the only solution to remaining the global hegemon...

Even though things are going better across most of the planet, it is much more likely that things will get worse before they get better overall. The continuing transition of China and India from planned economies to market economies will be very difficult--their rising demand will increase the prices of many commodities, which will of course spur the development of more efficient means of producing and or obtaining those resources. One of the best ways to spur innovation is to create pressure necessary for the resolution of either general or specific scarcity. As the chronically underdeveloped world begins to adopt real market economies and representative governments, we can be assured that they too will gobble up resources as quickly as they can produced, and, at the same time and that consequently, over the short term, prices across the board will probably increase. But, we must keep in mind, that price for all commodities have fallen relative to inflation over time, and the same will hold true for the long term in any situation. This isn't really what I had planned on talking about, but it sort of leads into my real topic of concern: colonization.
The United States has been an expansionist nation since its inception. One of the driving ideas behind America is still "manifest destiny", whether or not it is applied to the concept of filling up a continent or in our current top dog position in the international pecking order. That top spot will not simply maintain itself though. There always people and nations vying to reduce, mitigate or end our global domination, and I for one, am not in favor of having any nation but my own be in charge, especially when faced with the other possibilities. China, forget about it. Russia, really forget about it. Brazil? I mean, come on. The European Disunion? Please, somebody stop me. So for everyone out there who complains about the little things that don't really in the long run matter, let's just put the rest of the world in perspective. Sure, Europe is a nice to visit, even live, so long as you don't have to work for the country in which you're living, unless it's one of the Eastern Europeans who have wisely adopted such long-run ideas as the flat tax and their growing opposition to the draconian regulation and idiotic structure of the European Union. Would anyone in the West want to live in what is about to become the most polluted nation in the world, namely China, and a terrible male/female demographic relationship in my age group, with I think four males to every one female. Of course, that's been a chronic historical problem for China, and probably one of the real reasons why Chinese society was never able to expand its zone of influence beyond what is now and what has always been China. The point is that there isn't another nation-state in the world that is as good as ours is, and there probably never will be again. So, the answer is obvious: instead of trying to teach through example and through painful lesson when necessary, we should get the fudge out. And right now, at this moment in time, no other nation or group of nations has the capability to go out and colonize as much of the Solar System as we can before anyone else does. Think of the headstart it will give us in terms of future domination of the Solar System. We can follow the example of our forebears and simply remember how the Constitution instructs in adding new territories and states. Before the Chinese can even get a man on the moon we could have several hundred, no, several thousand people LIVING on the moon. Before the European Space Agency can send three sprite young Euroadultkids to visit Mars, we could have a whole underground town and vast industrial projects already belching carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Before Brazil starts scouting the asteroid belt for mineral desposits we could already have claimed all of them. Right now we have the opportunity to do what we didn't do in 1945--create the necessary conditions for our continued and expanded dominance of the planet. In 1945 we could have smashed both the Russian and the Chinese into submission and began the process of continuing Manifest Destiny by annexing Japan, Germany, and all the islands and areas that we "liberated" from the Axis powers. Then we could have begun the process of Americanizing first as territories and then, eventually, as states within the Union. Ah, but you say that's no better than the brutish Romans--well, you know what, I'm convinced that the ingratitude of most of the people that we liberated in the past century is because they're upset that we didn't just make them full Americans instead of just treating them to our media, fashion, technological, scientific and every other thing that America leads the world in.
QUICK SUBSCRIPT: I'm sure that there are other people in the world who feel as passionately about their nation-state as I do about mine. But no other nation-state is in the position of the United States. What would it take to begin colonizing the moon, say tomorrow? How much would it cost? Does cost really matter when you're talking about expanding the range of human settlement and influence. If we really are life engineered to bring order to chaos then we should view such adversity with great enjoyment; indeed, such adversity is exactly what challenges us. How many new technologies will the initial colonization of the Moon and Mars require that we can't even imagine right now? How many of those technologies would have an impact upon life here on Earth? And don't you think that the rest of the world will begin to view with awe and wonder at the power, scope, magnitude and immensity of the United States?
Since we don't have a flux capacitor and we don't have Doc Emmett Brown sitting right here next to me working on it, we can't go back and convince Patton to go about forcing a conflict between the Soviet Union and us in a more subtle manner, we need to work from where we are now, which is the only nation with the resources to begin space colonization right now. Hell, if we wanted to, we could start building an intergenerational ship that could begin searching for habitable planets in our neighboring star systems. There's nothing preventing us from constructing such a vessel. There's nothing preventing us from assembling producting facilities at the various Lagrange points that could construct a ship in orbit; what would it need? Ten nuclear reactors, maybe a few more? Be a kilometer long and have a crew compliment of five hundred couples, hyrdoponics, and other renewable resources onboard for consumption? We can build massive stone structures without the use of any technology thousands of years ago, but we can't have a little fortitude now and face facts: if we want the human race to survive, we have to get off this planet. Every 62 million years or so, massive extinctions happen across the planet. The most likely explanation is that as the Solar System orbits the galaxy, it doesn't do so in a straight line, rather, the Solar System dips up and down like a sine wave, as it descends into the denser region of the galaxy, the possibility that our Solar System and other systems will come into close contact are much higher. Think of this way: a massive ring of debris called the Kuiper Belt and, even further out, the Oort Cloud, orbit our Sun. Similar debris rings probably surround other star systems as well, meaning that when two star systems come into close contact, the larger star's gravity will pull the material that surrounds the smaller star toward it, and since our star is not a very large star when compared to the rest of the galaxy, we are almost always on the receiving end of what is essentially a slingshot. As the material in the Oort Cloud and the Kuiper belt are pulled towards the more intense gravitional attraction, they are also pulled away from our Sun--this is all fine and good until the Solar System begins it's thirty some odd million year exit to where we are essentially right now, on the outer edge of the galaxy, at which point the material will retract and then be shot into the inner Solar System. Really, though, we've been quite lucky--most of the incoming material is probably absorbed by Jupiter and the other gas giants, but, it only takes one object of enough size to devastate our little planet. And it's been more than sixty-two million years since the last mass extinction took place, so, really, we're due for one any minute now. The sooner we get at least some people off the planet, the sooner we will be closer to guaranteeing that somewhere, some people will always survive. And that should be the long term goal: the survival and eventually, the dominance of human across not just the planet, not just the Solar System, not just the galaxy, but across the known universe.
The federal government could begin fostering this process by offering colonists favorable incentives, like paying no federal income taxes for your first ten years of colonization or something along those lines. It could accelerate private initiatives by constructing space ports across the country and by creating flight regulations for space flight and colonization procedures and such. It should help create a network of fuel stations and the basics of life, such as utility lines from main government bases that could serve as the hub while the outlying settlements would the spokes, from which new settlements could grow.
The sooner we start, the sooner we can expand to other planets, and the sooner we can get out of this Solar System and find a planet that we can call New America and dispense with bogus international relations and other formalities that are really just crap.
Well, gotta move tomorrow, so, this is Ripley, signing off.

