Demographics, the West, and the Singularity

Something incredible has been happening for the past two hundred years. Slowly but surely, more and more people survived childhood, and subsequently, more and more people lived to reach adulthood. For centuries, a person could be assured of a relatively long life span if that person could only survive the perils of childhood, and most importantly of childbirth itself. That, in and of itself, is one of the primary reasons for the mass demographic shift that is only just now becoming apparent. It is like the iceberg, who's size is masked by the water in which it rests. Now that most people survive into adulthood, and have been surviving into adulthood for the better part of a century, we are now facing a catastrophic change: the West, for the most part, will become a collection of national retirement homes. Most of Western Europe will be much older, with perhaps as much as forty percent of their populations over the age of fifty by 2050. Japan will face similar prospects much sooner--only the United States and Australia will have much the same demographic distributions that they have today. The consequences for such a drastic and dramatic change are almost unimaginable. Europe, despite the hoopla over the EU and the euro will quietly begin to realize that not only will their native populations all be too old to take care of themselves but a significant majority of the younger population will be one that probably won't care too much--especially for most of Western Europe, Muslims will make up a significant minority of the population, in some places such as Sweden, as much as forty percent by 2050.
What to do then? Close down shop and quit the hell out of Europe as quickly as possible before it officially becomes Eurabia? Not quite--because there is an enormous opportunity to turn the collapse of the First Customs Union (known now as the EU) into a much different transnational organization, one that will be much smaller in scope, but much larger in geographical size. Wait a second there Maley, you say, the First Customs Union hasn't collapsed, let alone the EU, why they're the world second largest economy if you count the whole thing and ignore the irrational rise in value of the euro relative to the dollar and the yen, but the whole currency system is so screwed up anyway that that's at least twenty-seven different posts over the course of about a year just to get that thing explained right. Anyway, the EU hasn't collapsed...or is it? Well, let's keep in mind that:
1)only one country has to reject the new Omnibus Recognition of Ridiculous Rights, Priveleges and Responsibilities of the massive new EU bureaucracy to take over the free peoples of Europe, or, what that hack who thought that Jefferson wrote the constitution calls a "constitution." The new constitution of Europe is not a constitution, it reads like a university diversity manuscript with some budget addendums tacked on just for good taste. Do you really think that Vaclev Havel is going to let the Czech Republic or that the Slovaks or the quite libertarian Baltic states or Poland or any of the other newly liberated countries are going to want to subject themselves to that kind of frivolous regulation without even letting them have any say in the matter? The EU is one of the most undemocratic organizations on the planet right now, and how much longer do you think that's going to last once the people in all those newly liberated Eastern European countries and maybe some of the native populations in the western ones get a little angry when the imans start demanding more and more of the public dole?
2)Let's say that it actually get ratifies. How long has it been since any one power controlled Europe? Or, put more accurately, has long has any one power controlled Europe? Because no one has ever controlled all of Europe--you could say that for all intensive purposes that the Little General controlled all of Europe, but for what, a decade at most, and it wasn't as if the whole continent started speaking French all of the sudden. The Germans? The Mustache wasn't able to keep that little thing going for not even half a decade before our boys pushed them back over the Rhine and turned them into the little wusses that they are today. And, no, the Romans never crossed the Rhine either, preferring to have satisfied themselves that there wasn't anything over there worth having--pretty much the same attitude they took toward Ireland after seeing the Irish. Thank blarney for that. So, if the EU constitution goes into effect, it won't last very long, especially since....
3)Countries are already seriously flaunting such things as the Stability Pact--how long before the EU Central Bank or whatever it's called starts letting nations like Portugal and Italy and Spain which have been economically punished because they have been unable to change their interest rates do so? And then the whole reason for having a single currency goes out the window--if different regions have different monetary requirements, how do we mesh that with the idea that we can have one rate, one currency, one rule applied to twenty-five nations? And sooner rather than later people in Europe will realize that they liked it much better when they had their lira or marks or francs or guilders because at least they knew what it was really worth.
So, sometime in the near future, the EU starts to unravel. And here are the seeds for genuine opportunity. If the populations of migrant Muslims within the EU (thanks mostly to the democratization of their ancestral homes, Turkey, Iraq, now Lebanon, and possibly Egypt and Syria next) are able to accept the blessings of modernity, free enterprise, the rule of law, separation of church and state, and representative government, than that new entity that has been scarily called EURABIA might actually become a potent force worldwide. In other words, if the enthusiasm for freedom in other countries can reinfluence the stale democracies of primarily western Europe than so much the better, because only an energized, motivated West can accomplish the goal of defeating the nexus between blind, inarticulate rage and religious fanaticism, and imagine how much more powerful the West would be if joined by Muslims who are as much heirs to the traditions of the West as Christians and Jews are--even more so because of the debt that the West owes Islam for it's maintenance and preservation and expansion of ancient ideas and books during the height of Islamic power and influence, sometime around the 13th century. And what better way than to do so through a genuine Customs Union, which is really all that the EU is and if was just a Customs Union honorably and openly, it would function as it should--opening the borders for trade between member countries and restricting it for those outside of the Union. The EU is a huge market, one that would usually be fettered by language, custom, and tariffs. By removing the tariffs and ensuring free trade and a slightly regulated labor market, the Second Customs Union could cement the new democracies of the Middle East to the West, thus making Eurabia a genuine area of convergence between civilizations, making such a possibility unique.
Finally, this relieves the demographic timebomb question by assimiliating the migrant populations and completely Westernizing them.
But what about the Singularity--heres the thing. If you don't know what the Singularity is you need to reread yesterday's post and get back to me right here. If you did read it you know that the Singularity is the moment when we, humans that is, create a genuine artificial intelligence. Snicker snicker, computers thinking hahahaha. The truth is though that we are much closer to it than ever before and in many ways, all the more unprepared for it because we've been hearing about it for so long that we almost have lost the will to believe in it. It's like lasers--we've seen too many movies to ever believe that anyone will ever use a laser in combat, but that too is coming. In my lifetime someone or something will successfully create a genuine AI and by genuine I mean one that is truly self-aware, one that can defend its own existence and one that we will not be able to directly control. The possibilities for this development are endless. Already the infrastructure is in place that a genuinely intelligent enough program could make use of--billions of 'nodes' already exist worldwide, in the form of personal computers, servers, supercomputers and the overhead satellite network and the underground fiber optic network. Each 'node' can be relatively equated with one or more neurons--indeed who knows whether we can even calculate the actual processing power of the human brain, but the point is that their exists already a vast network of processing power that if programmed properly might unleash electric hell upon humanity. The thing is that the faster we progress towards demographic change, the more automation and technology old-age nations such as Japan and Germany will require to take care of their aging populations. This means that there will only be more incentive to make things smarter, faster, more independent, more like us with each succeeding generation until finally boom. So really, we've double-blind-sided ourselves--not only was the Singularity inevitable, but now we've accelerated our need for very high-tech gear, and that means that very very soon, somewhere, a computer will be talking to you. And you won't have any idea what to say to it.

