Other powers are taking over military and police roles that once fell to Washington by default.

A minor example is worth citing: the International Maritime Bureau last month reported that pirate attacks on commercial shipping had fallen to just 70 during the first nine months of 2012, compared to 199 in the same period of 2011. The Maritime Security Review reported on September 24, “International navies have stepped up pre-emptive action against pirates, including strikes on their bases on the Somali coast.”

I am informed that Chinese naval vessels have sent lending parties of marines on shore to retaliate against the pirates’ villages. Unlike the Obama administration, China has little concern for Muslim sensibilities. A significant strategic problem (and an important source of terrorist funding) is coming under control because of China’s willingness to deal harshly with the locals.

“The next day, the ninth from Soaring Woodhelven, Atiaran told Covenant about the Unfettered One in a voice as flat as crushed rock, as if she had reached the point where what she said, how she exposed herself, no longer mattered to her. ‘There are those from the Loresraat,’ she said, ‘who find that they cannot work for the Land or the Lore of the Old Lords in the company of their fellows – Lords or Lorewardens, the followers of Sword or Staff. They have some private vision which compels them to seek it in isolation. But their need for aloneness does not divide them from the people. They are given the Rites of Unfettering, and freed from all common demands, to quest after their own lore with the blessing of the Lords and the respect of all those who love the Land. For the Lords learned long ago that the desire for aloneness need not be a selfish desire, if it is not made so by those who do not feel it.

“’Many of the Unfettered have never returned into knowledge. But stories have grown up around those Ones who have not vanished utterly. Some are said to know the secrets of dreams, others to practice deep mysteries in the arts of healing, still others to be the friends of the animals, speaking their language and calling on their help in times of great need. Such a one saved us – ’ […]

“’Some are dreamers, some healers, some share the life of animals. Some delve the earth to uncover the secrets of the Cavewights, others learn the lore of the Demondim – whatever knowledge guides the One’s private prophecy… Never before have I seen one of the Unfettered. But I have heard the Rites of Unfettering. A hymn is sung.’

Dully, she recited:

Free
Unfettered
Shriven
Free
Dream that what is dreamed will be:
Hold eyes clasped shut until they see,
And sing the silent prophecy
And be
Unfettered
Shriven
Free

(From Lord Foul’s Bane, The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, by Stephen R Donaldson. I am aware of the risk to the mystic of not being embedded in the rhythms and rituals of a community.)

I think that, if I had a vision of right worship, it would look something like this

Consider a single scene from one of the most prominent artistic fiascos of recent years, Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor. Forget Ben Affleck’s refusal to sleep with Kate Beckinsale the night before going off to battle; forget the rest of the frightfully noble love story. Look at the action sequences in the movie, the scenes that many critics unaccountably praised. Here’s the moment: the Japanese have arrived, dropped their load, and gone back to their carriers. Admiral Kimmel (Colm Feore), the commander of the Pacific fleet, then rides through the harbor in an open boat, surveying the disaster. We have seen Kimmel earlier: not as a major character, but as a definite presence. Before December 7, he had intimations that an attack might be coming but not enough information to form a coherent picture. He did not act, and now he feels the deepest chagrin. Dressed in Navy whites, and surrounded by junior officers also dressed in white, he passes slowly through ships torn apart and still burning, ships whose crews, in some cases, remain trapped below the waterline.

Now, the admiral’s boat trip could have yielded a passage of bitterly eloquent movie poetry. Imagine what John Ford or David Lean would have done with it! We have just seen bodies blackened by fire, the men’s skin burned off. Intentionally or not, the spotless dress whites worn by the officers become an excruciating symbol of the Navy’s complacency before the attack. The whole meaning of Bay’s movie could have been captured in that one shot if it had been built into a sustained sequence. Yet this shot, to our amazement, lasts no more than a few seconds. After cutting away, Bay and his editors return to the scene, but this time from a different angle, and that shot doesn’t last, either. Bay and his team of editors abandon their own creation, just as, earlier in the movie, they jump away from an extraordinary shot of nurses being strafed as they run across an open plaza in front of the base hospital.

People who know how these movies are made told me that the film-makers could not have held those shots any longer, because audiences would have noticed that they were digital fakes. That point (if true) should tell you that something is seriously wrong. If you cannot sustain shots at the dramatic crux of your movie, why make violent spectacle at all? It turns out that fake-looking digital film-making can actually disable spectacle when it is supposed to be set in the real world. Increasingly, the solution has been to create more and more digitized cities, houses, castles, planets. Big films have lost touch with the photographed physical reality that provided so much greater enchantment than fantasy.

#Muhammad – When They Insult Our Prophet (PBUH) (by BayyinahInstitute)

(found via Ian@Psybertron  I thought this was great)

So, younger son and I are working our way through the Doctor Who sequence, and we got to Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks last night. And watching the first 40 seconds of the above clip, I was suddenly struck by the thought – is this Obama’s attitude to Islamist terror???

For a bit more on my view (mentioning some of the art he references) see this old post from 2006, about the skandalon.

So: this is the global temperature trend of the last fifteen years. It is downwards. (Found here)

Now, in and of itself, that doesn’t mean very much – it could all be part of the natural fluctuation within an overall increasing trend, etc etc blah blah blah. (Although, obviously, the longer it continues, the more difficult the ‘mainstream consensus’ will find it to brush things away).

However, what I want to compare and contrast this graph with, is this one, showing use of fuels through the twentieth century (from Gail Tverberg).

Notice how the use of fossil fuels (=oil) really kicked off after the Second World War and that we are now using some four times as much per year as then. Now it occurs to me that if the relationship between the use of fossil fuels and the temperature of the earth was in any way a direct one, then we would be observing a similar acceleration in the year on year increase of temperature as can be seen in the use of fossil fuels. What we observe instead is a contra-indication. Not only is there no acceleration of the increase, there isn’t even an increase!

Clearly, carbon dioxide is only one factor in a chaotic system, and there simply isn’t a direct and linear relationship between the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere and global temperature change. That’s just a pesky little fact.

The interesting question, to my mind, is about how far the increase in temperature in the second half of the twentieth century is anomalous when compared to other periods of history – eg, when compared to the trend since 1700, or the trend since about 1800, or the trend since about 3000 BC. This, however, leads us into Hockey Stick territory – and it explains why that remains such a totem. If the Hockey Stick is correct, then the acceleration can be (just about) found. Yet if the Hockey Stick is fraudulent – which I believe it to be – then this is some strong empirical evidence running against the CAGW hypothesis. I shall maintain my watching brief.

the idea that the solution is to use the full weight of the state against whe weakest and most disadvantaged individuals in the conundrum, is not one any decent person should entertain.

“The more people who know about this, the better off we will all be.”

Well worth twelve and a half minutes of your time.