advocacy versus possibility

A further explanation on my thoughts on people's freedom of association: custom is often confused with what's "moral". It's customary to say "hello" to someone, or "excuse me", or "thank you" or any of the other nicecities that constitute civilized life. It's customary that a man ask a woman to marry him, and it's customary in Western civilization that one man and one woman marry and enjoy all the benefits of such a relationship, whether they be physical or economic or social or procreative--now, we shouldn't just toss customs out the window, nor should we not recognize that the social benefits of one man to woman help in the long term demographic challenges that all Western nations face--but the kind of association that I'm envisioning is a competing field of choices for people--think back to the days of the Western frontier, and specifically, to the recent allegations concerning Lincoln's "homosexuality." Lincoln lived in what was essentially still a frontier, Illinois, and he resided in a room with two other men who rented the space just as he did--they shared the room because of necessity and sometimes were forced to share beds. The primary reason for this was economic--it was cheaper to just rent the room or the bed than an entire room to yoursel or, even more unimaginable, an entire house to yourself, even for a young lawyer like Lincoln. My point is that back then such informal group associations happened all the time, and they happened for the mutual benefit of all parties involved. Today it is even more applicable, as all the people that I know who are in their twenties and are unmarried are not "with" someone live with roommates. Imagine if those people could form a "group marriage" that was economic in nature, not intimate. Together those people could purchase health and car insurance cheaper, pay their taxes together, and pool their resources in a legal, formal matter that demanded, no required responsibilites from all parties. A person would essentially buy their way into such an arrangement and then be paid their investment upon their departure. Such associations would enable people to overcome the collapse of the nuclear family and it's safety net while at the same time reducing further government intrusions into their affairs by giving them more choices because of their combined purchasing power and combined assets. Now this is only one such situation--if the state of Utah were to recognize polygamy as a legitimate form of marriage, I say go for it. One woman is too much work for me right, I can't possibly imagine any rational man choosing to have to deal with more than one by himself, but some people might wish to form polyamarous marriages with multiple partners or simply a group marriage between individual couples. Who knows? The point is that we cannot prohibit free association--it's the First Amendment to the Constitution for crying out loud! And just one other point: it was customary for thousands upon thousands of years that some people be held in servitude and be forced to perform manual labor for those held them as slaves. Slavery was a global institution whose roots reach back as far as the dawn of civilization itself, indeed customary practice was argued to be moral by Southern proponents of slavery. Slavery was supposed to help bring the souls of the heathen Africans closer to the light of Christianity, and most of them argued this position seriously, even so much as using the Bible as evidence! But we ought to be thankful that we abolished this odious insitution and that we fought for more than a century to help bring the descendants of slaves and other minorities full partners in the American expedition and allow them every opportunity to succeed. I'm not suggesting that marriage is an odious institution--far from it, marriage is the binding clue of civilization--the only problem is that as it stands now, marriage has become more like the cheap grocery store brand tape that doesn't really work and you can never quite get it to tear right or stick to--and there's no going back to the magical world of yesterday or any sense in trying to stand in front of history and yell "halt!" because it won't work. The industrial revolution began the process of destroying the nuclear family, and the information revolution has dug the hole--there's nothing really left to do but accept it and move on, and again, adopt my federalist approach by amending the Constitution to allow the states to define marriage for themselves while simultaneously not forcing any state to recognize another state's marriage license. Gotta go pack up for a show.

a note on the use of sci-fi as "evidence"

I personally, and this is just me personally, I feel that sci-fi has been the only field of fiction to really challenge our notions of what today is and how we live and what horrors await us--such as the Singularity, the end of death, the colonization of the Solar System and the galaxy (not horrors because they will be terrible, but horrors because are unprepared and are not ready to face facts--we are life engineered to bring order to chaos--the "Bene Gesserit" view from Frank Herbert's Dune series) . Heinlein was the first to see that today's marriage customs are simply not going to cut it. There are simply too many people out there wanting to live their lives as they want to and to force them to not do so is both against our tradition of individualism and self-governance but also goes against common sense. Using force to prevent even a small group of consenting adults from doing what they wish with their bodies, minds, and from how they wish to contractually arrange themselves will only result in trouble, trouble, trouble. Look at what sixties years of the "drug war" have reaped. A narco-terrorist proto state in Columbia, Afghanistan which has but two exports, opium and hashish, a global narco-terrorist network that is filthy rich and shadowy and has its tendrils into who knows how many developing nations governments and is pretty much singlehandedly responsible for most of the global corruption, an underground economy in the United States estimated at over a trillion dollars, and the list goes on and on and on. What a terrible waste of resources, time, manpower, intelligence, and money. And look at the "marriage" debate. The evangelicals are praying hard that these are indeed the end times while the pinkoleft thinks that the evangelicals are nuts for thinking that end times are here and this is just a progression towards a more fair, more just system. What good can ever come of a situation when two groups not only vicersally despise each other but are unable to even talk to each other. Naturally, this is mostly the fault of the pinkoleft--the only speak their language, while the evangelicals, libertarians, conservatives and others on the right were forced for many years to learn how to speak Leftspeak so as to survive in polite society. We're bilingual, while they're not, which somebody point out on the Corner the other day. Let people associate how they want and don't interfere--it's just not a good idea.

