The Battle Against Bush

CIA Fires Employee for Alleged Press Leak
Apr 22 7:49 AM US/Eastern
The CIA fired a top intelligence analyst who admitted leaking classified information that led to a Pulitzer Prize-winning story about a network of secret CIA prisons...

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Byron's summary of events so far:

Mary McCarthy, a Kerry-supporting Democrat in the CIA, who was a senior director for intelligence programs under Clinton and appointed by document thief Sandy Berger, one of a dissident group that has been running an internal war against the Bush Administration for at least three years, decides to destroy an important intelligence operation, along with the covert cooperative relationships it involves with European intelligence agencies, and to do this in wartime with American troops in harm's way on foreign battlefields. She is caught following a failed polygraph exam. A Washington Post reporter and Bush Administration critic, Dana Priest, is the journalist contact and conduit in the operation. Priest proceeds to write up the story. The editors of the Post, in their role as overseers of a key Bush-hating liberal media outlet, knowing full well the consequences that will follow, then make the national security decision to publish the story to the world, on their front page. For her part in this campaign, Priest's media community awards her a Pulitzer prize.

The CIA traitor should do serious prison time, and the Washington Post and Pulitzer committee should be held in public disgrace for actively aiding the enemy in wartime. The scope of this activity, within the CIA and probably extending to the intelligence committees of the Congress (Rockefeller and Durbin have reportedly been asked to sit for polygraph exams), has been much wider and deeper than this one incident, and it will be unfolding over the coming months as the Justice Department investigations proceed. It's about time.

This is another demonstration of something that has become increasingly apparent during the past two or three years: There are factions in the country, heavily involving the mainstream liberal media and dissident members of the intelligence community, which are far more concerned to destroy Bush than to succeed in the battle against fundamentalist Islam. They are more than willing to subvert the latter to achieve the former, even if that means actively aiding the enemy, an enemy who has no more effective allies than these.

Byron

Nuclear Iran

History clearly is turning, and clearly not in our direction. It seems incredible, but really isn't, that in the 21st century religion would be the fulcrum on which it all tipped. The Enlightenment briefly flowered, in France and Scotland mostly, and Western intellectuals quickly fixated on that episode as if it expressed something intrinsic about human nature and the inevitable direction of history. That was delusional, a triumph of wishful thinking over reality. The true idea that people don't live by bread alone does not mean that they live instead by logic and science. The truth about people and cultural survival is turning out to be quite otherwise.

Mark Steyn's Facing Down Iran is very good and very sobering.

As clashes of civilizations go, this one’s between two extremes: on the one hand, a world that has everything it needs to wage decisive war—wealth, armies, industry, technology; on the other, a world that has nothing but pure ideology and plenty of believers... Four years into the “war on terror,” the Bush administration has begun promoting a new formulation: “the long war.” Not a reassuring name. In a short war, put your money on tanks and bombs—our strengths. In a long war, the better bet is will and manpower—their strengths, and our great weakness. If you add to the advantages of will and manpower a nuclear capability, the odds shift dramatically.

Immigration Wrongs

I just heard a newscaster report that the rallies today were aimed at stopping legislative attempts "to criminalize illegal immigration."

Hmm. I guess that's like a rally to promote the decriminalization of legal immigration, only the other way around.

The debasement of language is reaching the point where it will soon be impossible to say anything clearly. It will, however, continue to be possible to say nothing clearly. Or anything unclearly.

This is all a good thing, of course, since we know that perspicuity and logic are merely ploys which enable the powerful to control the narrative. Even the notion of narrative is more than a little suspect, as it implies some kind of linear progression from A to B to C. The hegemonies of language being apparently unavoidable, I think it's clearly best to say nothing, as unclearly as possible.

Ignorance is strength.

Byron

Climate Change

As George Will points out, climatologists and meteorologists have spoken, the debate about climate change is over, the media are all agreed that it's a terrible crisis, and something must be done immediately, if not sooner because time is running out! The stampede is on!

Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976) warned of "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation." Science Digest (February 1973) reported that "the world's climatologists are agreed" that we must "prepare for the next ice age." The Christian Science Monitor ("Warning: Earth's Climate is Changing Faster Than Even Experts Expect," Aug. 27, 1974) reported that glaciers "have begun to advance," "growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter" and "the North Atlantic is cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool." Newsweek agreed ("The Cooling World," April 28, 1975) that meteorologists "are almost unanimous" that catastrophic famines might result from the global cooling that the New York Times (Sept. 14, 1975) said "may mark the return to another ice age." The Times (May 21, 1975) also said "a major cooling of the climate is widely considered inevitable" now that it is "well established" that the Northern Hemisphere's climate "has been getting cooler since about 1950."

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/04/cooler_heads_needed_on_warming.html


I think what quotes like these demonstrate is that there is geological time, and there is human time, and they are very, very different. Like other animals, our necessary routines and biological needs recur on schedules measured in hours or days, not millennia or eons. It is inevitable that evolution would have fitted us with sensory and perceptual capabilities that reflect those short time scales. As a result, hours and days have reality for us, but a century -- a mere geological nanosecond -- is too long to be more than an abstraction. I think the climate change debate is suffused with fundamental misapprehensions because of this. My guess is that even a few thousand years of tree rings or Antarctic ice are not worth much in this context.

The public debate and viewing-with-alarm we see in the media seem to me almost entirely worthless. We talk as if we are conceiving of vast time scales, but we really aren't, because we can't. Geological time is literally beyond our intuitive comprehension. That's for the same reasons we can't intuitively understand quantum physics or interstellar distances -- our mental searchlights just weren't built to shine there. How could it be otherwise? Like all surviving species, successful adaptation means that we know the world as we have needed to know it. The necessities of survival, and the schedules on which those occur, necessarily have fitted us to accurately comprehend some aspects of the world, but not others. So we easily and intuitively comprehend cycles of short duration, like diurnal or seasonal ones, but not cycles that last tens or hundreds of thousands of years. When we think about climatological change, we can't help but think about in a perceptual framework that is, in geological time, ridiculously short. In doing that, we vastly distort and misunderstand the time scales actually involved, and it's almost impossible for us not to interpret local fluctuations and blips as if they were geologically significant changes.

None of this means that significant climate change is not occurring, it just means that any conclusions about that are highly suspect. Of course, it can be argued that, in that case, we should assume the worst and make policy accordingly. But that approach should be evaluated in terms of the costs and benefits of particular policies, compared with the returns to alternative social and technological investments. I doubt that most of the things being proposed to Stop Global Warming would fare well under that kind of scrutiny.

Byron