now to connect the dots...

The year is 2019. A recently enlarged United States faces its first serious crises post-President Rice. Several Canadian states, Australia and Cuba, after a violent civil war following Castro's death finally in 2011 all became part of the United States. Secret negotiations are being conducted between the US and Taiwan in an effort by the Taiwanese to become an American state. The PRC learns of this and reacts harshly. They seize the Spratly's and an assortment of other smaller islands claimed by a diverse lot including Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. The newly minted blue water navy that the PLA spent decades dreaming about blocks the shipping lanes in the South China Sea and demands that Taiwan accept immedate reunification. The United States declares Taiwan a territory and begins sending troops immediately.
Who are our allies in such a fight, not including the sizeable additions to American strength that the red-state Canadians and the Aussies would make? Would our few remaining allies outside of Japan and Britain wind up categorized as such:

We keep assuming that Europeans are like Britain and Japan when in fact long ago they devolved more into a Switzerland and Sweden—friendly neutrals, but no longer real allies. In the meantime, let us Americans keep much more quiet, wait, and watch—even as we carry a far bigger stick.

Because this is where we're heading toward right now. The end of the West. Some projections have European becoming a majority Muslim by the middle of this century. Of course, projections are just projections, but the problems that they already have that aren't being talked about except by genuises such as Mark Steyn and even when he talks about what's really happening in Europe I don't think any of the Europeans really hear him. They made read the article, they might even laugh, because if you can't laugh at Mark Steyn you are a humorless, empty vessel of a person. But I'm sure that there are those out there would who scoff at his ideas. Just as that woman who claimed after the 1972 elecion that "she didn't know anybody who voted for Richard Nixon." I'm sure there are quite a few liberals right now who couldn't name anyone that they personally knew who voted for Dubya.

The end of the West--or, at least, the end of the West in those countries that created the West, that forged the nation-state, that brought forth the industrial revolution, the Renaissance, the Reformation--even in Britain, where more people attend Friday prayers that people attend Sunday mass. Now, I myself am areligious. I find all religion suspect, because it always, even in such decentralized forms as modern Protestantism, always has some kind of earthly authority figure who acts as an intermediary, an authority if you will, on the supreme being and what we know about that thing that we call God, but I say God and that is but another word and what is another word but...? Anyway. So, while at first glance I have no problem with fewer and fewer people attending secularized Europe (mainly the core of the EU, FrancoGermaniaBenelux, Britain and perhaps a few others) I do have a problem with more and more people attending mosque.

Whoa, slow down there Hamey. Are you saying that we should actually be advocating that Islam is an unfavorable religion, that it somehow, it seems, manages to produce individuals capable of highly irrational behavior, such as strapping explosives to their bodies and blowing themselves up? That there is something about the particularly virulent strain of Wahhibism that has infected the Islamic world and spread its influence into any and every Muslim community that it can? That we should be appalled at the Dutch reaction to the killing of Theo van Gogh? Just for comparison imagine if Muslim terrorists tried to kill Clint Eastwood for instance. Clint of course, probably carries a weapon with him everywhere, so there's not much chance there, but the point is that instead of showing his movie at their little film festival or in the theaters or whatever, they pulled it. Worse, they then showed films promoting multiculturalism and Islamic propaganda. While change is happening, as the Cedar Revolution proves, which I hope that someone gets into the Tent City in Beirut and helps them organize and maintain the pace of their protests until the Syrians get out and stay out. If the Orange Revolution in Ukraine is any indication of the potential for people power we should be very optimistic and we should open our eyes to the substantive reforms that are taking place throughout the Arab including the Gulf States and even to some degree Saudi Arabia which held municipal elections last month and Egypt which just announced some modest, unspecified electoral reforms. The more states there are that embrace the three most important values of the Enlightenment: the rule of law, the market economy and representative government, the easier it should become for those states acting in concert to liberate even more states. Until the entire planet is composed of nothing but nation-states that adhere to those three principles.

For some reading that you may not really enjoy but need to be aware of, go here and just read it. Fr something that you don't really need to be aware of but will enjoy reading, go here. Sorry for the absense over the past week or so, but we had practice for our last show every night last week. Just shows you how hard it is to replace one person in a band. Took four of us to do it.

days go by

And things seem to be accelerating. First of all, if you haven't been paying attention to what is now starting to be called the Cedar Revolution, you really need to get on top of things. Take my advice and read this, that, and this over here, and just for your special needs and to up your spirits, read VDH. "Talk amongst yourselves for a just a moment," as Mike Myers character on SNL would say. I'll wait for you to catch up.

seems like someone would be able to figure this one out...