End of life versus the end of death

The Schiavo catastrophe was everyone in a hissy fit, and rightly so. A woman is starving to death and the executive and legislative branches of the federal government and of the Florida state government are powerless to do anything because the fact of the matter is that Terry Schiavo's husband is the only person who can make the decision that he made. Now, we can disagree with it, we can despise it, we can scoff at it, we can admire it, we can come to any conclusion that we want to about what's going--the federal government should never have so ineptly intervened--the issue shouldn't be broadcast all over the news--yadda yadda yadda--but the fact remains that Terry Schiavo will probably die today, and if not today, sometime in the next few days. She will die, but life will continue, minus one, and about eighty thousand other people, too. For the discussion that would have to ensue were it not for the already written one by John Podheretz, but the basic breakdown is between people who view human beings as individual miracles and people who view human beings as simply human beings, a "wonder, not a miracle." Now, the divide between these two opposing views seems cavernous--a basic ideological disagreement about how we should define humanity, and it's a question that is never going to be answered, settled or agreed upon. But it isn't something that is just going to go away, indeed, the questions that arise between such differences of opinion are only amplified by the media and the attention that such cases get. EJ Dione points out that:

There are countless decisions made every week when a family member removes someone they love from life support. Just over a week ago, a 5 1/2-month-old baby named Sun Hudson died after doctors at Texas Children's Hospital removed the breathing tube that had kept him alive. It was removed over his mother's opposition under the provisions of the 1999 Texas Advance Directives Act signed by then-Gov. George W. Bush.

The Schiavo case is not the only case, it's just the one that seems to have gathered all the momentum. Basically it was time to have this debate, and no one was really prepared for the gravity of the emotions felt across the spectrum. There is only one pragmatic answer to this quandry--require everyone by law to have a living will. There would never be a question then of what to do, the individual would have already made that decision. If Terry Schiavo had done so, we wouldn't be having this national conversation, the executive and legislative branches wouldn't have made asses out of theirselves and we wouldn't have a media circus focus on what is truly a pitiable situation. We aren't involved in the situation and thus shouldn't draw conclusions based on an afternoon of Google research into Michael Schiavo--or into Terry's parents behavior, or into Terry herself and the eating disorder that led to her heart stopping for fifteen seconds. We simply cannot pass judgment upon a situation that we aren't involved in. But we can learn from it, and one of the first things that we can learn is that everyone should have a living will. The second is that really, marriage as it has been defined up to this point has reached a breaking point. Were Michael Schiavo not the only person who could legally speak for his wife's wishes, than in all probability, she would still be blissfully unaware of the world and happy as a pea in pod. Were Michael Schiavo not economically motivated, in other words, were his assets and monies not also his wife's, and vice versa, then he probably would have divorced her a long time ago and allowed her parents to take care of her. It has become blatanly apparent that the tens of thousands of year old institution of marriage, an institution that probably arose as one of the first pillars of nomadic and primitive agricultural societies, a solution that was fairly market based in its innovativeness--one man, one woman and that's it--no longer serves socieities interests fully. Now I'm not saying that people should be forced into accepting some radical changes to how marriage is viewed, i.e., by allowing members of one gender to marry each other, but clearly, society has changed and we cannot ignore that. We cannot just hope that it will go away, because if we ignore a problem, and sweep it under the rug, sooner or later it becomes the elephant in the living room. I think that the federal government should pass a constitutional amendment to the Constitution concerning marriage, but it should read as such:

1. Marriage, civil unions, group associations and such shall be defined by the states

2. No state shall be forced to recognize another state's marriage, civil union, or group association license.

We can talk about whether or not there should be any other planks to this amendment can be debated, but essentially, by allowing the states to decide how they want to deal with marriage, we can allow the miracle of federalism to work its magic. Thus, the Southern states could all define marriage as they wanted to, ignoring civil unions and group marriages (see Robert Heinlein, especially The Cat who could walk through walls and Time Enough for Love) while simultaneously recognizing the marriages from states that follow similar rules, while the rest of the country could define marriage, civil unions, etc., as they wanted to, and everyone would be happy. Interestingly enough, Heinlein tackled both the modern problem of marriage and the modern conundrum of life extension at the same time. The main character in Time Enough for Love is a mutant who has lived for two thousand years and is close to death at the beginning of the novel when through regeneration techniques he is revived and ends up living pretty much as long as he wants to. Aubrey de Grey, who I admit, looks more like he belonged during the Civil War period with that beard, has probably done more work in a synthesis of what needs to be done to finish off the greatest disease of all--aging. I may have to dig for it, but Glenn Reynolds said something last something while talking about taking his grandmother to a hospice for physical therapy after she had hip replacement surgery--all he could think was that once all of the people in that hospice had been healthy, vital, people, and now, they needed others help. But the thing is that, a century ago, everyone pretty much looked like that when they reached their forties or fifties, and few lived beyond that age. And so on and so forth back into the dawn of human history--more people have been living longer than ever before--sure, a few of the people who enjoyed all that life had to offer at any point in history were more likely to live toward the end of our "natural" lifespan--but now we have thrown natural lifespan out the window and can't close it either. We are almost required by the dictates of science and to marvel at our ingenuity to conquer physical death, and I certainly think that we ought to take the possibility of extending our lives by a hundred, five hundred, a millenium, an aeon, an epoch, very seriously because the one thing that the human race has never had are truly long term thinkers and planners. And by long term I mean many, many thousands of years. Now, there are some logistical problems with all of this, the most important of course that if people do live longer, than what about the younger people, what about each new generation, will there be an inclination to no longer procreate, and instead simply tinker with our DNA individually instead of throwing caution to the wind and practice good old fashioned sperm to egg mix and match? What will happen to people who live for hundreds of years? Will they lose something of their humanity because they are no longer really mortal? I think that yes, something of their, and hopefully my humanity will be lost, and we will finally be able to begin to escape not only this tiny protective shell, the Earth, but also, our even tinier and less protected shells our bodies and define our own existence without being defined by it. And that's really the greatest tragedy for Terry Schiavo--she no longer has the ability to define her existence--she is defined by it and thus trapped by, trapped by the conventions of society and the cruelty of the law and of our marriage custom and now, because she cannot feed herself, she is starving to death, a death that no criminal would ever be sentenced to, a death that is probably the most terrible death imaginable, a death with an empty stomach and a confused mind, a death that serves no purpose but to remind us of the urgency to bring about the end of death.

and now to finish...

Here's that original again--this month has been crazy, what with many practices with potential new drummers and many shows and many shows yet to come. continued from the second paragraph:

Measured by Hobbes's test, the superpower looks less super.

