Who would fardels bear

The “shock of confinement” makes the newly arrested more likely to commit suicide than the convicted.

One reason why jails have a higher suicide rate (46 per 100,000 in 2013) than prisons (15 PER 100,0001) is that people who enter a jail often face a first-time “shock of confinement”; they are stripped of their job, housing, and basic sense of normalcy. Many commit suicide before they have been convicted at all. According to the BJS report, those rates are seven times higher than for convicted inmates.

The Marshall Project

But Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t new to prison nor was he the only person to fall from the heights. At least 10 billionaires have gone to jail, some for life. Bernie Madoff may be the most famous. The list of prominent American politicians serving sentences is extensive. Many heads of government have been imprisoned. But very few have committed suicide.

The most recent major political suicide was former Peru president Alan Garcia’s.

Former Peruvian President Alan García has died after shooting himself as police arrived at his home to arrest him over bribery allegations. …

Officers had been sent to arrest him at his home in the affluent Miraflores neighbourhood in connection with the allegations.
Interior Minister Carlos Morán told reporters that when police arrived, Mr García asked to make a phone call and went into a room and closed the door.
Minutes later, a shot rang out, Mr Morán said. Police forced the door open and found Mr García sitting on a chair with a bullet wound to his head.

BBC

To what extent were loose ends rather than the fear of confinement the driving motive?

Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?

The 10 ships revisited

In 2010 I argued in The Ten Ships that al-Qaeda was not rooted in a place but in a transnational agenda with a system of support.

Neutralize the intellectual appeal of radical Islam, topple the rogue regimes, and ease Western dependence on oil and you win the war. Yet their centrality, and even their existence is what the politicians constantly deny.
Bill Kristof of the New York Times does his best to talk up the magnificence of President Obama’s strategy but only succeeds in exposing its bankruptcy. His argues that America must ‘help’ Pakistan, to invest in more schools but uses an example so unfortunate that it undermines his entire argument.

I can’t tell you how frustrating it is on visits to rural Pakistan to see fundamentalist Wahabi-funded madrassas as the only game in town. They offer free meals, and the best students are given further scholarships to study abroad at fundamentalist institutions so that they come back as respected “scholars.”
We don’t even compete. Medieval misogynist fundamentalists display greater faith in the power of education than Americans do.
Let’s hope this is changing under the Obama administration. It’s promising that the Kerry-Lugar-Berman aid package provides billions of dollars for long-term civilian programs in Pakistan, although it’s still unclear how it will be implemented. One useful signal would be for Washington to encourage Islamabad to send not only troops to North Waziristan but also teachers.

The question we must ask is if Islamism has been sufficiently defeated by America’s new energy independence and the collapse or neutralization of sponsor states in the Middle East to let Afghanistan go.

The one big question mark remains Pakistan. Pakistan was where Osama bin Laden was after all and his successors may still be nourished there today. Victory in the WoT will not be complete unless there is some assurance Pakistan has been dealt with. If Islamabad has been quieted, Afghanistan will have been safed, at least for now.

As a practical matter the pressure on the military to pivot toward “near peer” rivals like China and Russia is growing. If Hong Kong is occupied by the mainland the pressure will grow intolerable. The urgent question is: how stands the situation with Pakistan?

The China Challenge

Part of the problem with ongoing events in China and especially the protests in Hong Kong is that much of the crisis is internal to that country. The West, even the United States, has limited control over events.

Complicating matters is that the US is wracked by its own internal conflicts. The legitimacy of American political institutions is in doubt as never before. This is partly expressed in trade policy. While it would be wrong to suggest American trade policy is accelerating events in China surely it is factual to say that both crises are playing into each other.

Both nations are struggling with governance. China is testing the proposition of whether a totalitarian party can lead a great country in the 21st century. America is determining whether a neo-Aristocracy powered by fiat money can transition to as yet an unknown future.

It’s an open question which country is being destroyed by its ruling elite. Perhaps both.

The only effective American response to the China challenge is internal. It has to get its house in order if it is to regain its place as the cornerstone of the future. A crackdown in Hong Kong will lead not to a military response but to yet further stress on trade. But it will not be limited to trade. The impact of trouble in China on the global currency and financial systems has yet to be reckoned.

We truly live in interesting times.

The Scandal of Money

I am reading George Gilder’s The Scandal of Money which has so far proved tremendously interesting not in the least because it coincides at many points with my own earlier thinking as set forth in the pamphlet War of the Words.

