus, which is a little misleading - Plotz seems to know his way around. But he's friendly and wears his learning lightly, which is the only way to dress.

And happy Groundhog Day!

The end of Europe? III

"I grieved to think how brief the dream of human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes - to come to this at last. Once, life and property must have reached almost absolutely safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed.

"It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal in perfect harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to the intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.

"So, as I see it, the Upper-world man had drifted towards his feeble prettiness, and the Under-world to mere mechanical industry. But that perfect state had lacked one thing even for mechanical perfection - absolute permanency."

- H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895)

For most of his adult life, Wells was a socialist by conviction, believing that progress could continue only if controlled and directed by a central authority, the kind that traditionally has not ruled free societies except in times of war. Only in his last years, during and after the Second World War, did Wells finally come to accept the obvious: socialism could be achieved - but only by reorganizing society on a permanent war footing. War had already led to socialism in the Europe and the rest of the world; continued socialism would just mean a permanent prospect of war. And even then, society could not be made to stand still in the way the vision-bewitched, power-hungry socialist planners wanted. Socialism could not be a permanent stasis, only a stopping point on the way to decline or self-destruction. In other words, Wells late in life grasped what his and the preceding generation of European intellectuals had led their civilization to: disaster. This same despairing realization lies at the bottom of Orwell's 1984, published in 1949, three years after Wells' death. Thus far Wells the prose stylist and popular social thinker.

But in his science fiction, Wells knew better: his artistic intuition was stronger and better than his political beliefs. In his bones, regardless of whatever socialist opium he deluded himself with, he understood the real situation, probably because in his youth, he had absorbed the new, dazzling, and penetrating ideas of Darwin and other evolutionary thinkers: your biography doesn't stop until your dead, and history doesn't stop until and unless humanity becomes extinct.* There's no PAUSE button. The evolutionary idea had a fatal implication for the socialist utopia: the world of stasis - the heaven-on-earth of the socialists - is a religious fantasy.

Europe might come to that sad end, within our lifetimes. But it's also imperative, before arriving at such a conclusion, to take the longest view possible of European and Western history and see its unusual features in the light of centuries and millennia. Compared with other societies and civilizations, Europe's demography has always been unusual: delayed marriage, exceptional accumulation of capital and knowledge, escape from the Malthusian trap of food supplies saturated by population growth. With these came other unusual traits: starting with feudalism, contractual government in place of autocracy; individualism, romantic love, feminism. These distinctive features originated in the much-misunderstood Middle Ages and Renaissance (which, contrary to a common confusion, should be considered a unit). This era marked the formative age of the modern West. The Western habit of extending adolescence allowed for rapid and sustained social change, so much so that the West now takes innovation and progress for granted. The American branch of the modern West goes a step further in "lightweight," low-overhead civilization. Not so for typical pre-industrial civilizations, where a static ideal always reigned in theory, if not in practice. In place of closed systems of thought (religious and philosophical dogmas), we have learned to live with partial and incomplete truths and take for granted the never-ending possibilities thus opened up.

This is all radically different from any human society that existed before about 300 years ago. Europe's overseas descendants and the societies of east and south Asia have absorbed this dynamic and made it their own, germinating new civilizations along the way. And all of this because Europe failed in a crucial way: it failed to be a successful pre-industrial society - unlike, say, China, by any measure, the world's most successful. (That's before the shock of its encounter with the modern West). Fruitful failure is often much more interesting and charged with possibility than simple success. Simple success tends to halt progress. Progress - real progress, not the fake "progress" of the left - requires repeated failure. One failure, once, won't do much; but repeated trying and failing changes everything. Repeated failure at one thing can lead to other and new things that no one had thought of before. That is one of the main lessons of the 1200 or so years of the history of the modern West.**

We should keep such facts in mind as we survey Europe's recent past and possible futures. These are especially important to keep in mind when we consider the triple roots of modern Western culture: the barbarian peoples (Germans, Celts, Slavs, etc.), the classical Greeks and Romans, and the Hellenistic-Hebraic hybrid of Christianity. It keeps a reasonable perspective on the views of such Catholic or conservative writers as George Weigel, a view that, for all its value, tends to overemphasize the ancient classical and biblical sources of the modern West, to the detriment of the distinctive contribution of the Dark Age barbarians. Their individualistic restlessness kept Europe from becoming too civilized, too successful and complacent at any one thing. That is why the legend of Faust is so dead-on about the modern West. It is perhaps the supreme story that modern Western literati have played with about their own civilization.†
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* And what is history, but biography writ large?

** This is a larger point to grasp about human evolution. Humans are not better chimps or apes - they're good at something else entirely. Presumably, the ancestors of humanity were at some point primate failures and in danger of extinction. But they evaded an otherwise inevitable doom as failed primates by becoming a successful something-else. It is the unusually long adolescence of humans makes this possible. It also makes culture - as opposed to pure instinct - a human necessity. Culture is (part of) human nature.

† Worth reading in Goethe's version, at least Part One and bits of Part Two - see such modern translations as Kaufmann's.