Scroll down to read the first part of this...you'll see where it is. I refer to it as the original. But, as my answer to the end of the second paragraph, demonstrates, we are clearly seeing some results--so the superpower doesn't look less super, it's looks like it could kick your ass.

Its military has been stretched to the breaking point by the occupation of a single weak country, Iraq.

Now I know that this might sound a little pedantic, but what exactly is the breaking point? I mean, is there a definitive point at which this author can define for us when the US military has broken, and what exactly would that breaking look like? Last time I checked pretty much everybody but either the Air Force or the Marines didn't make their recruitment goals and that was the first time in many, many years. And they weren't off by very much. And to goad the issue by calling Iraq a single weak country is just unnecessary. That's the whole point really--that the enemy that we're facing is so radically different that we cannot make the mistake of calling them weak, even though inherently they are, we must never underestimate them, but instead, as all those Lieutenants returning from Iraq to the US and then returning to Iraq as Captains, we must learn from them. As I've said before, there are more of our platoon/company/brigade leaders who are returning to the field of combat than theirs are, and the longer time goes on the fewer of their mid-echelon leaders will remain, and the more of ours will have progressed up through the ranks, meaning that the lessons of this conflict will not be lost upon the US military. One thing America hates is losing, and one thing the US military hates is the idea of losing. So, right there, see ya.

Its economy is held hostage by Himalayas of external debt, much of it in the hands of a strategic rival, China, holder of nearly $200 billion in Treasury bills. Its domestic debt, caused in part by the war expenditures, also towers to the skies.

I've been meaning to do a huge long post on the nonsensical "Current Account Deficit" for along time and the nonsensical international currency system for a long time, so here goes. The first thing that we have to recognize that foreign investment is not a debt--foreigners invest their money in America because they want to earn more than they could anywhere else. We've got the best infrastructure, the most highly trained adaptable workforce in the world, and one of the world freest economies. So that aside, what precisely is external debt? External debt would have to be then the Treasury securities, bonds, T-bills, and other strange quirks of the post Bretton Woods currency regime. And the fact that China holds $200 billion in Treasury bills, bills that say that the US government guarantees the value of the dollar over the course of a given period and will reward that investment with interest of its own. The further fact that most of the "debt" that we have financed by allowing foreign governments and even individuals to purchase dollars as if they were at a futures market should bely the insanity of the current situation. The East Asian economies need the United States to consume from their massively export driven economies but the US can only do so if the dollar remains relatively strong and as long as the East Asian governments purchase dollars--conversely, many East Asian economies have pegged their value to the dollar, thus preventing the paradoxical free floating currency trading regimes that exist say between the dollar and the euro and any other currency in the world which is not pegged directly to the value of the dollar--but the dollar itself is not pegged to anything, which means that a great majority of the worlds currencies are nonsense. That's why the value of the euro has risen so dramatically despite no real economic reason for it's doing so. If the values are accurate, than it means that anywhere in Europe, the value of a given hour of work has suddenly become, by default, more efficient than an hour of work here, even though we know that productivity rates in America has been rising dramatically while advancing pathetically in Europe. The final and further trouble is the way that the Current Account Deficit is calculated. Everything coming is counted as an import. But not everything going out is counted as an export. This means that every American company that has production facilities abroad and that sends products to the US has those counted as imports. But this also means that the vast financial services sector is not counted as an export, even though we provide a huge amount of such services worldwide. So the entire program is poppycock because trade is never a win-lose situation--it can only be so if a person either received inaccurate information about the trade or were purposefull deceived--but otherwise, trade is a win-win situation. When you go to the store you don't want to pay more than you have to, and if you can find it cheaper somewhere else you will. The store doesn't want you to leave to go somewhere else, and so you both meet at the margin, voila, the price system. The price system does not suddenly disappear because the size of the trades increase--that's my greatest beef with economics, is the illusion of micro/macro differences--there are no micro/macro differences. Macroeconomic decisions are simply aggregates of many microeconomic ones, but that's for another post, another time. But what does all this mean, and why is not a sign of weakness? Many people point out that no country has ever been a debtor and a superpower--but the world depends on the dollar for growth to continue--the dollar is now for all intensive purposes gold--we've simply created a new, arbitrary currency that has replaced gold as the gold standard. For the world to change to another currency or to another system of currency trading would in the short term be disastrous and in the long term bleak. The East Asian economies will continue to finance the debt as long as we continue to buy their goods and they our services and media and everything else that we make that everyone seems to forget about. Oh, and finally, the historic levels of the federal budget deficit as a percentage of GDP are right about where they've been for the past sixty years or so, right around 4.5%, so, that's all poppycock too.

The United States has dramatically failed to make progress in its main declared foreign policy objective, the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction:

I had to break this sentence into its constituent phrases because something annoys me about it. One of our main "declared foreign policy objectives" are the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The nonproliferation. Not the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The phrasing is in insidious. By focusing on the negative aspect of the policy, the writer is able to convey a sense of the improbability of proliferation. After all, it's a NON. I always thought that one of our main foreign policy objectives was to STOP the proliferation of WMD, not nonproliferation. Do you not see how clever the Left is with language? Clever, clever, clever...

While searching fruitlessly for nuclear programs in Iraq, where they did not exist, it temporized with North Korea, where they apparently do exist, and now it seems at a loss for a policy that will stop Iran from taking the same path. The President has just announced that the "end of tyranny" is his goal, but in his first term the global democracy movement suffered its greatest setback since the cold war -- Russia's slide toward authoritarianism.

Ah, the belief in total information awareness. Our searches in Iraq were not "fruitless" nor is it surprising, nor should it be unbelievable that in all the available time to Saddam that he didn't some exporting of his own to cover up anything that he might still have had tucked away, and if he didn't, oh well. It's so easy to say that because we didn't attack North Korea that we don't tangle with nations that have nuclear weapons, when we didn't attack North Korea ever since the Korean war! The situation on the Korean peninsula is a completely different one, and while the nuclear component is important, it is not he all important one, i.e., that North Korea has ten of thousands of artillery pieces within firing distance of Seoul. That pretty much makes a pre-emptive attack highly, highly, highly unlikely. The South Koreans aren't interested, and probably would require some mild cajoling even if they were attacked by the North Koreans. As for the Iranians, there is no good answer but leasing the Israelis a few B-2's for the night and letting them take care of it. Russia's slide toward authoritarianism? I didn't realize that anyone ever got off the authority bus in Russia, and don't start saying that before Putin things were hunky-dorey. Besides, every conflict has setbacks and reversals--the important is perserverance, not this trite.