the budget "process" is upon us yet again. i feel like george carlin when he observes that everything is a situation. we know that it's an emergency, but everything is a situation. and the budget process is pretty much in the same boat. we know it's a process. it's the budget. but it's completely farsical. the notion that anything of genuine value is going to take place is virtually impossible. of the freshman republicans who helped bring about the revolution of '94, only one of them has actually proposed spending "cuts" not just "decreases." The very language that we use to describe the legislation that surrounds the budgets is ridiculous. A spending decrease is called a cut by those on the left and spending increases proposed by Republicans are supposed to be taken at face value because at least they aren't as big as they would have under the Democrats. That's just ridiculous. Ridiculous. I can't even tell you how ridiculous this whole situation is. But I am especially angered by the Republican's reluctance to seriously reign in federal spending. I do think that it is time for the federal government to adopt policies that many of the states have--spending can never grow faster than inflation and any surplus is split between a rainy day fund and either immediate rebate checks or reductions to the tax schedule. If there's a deficit, all non-defense and homeland security funding is immediately cut by whatever percentage necessary to eliminate that deficit. We have the technology, we have the capability, we should be able to adjust federal spending in a logical, technical manner that actually makes sense. Why not simply reverse the budget process and wait until the total taxes for a given fiscal year are collected and then figure out how much is available to be spent and aim to spend less--not simply to reduce the size of government, but to make it more efficient and to leaner.
Then again, who ever heard of Rome?

did you hear what Dean said....

I just can 't believe how lucky we really are:

First, the offending statement: “You Think The Republican National Committee Could Get This Many People Of Color In A Single Room? Only If They Had The Hotel Staff In Here.”

There's a great song by Ben Folds Five, called boxing and the beginning lines are:

Howard, the strangest things

have happened lately when i

take a good swing, at all my dreams...

oh Howard Dean, if only you can keep up this murderous, tortuous pace whose sole purpose is to make Hillary look good for the next four years. Come on, what did you have to give up, what did they have on you that made you decide it would be okay to play patsy for the next four years and be remembered as the worst thing since Terry MacAuliffe. Somebody stop me.

this is interesting...

go check out these guys over at this address. they are on top of things. seriously. The Iranians need to have their farsical notions of regional hegemony squashed--and quickly. This "common front" that they have formed with Syria is nothing more than an attempt into daring the United States into entering into a two front war. Do they believe that most of their troops would seriously risk an engagement with the United States? And do they not understand, that unlike other Western enemies they have faced before, the United States Army and Marine Corps learn quickly, and that the number of second and first Lieutenants who return to the battlefield as Captains far outnumber the number of jihadis who even return to the conflict. I guess that the alternative really is worse: you know, people actually taking showers and shaving and maybe even once and a while going out and seeing the skin of a woman from say her hand to the end of her shirt sleeve-I heard this fantastic story about some part of medieval europe, perhaps a small independent city in Germany, although I could be wrong, but anyway, they believed in bathing once a year. Consequently, most of the children in the village were all born about nine months after the, uhm, bathing. Coincidence?
No, not at all. People are smelly, stinky animals when not properly cleaned and maintained. It's no wonder that was the only day those poor medieval people had sex, and it's also no wonder why so much of Europe spent so long engaged in so many pitifully inconsequential battles that today interest only the few of us who care about Ruprecht II and the seven electors of the Holy Roman Empire. And it's also no wonder why the Catholic Church is rotten from the inside and out--since the Council of Nicea the Church has been as is, and since that time, fifteen years give or take, the Church has prohibited its' priests from marrying. What does that do to someone? To be denied the ultimate reality of biological existence, every individuals responsibility to procreate, what does that do to someone? Well, look what it does to people. Look at it. Look at it and see that any authority driven hierarchy that regulates sexuality, whether a centralized one as in the Catholic Church, or a decentralized one in Islam, will ultimately destroy itself because it is attempting to control biological destiny. There is no way of getting around the drive that is implicit within each and every human being--to do so, whether in the interest of pursuing a monastic or spiritually "pure" life is to delude oneself into believing that any one action is any more moral or ethical than any other. Actions merely are--it is how we judge those actions that determine their status within the realm of subjectivity. A monk who has spent his life in isolation has lost something of his humanity through his own resolute determination to avoid all the trappings of life. And this is not say that there lives were in vain, merely that they were vainly wasted--vainly because they believed they were doing it for a greater purpose and wasted because they failed to see that their own purposes will always be the one consideration that is not subject to any requirement of faith. And because our own purposes are the only yardstick through which we have to gauge the value of our lives--how we lived, what we did, were we content? we must strive to be honest in our evaluation of whether or not we lived up to our own expectations. I think that many people who claim "faith" as one of their primary values are not being honest--they, when confronted with the world, turn to the only explanation that requires no effort upon their part--the word Islam means after all, "to submit", born-again Christians will often talk about their own moment of personal "submission" to Jesus Christ, accepting that Jesus is the only path to salvation and that everything else is irrelevant. But there's an essential disconnect between that kind of faith, blind, submissive, and hierarchial, and reality at large. By submitting to whatever Man with white beard incarnation people "submit" they are ultimately subsuming their own interests in favor of whatever they are submitting to. The same occurs with any ideology--a person must forget their own personal interests, beliefs, ideas, in order to accomodate the ideology. Really faith and ideology are the same two things--I should know. I was once a rapid idealogue--I was an Objectivist and I worshipped at the sacrificial shrine of Ayn Rand--but then I realized that I was no better than the Marxists, postmodernists, deconstructionists, and any other statist ideology that I had faced. Any ideology is inherently self-limiting. Most of your choices are already made, and worse, almost all of the questions already answered. The important thing about questions is that the answers they produce generally only lead to more questions. There is no single, final answer in the realm of life and of options available to people. There are only more questions, because to be satisfied is to be complacent and to be complacent is to be dead. And many of the people that I have encountered who were genuine in their blind acceptance of faith are among the most uninteresting, most unimaginative, most humorless (except for of course, members of the Rabid Left, who would probably never laugh at any of my jokes)--which again points to the similarity between blind faith and blind ideology. They both stimulate the same kinds of behavior. Both seek to restrict free association and choice, both seek ultimately to enforce their beliefs upon others, and both have only the ends in mind--for people of faith, it is the afterlife that matters, not this pitiful sham of existence that we are forced to endure--for people of ideology, the ends are the means, it doesn't matter how it must be done, but people must be forced to drive prissy little electric cars and that right of way must be given to bicycles and that really the country would be better off if we just had one great big giant bicycle path through every state so that we could have .000000032% more GDP than we otherwise would have. Of course, not counting the huge lag time we would have to add to people's commutes. I can just see it now:

And today on Bicycle path J stroke 9 stroke 838474 stroke 12 you can except heavy so keep your eyes on your handlebars and don't let your laptop and Ipod fly off and please remember, keep both hands on the handlebars at all times--we wouldn't want anyone to ride freestyle or without a helmet or knee pads or any thing else that the worry association of America worries about....AHGHGHGHGH

The lesson folks is that when you mess with nature, you're gonna have a bad time. And when you try to contain the procreative forces that are, for all intensive purposes, the defining characteristic of all lifeforms, you are, messing with something that has more than four billion years of experience on you. Do you think that if procreation were personified that it might not be slightly irritated that there was this one particular species that developed these silly ideas that some people should be able to say what kinds of things you can and can't do and who can and can't and where and how you can do it and at what time of the month--I mean, honestly, where are the feminists--don't they know that women are still treated as pariahs when they are menstruating in most Muslim societies? Where's the outrage?

I'll tell you what though--ultimately all systems tend toward chaos--the more they try to control those forces, the more they will lose control of it. Sort of like what's happening in the MSM right now--they are trying to hold on to the whirlwind, and instead they're just getting the piss beaten out of them. I never thought that life could be so good.

and we thought the universe really was going to fall apart...

I may have just accidentally published the title without the accompanying post. If I have, I apologize, if, please disregard. Disregard this too. And this. Can you believe the reaction of the MSM to the Eason Jordan resignation and that somehow, the blogosphere was after Jordan's scalp? I think not. I think that instead they are terrified that there is finally accountablity in the media. And now if someone with just a little more motivation would get in Freedom of Information Act and get some accountability in the government and private sector bureaucracies. Accountability. What a wonderful word.

just build the reactors!!!!!

i must find the story that i read months and months ago. I am looking for it now. Just thought about it as I was finishing the last post. Nuclear reactors. How many nuclear reactors would it take to completely end our dependence on oil from OPEC? Anybody? More later.

hugh hewitt drives the bulls

if you haven't been paying attention to the eason jordan kerfluffle, visit Hugh Hewitt's website for basically the entire story, because it really has been Hugh who has been moving this thing along, although you can really tell when a story has been blogstreamed when Instapundit comments on it, which I believe he has, today or the other day or something along those lines. The amazing thing about the Eason Jordan incident is that the MSM have now proven themselves to be the final defenders of the Maginot Line--if CNN did not believe in its' own infallibility and capability to decide what is news and what isn't, none of this would be a problem. CNN would have an archived website that held all of their video footage, footage of executives giving speeches, all the collected archives of CNN's years of broadcasting, and everything that's ever been written on CNN's website.
Instead, apparent silence. Indeed, since I refuse to watch any form of television, I really have to take everybody's word that CNN isn't saying anything about it. But I believe it. I always thought that for someone to be a postmodern liberal, they had to have some kind of rationalization malfunction--the imposition of their values upon the world at large makes their existence within that world very fragile. Hence the Left's near total submersion in the culture of victimhood, and their humorlessness--there can be no deviation from their worldview. Any deviation results in the gears getting completely jammed. Hence CBS's inability to just fire Dan Rather and say, "You know, we've been leading you all by the chain for the past thirty years or so, and this last little situation pretty much illustrated our entire sordid political agenda. We know we can't make up for the past thirty years of brainwashing, but at least from now on, we'll own up to the fact that we believe certain things and are going to advocate them and we're not ashamed of it, but we are no longer going to hold high the standard of objectivity against everyone else's partisanship. We are just as partisan as everyone else and we're proud that we can be such in America."
But instead, silence. Which leads me to believe that a prediction I made before the election (before I started blogging, so you can either take me at my word or not--accountability, accountability, accountability) and many others made: if Dubya wins the Left will become unhinged. I watched the election and thought to myself, if this is how they are behaving now, what will they be saying when Dubya begins to enact his priorities without even hearing their objections? How far will they go to marginalize themselves and what will make it stop?
The various factions within the Democratic Party have more than frayed--they are on the verge of unravelling. The red-state Democratic Senators (just look at their voting records on the Bush tort-reform legislation that just passed the Senate) are cowering, fearing that Dean's DeaNiaC's will only pull the plug out of the already leaking tub--and then what? Sixty plus GOP Senators and an emboldened President Bush who would have two free years to pursue an even greater agenda? Pshah. And you thought that the Left's current behavior was reprehensible. If the aggregate Left continues its march against history, then history will just have to judge them harshly, which it seems, history is already doing.
For how long has the Left been bereft, bankrupt, totally and utterly devoid of any ideas? For how long has the Left paraded around, holding their own high moral standards as the epitome of public policy, and for how long will the myth that only the Left possesses the ethics and pragmatic capabilities to solve postmodern man's problem persist? How much longer? How much longer before every conservative/libertarian just decides to hell with the popular culture, who cares what's popular?
Apparently we do. Apparently everyone does. But, I blather and blather and blather and nothing really gets said. Worse, nothing really gets done. This makes me think of that stupid movie with Ethan Hawke and Winona Ryder, Reality Bites, and on the soundtrack, Ethan Hawke sings a prog/indie rock song where he shouts something about not voting or was it maybe explaining his apathy, in any case, he shouts something about the "Republicrats and the Demicans" and at the time, I almost thought it was inventive. I was dismayed at Mr. Newt's tactical overreach during the budget crises of 1995/96 and their inability to counter the smooth talker that was el Bubba, and I thought to myself, Now you know, really, historically, the two parties have really not been all that different. It's not as if the Democrats completely rewrote the rule book during their sixty or so years of dominance. They were handed the modern state's political and regulatory structures--they didn't create them, Teddy Roosevelt and the Progressives, the true Progressives did. And it's not as if the Republicans are apparently ever going to reorganize the federal government into an efficient mechanism so why not join Ethan Hawke in his apathy?
Like I said, for a genuine liberal, a liberal of the best, most accurate definition of the word, Bill Clinton's years as President were a terrible time. What did the Left advocate in the 90s? Social Security, Medicate, education and the environment. How many times did that stupid phrase, focus grouped and studied and probed and analyzed, how many times did that get uttered? And to what end? So Clinton could garner only 49% of the popular vote during supposedly the longest peacetime expansion in American history? And the Left is saying that Bush winning 51% isn't enough of a mandate? Somebody give me a bottle of valium right now before my head just spins right off my neck.
For those of you who think that Ted Kennedy represents a true liberal, go have your vision checked. Or, as James Taranto over the Best of the Web says "Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment." The Left has become the reactionary force in the world while the Right has become the progressive force. The poles of politics, just like the Earth's, apparently flip as well. Let us only hope that the Right does not become as entrenched and as unwilling to accept change and adapt to it as the Democrats have. Otherwise, with both parties out of the loop on the fact that the world is changing very rapidly. Well, I wanna move somewhere else, preferably someplace tropical with warm sandy beaches and the drinks with the little straw hats in them. Well, Avi, we've got sandy beaches. That's a twenty point movie quote folks.

