How long has this been going on?

I have a standard apology, which is beginning to read like legal boilerplate, for devoting too many postings to politics and not enough to spirituality and psychical research, which are part of what this blog is supposed to be about. So here it comes again. Those subjects are harder to write about — many of their aspects can't be framed easily in ordinary language. They are subtle and complex. Maybe I was over-ambitious in incorporating them into the Great Plan for Reflecting Light.

Still, they are interesting and important, and I propose in today's edition to at least keep the psychical research flag flying. My subject is what must be the only popular song — at least the only first-class one — whose beneath-the-surface subject is reincarnation. It is the classic "Where or When" by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. In case you haven't listened to it lately — if you've never heard it, you are culturally deprived and no mistake — the lyrics open like this:

It seems we stood and talked like this before
We looked at each other the same way then
But I can't remember where or when
The clothes you're wearing are the clothes you wore
The smile you are smiling you were smiling then
But I can't remember where or when

Lorenz Hart (who wrote the words), despite his well-known emotional problems, must have been psychically sensitive or had a touch of mysticism. In these seemingly simple but profound words, he has expressed poetically something I believe many people have experienced occasionally, especially when in love or infatuation: a haunting sense of meeting someone that is more like a re-meeting, a resumption of a relationship that isn't bound to the here and now.

Most varieties of occultism, and even one of the world's major religious traditions (Hinduism), say that when we leave the physical body at death our soul or spirit continues on a more rarefied plane, and after an inter-life period selects another body to be born into. But, according to this belief, the "new" person retains both unconscious memories of previous incarnations and so-called karmic attachments to the souls of individuals they were involved with in those past lives. When you meet someone who was important back then, such as a husband, wife, or close relative, that elusive "it seems we stood and talked like this before" feeling whispers to your inner ear.

But the relationships we established with them are not over and done. The give-and-take normally has to be worked out in succeeding lives.

Do I know this for a fact? No. Does evidence for it exist? Yes.

There is the testimony of mediums who are in touch with spirits able to see the larger scheme better than we can here in the physical-mental world. Don't believe in mediums? Okay. There is scientific evidence.

The best known scientist who has studied reincarnation is Ian Stevenson, M.D., head of the Division of Personality Studies at the University of Virginia. For more than 30 years he has studied spontaneous cases (i.e., not induced by hyponosis) of past life memory, mostly among Asian children.

Many people get in touch with apparent past life memories under hypnosis. This kind of evidence should be approached with caution; people who are hypnotized are usually in a state of extreme suggestibility, and unless care is taken they may make up stories based on what they think the hypnotist wants to hear. Serious researchers are well aware of this and avoid leading the witness.

The two best studies known to me of past life memory based on investigation conducted with scientific rigor are Reliving Past Lives by Helen Wambach, Ph.D., and Exploring Reincarnation by Hans TenDam.

Wambach's is particularly interesting — and persuasive — because she does not limit herself to reporting particular hypnotic sessions revealing alleged past life memories. More than 1,000 experimental participants were regressed to other lifetimes; while they were experiencing those lives, she asked them about their environment, clothing, food, what sex they were, and other questions designed to "place" the earlier incarnations. Wambach then performed a statistical analysis on the claimed previous lives as a whole.

What do you know — her subjects were (in their professed earlier lives) 49.4 percent women, 50.6 percent men, just what you would expect if their stories were authentic. The earlier lives were widely distributed geographically and temporally. Contrary to the cartoonish notion, hardly any claimed to be famous people; there were no Napoleons or Queen Nefertitis. Wambach also says that her historical research on some of the times and places of the remembered lives turned up no anachronisms or contradictions of known fact.

Do you have an intuition of a very long shared past with someone you know, longer than your current association? Seems like old times.

Some things that happen for the first time
Seem to be happening again
And so it seems that we have met before
And laughed before
And loved before
But who knows where or when

Thinking about insurgency

Some critics of the mass media get riled about their use of the word "insurgency" rather than terrorism, enemy action, or similar strong terms. They see the word as an attempt to be value-free and refusing to take sides. But we need a word to describe a war format that has been developed to a high degree in recent years, and which conventional military terminology doesn't fit. Insurgency is an overall strategy that can include terrorism among its tactics, but much else besides.