The shaky foundations of America's power were on display in the President's recent travels

What this sentences should have read was "the collapsing foundations of European power were on display in the US Presidents recent travels."

Shortly before Bush landed in Brussels, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany quietly but firmly repudiated the President's militarized, US-centered approach to world affairs. NATO, he heretically announced, should no longer be "the primary venue" of the Atlantic relationship. Did that mean that Europe would continue to take direction from Washington through some other venue? Hardly: He was, he said, formulating German policy "in Europe, for Europe and from Europe." The superpower's penchant for military action was also rejected. The chancellor said, "Challenges lie today beyond the North Atlantic Alliance's former zone of mutual assistance. And they do not primarily require military responses."

Translation: we know that we can't defend ourselves any longer and aren't a threat to anyone or anything because we just want to conduct our dirigiste business and wait until we're a nation of seniors all on permanent vacation. Oh, and, we don't want to participate really in NATO anymore because we know we can't even help you because we don't have the technology to help. Yes, those challenges that require the relatively easy modern ability of air travel, which every NATO member but the UK is dependent upon the US for. Yes, yes....

Schröder was standing on solid ground at home. A poll in the German newspaper Die Welt revealed that "Vladimir Putin is seen as more trustworthy than George W. Bush, France as a more important partner for German foreign and security policy than the United States. Closer harmonization of German foreign policy with America is not wanted, either."

Our relationship with FrancoGermaniaBeneluxSpain is like an adult to a poorly behaved, ill mannered young adolescent. What they need and what we never really gave them was a good collective spanking. At a certain point though, you have to let the adolescent make their own mistakes, or they will never learn from them. Look at how we tried to educate the FrancoGermanianBeneluxiansSpanish about how to conduct civil society and look what it got us. This hogwash. As faras I'm concerned the position of FrancoGermaniaBeneluxSpain becomes only more and more irrelevant as each day goes by.

Meanwhile, offstage, in an apparent extension of constitution-building at home, Europe was taking the lead in building cooperative global instruments, including the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and the International Criminal Court.

This blind and ignorant belief that all international treaties and "cooperative global instruments" are all good and are all beneficial and are the panacea to all our of problems is sickening. Yes, Europe has taken the lead in forcing their economies into permanent stagnation, their citizens at the whims of foreign judges, and their futures on a document that is so complex it's not a Constitution, it's an OSHA pamphlet. Yeah, doing real well.

No sooner had the President arrived in Europe than an economic trapdoor seemed briefly to open beneath his feet when the South Korean Central Bank stated that it intended to move some of its holdings from the dollar to other currencies, causing a 174-point drop in the Dow Jones average. The next day, the bank disavowed its report and the dollar recovered, but not before the fragility of America's economic position in the world had been revealed.

And why did the South Korean Central Bank change its "intentions"? Because they realized, "haha" if the Americans don't buy our worthless pieces of plastic then who well? Again, see the illogic of the current international currency regime above.

In an atmosphere of programmed smiles and brittle celebrations, the presidential dinners and toasts compensated for local public sentiment rather than reflecting it. The less popular Bush was in a given country, it seemed, the jollier the summit meeting. Even in little Slovakia, where the festivities seemed more spontaneous than elsewhere, an opinion poll showed that a majority believed that the United States, not Russia, was the most worrisome threat to democracy.

How much more cynical can you get? Programmed smiles? Brittle celebrations? And for the record, no respectable journalist or writer should ever use public opinion polls to validate an argument. Ever. They are simply the most inaccurate things around. And they should be ignored.

In his meeting with Putin, Bush seemed almost obsequious, repeatedly referring chummily to an unresponding, scowling Putin (it's an expression that settles naturally on his face) as "my friend Vladimir." As for democracy in Russia, the man who would "end tyranny" everywhere in the world could only muster, "I was able to share my concerns about Russia's commitment in fulfilling these universal principles."

Is it a common trait of all reactionaries (remember the Left is now the reactionary force in the world, and the Right is now the progressive force) to be unable to understand strategery? You do what you can and you do your best trying and if all else fails, try something else. In just one century, the majority of the world has gone from living in repressive, tyrannical, despotic regimes, to for the first time in human history, a majority of people now live in relatively free societies that allow their citizens to do pretty much what the wish. And you know, so what Bush doesn't have the foggiest idea how to have a press conference or what to call Putin--what's important is that Bush was able to say to Putin what he wanted and to let him know that there will be consequences in the future. What's wrong with that? The point: understanding strategy means knowing when to give a little, and when to push hard.

A portrait of a peculiar relationship with Europe emerged. To Bush's Don Quixote, tilting, at God's command, against imagined evils, Europe played Sancho Panza, humoring the Knight Errant but mocking him behind his back. Or perhaps it was more like that other great inverted relationship between master and servant, P.G. Wodehouse's upper-class twit Bertie Wooster and his sagacious, potent butler Jeeves, who contrives to get Wooster out of his ceaseless ridiculous scrapes in high society. The difference is that Europe's rescue is only feigned. Yes, France will help in Iraq -- with one officer, who will stay at NATO headquarters in Europe.

Awwww. How cute. An allusion. And the differences is that first of all, just like the 101st Airborne Division trapped in Bastogne in the winter of 1944, we don't need to be rescued, and, the Europeans are in no position to go rescuing anyone. That would be the equivalent of sending a nonswimmer to save a drowning bear. Who needs France?

In history, the rise of imperial pretenders has usually led to military alliances against them. Such was the case, for instance, when a previous imperial republic, Napoleon's France, conquered most of Europe but then was defeated by an oddly assorted alliance of Britain, Russia and Austria-Hungary

Well, that nature, it abhors a vacuum. But, what's an imperial pretender, and didn't alliances form against empires as well? A previous imperial republic? Is this guy implying that we're an imperial republic? What the hell is an imperial republic? Napoleon conquered most of Europe using conscripts he acquired in each of the nations he conquered as he went and then was destroyed by everyone who was left standing, not an odd alliance. The British and the Russians has been on cordial terms for a long time, and the last thing the AustroHungarians wanted was a powerful France, so nothing really odd there.