it almost hurts to say this...

but good god the Democrats need help. I have been sifting through the news, and am on my way over to The Note, which I used to read and then just sort of forgot about--so many website, so little time. But whatever happened to the quaint little notion that somehow left of center progressives were somehow smarter than their right of center barbarian ancestors who were somehow still around. I've been back and forth over this ground with a backhoe (ten points to the person who knows who said that): "Any truly intelligent, conscious, aware (substitute any 'post'modern description of, well, anything here) would understand and realize that what I've suggested is how we should go about it."
People who say things like this also usually start off by saying, "On this particular issue, I feel," or worse, "I feel that xy and z are very bad and we should change xy and z because I feel so very bad about it."
Many people have commented on the near univeral preference for the Left to engage the heart, because the hearts of men are much easier to sway than their minds--and if you sway the heart enough, the mind forgets and becomes comfortable, at ease, and then the mind ceases to care. That's when you end up with people who can't have a discussion/argument without resorting to using their personal experience as evidence and worse, those whose own personal experience is orders of magnitude higher in value than yours and some silly economist named Friedrick Hayek or Ludwig von Mises or Karl Menger, or some silly historian named Thuycicides, or that we all know that Plato was the greatest philosopher ever--never mind that Plato's philosophy has lead to more tyranny and oppression, and that maybe, perhaps, we ought to investigate Aristotle.
The worst part about all this is that you, the person who prides themselves on expanding their knowledge base, on seeking out new sites and new information, boldly going where no band has ever gone before, honestly want to either solve the problem or just talk about it. Talk about it. It's almost, almost impossible to have an honest, open discussion with someone who is a progressive, an intellectual, a 'post'modern. Why? Because they have already made their mind up--to them, there is nothing else that needs to be talked about it--except of course, for all the talking that they'll do while they shitfiddle away civilization.
I have an idea for a television show that would illustrate this point perfectly. Imagine the cut scene, and the TV guy's voice comes on saying:

The drama. The excitement. The action.

(big explosions and raucous noise)

Tonight on CrapTV:

Red Stater versus Blue Stater

Who can actually run a 7-11 for a full year

Oh sure, sure, I know, there are plenty of ultra rich, super mega mega dauntingly rich progoberals wandering the planet--but I'd still make the challenge. Put George Soros in charge of a 7-11 and put any self-avowed conservative/libertarian and let's just see what happens. I'll even grant you that once in a while, a progoberal* might even win, but it won't happen very often. And of course, the reactifists*, well, I'd never visit a 7-11 run by a reactifist. Never.

A Progoberal is a progressive liberal, someone who may yet still be slapped in the face by reality.

A reactifist is a progressive liberal who got slapped in the face by reality and turned the other cheek.

a weekend break

Had so much to do this weekend, inbetween reading the news of course, that I had to take a little break from blogging. The show Friday night and the recovery Saturday, coupled with having to have to help our stand-in learn just around 40 songs for our show on the 26th of February. Well, let's just say I'm a little spent.
But I will find time to blog extensively today.
Now, what's going on in the world?

just as quick retort

Just bear in mind--I'm not saying that when time comes in 2008 that I'll be going door to door for Hillary. Not unless she chooses Condi Rice as her running mate, but that's not going to happen either. Truth of the matter, if I could choose one person who I would prefer be President, it would be Condi Rice. I can't really think of another person who has impressed me enough, although, I have to admit, when I first heard Dubya was entering the race, way back in 1998 or 1999, whenver it was, I wasn't very impressed with him either. But there are so many high profile Republicans:

1. Guiliani--tough guy from frickin New York. Other than that, not impressed
2. First--he's a doctor. Great. He just doesn't have any cajones.
3. Mitt Romney--his first name is something you wear playing baseball. And that's exactly what he's going to feel like after he runs. A worn out, beaten to death, catcher's mitt.
4. Pataki--Please.
5. McCain--
6. no, but seriously, McCain doesn't stand a chance in hell. He'll be way to old, and he's worked way to hard over the years to carve out his little fiefdom in the Senate. He'll be reluctant to give that up just to go on the road again and be forced to talk about Vietnam.
7. Arnold--notice how everyone gets their last names used, but with Ahnuld you always use his first name? Anyhow. If only he could run, he would win handily and govern, well, probably pretty effectively.
8. JC Watts--Now there's a great ticket idea--Condi for President, JC for Veep. Wow.
9. and of course there are the minor stars, Dole, Graham, Perry, Bauer, etc., etc., who knows how many people may try to run.

