Another excellent post from The Belmont Club, Which I read every day.
The barbarians of ISIS destroy ancient artifacts, in an outrage like those committed by the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The Taliban’s rejection this month of international appeals to halt the destruction of much of Afghanistan’s pre-Islamic heritage — their leader Mullah Mohammed Omar termed them idols — indicates that those most determined to impose their vision of a perfect Islamic state are firmly in control.
That article was from the period before the US invasion. Many artifacts were repaired but that will stop and the destruction will resume after we leave.
The Mosul destruction is to be expected everywhere the Takfiri tide rises enough to control an entity.
A professor at the Archaeology College in Mosul confirmed to the Associated Press that the two sites depicted in the video are the city museum and Nirgal Gate, one of several gates to Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian empire.
“I’m totally shocked,” Amir al-Jumaili told the AP “It’s a catastrophe. With the destruction of these artefacts, we can no longer be proud of Mosul’s civilisation.”
Isis took control of Mosul last summer in a lightning advance that led to the eviction of thousands of Christians and other minorities from their ancestral homelands in the Nineveh plains, amid reports of forced conversions.
Fernandez make an excellent point; this is what entropy looks like.
The idea of “irreversibility” is central to the understanding of entropy. Everyone has an intuitive understanding of irreversibility (a dissipative process) – if one watches a movie of everyday life running forward and in reverse, it is easy to distinguish between the two. The movie running in reverse shows impossible things happening – water jumping out of a glass into a pitcher above it, smoke going down a chimney, water “unmelting” to form ice in a warm room, crashed cars reassembling themselves, and so on. The intuitive meaning of expressions such as “you can’t unscramble an egg”, “don’t cry over spilled milk” or “you can’t take the cream out of the coffee” is that these are irreversible processes. There is a direction in time by which spilled milk does not go back into the glass.
This is also called “The Arrow of Time,” which runs only one way.
You are watching entropy at work, witnessing the destruction of information and seeing disorder take over the world.
To understand this more clearly, open the case of your computer and consider the arrangement of the jumper wires (assuming you still have jumper wires). There are only a few ways the jumper wires can be correctly connected but millions of ways they can be wrongly attached. Order (in the sense of a functioning arrangement) is that small percentage of outcomes that work. Entropy is all the ways it won’t work. Order is statistically hard to achieve. Disorder is relatively easy to create.
It took an ancient craftsman years to produce those statues preserved in the Mosul Museum. It took one thug only a few minutes to pound it into rubble and dust.
We will see more of this as the jihadis take over more of the cradle of civilization.
It will come as a mystery, a total mystery. The reason for our befuddlement is because while ISIS’s destruction of Mosul’s artifacts is serious, it does not spread entropy as drastically as the Western cultural elite. Their powers of demolition are far greater because modern technical civilization depends on what economists call rational ignorance.
Unlike pastoral societies when a man might know all the things that mattered, most of us moderns know very little outside of our narrow fields of competence. We compensate by trusting others to know things about which we choose remain substantively ignorant for lack of time. This opens up a tremendous opportunity for Western charlatans to spread entropy for their own narrow, sectarian reasons.
Michael Crichton described it slightly differently:
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
That is the same thing, although many people, especially intelligent people who should know better, don’t realize it.
We are seeing evidence of this in our own society. Some of this is seen with social rules. They are changing very quickly.
People who wonder how marriage went from an institution involving men and women to almost any combination conceivable in the blink of an eye, wonder at record winters in an age of ”Global Warming”, who ask themselves why their “Affordable Care” is so expensive and why the “free and open internet” has 300 pages of secret regulations; who puzzle over the identity of the masked attackers who attack centers of population every day are basically watching the effects of industrial scale entropy. They are watching knowledge — indeed common sense — being erased or obfuscated; destroyed at a rate that would defy the understanding of few guys wielding hammers.
“The Great Society” has destroyed much of what traditional society once thought obvious.
The Department of Justice has decided that antidiscrimination laws apply to the transgendered. So it appears that someone with a penis has a federal right to use a women’s bathroom via a declaration that he feels like a she. What could go wrong?
That is actually relatively minor in its threat to society. Worse is this:
The EPA has been seized by hard greens who are determined to remake the US electrical system – which is “an engineering marvel, arguably the single largest and most complex machine in the world” — despite their total lack of qualifications for this task. The effort relies upon “facts” about climate change that are highly uncertain, and upon a legal interpretation that should be a joke. (Indeed, EPA’s entire set of rules on CO2 rests on a Supreme Court opinion that was an embarrassment to that institution.) But EPA knows that it will take years for the courts to declare their legal view erroneous, and in the meantime the utilities have little choice except to follow the proposed rules, so by the time the law moves, the revamping will be a fait accompli. The utilities seem to care little as long as they can pass the costs on to the customers, and the potential for disaster is immense.
An enemy, like Iran or North Korea, could solve the dilemma by using an EMP, or electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear weapon.
[A]n electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, is the most significant threat” to the U.S. and our allies in the world. He’s right. Our food and water supplies, communications, banking, hospitals, law enforcement, etc., all depend on the electric grid. Yet until recently little attention has been paid to the ease of generating EMPs by detonating a nuclear weapon in orbit above the U.S., and thus bringing our civilization to a cold, dark halt.
That would be entropy on a grand scale.
Tags: Afghanistan, Congress, energy, Islam, politics, terrorism