Such is not the case today. Europe seems determined to bypass rather than fight the American challenge. And power? The American kind is poor in "future goods." There is rivalry in the air, but it no longer takes a martial form. Instead, Europe seems bent for now on building itself up economically and knitting itself together politically -- readying, it appears, another kind of power, based more on cooperation, both within its own borders and with the world, and less on military force.

Such is not the case today indeed because Europe is incapable of fighting us, or even indirectly challenge us. The First Customs Union will come crashing down because of currency problems, but that's another story. Cooperation is all fine and good, so long as the person you're cooperating with isn't a mass murdering fanatic capable of just about anything and you're his bunkmate. And the Europeans can have all the cooperation they want because in twenty years they're going to poorer, older, and less able to do something than they are now.

I'm amazed that this article got published. I'm more amazed that this guy, what's his name, Johnathan Schnell, has a book out. I just looked at the amazon link and it looks to be a riveting ride through hippy heaven. Where has this guy been for the past ten years? We're not evolving toward a point of total war, but rather, toward a point of focused, directed, highly coordinated, accurate, and lethal warfare that focuses on destroying only targets that matter, not the indiscriminate total warfare of the World War I and II that were brought on by desparation, not choice. Unbelievable.

early morning, early post...

I know that it's been a couple of days since I promised to finish fisking that article, and I will do so this morning, but there's something that I need to talk about first. I was just reading VDH's latest morale booster and something at the end of it really caught my eye:

Every time the United States the last quarter century had acted boldly — its removal of Noriega and aid for the Contras, instantaneous support for a reunified Germany, extension of NATO, preference for Yeltsin instead of Gorbachev, Gulf War I, bombing of Milosevic, support for Sharon's fence, withdrawal from Gaza and decapitation of the Hamas killer elite, taking out the Taliban and Saddam-good things have ensued. In contrast, on every occasion that we have temporized — abject withdrawal from Lebanon, appeasement of Arafat at Oslo, a decade of inaction in the Balkans, paralysis in Rwanda, sloth in the face of terrorist attacks, not going to Baghdad in 1991 — corpses pile up and the United States became either less secure or less respected or both.

Bold action. The kind of thing that makes you jump back, the kind where you are unable to believe that what you are seeing is actually taking place. The kind of action that either way earns you respect, whether the situation turns out in your benefit or not. In other words, a big gigantic risk. Bold action is always a risky proposition, because you never know how the situation will turn out. But the fact that you tried, most people will look at that and say, "Well, it may not have worked, but damn, that was impressive." And really, more than anything else, that's what makes these past few years different from the past twenty, including the Reagan years. While Reagan was certainly bold, he wasn't really actively bold. He didn't pledge public support or have the mujahadeen of Afghanistan to the White House for coffe and hashish. He didn't send a couple of divisions to Nicaragua to clean up the Sandanistas, or bring down the full wrath of our military capacity upon the Libyans. He withdrew from Lebanon rather than face down the emerging threat there. Instead, really, what Reagan did was propose bold ideas. The notion that we could be defended from an ICBM attack by putting satellites in space was a bold idea. The Laffer curve was still being joked about by almost everyone who thought of themselves as "progressive" when Reagan said, you know, maybe people might actually would work more if they could keep more of their money. Hmmm. Firing the FAA union workers was while a bold action really had much more of an abstract effect because of the way that other executives (and we often forgot that the title of executive really does apply to the President) felt that they could deal with their burdensome union employees, which again had actual concrete effects. People who sucked got fired. But more of an idea. The point is that while yes, we should respect Reagan's accomplishments, and be proud of the direction he set this country on, we should see that comparatively, President Bush has been much more of a risk taker, and he has been greatly rewarded for having taken a great many risks, and he is also greatly respected for having taken those risks. He is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the most powerful man in the world and everyone knows it. While the Iranians and the North Koreans may talk a tough game, and may actually believe the adage that "the US only attacks nations that don't have nuclear weapons" they should be a little less naive. There is not a shadow of a doubt in my mind that should the only option available be an attack against either of those nations that Dubya would hesitate only to pray for forgiveness for the deaths that he knows he will cause and for the strength that he would require to see it to the end.

Additional: Something related, but aren't you always impressed by people of action? People who get up and do things and do things because they enjoy them? That the doing is the part that matters? Where does the phrase, "a man of action" come from but from people who marvel at others abilities to accomplish what they set their mind too? The same applies to international relations, a phrase that is not used enough to describe the world at large. Nations that get things done earn respect from other nations. Do you think that in ten years people will remember the minutiae that have occupied our unfocused attentions via the telescreen since 9/11? Do you think that there will ever be classes on media where people actually sit and watch twenty four hours of news from the early 21st century and decide whether or not they should be preserved but only because of the hot chick on from the three to four hour? No--because people will call this time period the End of Ignorance--a transition from Moderate Ignorance and of course, the previous era, Full Throttle Ignorance, a time period when people final began to realize that, you know, maybe it is more important in what we do than what we say and how we say it. That worrying about whether or not everyone in the room likes what I'm wearing and is going to compliment me on my hair is really not all that important. That's why I follow the German model--wear it until it absolutey has to be washed. This era is also characterized by the shrill and quickly tiring tirade of the demographically vanishing Left--Susan Estrich will be proudly displayed as one of this era's standardbearers--for embodying almost all of the most farsical notions around at the time--a tirade that seems to have no end, and will only become worse as the years roll by as the Left becomes more and more obsolete and unable to cope. But action--the bolder, the better. At least then everyone will know that we mean business.

a quick round up...

This is absolutely ridiculous. I can't frankly believe that Bill Clinton actually called the hacks in Iran "progressives". I simply cannot believe it, and this just when I was actually starting to see the good things in Bill Clinton, like the fact that he was no longer President and that there has been nary a scandal in the Bush administration, and that perhaps, perhaps, Bill Clinton would not follow the path of Jimmy Carter.
Alas, it appears that my worst fears have been confirmed. Carter must have given Bill a quick how to %*$&-up America's foreign policy the best course and then sent little Bubba running to Davos to speak his mind. Listen to the mp3 link on Littlegreenfootballs and listen to the master say nothing while saying everything. Perhaps Bill is really that naive?
Can he be that naive?
Or, is he simply exploring options? The best thing to do is just listen to it and then decide for yourself if Bill is continuing his attempt to be an elder statesman or the young apprentice to Carter's dark side?
And I promise that I'll finish the fisking of that article thingee from yesterday, but tonight we're going to go to see Elvis Costello, which is going to be awesome.

time for a proper fisking...