The point is that, well, I hate the idea of having another Clinton the White House, especially if Bill becomes the SecGen of the UN, but I don't really like much of the field, except for Condi. There is one guy who would make an excellent President. He has been an exceptional governor, he has made difficult and unpopular choices that earned him respect in the long run, and he governs one of the larger electoral prizes, Florida. His name, unfortunately is Jeb Bush.

never whistle while your pissing...

if you don't know that quote go here right now and buy the book. no questions, just go buy it. and then have fun reading it. i'm sure that the only more difficult book in the world to get used to when you first pick it up has got to be As I lay Dying by Faulkner. Only because Flannery's Wake is impossible to read. Maybe it's time to try.

So many thoughts are buzzing around today, and I've got plenty of time to write. The show doesn't start till 10:30 so we won't even be packing up until around 9:00.

First, though, I want to talk about how in the hell Howard Dean has apparently locked up the DNC Chair. Call me crazy, but I've never subscribed to the notion that the Democrats, and by this I mean the Party, not their constituents, are morons. And I mean complete and total morons. I've never believed that. I believe that there exists a substantial number of Democratic Party officials who sincerely believe that their way of bettering America is the way to do it, and they are determined to implement their policies and reward their constituents as much as they possibly can given their minority status. But I refuse to see how nominating the man who must have sobbed himself to sleep the night he screamed his way to the back of the nomination race would make an effective DNC Chair. All the Republicans would have to do to discredit is play a little five second snippet of his speech that night where he screamed his way through the list of the next Democratic primaries. That's it, over, done with. Nothing left for Chairman Dean to top his previous performance by entering the ring with some wrestler, Hulk Hogan, the tall guy whose supposed to dead (the Undertaker, you see how much I know about wrestling), or maybe even Andy Kaufman's corpse, reanimated for the evening and actually looking quite well compared to Dean, whose jugular suddenly explodes in a burst of blood, ending the match.
This is the guy the Democrats want chair their party?

Garance Franke-Ruta, who wrote sympathetic Dean pieces in the
American Prospect during the campaign, spoke with several former Dean staffers.
One called the candidate "a horrible manager" and added, "I wouldn't trust him
to run a company." Another called his management style "just a disaster."Dean,
remember, raised about $50 million by positioning himself as the most anti-Bush
candidate, but blew through it so fast that he was nearly broke by January. This
represents the sort of financial acumen you associate with deluded,
flash-in-the-pan celebrities — cue the narrator for VH-1's "Behind the Music":
"But the good times and lavish spending couldn't last for M.C. Hammer" — not
with chairmen of major political parties.

And if you've seen that "Behind the Music" about good ole Hammer, well, then you know what the Democrats are facing. Dean will have a personal entourage of no less than about sixty, probably several dieticians and physicians to help him keep that blood pressure in check, at least ten personal assistants, who knows how many times Dean ask the same question to each of them every day and how many of them have to ask their personal assistants. Personal assistants who have assistants. It just goes to show you. If you don't know what you think about something, having more people talk to you about it is only going to make you more confused and less able to come to a decision about it. The Kerry campaign had many many many many many many many (do you feel that typing certain words over and over and over and over and over again can actually be kind of fun?) many many, I think they were called advisory groups, groups focusing on all the various minuatae that concerns policy makers, such as where should I build this bike path?

On the other hand, Dean's takeover of the DNC certainly does make somebody look good. In fact, it makes her look not just like the sanest of the Democrats, but the only Democrat who might actually be able to convince a majority of Americans to vote for her (it's important to keep in mind that no Democrat since Lyndon Johnson has won an outright majority of the popular vote. Not one. Jimmy Carter couldn't win an outright majority, and Bill Clinton didn't either). And that person is of course, Hillary Clinton. And to add injury to insult (to Dean of course) Hillary fainted the other day. I almost fainted when I read this:

Religion is now so central to our politics that every candidate
prays like Voltaire on his deathbed just to cover his bets. This comes easily to
Hillary, who's naturally self-righteous and a sincere, lifelong Methodist. For a
while, she's been a regular at the Senate's weekly prayer breakfasts, clutching
her own well-worn Bible, sometimes even holding hands with Sen. Lindsay Graham
(R-S.C.), chief among her husband's tormenters.

And then I did, actually faint when I read this:

To get right with the military, which never forgave her husband
for his "don't ask, don't tell" doctrine, she chose to be on the Armed Services
Committee. On weekends, instead of hanging around the house in Chappaqua, she
visits bases.

All of this convinces me that Hillary is out to promote herself not just as the most uncompromising wartime President in US history, and if she does in fact win, Hillary may wind up being the most hawkish President ever--because she knows, if she's as good a politician as everyone says she is, she knows that the only she'll ever convince enough red-state voters to trust her on national security issues, that she would have to advocate positions that many Republican officials don't. For Hillary to win the Presidency all she has to do is push three (or maybe four, we'll see how this goes) positions: close the borders and enforce strict assimilation policies upon the immigrants already here, construct enough nuclear reactors so that we don't have to import any oil from anybody except maybe Canada and Mexico, and break the backs of the municipal and teacher unions by making all government jobs contractual and by allowing vouchers and school choice to be implemented where they are desired. Doing so would position her to right of the Republicans on three very sensitive political issues, and it would make her a serious candidate because those are big ideas. Notice how Hillary hasn't said virtually a word about Social Security? Look for her to come out for large personal accounts soon. And, look for her to start pushing for tighter immigration policies and for her criticizing the Bush government for not enforcing current laws.