Insurgency can take the form of recruitment through ostensibly legitimate institutions like schools and mosques; threats to demoralize a country's population and government; propaganda to de-legitimize an established political system or regime; acquisition of resources through smuggling, narcotics dealing, and other crimes; raising money using front organizations; and, of course, sabotage and violence. Most of these activities are small-scale and clandestine, not the kind of warfare that large organizations, particularly government organizations, are equipped by background and training to counter.

Such are ways an insurgency avoids a direct full-scale confrontation with a larger and better equipped force, which the insurgency couldn't hope to win, and restricts the terms of engagement to situations where it has advantages such as surprise, lack of visibility, and fanaticism — even suicidal fanaticism — among its followers. Hence the expression "asymmetric warfare."

There's been a lot of discussion in the blogosphere and elsewhere about whether our armed forces are hogs on ice when trying to defeat insurgents. The negative argument runs something like this: our military establishment is terrific at straight-ahead campaigns of the World War II type, against identifiable state enemies. We can turn them to powder before they've had their morning coffee. But when the rules change drastically, and we face opponents playing to their strengths rather than ours, we're as vulnerable as armies behind castle walls were when faced with newly invented artillery, or World War I infantry armed with rifles and bayonets leaping out of the trenches to be shredded by machine guns.

Insurgents, this reasoning goes, use our massive strength — designed to be used on a large scale with all the implied time required to get it in place and the relative inflexibility of top-down, bureaucratic organizations — against us. Exhibit A for the prosecution: Iraq, after the waltz in.

I'm too optimistic to believe that, partly because the few active-duty (or recently so) U.S. military people I've run into in recent years weren't anything like the stereotype of the unquestioning, unimaginative drone. One of them showed me a couple of studies — unclassified, of course — that impressed me with one department of the services' ability to question its own routines and inertia. Besides — our fighting men and women are Americans, and Americans generally put a high value on improvising and pragmatism. They're still learning, but they can learn just as well, if not better, than insurgents hobbled by a certain religio-political system that has all the answers and discourages individual thinking.

Jonathan Winer at Counterterrorism Blog has posted an excerpt from an Army document that suggests our side is carefully considering what needs to be done to answer insurgencies. It says, "Because insurgents attempt to prevent the military battlespace from becoming decisive and concentrate in the political and psychological, operational design must be different than for conventional combat." And the authors go on to suggest what that design needs to include:

• Fracturing the insurgent movement through military, psychological, and political means, to include direct strikes, dividing one part against another, offering amnesties, draining the pool of alienated, disillusioned, angry young males by providing alternatives, and so forth. Relationships within insurgent movements are not necessarily harmonious. Cabals within the insurgency often vie for leadership or dominance. Identifying these rifts and exploiting them may prove to be a coup for the counterinsurgency strategy;
• Delegitimizing the insurgent movement in the eyes of the local population and any international constituency it might have;
• Demoralizing the insurgent movement by creating and sustaining the perception that long-term trends are adverse and by making the lives of insurgents unpleasant and dangerous through military pressure and psychological operations;
• Delinking the insurgent movement from its internal and external support by understanding and destroying the political, logistics, and financial connections; and,
• Deresourcing the insurgent movement both by curtailing funding streams and causing it to waste existing resources.

We can only hope that everyone, military or civilian, charged with defending us against the very real advantages that decentralized, non-uniformed insurgent forces count on is thinking equally creatively about fighting a kind of conflict that is mostly new to us.

For those who are interested in following the action on these strange, ill-defined, geographically diffuse front lines, Counterterrorism Blog is a fine source, with contributors who seem to know what they're talking about. Some of the blog postings are hard to understand without a certain amount of specialized knowledge, and some are disturbing, but as a whole they dig far deeper than 98 percent of what you learn from reporters and pundits in the mainstream media about the so-called "War on Terror."

Oppression, noted

Read this before you take another breath!