Here's the original, hat tip to RCP, which is of course where all of my information comes from. No, not really, but those guys do a bang up job and wow. Wouldn't have made it through the last election without RCP and the Iowa Electronic Markets. Haven't checked those in a while, but you know it probably isn't too good an idea to start looking at whether or not there's actually anyone placing bets on the 2008 election and if they are, where are you and did you go out tonight? But to the fisking of the original.

A less super, superpower?
--okay so this is the title, but honestly, isn't that something that Doctor Evil would say? "Oh yes Number Two, a less super, superpower, moohuahuahuaaa!" VDH just had an excellent article, Merchants of Despair which is really the reason why I feel the need to fisk this, who am I fisking, have to check, ah here it is, Johnathan Schell. Having read VDH's article I felt so, well the way you always feel when reading Victor Davis Hanson, alive and sure of yourself and proud of the accomplishments of Western civilization. Not that you don't feel that anyway, only it's much easier to believe in the vitality and the West's propensity for change and adapation when you see it put it so directly and proudly and without shame or remorse that you believe such things. It's a moving thing. So then I come across this thing today, this less super, superpower and I think to myself this is precisely the same kind of ho-hum the US is bound to screw up because, well, just because. And nanny nanny boo and then the tongue gets stuck out and we quickly regress to more primitive yet more honest ways of disagreeing. Which the fisk, though savage, is not really honest because hindsight is always 20/20--it's much easier to criticize than to originate, especially when you all the time in the world and they may have had a deadline.
I am never able to stay on just one thing, case ya hadn't noticed.
On with the first sentence....:


One of the most difficult things to judge in the world today is the extent of American power.


Okay. Apparently there many difficult things in the world that require us to pass judgment upon. I would be interested in knowing which of those are the "most" difficult to judge and which would fall into the "easiest"category. But that aside, really, that sentence pretty much sums up life for me. I mean, in any situation, it's difficult to gauge what the extent of anything is. We have much better information than we've had in the past, but we still only have a partial picture of what's actually going on in the world between all of it's six billion inhabitants. Or perhap even more. What' s going on in the world when you include the dolphins or the bacteria or even the virus and those plasmids...no...the prions, yes that's it...what then? Isn't it fair to say then that all actions and reactions are difficult experiences to judge and that only through experience and practice can we hope to make accurate judgments? So besides this sentence being generally true of all "things" that require human "judgment" what else is there I could possibly complain about in this sentence. The use of "extent"; for some reason I always think of extent as the apex, as the high water mark. A reporter might say, " The extent of the flooding yaddadada." It's just negative and meant to be negative.

On the one hand, there is no doubt that the United States possesses a far larger pile of weapons than any other country, that the American economy is also larger than any other country's and that America's movies and television programs are consumed globally. America is widely accorded the title "only superpower," and many of its detractors as well as its supporters describe it as the world's first truly globe-straddling empire.


Ah yes on the one hand. And on the other hand. Okay, so the US has a great big pile of weapons from which we merely randomly select, assign to the next soldier, chopper, boat, whatever form of transportation available and say here ya go, go blow something up you crazy fool you! Big pile of weapons. Just sitting out in Montana. At least five miles long and I dunno, ten stories high. All sorts of weapons. Machine guns, machetes, roman candles (just to annoy), grenades, tanks, planes, bombs, missiles, and so on and so forth. On the hand on the other hand, it's just not true that we have a larger "pile" of weapons. We actually have a relatively small military compared to the offical sizes of many of our potential enemies and actual adversaries. As a percentage of GDP what we spend on the military compared to Social Security and Medicare is teeny teeny tiny. Maybe a full 5% of GDP on the military if you count all the extra expenditures for Iraq and Afghanistan over the past couple of years. Our military is so awesome because it's a volunteer force backed up with superior technology, tactics and training. Not because of some pile of weapons. Yeah yeah, largest economy, uh huh, she likes that. And remember there, not just American's movies and TV, but our music, our literature, our science (who has won most of the Nobel Prizes of the sciences in the past century, hmmmm?), our ideas, our politics, our clothing, why, pretty much the whole of our culture is out there competing for everyone's attention. And it's working....the whole tone of this little bit is condescending. I mean describing us as the world first globe straddling "empire" is a bit much. All this talk of Empire and I can't even get some kind of Imperial commission to go and administrate some far flung colony and teach them English and our common law traditions...somehow that just doesn't fit with Empire. If we are an Empire, we're the first Empire of Freedom, not an Empire in the traditional sense, because we have brought more liberty to more people than anyone will probably ever bring to any segment of humanity at any point in the near to relatively distant future.

Cigarette break. (soft elavator music, daraatata, daratataata, rarararataa!)

On the other hand, it is not yet clear what the United States can accomplish with these eye-catching assets. For power, as Thomas Hobbes wrote in one of the most succinct and durable definitions of power ever offered, is a "present means, to obtain some future apparent good." Power, after all, is not just an expenditure of energy. There must be results.

I'm trying not to go and smoke another cigarette. I know that's a bad way to handle stress. But right now I don't really see that I have another option. Perhaps a drink of some cool refreshing water. Ahhhh. Here's the other hand. I'm having a hard time not seeing what the US can accomplish with our stylish and trendsetting assets. Iraqis voting. Lebanese peacefully revolting. The people in Krygihoweveryouspellitstan and Tajikstand are also taking to the streets to protest the rigging of their elections. The Ukraine. I dunno. Seems like results to me. Seems like we're going to be obtaining some "future apparent good" which would be liberalizing the Middle East and bringing modernity to the doorsteps of the evildoers. Seems like results to me.

And that's just the first paragraph. More to come later.
Just remember, everything is a work in progress.

the leftist mentality: a beginning...