One good thing about all of this though: if Hillary does actually win the Presidency, then she'll do more damage to the national Democratic Party than even Bill did during his eight years, and Bill did a whole lot of damage. See, the Clintons are not really Democrats. Really, the Clintons are the same people who are now Republicans throughout the country who either once were or their families were Democrats for generations. Liberals who have been wacked in the face by reality. And I imagine that being married to Bill Clinton wacked Hillary in the face pretty quickly. The final touches were put on her wacking job when the Co-Presidents first arrived in Washington, and the final touches of her what I call "but it should be this way" liberalism, were eradicated during the impeachment proceedings. Hillary, and this is an important point to make, has changed, or more aptly, she has managed to begin to change the public perception about her. Whether or not she really has abandoned her desire to nationalize one seventh of the US economy, or whether she actually believes the things that she has begun saying over the past years is irrelevant. Again, if Hillary is really a smart politician, then she knows that in order for her to win the Presidency, she must say these things, and she must advocate these positions, and she must follow through on them, or she will never get to be the 44th President of the United States. And that is why I will gladly support a Hillary for President if it means that the Democrats truly become a national party no more--uberhawk terrorist thwarting rogue state attacking people liberating Hillary who closes the borders and allows school and ends foreign dependence on oil versus watching the Democrats die slowly, as the Conservative Party in Britain appears destined to do. Hmmmmmm.......the shitty thing in life is realizing that all choices, are, well, basically crap.

And this one is no different.

SHOW TOMORROW

ah yes, there's a show tomorrow. Just in case anyone is reading this, and by anyone I mean anyone in the Atlanta area, and one more exception, by anyone, anyone who does not live with me and I have not already called or emailed, PLEASE come to the show. Not that we're desperate or anything, but it just seems like pulling teeth to get people to come out to CJ's Landing, which is really not that far from where we live. So come on now people. Get out and support local music. We're playing with the Apostles, and there's some other band starting the whole thing off, but we, Slip Tripman, are the headliners. If you have any questions you can email SlipTripman@hotmail.com. There, that's easy enough. Free promotion. Of course, because it's free, it probably means that nobody besides my mother and the rest of my family read this, and they all live in northern Virginia, so woohoo.

yo ho ho and a bottle of rum...

over at drudge the headline is that rumsfeld offered his resignation to bush TWICE and that both times (all this occurred during the Abu Ghraib crap, and i'm sure just calling the incident 'crap' ought to get some response) the President declined his offer. Tells you something about Bush's determination to completely offend and ignore his critics, and incense them to the point of hysteria. Which is of course, what happened. Meanwhile, the Volcker report is out and it's pretty damning--just goes to show you--international law is pretty meaningless. Especially when the organization that is running the show is as corrupt as a French official in Indochina during the early 1950's.

i've said if before...

Back in high school and college, I remember always being involved in an argument. Generally the argument usually began because I would object to whomever's spurious belief that we had reached an information zenith and now that we knew everything we could predict everything. History used to call them planners but now we call them progressives or environmentalists or any other shade of left that presupposes to know that the world is as it should be and as they wish it to be. The actual argument itself was never really important. Nothing was ever discussed, and that for me, was usually the biggest disappointment. To discuss something with someone who assumes that their opinion is not just right, but prima facie more important that your opinion is not discussing; it's ramming your head against a brick wall. The one thing that would usually irritate someone of this ilk the most was when I would suggest that we would soon not be facing overpopulation, but underpopulation.
The look on each of their faces. Wow. Give me just a moment.
"How can you even suggest that? Aren't you aware of all the people in the world who live on less than a dollar a day and the women in underdeveloped countries who don't have access to contraception?"
And so on and so forth. To which I would always reply, if the world was getting overpopulated, then wages indexed to inflation would be falling. In other words, the more people there are, the less the value of everyone's service because there are so many more of them. Yet wages continue to rise across the world, primarily because people, highly trained, knowledgable, capable people and people to work in every sector of the market, are highly in demand. We are facing a catastrophe of epic proportions, we are facing underpopulation.
That would usually end the conversation, as they would declare me an fanatical conservative evangelical unfit to exist in the postmodern world. Never mind that I am neither fanatical, conservative or evangelical. But now Stanley Kurtz, research fellow at the Hoover Institute, has confirmed what Julian Simon and other's predicted a long time ago--that all of the industrialized world and soon the developing world will all be facing demographic changes that the world has never before faced.
What's the lesson here? We do not and will never be at an information zenith where we are aware of everything that is going around us and our impact and effect upon everything. In other words we will always be forced to re-evaluate our positions. Ideology only makes that process that much harder, because it forces into a rigorous set of beliefs that cannot be changed. The Reactionary Left, or as I prefer to call them, the Demagogue Democrats, and especially the environmental wing, will be hard pressed to accept such notions without actually being excited. Finally they say, fewer people. I say the more people the better--the more people we have working on our problems, even if some of our problems are caused by having more people, the better off humanity will be in the long term. A growing population is a dynamic population--a shrinking population is a doomed one.

so little time....

had to get up early, well, early for me that is (11ish is still quite early) and run over to another Taco-Mac and drop off a press kit. Every monthly gig is another monthly gig is another step towards becoming a completely unproductive member of society. If only everything was this easy. Now I've got to run and teach a few classes and begin organizing our end of the month EXTRAVAGANZA, which is really just a bunch of our friends playing with us at Taco-Mac on the river. You can get a complete list of my band's shows here.

The blogosphere's reaction to the SOTU is almost typical. Some like it, some hate it, some blog about it, other attempt to apply critical theory to Bush's mode of speech and argue that he is the first postmodern man because he actually says nothing while he talks. But only those who actually think postmodernism and deconstructionism are good things. I actually completely forgot about it. I was putting press kits together and researching playing colleges (apparently they pay pretty well) and it just completely slipped my mind. But I read that Bobby Jindal and a few other brave Congresspeople had died their fingers purple. My hat is off to Representative Jindal. If I had lived in Louisiana, I would have voted for you.