Matter can be neither created nor destroyed, only change form. The molecules of air you are about to inhale have made the rounds. Have you considered this? Some of those molecules were once breathed by a slaveholder.

By pointing this out, I'm just helping to prepare you for the future, perhaps the very near future, when every product and action will come with a reminder of your guilt (if you are white, especially a white male). You can expect to see countless Diversity General's warnings to tell you that the item you are about to partake of is ideologically impure, right above the Surgeon General's warning to assure you that it will kill you -- not that you don't deserve it, you exploitative swine.

We are becoming, as Vanishing American notes, a modern analogue of the flagellants of the Middle Ages, who wandered from town to town treating themselves to expiatory glee via the lash.

These sour thoughts are prompted by, of all things, a compact disc of flamenco guitar music played by Tao Ruspoli on Mapleshade's Wildchild label. I ordered it because I'm keen on flamenco, and because Mapleshade -- one of the few remaining independent American labels not owned by a large corporation -- boasts of the audiophile-quality sound of its CDs.

The recording is well engineered, the disc enjoyable. Ruspoli has a formidable technique, although to my ears it's somewhat careful and studied. He's not yet a major league flamenco artist (shoot, I've known guys in Santa Fe who could play rings around him). Anyway, in his self-written insert notes, he wants to make sure we understand the political dimension of flamenco:

Like jazz or blues, it's improvised music, an oral tradition created by people who'd been forced to the bottom of society: poor, oppressed, marginalized. Flamenco was born 150 years ago in the melting pot of Andalusia. It was born among poor people of diverse Mediterranean backgrounds, back then -- and now -- the victims of prejudice and exclusion, much like blacks in America.

Thank you, Tao; I'll listen much more reverently now that I know I'm hearing the authentic voice of the World Grievance Society. Next time I run into a Gypsy pickpocket on the no. 64 bus from Stazione Termini in Rome, I'll wish him a nice day. I'd give him a chocolate bar, too, except that I would be deterred from purchasing one by the EU warning label informing me that chocolate owed its origins to the Amazon Rain Forest, rapidly being decimated by corporate greed, and that the original European stash of cacao beans was brought back to Europe by Hernando Cortez, stolen from the gentle, peace loving Aztecs.

Steyn out of line

Oh, no! I have to take issue with Mark Steyn's new book, America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It.

Steyn is one of my contemporary heroes -- he's in The Gold Standard section of the blogroll -- so I was keenly looking forward to his latest book, and a little disappointed that I need to register a partial dissent.

Mind you, most of his book about America as the only power that stands between raging Islam and all the rest is spot on. America Alone is timely, original, and full of acid humor. Steyn is incapable of writing a dull paragraph, and he scores with wit even when his ideas are shaky. The book is a great read and I recommend it.

Don't look for comfort in his pages, even as you're laughing yourself silly. Steyn thinks the really bad news hasn't reached us yet, and he'd rather deliver it himself than wait for a jihadist madman to make the point in some very unpleasant, if not lethal, way.

Steyn sees trends leading us to, as he puts it, "the dawn of the new Dark Ages (if darkness can dawn)": The West's loss of civilizational confidence and belief in its virtues and achievements. Check. A Muslim intoxication with itself and an absolute belief in its mission to convert all humanity, by force where necessary. Check. And, apparently above all else to his thinking, a European fertility rate that is too low to replace or grow the population -- the indigenous European population, that is. Here's where I part company with the estimable Steyn.

"The single most important fact about the early twenty-first century is the rapid aging of almost every developed nation other than the United States: Canada, Europe, and Japan are getting old fast, older than any functioning society has ever been and faster than any has ever aged," he writes. "A society ages when its birth rate falls and it finds itself with fewer children and more grandchildren."

Ah, but some populations are breeding to a different beat. In Afghanistan, Steyn says, the rate of births per 1,000 people in 2005 was 47.02. In Albania, it was 15.08. "That means Albanians are breeding at a third of the rate of Afghans," Steyn says. Replacement rate -- the number of babies per woman at which the population remains stable -- is 2.1. "Some counties are well above that: the global fertility leader, Niger, is 7.46; Mali, 7.42; Somalia, 6.76; Afghanistan, 6.69; Yemen, 6.58. Notice what those nations have in common? Starts with an I, ands with a slam. As in: slam dunk."