Gilder examines money as information and asks, correctly, whether it conveys truth about the physical world and the state of human capital.  You can tell he’s going to argue for the negative. 

Mein Kampf and Mao’s Red Book are morally the same

Ukraine’s Constitutional Court has upheld a law that equates communism to Nazism and bans the dissemination of its symbols, a law that has prompted angry protests from Moscow.
In the July 16 ruling published on its website, the court said the “communist and Nazi regimes” used similar methods of “implementing repressive state policies.”
“The communist regime, like the Nazi regime, inflicted irreparable damages to human rights because during its existence, it had total control over society and politically motivated persecutions and repressions, violated its international obligations, and its own constitutions and laws,” it said.

RFERL

As the 20th century fades into the past Communism will be seen for what it truly was: the Other Totalitarianism, arguably the greater one. This judgment was held at bay by its hordes of professional apologists. As that coating wears off the verdict can no longer be avoided.

This will upset the True Believers those who believed — and many still believe — in what turned out to be the most murderous ideology of all time. But the sad truth is that good intentions are often at the heart of many historical evils. Meine Ehre heißt Treue was sincerely uttered also.

Are the True Believers supposed to forget it? No, they’ll just have to live with it. Like the relatives of all those people their beautiful murderous ideology killed.

It would be interesting to know how much aggressive virtue signaling is really driven by the secret guilt and growing awareness, not of being worse than others — for all men are sinners — but of being no better. We used to say back in the day that the primary reason people joined the ranks of the grim and determined was to escape from mediocrity. They just couldn’t stand the idea they weren’t special.

Belonging

The space we inhabit is already delimited by many boundaries described by membership. Private airline lounges are closed to economy travelers at airports. The doors to restaurants, hotels and shops are effectively shut to illegal aliens and poor people who go to San Francisco. The deceptive absence of physical walls belies the fact there are virtual barriers everywhere. It’s those barriers that count.
Expect this trend to continue.

New At the Belmont Club

Our fragile world

Megacities are immensely fragile because complexity is only prevented from descending into chaos by the order provided by massive quantities of energy. The power outage in Manhattan is a reminder that civilization cannot function for more than a few hours without electricity.

What will happen in a 5G, Internet of Things world if the whole mind bogglingly complex edifice rests on the tottering, variable and fragile basis of Green Power? In such a civilization a hundred percent uptime would be a hard requirement for many systems.

In a less technological era the fall from the few appliances to the state of nature was short. Running out of candles in 1802 would be inconvenient but not disastrous. But in our complex world running out of power means losing comms, refrigeration, water and maybe even the elevator in a 60 storey building.

The Empty Earth

Green energy like any other form of power generation will require large installations to produce. The land devoted to windfarms, solar energy arrays and biofuel cultivation, not to mention tidal generators will grow as the population increases.

Since “Green” Satanic Mills must ultimately replace the old Satanic Mills with facilities of comparable or even more extensive size the only way to actually reduce the human footprint is to reduce population. This linkage is downplayed but obvious.

Given the overlap of population growth and environmental problems, many would like to see a change in U.S. policy on global family planning. In 2001, President George W. Bush instituted what some call the “global gag rule,” whereby foreign organizations that provide or endorse abortions were denied U.S. funding support.

Environmentalists considered that stance to be shortsighted because support for family planning is the most effective way to check population growth and relieve pressure on the planet’s environment, and as a result, the global gag rule was rescinded in 2009 by President Obama but put back in place by Donald Trump in 2017.

Global population and the environment

The Scientific American explored the conflict between the Green Agenda and Open Borders.

What to do about booming legal and illegal immigration rates is one of the most controversial topics on Americans’ political agenda these days. More than a million immigrants achieve permanent resident status in the U.S. every year. Another 700,000 become full-fledged American citizens. The non-profit Pew Research Center reports that 82 percent of U.S. population growth is attributable to immigration.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that U.S. population will grow from 303 million people today to 400 million as early as 2040. While many industrialized nations, including Japan and most of Western Europe, are experiencing population growth slowdowns due to below replacement birth levels and little immigration, the U.S. is growing so fast that it trails only India and China in total numbers.

Recently this conflict came to a head in of all places, San Francisco, where the affluent Woke opposed the tides of homeless on the grounds they were bad for the environment.

One of the big challenges to the Green Vision is that the technology it relies on is immature. A WW2 style effort to build massive installations of current Green tech will cover the earth in obsolete junk.