It's after lunch and Ralph is nine. Out on the schoolyard, Ralph is constantly picked on. The teachers at the school don't really pay attention (mind you this is all taking place say in the 1960's through late 1980's) and Ralph can't quite seem to get them to understand that he getting his ass handed to him on a daily basis. Ralph's father reacts by trying to teach Ralph to defend himself, to at least put up a fight against the group of older boys who terrorize pretty much everyone on the playground. Ralph though doesn't seem to catch on to the idea of self-defense. Then one day a new teacher arrives who promptly upon seeing the older boys duct-tape Ralph upside down to a tree by his feet gives them all the harshest punishment possible--whatever the punishment would have been for something like that in this timeframe. Perhaps the timeframe is larger, but people born during this timeframe are all of voting age and thus consequently, all members of the body politic. All will become apparent.
So they boys are punished and Ralph finally sees the potential that authority has to exert force upon others--now, this is not to say that it's not tragic that Ralph was getting his ass handed to him or that the school administration did nothing to stop it or monitor the playground, however, at a certain point, even a nine year old must assume responsibility for their actions. Had Ralph even tried to fight back his social stock among the rest of the children would have gone up immensely, and sometimes all it takes is a little bit of public pressure to keep bully's from doing their worst. Instead, Ralph stood and just took whatever they dished out. Now imagine you are Ralph and you have just seen a government official, a representative of the state so to speak (even though you, as Ralph are only vaguely aware of this because you're 9, but you know that teachers have a great deal of authority, you have just witnessed a teacher handing out the harshest punishment possible and that's really all the proof you need) doing what you could not, punishing those who were punishing you.
It only starts there though. Realizing that there are agencies, organization, and institutions that can coerce people only means that you have to understand how to manipulate those agencies. Surely you as Ralph have realized that the punishment the older boys received because of YOU will only make them wish to retaliate with all the more intensity. So now you're stuck? How to assure you're safety? You can't fight them yourself, and you are only safe in the presence of the teacher...only safe in the presence of the teacher...perhaps we could help the teacher after school...wait it out until the older boys give up or she punishes them again. And now we've really hit the solid truth: letting other people take care of your problem binds you to them and they to you. It works both ways you see. The teacher, acting only out of belief that all children should be free from such oppression and violence, now realizes that she is Ralph's protector and to abandon him is to leave him at the mercy of the older boys. Ralph, bound to her because he cannot imagine facing those tyrants again, and he starts blaming them for his shame and cowardice instead of assuming responsibility himself. And the two of them ever more dependent of each other in order to define themselves. And so it goes, the leftist mentality is born.
The Leftist Mentality is not the permanent name of a condition that has apparently affected a substantial portion of the population. How substantial we can only estimate, but I would say anywhere from 15% to perhaps as many as 30% of this country has succumbed to a series of intellectual fallacies and in doing so they have become hypocrits and incapable of even modest personal objectivity-Entrenched Infertile Reactionary Elitists is perhaps a better name. No, because that spells out Eire and I'm not soiling the named of Ireland for these hacks. I'll get back to the name and then get back to you. The story about Ralph is only an illustration of how such a person might conduct themselves at an early age--what would we call them? Goody-two shoes perhaps? Humorless? Taddle-tales? The point though is that they prefer to use the authority of adults and teachers (the government of children) rather than build their own authority through action. And this continues throughout life...Ralph is now sixteen and he's actively involved in Student Government, where he has just managed to get the school to agree to a recycling program, not a bad idea, only he wants everyone to be forced to recycle. In other words if a student observes someone not recycling and they report it, that person should receive some kind of punishment--if it's a student, detention perhaps, a teacher, some pay is docked. The Student Government rejects that part of it, but Ralph still thinks this is the best way to go about it. And he then runs for President the next year and is soundly defeated. This only makes him more bitter. "I should have won because I would have been the best SG President ever," he moans. Then Ralph decides that he must understand more about this process of politics and so he begins a journey and he doesn't get very far. He reads Plato but skips Aristotle, deciding that Plato had pretty much figured it out and that only those who believe in the Republic are worth reading and he searches them out. As he scans the centuries nothing really catches his eye until he gets to the nineteenth century and a little fellow named Marx and another fellow named Engels and then it all falls into pieces. And then Ralph steps onto the boat to Neverland and never gets off. He spends the rest of his life a bitter man who finds joy in nothing and "activism" in everything. But his "activism" is not advocating any kind of change, but a rigorous maintenance and strengthening of the status quo. He doesn't see that he is the reactionary, that his attitude is one of venom and inconsiderate behavior and statements that are meant only as jabs and not as genuine conversation. And he will spend his life in an opaque myopic haze, angry and never really understanding why because none of the theories that he has read or discussed in his 'activist' seminars or party conventions or subgroup meetings seem to explain why the rest of the world keeps going. How can those idiots in red-state America let themselves be brainwashed by Hannity and Limbaugh and G Gordon Liddy and Glenn Beck and those stupid annoying blogs challenging the real journalists...HOW DARE THEY CHALLENGE MY STATUS...how dare the Left not see that they are the reactionary Luddites who are now, ironically "standing athwart history yelling stop!", that they are the ones who are fighting for the entrenched, for the privleged, for the system, that they are fighting for the system.
And it's then I realized why I always felt like a rebel and why I never felt any discordance between my "conservatism" and my innate desire to end the current system, to in the popular vernacular of about thirty years ago, to fight the man, because as I knew at an early age, the man is and remains the Left and there still remains a great deal of serious mind-to-mind combat to go, the universities must be cleared out, public education privatized, the second and third newspapers taken on and held to account, and perhaps the largest possibility for blogs ever: using the Freedom of Information Act to hold the government at large accountable for every dollar spent and every instance of inefficiency. Just imagine what the guys at Powerline could do every federal agency if they got their hands on their books. And all the while Ralph still thinks he is the revolutionary, that he's the progressive. No, sorry Ralph. The conservative movement has successfully transformed itself into the newest incarnation of America's long history of populist reforms and progressive inclinations to help make life better for all Americans and doing so as best we can. Just remember though, this is only a beginning in an attempt to understand today's reactionary movement. Next time, we'll talk about why reactionaries tend to cluster in cities, beyond of course the obvious THE CITIES ARE CONTROLLED BY THE PUBLIC SECTOR UNIONS and why they stay in the cities when it's so much better out here in the suburbs. This is Ripley, signing off.