Replacing themselves much less rapidly, in a "population death spiral," are Canada with a fertility rate of 1.5; Germany and Austria, 1.3; Russia (where 70 percent of pregnancies are aborted, and "women are voting with their fetus") and Italy, 1.2; and Spain, 1.1.

If the population is shrinking in places, some of us think that's a good thing for the planet and the quality of life. Steyn has no time for anyone who worries about overpopulaton, though. To be fair to him, he doesn't descend to the complete idiocy of arguments like, "Look at all that empty space we've got," as though new additions to the total population head straight for the desert wastes of Nevada or the tundra up there 'round Hudson's Bay, rather than to ever-expanding urban areas. But he can't resist blasting away at sitting ducks, as when he makes fun of Paul Ehrlich's ecological doomsaying in the 1970s. Ehrlich was a self-promoting charlatan, of the sort you can find in any field, and it won't do to trash the population stabilization movement by dragging in its least responsible spokesman.

So why does Steyn think these low fertility rates in most Western countries mean big trouble? First, because it means that the population will be, on average, much older than the best-of-breed countries. Old people tend to be inflexible, challenge-avoiding. Whereas the younger populations -- those that start with I and end with slam -- are full of energy, ready to take on the world. Which is what they're doing.

More than that, on the nature-abhors-a-vacuum principle, Steyn expects that Muslims will pour into every place that has a population loss and quickly become a majority.

And so they will ... if we allow it. Steyn assumes that we will, even implies that we have no choice. Herein lies Steyn's number one blind spot. For all his good conservative credentials, he seems to have bought the tranzi argument that national borders are obsolete and irrelevant. He's not an open borders advocate so much as someone who just takes them for granted. As far as I know, and I've been reading his columns for at least five years, he has barely noticed the invasion from Mexico to the U.S. and has never urged European countries to shut down the Muslim immigration factory and the asylum racket.

Europe has thrown itself open to Muslim immigration, is paying the price and will soon pay a much greater price, in my reckoning. But the pathology is self-inflicted. No country has to accept the spillover from Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and the other Petri dish countries. So with a sane immigration policy -- viz., one that quarantines Islam -- a falling population is no threat to Spain or Italy.

To be sure, the mad fecundity in the Arab world will have devastating consequences locally. Too bad. It is not the West's job to save countries, especially those where a majority of people see the non-Muslim world as the enemy to be overcome, from the consequences of their own folly. I'd like for African countries and suchlike to see the light and start encouraging birth control for all they're worth. But if they insist on reproducing irresponsibly, they shouldn't look to Europe to take up their excess population, and if it means they find out what one of the horsemen of the Apocalypse looks like up close, I'm sorry -- but maybe famine will teach them a lesson.

In the modern world, more than at any time before, strength is not in numbers. If it were, India and China would rule the world. Maybe they will one of these days, but if so population size will have little to do with it. Civilizational strength comes from economic strength, technological progress, a rule of law, guarantees of private property, self-confidence enough to take risks, and a spiritual foundation. It no longer (if it ever did) derives from having the most bodies to throw into the front lines for cannon fodder.

Steyn's other reason for alarm about shrinking populations is the much discussed problem of having enough workers to support the welfare programs that modern societies, especially in Europe, have grown accustomed to. "The progressive Left can be in favor of Big Government or population control but not both," he says. "That mutual incompatibility is about to plunge Europe into societal collapse."

If he means that we may have to choose between the kind of vast largesse Europeans have become accustomed to -- government-sponsored visits to health spas, six weeks paid vacation, two years of paid maternity and paternity leave, all that -- and a quickly and steadily declining population, then he's right. If those are the only options. But I don't see why they have to be. Surely all the world's brilliant economists, or even just one of them, could figure out a plan for a "steady state" economy provided there was a reward for that model instead of theories demanding constant growth. If the ratio of young workers to old stays about the same from generation to generation (rather than soaring, like in Mali), why should they not balance out and provide for an acceptable though not extravagant social security and retirement benefits system?

