‘Teach Me, Dad’

Obama, Sleep Deprived

Anti Americanism: The strongest glue known to mankind.

The American Spectator:

Meanwhile my local newspaper today reports that “a Canadian soldier and an Afghan boy died in…attacks by the [Taliban] extremist insurgency…” If — as a result of Obama’s speech — the Taliban are now targeting Canadian rather than American troops, Prime Minister Stephen Harper had better start brushing up on his Koran and get on the first jet to Cairo.

There is nothing in this or any other story I’ve seen to suggest extremists have had a change of heart toward the U.S. And writing a curious and misleading headline won’t make it so.

Of course, if you can’t find a militant to say that Americans are now welcome in the Islamic world, you can always find some Yankee Think-Tanker who will put those or similar words in the collective Muslim mouth. “Obama may have managed to ‘plant the seed of doubt in some minds’ of extremists, said Robert Malley, of the International Crisis Group,” according to the AP story. ”Seed of doubt” is a lovely metaphor, sort of like “the cloud of unknowing,” but it is unclear what doubts extremists had planted in their fertile brains. Are they having doubts whether America is still the Great Satan? So they doubt whether Western culture is still decadent? Or, more likely, are they having doubts about the West’s commitment to defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda?

Malley continued: “There was enough … that represented openings for those who wanted openings.” Some might say the notion that extremists and terrorists are looking for peace openings is the height of naïveté. If they wanted peace would they be blowing up mosques and Humvees? Pundits sometimes forget that not everyone is as awestruck with Obama and his message as they are. To Islamic militants, Obama is just the latest representative of earthly evil.

ON THE CONTRARY the story suggests that nearly all Islamic militants responded negatively to Obama’s speech and did so, not because they weren’t swept away on a tide pro-Western good feelings, but because they feared alienating or irritating their fellow militants. Here’s how the AP put it:

Two influential fundamentalist groups, Lebanon’s Iranian-backed Hezbollah and Egypt’s opposition Muslim Brotherhood, as well as a Saudi preacher, accused Obama of being deceptive. They said he offered soft words to hide unchanged anti-Muslim positions. But that could indicate their nervousness that Obama’s strategy could undercut support for militancy.

You see how it works? When militant leaders say Obama is a liar, they don’t really mean that Obama is a liar. They only say Obama is a liar because they are nervous about losing support among their bloodthirsty militant backers. It’s a kind of doublespeak that only AP reporters are privy too.

The story would have us believe the Islamic militants’ “positive response” is due largely to Obama’s doomed Israel Policy. This policy  — destined to go down in history as a corollary to Chamberlain’s Munich Agreement — is to appease extremists by taking a tougher line with Israel. This is a popular notion throughout the Arab punditocracy. “Extremists will only be disarmed when the U.S. takes a more neutral stand on Israel,” says Abdel Wahab al-Qasab, a Qatar-based analyst. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, however, doesn’t give a damn about Obama’s appeasement policy. Netanyahu ran for the premiership on a platform that included “natural growth” within the Jerusalem municipality, an area that includes Arab East Jerusalem and parts of the West Bank captured in a 1967 Middle East war. He intends to hold to that.

The story does get one thing right. The region is growing more militant, not less so. Largely because hatred of the U.S. is the militants’ bread and butter. Without that hatred the militants and their big dollar supporters will simply put away their purses and go home to watch Law & Order: Crimes Against the Prophet Unit. Anti-Americanism is the strongest glue known to mankind. It holds the weak European Left together and it binds militant Islam. It is the raison d‘être for most of the world’s tinpot dictatorships. Selling out Israel will not make the paste any less sticky.

Now read the entire story and one finds the lone example of a positive response to President Obama’s Cairo speech comes from some Egyptian named Essam Derbala, a leader of the Islamic militant group al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya Al-Qaida. Derbala is said to have “told an Egyptian newspaper over the weekend that the Taliban should reciprocate by announcing they will no longer target Americans.” The obvious problem is the Taliban could care less what some guy in Egypt thinks they should or should not do. Nor are they likely to give American soldiers a free pass when U.S. troops are still trying to kill them.