Instapundit was of course all over the round-up on the SOTU. Just keep scrolling. I often find that when reading Instapundit I often missed some very important things just because Glenn seems to be the uberposter. Amazing. Now if I could only figure out how to link to things on a page instead of making you scroll down to find what I was talking about....

refocusing our energies

Now that the election in Iraq has concluded and the arduous process of counting the ballots continues, it is time for a general re-evaluation of what we are facing and how best to combat the enemies that face us. The Wahhibi movement that has infected modern day Islam is not an honest heir to the proud intellectual achievements of prevous Islamic civilizations. It is important to remember, while Europe was comatose, the great Islamic civilization of the 9th, 10th, 11th and even 12th centuries were providing us with many great insights and advancements, including ones in medicine, astronomy, algebra, and many others that right now I just can't put my finger on and don't want to Google. I am simultaneously blogging about the disease of Wahhibism while I'm working on my band's website, which you can check out here. It's not much, but it's better than it was. I'll be back. Have to go read these two articles that my dad sent me so that I can better understand Salafism and Wahhibism. To defeat the enemy, one must understand the enemy.

another dixie chicks moment

ah, eason jordan. the insanity never ends. always seem to me that when some self-important twit has to run off to some meeting of self-important people and say nasty things about the US military just to get a rise out of people, we ought to be able to revoke their citizenship. If you can't say what you want to say here in America, don't go run off to another country and say it there. It's ridiculous, it's preposterous, it's disgusting, and more importantly, it only damages their credibility even more. The situation is precisely the same as Rathergate. The more the MSM believes in their own infallibility, the more that they'll screw up, and the better off the rest of us will be. There is an easy way to deflate the power of the MSM--turn of the TV.

how to accelerate the media reformation

Hugh Hewitt is currently pondering the Eason Jordan "event" that happened apparently on CNN a few days ago. One of the things that I think is the best way to respond to this situation is to let them talk. The more they open their mouths, the more damage they do. What was I read on Drudge a few days, maybe weeks (information in the blogosphere is geometric; one day you start reading and then you realize it already two weeks later) that CNN and MSNBC's decline almost precisely matched Fox's net increase over the past five years? Essentially, the MSM have become the so called "cool" kids at school. They only hang out with each other, and their criteria for hanging out with each other is entirely superficial and subjective. They somehow manage to dominate the gossip landscape, even though most of the people talking about what the "cool" kids were doing either don't know the "cool" kids or only know them from the occassional foray into their rather exclusive clique. In other words, they have become tools. And what's really funny about this is that they don't know that they are tools. They still think they're cool, that everyone wants to be around them at the same time that they make their exclusivity all the more pronounced. Ah, to realize that life really is a John Hughes film. Fantasique!

to finally openly reflect

so much has happened in the past four years that often it's difficult to put into perspective. on the one hand, I can hardly think back to the days right before September 11th. It's as if my mind has placed those days in the same category as virtually all of my childhood--the time before anything really mattered. The time when really, as far as the eye could see, there was nothing that would challenge Fukyama's prediction that we had reached the end of history. That representative government, the rule of law and market economies had solved most of the problems that had plagued mankind since the first people thought it was a good idea to chop down a bunch of wheat they had planted a few months prior and wandered in to harvest it. The problems of government really boil down to one simple idea: power cannot be concentrated in the hands of the few, it must instead be dispersed, decentralized throughout society so that everyone within that civilization has the opportunity to achieve. The guarantee of achievement is one that authoritarian civilizations provide plenty of, so long as you participate in the brutal subjugation of your fellow citizens. Of course, that doesn't guarantee that one day you yourself might be purged, feared because you had achieved so much and had so many admirers that you were a threat to the ubercitizen in charge of it all.
But like childhood, eventually we must all grow up. So has the United States been forced to grow up, grow up quite a bit from our preconceived notion that the end had finally come. That finally everyone else just wanted to be left alone and to do with their lives what they willed. The very idea that we, and virtually we alone (not to discount our many allies in Dubya's "coalition of the willing" but in purely nominal terms, we're doing the heavy lifting") would be forced into becoming the Martin Luther of the Muslim world, well, let's just say it's a little crazier than one German monk starting the Reformation that would lead to the creation of modern nation-state as it is today. One glaring difference between the modern world, and the world of pre-Reformation Europe is that the axis of power between religion and state has been broken. The West has now enjoyed nearly three full centuries of separation, and to that degree, one of the major power axes first formed in civilization, the union of strong man and witch doctor, no longer exists. That's a pretty fundamental shift in the context of history. But the Muslim world has never had a Reformation. Nor would a Reformation really work within the context of Islam. It's a diverse and diffuse religion, with various sects in which their is no central political power, like the Holy Roman Catholic Church. There is no Church to Reform, but their certainly are mosques to reform.
The Muslim world, for the most part, is still beholden to the flawed concept that faith must have a stranglehold on the state in order to ensure God's will is carried out here on our little blue planet. Thus, this conflict, is indeed a fight not against terrorism, it is a fight to secularize the Muslim world. The global terror network realizes this. They realize that when the union of mosque and state is broken in the Muslim world, their power will have evaporated. "Blah! Islam is a fundamentally different religion from Christianity. For Muslims, the Koran is the law." Well, you know for serious Christians, the Bible is the law, too. But serious Christians in Western civilization also know that they can't go out and enforce the law that they believe in upon believe who don't believe it. What Muslims of genuine and virtuous faith must realize, is that they cannot force their faith upon others. To do so is a violation of a fundamental human right. People must be free to choose their own faith, or no faith at all, and must be free to do so without intervention from state backed religious instituions, of whatever faith they may be.
This is the stuff that someday, a future Tom Hanks and Steve Spielberg will make a feature series like Band of Brothers and our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will all be amazed at what we accomplished simply by planting the seed of rebirth in the birthplace of human civilization. The only thing they should have done differently, was have every Iraqi dip their middle fingers in that indelible ink. That way they could have given every naysayer, every person in blue-state america that had to go to therapy because of the election, every complacent European sitting with their welfare check and their doctor's office appointment nine months from now, every terrorist, they could have given all of those and more, the finger.

ah the ease

just updated my profile
case anyone cares

the more things change

well, i had this wonderful, exceptionally long post prepared last night, when i lost my internet connection, and then bang. actually it was more like BANG, which i had to read again after i read it the first time. but then i couldn't believe THIS either, but i would reread it again. and again, and then just hope, that possibly, perhaps the people in this country who up to this point had dedicated the past four years of their lives to wishing the Al Gore had been elected President might actually begin to respect Dubya....maybe?