What's the alternative? Mark Steyn's. He thinks we ought to be doing our damnedest to outbreed the Muslim world, and presumably have more babies to keep the welfare state going -- although he is as dubious as I am about the overall benefit of a system where people feel themselves dependent on the government for every earthly good. If that means continuously going above replacement rate, then Steyn in effect bids us to keep growing in population forever. Forever. A world of seven billion, 10 billion, 20 billion ... ad infinitum. But that's a crock. Anyone who thinks about it seriously, and for the long term, knows that the Earth's population can't keep growing indefinitely. At some point, it's got to stop. We can debate what that point should be, but some think we've already gotten there if we know what's good for us.

Any day now it will be officially announced that the U.S. population has reached 300 million, or twice what it was when I was born. Many businesspeople will find that cause for celebration, and Mark Steyn will too. He's proud of the U.S. for its wombcentricity. I won't be celebrating more traffic of every sort from cars to airplanes, more urban density and highrises, more land converted to ever-creeping suburbia. Although it is something of an ad hominem, I can't resist pointing out that Steyn himself lives in a one-horse town in New Hampshire; he is among the knowledge workers who can drop out of the urban rat race at will and send his product bouncing off satellites. Most people with jobs are not so lucky. He can easily escape the side effects of the population growth medicine that he prescribes for the rest to swallow.

Enough on that. I've been giving a one-sided account of America Alone. There's far more to it. Steyn's book is an antidote to complacency in the face of implacably aggressive Islam, and showcases the wordplay and outrageous humor that his devotees (myself among them) admire. He's right about the big picture. It is the end of the world as we've known it, and we'd better be thinking hard about what we want to replace it, and how to get there.

UPDATE 10/12

I thank the reader whose nom de blog is Vanishing American and Lawrence Auster for their comments. (Auster replied in a personal e-mail and I will not try to paraphrase his thoughts, but he has expressed his views on Mark Steyn often, most recently yesterday.)

The casual reader might wonder why all this carry-on about Steyn. The answer is that he is a popular author and columnist with a devoted following, and therefore likely to be influential among people who consider themselves conservatives and perhaps others who read him for his clever rhetoric.

The hard line on Steyn is that while ostensibly sounding an urgent warning, he is actually a defeatist who has written off Europe and reduces the great struggle for preservation of national identities and personal freedoms to a demography derby. Taking his work as a whole, but America Alone in particular (because that book is freshest in my mind), my impression — based on the written record; I can't look into his soul — is that he is genuinely alarmed at what he sees and wants to motivate his readers to save what can still be saved (which for him doesn't include Europe).

But it's always easier to point out what's wrong than to devise realistic, coherent and practicable solutions, and Steyn is no exception. Perhaps because of a demanding publishing schedule (he calls himself the "one-man content provider"), he tends to fall back on a well-rehearsed routine of viewing-with-alarm, which seems reasonably original each time because he is gifted at finding funny and striking ways of expressing the same thoughts about the dangers of Islam. It may be that he doesn't have time to ponder deeply what our reply to Islam should be, or it may be that he has taken the soft option of peddling a simplistic solution, i.e., mass production of the Weaponized Baby System.

Why can't he understand that the first line of defense, and the easiest to achieve if the will is there, should be a reassertion of national boundaries and a refusal to accept immigration of people whose main reason for arriving is to undermine existing institutions and substituting their own? I don't know; but Steyn is so enthralled with the "demography is destiny" vision that apparently just enforcing border controls seems to him routine and undramatic by comparison with a Fecundity Five-Year Plan.

Given his prodigious talent with words, I'm glad Steyn at least gets the problem mostly right and I'm happy to have him trashing multi-culturalism, political correctness, etc. But I too wish he'd think more deeply about how we can turn back the moral and political plague that is eating our future.

Hold the champagne

Don't break out the bubbly and clink glasses yet.