The headline of the week (from the AP): “Some militants respond positively to Obama speech.” It is perhaps instructive to take a headline like this and replace today’s evildoers with one from the past and see what you come up with: “Some Nazis respond positively to Roosevelt’s address.” Or, “Some Mongol Warlords have nice things to say about Pope Innocent’s bull.”

Google Solutions

Obama Tshirt

Ancient warfare: Fighting for the greater good

New Scientist:

War, what is it good for? A lot, it could turn out.

Lethal warfare drove the evolution of altruistic behaviour among ancient humans, claims a new study based on archaeological records and mathematical simulations.

If correct, the new model solves a long-standing puzzle in human evolution: how did our species transition from creatures interested in little more than passing down their own genes to societies of (generally) law-abiding (mostly) monogamists?

No one knows for sure when these changes happened, but climactic swings that occurred between approximately 10,000 to 150,000 years ago in the late Pleistocene period may have pushed once-isolated bands of hunter-gatherers into more frequent contact with one another, says Samuel Bowles, an evolutionary biologist at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and the University of Siena, Italy, who led the study. “I think that’s just a recipe for high-level conflict.”

By warfare, Bowles isn’t talking about highly organised contests between nation-states and their armies. Rather, this period of warfare was probably characterised by ongoing skirmishes between neighbouring populations.

“We’re talking about groups of men who got out in twos or threes or fives,” he says. “They didn’t have a chain of command and it’s hard to see how they could force people to fight.”

For this reason, altruistic intent on the part of each warrior is key. Each person would do better to stay home than to put their life on the line for their neighbours – yet they still went out and risked their lives, Bowles says.

To assess whether or not people with a random genetic predisposition to altruism could flourish via armed conflicts, Bowles culled archaeological and ethnographic data on the lethality of ancient warfare and plugged them into an evolutionary model of population change.

In ancient graves excavated previously, Bowles found that up to 46 per cent of the skeletons from 15 different locations around the world showed signs of a violent death. More recently, war inflicted 30 per cent of deaths among the Ache, a hunter-gatherer population from Eastern Paraguay, 17 per cent among the Hiwi, who live in Venezuela and Colombia, while just 4 per cent among the Anbara in northern Australia.

On average, warfare caused 14 per cent of the total deaths in ancient and more recent hunter-gatherers populations.

The cost of losing an armed conflict as a group is high enough to balance out the individual risks of warfare, especially if a population is relatively inbred, Bowles’ model concludes. Since evolution acts on genes, it makes more sense to make more sacrifices for a related neighbour than an unrelated one.

Since Bowles had no way of knowing how inbred Pleistocene populations were, he compared contemporary hunter-gatherers such as African pygmies and native Siberians. Individuals in these populations were closely related enough to justify going to war, he found.

“There’s no doubt that his is a controversial view,” says Ruth Mace, an evolutionary anthropologist at University College London. Inbreeding between the victors and any surviving losers would dilute, not concentrate, altruistic genes, she says.

Bowles modelled this possibility in a previous paper and found that even with a measure of inbreeding, altruists still win out. However, he agrees that it would slow the evolution of altruism through warfare. “A much better way to spread the genes is to kill everybody,” he says.

Mark van Vugt, a psychologist at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK, notes that warriors could act in their own self-interest, not for the good of the group.

“Studies on the Amazonian Ya̧nomamö people show that these warriors do get a greater share of resources, they get more women, they sire more offspring,” he says. “How do you explain that there are individual benefits for these warriors? There shouldn’t be.”

Still, van Vugt thinks Bowle’s model is on the right track. Studies show that people divided into arbitrarily chosen groups – say heads and tails – behave altruistically to members of their group, but are more hostile toward non-members.

“Together we provide different pieces of the puzzle. If they fit together, they are starting to make sense,” van Vugt says.

What North Korea Has That We Don’t

Typical White People