“Armageddon”

OTTAWA—In the unlikely, but unfortunately not impossible event of nuclear war, Canada would be one of the worst places on Earth to live.
Or rather, to die.

Alan Robock, a pioneering researcher in the science of nuclear devastation, provides the terrifying picture.

“Countries like Canada — you think you’re safer because you’re a member of NATO and (American) nuclear weapons will protect you. But you’re actually not,” he says over the phone from New Jersey, where he is a professor at Rutgers University.

Things go wrong all the time. When they do, the problems can be widespread, or they can be localized, and the solutions can be easy, or hard.

This week’s CrowdStrike debacle appears to be widespread, and its solution hard. And there are lessons in that.

Our present-day appeasers have exhibited all the delusory smugness of Neville Chamberlain.

To recognize appeasement, it’s best to learn from a master.

One must not mistake Neville Chamberlain for a Nazi. He wasn’t. His antisemitism was that of T. S. Eliot — an offended sensibility, a mild disgust at there always being some untidy trouble attending them. He was a prim Englishman who dressed the part of the aristocracy, but who was more of an accountant than a man of leisure and noblesse oblige. He was secretive and manipulative when in power; he was easily threatened by brilliance and outspokenness, separately, and doubly threatened when both qualities were combined, to excess, in Winston Churchill.

The modern Western world is dependent on undependable technology. From healthcare to banking, communications to infrastructure – electricity grids, water supplies, sewage systems and trains – we rely on complex systems that do what they do, when they’re meant to. For this to work, these systems must be secure against attack.

However, as shown by recent ransomware attacks on everything from hospitals to libraries, we often aren’t ready for sophisticated attacks on our technology. Our systems were built to be operationally reliable, but were not designed to be resilient to the efforts of determined adversaries who want our information or money. And this situation could get significantly worse. New technology has put a timer on our current security methods.

The biggest mistake we make is in believing that we are in a so-called ‘culture war.’ The phrase ‘culture war’ assumes that both sides have rival cultures they are battling to defend and promote. However, the enemies of civilisation, of life, and love, have no culture. If anything, their aim is not only to destroy the great cultural and spiritual achievements of the West, but to lay waste to anything that transcends the diabolical and obscene. Culture presupposes beauty, order, and tranquillity. It assumes those moral and spiritual values upon which harmony and holiness depend. In word, rite, song, and ritual; it idealises what William Blake termed “the human form divine.” In our “brave new world,” however, the human form is considered neither divine nor worthy of reverence or respect. It has been reduced to what Roger Scruton called its “animal essentials”—a purely natural object that can be remade in the image and likeness of anything but God. Put simply, the only ‘culture’ that is on offer is that of death and desecration, of defilement and the demonic.

Get ready. Assorted generals, politicians and officials think World War 3 is almost here. NATO higher-ups have been engaging in pumped-up war talk for a good while now. Britain’s military and political establishment has been particularly excitable, too.

Atomic scientists on Tuesday kept their “Doomsday Clock” set as close to midnight as ever before, citing Russia’s actions on nuclear weapons amid its invasion of Ukraine, nuclear-armed Israel’s Gaza war and worsening climate change as factors driving the risk of global catastrophe.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, as they did last year, set the clock at 90 seconds to midnight – the theoretical point of annihilation. Scientists set the clock based on “existential” risks to Earth and its people: nuclear threat, climate change, and disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence and new biotechnology.

In an era of economic uncertainty and rising populism, it could be considered prudent for the super-rich to hide, or at the very least downplay, their wealth.

Lording it over the masses at a time of political volatility has backfired on elites in the past so some restraint might be advised.

Mark Zuckerberg, however, has a $100 million apocalypse-proof bunker in Hawaii, perhaps explaining why he has no hesitation in flaunting his latest business venture.

Beauty isn’t always diverse

It seems that things are going to the dogs across the Channel. It’s not just that the French birth rate, educational standards, and the homegrown car industry are all in decline; nor even that the homicide rate, Americanisms, and fast-food outlets are surging. It’s even worse than that: a short-haired, flat-chested woman was just crowned Miss France. Though the public vote in Saturday’s televised final went to two more generously appointed and traditionally becoiffed contestants, in a shock move, the all-female judging panel ranked a pixie-cutted maths graduate called Eve Gillès — otherwise known as Miss Nord-Pas-de-Calais — above both of them.

I think she is just fine.

Neil Postman foresaw our trivial dystopia

Of the very few activities in my life that I count as being unambiguously improving, reading books and visiting authoritarian states probably score highest. Both are generally engaging, educational in some form or other, and force me to confront alternative visions of life. I feel much the same way, whenever I dip into Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), which explores how and why populations might realistically become oppressed or compliant.

This week, the U.S. Navy’s Carrier Strike Group 5, centered around the USS Ronald Reagan, has been steaming off the east coast of Taiwan.

Be glad it is there. China has been throwing a diplomatic tantrum — fiercer than usual — because the Biden administration allowed William Lai Ching-te, Taiwan’s vice president, to make “transit” stops in New York and San Francisco on his way to and from Paraguay.

It’s taken the Liberal government two tries and more than two years to get Bill C-11 through the legislative process. If the Senate doesn’t fight the government on removing a number of amendments senators previously added to the bill, Bill C-11 could receive royal assent shortly after Parliament comes back from break next week.

There is an old saying that revolutionaries never really succeed because they never stop being revolutionary. When power changes hands to new tyrants, the revolutionaries are eliminated, and the process starts all over again. That cycle changes with the elimination of tyranny, but like Tolkien’s missing ring, it never seems to really go away even when dormant.