It is remarkable, and encouraging, that Congress has passed a law for fencing off part of the border with Mexico, and that El Presidente felt the heat enough to feel he had to sign it. Even one year ago, such an event would hardly have been conceivable. It shows that American patriots aren't consigned to history, that they can still make their principles count against both transnational progressives' ethnic replacement schemes and the President of Mexico, who currently sits in the White House oval office.

Symbolically, it really is something to celebrate. Symbolically, America has triumphed over the Latin American invasion.

But, according to our strange political system, the practical effect may be nothing at all.

This morning, American Pravda, sometimes known as The Washington Post, gleefully explained how the tranzis and El Presidente are working at full steam to nullify the vote. El Presidente and his ruling junta will pretend, against the obvious intent of Congress and the people, that the vote was for “a combination of projects – not just the physical barrier along the southern border. The funds may also be spent on roads, technology and ‘tactical infrastructure’ to support the Department of Homeland Security’s preferred option of a ‘virtual fence.’”

So, our representatives foolishly imagined that they were voting in favor of a barrier to close part of the Mexican border to trespassers. El Presidente, however, knows better than mere citizens and their voices in Congress. It was really a vote for more roads, with signs in Spanish directing "migrants" to sanctuaries where they can evade the Border Patrol.

George W. "I-am-the-law" Bush is our Julius Caesar. He will observe the formalities of the old Republic while undermining them. The irony is that Bush, nominally a Republican, knows he can count on Democratic wrinkled radicals who own the courts to support him. The people of Arizona recently approved through a referendum the bizarre idea that to vote, you ought to have to show that you are the person you claim you are; naturally the Politburo members on the federal court overturned it this week.

I am not Brutus. I preach no insurrection and plot no plots. Unlike our Caesar, I believe a government of laws, not men, and the quaint notion that the government is there to serve the people rather than rule them. Bush should be impeached for treason and convicted.

British police excuse Muslim cop from guarding Israel embassy

London's pathetic Metropolitan police allowed police constable Alexander Omar Basha to decline guard duty at the Israeli embassy during the Lebanon invasion because of "his personal concerns which included that he had Lebanese family members."

This claim unleashed a fierce debate about the duties of a police officer. But representatives of the Muslim Police Association denied the decision was based on moral concerns, suggesting it was a “welfare issue.”

No one explained the welfare issue involved for Constable Basha in guarding the embassy, presumably since the explanation would have been embarrassing for the British Establishment's reigning multi-culti pushers: other Muslims might have taken revenge on Basha's relatives.

Not surprisingly, some of London's cops took issue with the decision to allow the policeman to decide for himself whom he would and would not protect. Typically, though, even the critics had to find a politically correct formula to justify their complaint. Said one: "If they can allow this, surely they’ll have to accept a Jewish officer not wanting to work at an Islamic national embassy? Will Catholic cops be let off working at Protestant churches? Where will it end?"

Yes, I'm sure the Met has been inundated with requests from Jewish police officers to be exempted from guarding Islamic sites, and Catholics from protecting Protestants. According to the moral-equivalence rules of discussion in modern Britain, you can't criticize anyone or anything Muslim without making it clear that you're only talking about a general principle and a problem that any other group is just as likely to present.

Once the facts came out, the head of the Met, Sir Ian Blair, should have instantly started proceedings to dismiss both Constable Basha and the superior officer who allowed Basha to set his own rules for doing the job he had sworn to do and was paid to do. That is part of his job as top cop — to knock heads until every police officer in the country can entertain no doubts that he is to serve all equally, and not only those he likes.

Instead, Sir Ian's response was typical of the shrinking nature of the uniformed bureaucrat. He asked for a review and report. Meanwhile Constable Basha will no doubt be reassigned to duties he finds more congenial. I suspect the review will be a protracted business, certainly long enough so that public recall of the incident evaporates. Eventually the Met lawyers will find some wiggle room that will allow the force to avoid setting a precedent, except by default. So the next British Muslim who wants to go by the laws of his own state-within-the-state can be confident that it will fall into a legal gray area.

I have very little hope anymore that Britain will stand by its traditional principles of fair play and rule of law as its guest hijackers demand their own way.